South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  “Why? This is all about god?” Sri exclaimed. “Of course! It’s what you do. I mean, look at your paper on the structural dynamic stability of Noah’s ark. I read that.” He looked over at Sal. “We all did.”

  For the first time that evening, Pavano looked flustered. “That was an early publication, and one that I regret. And I’ve said so in print. I will add, just for interest’s sake, that some models of ice cores do suggest significant quantities of snow accumulated immediately after the Flood, that perhaps as much as ninety-five percent of the ice near the Poles could have accrued in the first five hundred years or so after the Flood—”

  The room fell quiet, as if Pavano’s words had gone beyond the pale and could never be taken back. Cooper and the other nonscientists looked at one another, confused.

  “Holy shit,” Pearl whispered. “I think he just said Noah’s flood is a scientific fact.”

  “Sri, you’re wrong,” Sal said. “This isn’t about god. This is about money. Frank Luntz is why Pavano is going to become a very rich man.”

  “Frank Luntz?” Bonnie asked. “Sounds like a hot dog company.”

  “Frank Luntz advises the Bush administration about various policy decisions. Last year somebody got hold of a memo he’d written about how to handle what he called this ‘global warming problem.’ Luntz and everyone else in the White House knows global warming is real, that it’s man-made. Luntz told them the scientific debate is closing against them, but isn’t fully closed—that there’s just enough time to keep the public uncertain, to keep it thinking that there’s no consensus in the scientific community. No big policy changes need to be made if the public thinks there’s widespread disagreement. Pavano enters stage right.”

  Pavano shuffled behind the podium—his face had drained of color.

  “So you’re saying, what?” Pearl asked, her brows furrowed. “That he doesn’t actually believe what he’s saying? That he’s gonna make stuff up while he’s down here?”

  “To believe in climate change—” Pavano tried, but Sal interrupted him.

  “See, look at his language. He’s talking about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny. Scientists don’t believe in things. They either know things or they don’t.”

  Cooper could tell that Sal had just walked into a trap, because Pavano suddenly seemed very focused. “Just like those who once promoted the Big Bang as fact—as the gospel of how the universe began—suddenly change their minds? Tell me if this sounds familiar, Dr. Brennan: ‘Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest.’”

  “Don’t take Hawking’s words in vain,” Sal said.

  “So Stephen Hawking’s your prophet, and yet you desecrate what many others find sacred.”

  “And now we’ve fallen down the nerd-hole,” Bonnie groaned behind Cooper. “In like, a minute, they’re gonna start talking Elvish.”

  “He’s putting up a good fight, though,” Pearl murmured over her shoulder.

  “You guys have gone way off the rails,” Dwight said, exasperated. “Can we get back to Bonnie’s question about ice cores?”

  “Yes, tell us what research you’re trying to thwart while you’re down here,” Sal said.

  “Unlike other grantees on the ice this season, I’m not trying to thwart anyone’s research,” Pavano said. “Alarmists are finding it difficult to explain away the fact that Antarctica’s sea ice is at record levels. It’s not melting. To the contrary, it’s quite robust.”

  “The record amount is only three-point-six percent over the 1981 to 2002 mean,” Sri cried. “I mean, this year the edge of the ice extends out only thirty-five kilometers farther than it does in an average year. It’s actually getting thinner.”

  “In climate science, it seems to me, anything is possible,” Pavano said.

  “Could Antarctica melt?” Pearl asked. Cooper noticed a couple research techs roll their eyes.

  Pavano chuckled. “I think the scientists in this room would agree that even if man-made climate change was real, it would take thousands of years for it to grow warm enough for the Antarctic ice shelf to melt. In fact, that kind of catastrophic ice melt would require heat of apocalyptic proportions. But because I dispute the assumption that the earth is warming, it’s nothing I worry about.”

  “So what you’re saying,” Pearl replied, “is that the earth is not warming up like everyone says, that global warming isn’t real?”

