Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson

I’m glad that I did it. I made up a dummy account, just like this one, by logging on to a computer without using my login name, and then sent [her] an email that said if I saw her off the ice I would punch her in the face, or something. I never had any intention of doing so. Not even a little. In fact, like I said, I wasn’t involved in any of the housing drama. I merely wanted to let her know what it felt like when you have no control over a situation that is upsetting and affects your life. Simple.”

       CHAPTER TWO

       THE OFFSHORE ACCOUNT AND THE ALIEN ABDUCTION

       Antarctica, perhaps more than space, conjures up in the mind images of hardship, personal valor, danger, adventure, and of course, the hero.

      —Report of the U.S. Antarctic Program Safety Review Panel

      It has been noted that some individuals are using the ice machines in the dorms for chilling their beer and other drinks or food. This practice can lead to illness, is unacceptable and must stop immediately.

      —RPSC Safety Representative

      IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS FIRST NIGHT in Antarctica, Grif woke up freezing. He huddled under the blankets trying to sleep, but his uncontrollable shivering required action. First he got out of bed, donned his standard-issue expeditionweight long underwear, added the fleece jacket, some socks, and crept back into bed. No big deal. This was exactly the kind of demanding living he had expected here. That’s why the company had given him all these cold-weather clothes in the first place. After a few more minutes of shivering, he got up to find a knit cap and some mittens. Then a few minutes later he went for his parka. Lying in bed, trembling in full outdoor gear, his frozen breath dancing in the dim LED glow of the nightstand alarm clock, he thought of the next four months and the obvious mistake he had made in deciding to spend them here, where everyone wears outdoor gear to bed every night, and the government handbooks don’t even mention it. When the cold became too much, he finally jumped out of bed determined to get his blood moving. He rushed from the room to find all his neighbors pacing the halls in their parkas while the UTs (Utility Technicians) fixed the furnace that had broken down a few hours earlier, leaving the dorm toilets full of ice.

      This story always gets a laugh after you’ve just returned from the ice machine with a full bucket to freshen the drinks of people wearing shorts and slugging margaritas in a stuffy dorm room after work. It is a classic story of fingee awakening, and it makes old-timers laugh because everyone remembers that brief period where going to Antarctica somehow meant going back in time to a world without technology. Before I came down I imagined I would be sleeping in a hollowed-out pit of snow and braining seals for food. I had never imagined institutional modular dorms with laundry rooms and foosball tables. Few come to the ice prepared for relatively comfortable quarters. So it is no surprise that neither are they prepared for the entrenched class structure by which comfortable quarters are allocated.

      In McMurdo, the central currency for buying a larger room with a sink (so you don’t have to walk in the bone-dry air down the hall to the bathroom to fill your humidifier) or a shared shower (so you don’t have to face a robed expedition down the hall each morning, manhauling your toiletries) is called Ice Time. Primitive in conception, the more Ice Time you accumulate, the better housing you can expect. The Ice Time system rewards returning employees, an inexpensive carrot for retaining experience in The Program. But the official algorithm used to allocate housing considers not only one’s Ice Time, calculated in months (minus Ice Time before 1990, which has expired), but also one’s “job points,” calculated from a hierarchical system that measures one’s professional status in town. (For example, a Nurse, the Hairstylist, and the Meteorologist each receive two points, while a Quality Assurance Representative receives 12.) Those with fewer than 36 months of Ice Time add up their months and divide by eight. Those with more than 36 months divide by four. Adding job points to this quotient gives Ice Time.

      A good way to avoid all these messy calculations is to have friends in the right places. Anyone with a friend in NSF (“the customer”) is eligible for Housing policy exemptions, as are those having sex with managers. Managers are also quick to point out that Ice Time includes time “in the Program” and not just time on the ice, meaning that full-time workers in suburban Denver who receive Christmas bonuses, health benefits, who work standard 40-hour weeks, and who go home to their dogs each evening to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, have accrued lucrative Ice Time should they come down to McMurdo for any reason at all.

      In practice, the value of one’s Ice Time changes according to current conditions, but no matter what, in the summer, from October to February, everyone has a roommate.

When my friend Señor X flew down in mid-October, I rode his coattails across the tracks to Upper Case¹ housing. With only ten months of Ice Time, I had barely squeaked into Dorm 208. Now our room was bigger. We had a sink in the room and we shared a shower with only the neighbors rather than the whole floor. These were the fruits of Ice Time.

      Señor X and I had been roommates in Lower Case the previous summer, when he was in Fuels and I was in Waste. Our room smelled like diesel and garbage. I would sit captivated as he explained to me how Fuels would “pig the lines” by blasting an oblong projectile through the hose to expel standing fuel. I would explain to him the latest methods of handling urine. (The task’s greatest challenge was to forget the terrible havoc narrowly averted each time a u-barrel was successfully hauled down a steep and bumpy road above any cluster of buildings.) The relative ease of modern McMurdo urine processing impressed us because when Señor X had worked in Waste years ago, the u-barrels were taken to the Old Incinerator Building to thaw. Warmed as if by a mother hen, the hot piss was then poured into the sea at the hands of Waste Technicians who for the dark splashing foam kept lips clenched while observing firsthand the shades of mass dehydration in Antarctica’s extremely dry climate.

      Señor X was now on his sixth summer, but his first as an AGO groomer. AGO (Automated Geophysical Observatory) is a program of automated data collection sites on the plateau. Each summer the gadgets must be maintained and the generators that power them refueled with propane, which is converted to electricity using special on-site converters. For accommodations, two science techs stay inside the AGO box, a small shed with a heater, while two groomers sleep in tents. The crew is dropped off by a Twin Otter aircraft which leaves immediately because flight time is in high demand. For the next several days, while the science techs adjust the AGO units, the groomers prepare an ice runway for the larger LC-130 Hercules aircraft that will soon deliver all the supplies that the automated site requires to continue its clicking and whirring for the upcoming year of data collection. The groomers forge the runway on the ice by dragging heavy blades behind snowmobiles at high speed. Because some of the AGO sites have sastrugi—wind-formed ice ridges—as tall as a copy machine, groomers are frequently thrown from the machines. Groomers can break arms or crash through windshields. Their field kits include Vicodin. On the payroll Señor X was listed as a “Carpenter.”

      Señor X was to go to AGO 1 in a few weeks with a science tech named Jordan. Jordan was from a prestigious university. Señor X’s boss was a little worried about Jordan going into the field because Jordan had recently asked at a preparatory meeting if there were showers at the remote AGO sites. Of course there weren’t. The sites were out in the middle of nowhere. Besides that, all the women were buzzing about his eerie stare, and he was barred from one work center for loitering only to ogle them. Also, he had been telling people he came to Antarctica to meet aliens.

      Now, settling into our shared room after work one evening, Señor X taped three photos of a field of flowers on the outside of our door. Beneath the flowers I taped a picture of the Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth slathered in fiendish facepaints and wielding broadswords. One’s door decorations are an innocuous but not entirely unnoticed representation of one’s civic identity, much like at a boarding school. Identification with one’s door decorations in McMurdo increases with abundance or with particularly obsessive themes, such as top to bottom Christmas decorations, or more than ten