  “What I’m saying is that very little research has ever been funded to look for natural mechanisms for climate change. It has simply been assumed, by the scientific community, that global warming is man-made.”

  “I would actually prefer that the earth was not warming,” Pearl said.

  “It may not be,” Pavano said.

  “That makes me feel better.”

  “No, Pearl,” Sri shouted, “don’t go over to the Dark Side!” This resulted in a chorus of protestation. Amid the shouts, Cooper noticed Sal quietly stand up and walk out of the galley.

  That night Pavano pinned to the large bulletin board in the galley an abstract from a just-published paper by Willie Soon from the journal Climate Research, which claimed “the twentieth century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” By the next morning, it was gone, and in its place was a hand-drawn flyer: Breaking News Update: Climate Change Jesus super-excited about new developments, says “you’re getting warmer!” Next to this was a muscle-bound superhero Jesus, with a bubble coming from his mouth containing what one of the Beakers later told Cooper was the Schrödinger equation. Climate Change Jesus was set upside down, coring ice with his crown of thorns.

  PRODUCTION COOK: 5:00am–3:00pm and 4:30pm–10:00pm

  PREPARES HOT BREAKFAST: including pastries, fills juice machine and breadbox

  PREPARES LUNCH. Soup Daily Assists with dinner.

  Shops for own menu items on regular basis and general kitchen use items every other week on rotating basis with Head Cook (Bonnie)

  Menu will be provided. Both cooks are accountable for the food and adhering to the APPROVED menu. Special occasions/holidays are excepted from the menu.

  Food is to be used from Berm B first. Call in items from Berm A only after ensuring they are not available from Berm B. Food rotation is very important to its quality.

  COOKBOOK KEY

  EBF: Enchanted Broccoli Forest

  MW: Moosewood

  MWC: Moosewood Cooks for a Crowd

  SL: Still Life with Menu

  SP: South Pole 3-Ring Binder

  BASIC ROTATIONS

  Pasta 2 × week

  Mexican 1 × week

  Italian 1 × week

  Seafood 1 × week

  Alt every other cycle: Italian chicken fingers with patty, Tuna Melt with Seafood Croissant

  enchanted broccoli forest

  There were many ways to make things disappear at South Pole Station. After all, there were twenty-three different categories of waste. “Dormitory biological waste”—bloody bandages, used tampons, snot-soaked Kleenex—was stored in fifty-five-gallon open-top drums. Galley food waste—like onionskins, uneaten oatmeal, and trimmed fat—was packaged in Tri-Walls lined with three layers of polyethylene gusseted bags. But the category that Pearl found most relevant to her purposes was the “domestic combustibles,” also known as the “burnables.” This category included paper towels, cigarette butts, food wrappers—and cookbooks that had been carefully dismantled, page by page.

  Enchanted Broccoli Forest was the first to go.

  Still Life with Menu was the second.

  Pearl wasn’t sure if Still Life would be missed, but she knew Enchanted Broccoli Forest would. It was a go-to. Vegetarians sometimes requested EBF-specific dishes. But a week had passed, and still Bonnie said nothing about the missing cookbooks. Pearl couldn’t have known that Bonnie would lose the kitchen over the inedible Carrot-Mushroom Loaf from Moosewood Cooks for a Crowd. She only knew Bonnie would lose the kitchen
eventually. It was why Pearl had agreed to take the job in the first place.

  No one knew that Pearl had been waiting for a Carrot-Mushroom Loaf moment since she landed at South Pole in late September. She’d been hired as production cook, the junior position to Bonnie’s head cook. Pearl had applied for the top position, of course; she hadn’t spent ten miserable years in various eateries and ship’s galleys to become second fiddle in an institutional kitchen. (Nor did she go to Antarctica to become Alice Waters, but you had to pay the bills and government work paid well, especially when room and board was free).

  But Bonnie was a lifer; and after a certain number of years on the ice, lifers received the privilege of turning jobs down rather than having to reapply for them. Bonnie would never turn down a job at Pole, and it took only a couple of days on the ice for Pearl to understand that the woman would not be easily overthrown. She had allies. Those allies were other lifers, and they’d lost their taste for edible food some years earlier. Calling Bonnie to account for the state of the food at Pole wasn’t going to be an effective strategy. The operation would have to be subtler than that, requiring the actions of a person exhibiting the traits of monomania. Not all of the traits, of course—that kind of psychological profile would be peremptorily red-flagged by the VIDS team. Just a few of them.

  “Can you focus obsessively on a single thing?” Tucker had asked Pearl back in Denver after the psych exam. “Can you be insane when it comes to this single thing—improving the food—and be rational about everything else?”

  “What do my results say?”

  “That’s why you’re in my office.”

  “Then you already know the answer.”

  Pearl had arrived at Pole in the midst of an overhaul—a new station was being built just hundreds of yards from the current one. The National Science Foundation had been soliciting and rejecting plans for a new geodesic dome for years. Six months before Pearl came to Pole, they’d finally approved a plan. It was a matter of some irony that the firm that had won the design contract was based in Honolulu.

  One of the modules under construction would house the new galley with what Tucker had promised Pearl would be state-of-the-art appliances, stainless-steel prep tables, and more capacity—however, it wouldn’t open until next season. The kitchen in which she’d be working this season—the old kitchen—would present challenges. The galley on the Icelandic herring boat she’d crewed the summer after high school had been better equipped.

  September 30, 2003

  Perhaps the cramped conditions are what killed Bonnie’s creativity. Or maybe it’s the six-packs she puts away at the Smoke Bar every night. We’ll see. There’s a galley staff meeting tonight to go over the season’s menu. I’ll observe and say nothing.

  By the time Pearl was aproned up and scrubbing her nails for the first meal of the season, she had only seen Bonnie a couple of times since that trust-building exercise back in Denver. Bonnie had come into training hot. She was pissed. Pissed that she’d had to go through fire school again, and even more pissed that she’d have to deal with a Fingy production cook. Her previous production cook had left for the cruise ship circuit, and Pearl sensed that the parting had not been amicable. The trust-building exercise had done little to improve Bonnie’s outlook on the season to come. Granted, the “trust facilitator” contracted by VIDS had made a poor choice when he’d picked the “eye contact with touch” exercise. Pearl and Bonnie stood across from one another in the meadow adjacent to the fire school, eyes locked, hands clasped. But Pearl saw the pride in Bonnie’s angry eyes. Pride was easily exploited.

  March 12, 2003, at training

  Met her today. Big woman—my height but weighing in at about two bills. Wouldn’t tell me anything about what to expect, says all “Fingys” have to fend for themselves. Wouldn’t tell me what Fingy means either. She hates my undercut, said it was “punk, fifteen years late.” I’m trying to be friendly, but she’s not having it.

  The first days in the galley were like any of the first days Pearl had spent in a new kitchen, be it on land or at sea—getting used to her surroundings, examining the supply lists, memorizing her duties, and getting to know her co-workers. Kit, a skinny guy with lank brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, was the main DA—the dining assistant who was responsible for everything from cleaning tables and filling the milk machine to stocking the napkin dispensers. As head cook, it was Bonnie’s job to write up the menus and manage all kitchen operations.

  “Bonnie is a loner by nature,” Tucker told Pearl the first week in. “Being at Pole goes against every fiber of her being.”

  “I thought Pole was like the loner’s Disney World.”

  Tucker shook his head. “You have to at least possess the capacity to enjoy the company of other loners.”

  “Then why is she there?”

  “Dwight, our comms tech. They met at a Sheraton in New Orleans. He was the IT guy, she was buffet cook.”

  “She followed a guy down here?”

  “It’s not all that uncommon. Like two negative electrons, two misanthropes can bind together with the force of—”

  “Negative electrons repel each other,” Pearl said.

  Tucker paused. “Huh. Well, that explains why Sal Brennan has banned me from the Dark Sector.”

  Her days began with a 4:30 a.m. alarm. The sun shone as brightly then as it did at noon, which made getting up fairly easy. She’d make her way from her room in the elevated dormitory under the Dome (the galley staff received superior accommodations) to the kitchen, where she’d prepare hot breakfast for 105 people and put her proofed pastry and bread dough in the oven.

  At first, Pearl adhered slavishly to Bonnie’s menu. Huge warming trays filled with bright yellow scrambled eggs, vats of gluey oatmeal, white and wheat bread. The Polies seemed unperturbed by the monotony, although Pearl did notice that those who took oatmeal loaded their bowls with raisins, brown sugar, and nuts, as if trying to bury it under an avalanche of condiments. One guy even used salsa.

  October 15, 2003

  Bonnie says it is acceptable to bake in quantity and freeze items after they have been double-wrapped and dated. This is bullshit. She says “acceptable” but she means “required.” I don’t freeze my pastries. It does a disservice to me, to the pastries, and to anyone who tries to choke them down. Plus, the freezers smell like fish. Trying to figure out a non-confrontational way to handle this—too early in the season for a fight over breakfast foods. I plan on bringing up the oatmeal issue soon, though. It’s pretty low-stakes. A little seasoning, cinnamon and nutmeg, maybe, or even a couple teaspoons of vanilla or almond extract—hell, even a dash of salsa—could go a long way.

  Between meals, Pearl had to make the rounds of the storage units, recording temps and noting stock levels. The units outside of the galley trailer, in dark corners of the Dome, were the worst—the air was as cold there as it was outside. The giant freezer where they stored the meat products actually had to be heated. As she scanned the shelves, Pearl marveled at the quantities required for every meal. Thirty pounds of orange roughy for fish and chips. Nothing less than twenty-eight pounds of ground beef for Texas Tamale Pie. Grilled Reuben called for twenty pounds of corned beef, and the veggie Reuben needed five pounds of tempeh. Pearl glanced down at the monthly menus on the clipboard—it was like an endless repetition of the same twelve meals. She knew she could do better than polenta pie and fucking tofu nut balls.

  Pearl thought the station greenhouse was a nice touch, though. It was a steaming shoe box set atop the stairs on the annex berthing building. When Pearl opened the door, she had to break about fifty pounds of suction force, but once she did, she was treated to the smell of soil and green things, smells that Pearl had already forgotten—earth, compost, ripe melon.

  October 19, 2003

  I told Kit I’d take over greenhouse duty and he looked like he wanted to kiss me. The greenhouse will be the key to my success. That and getting rid of the cookbooks.

  Per
sonas, not personalities, were important at Pole, so Pearl settled on being a flaxen-haired scrub with a penchant for pink bandannas and self-deprecating jokes. Her requisite edge came from her undercut, which she kept up using a pink Bic twice a week, an operation that required two mirrors and an hour of her precious time. She was a small woman with what Sal had called the “face of a Pilgrim.” The scar above her right eyebrow—courtesy of a two-hook herring rig—suggested the correct amount of toughness and allowed her to affect kindness, solicitude, even motherliness, without losing credibility. She took up knitting again, and her wares became quite popular. She knit during Movie Night, she knit at the Smoke Bar, she knit during the station lectures. The station was clearly in need of a Goody Two-Shoes. Pearl could be that Goody Two-Shoes. She could be whatever she wanted.

  Meanwhile, she continued her quest to run the kitchen, which included feigning respect for the VIDS bureaucracy. But it wasn’t until the two Swedes came through the lunch line that Pearl realized the bureaucracy could help speed Bonnie’s exit. As soon as the Swedes showed up in the galley, Simon had had his eye on them.

  “I’m sorry, but station rules prohibit us from serving you meals paid for by American taxpayers,” Simon told the Swedes. “If you have foodstuffs you’d like to cook in our kitchen, you are by all means welcome to do so after the kitchen has closed.”

  “It’s okay, Simon,” Pearl said, “I have no problem giving them some food.”

  “That’s very kind, Pearl, but that’s against protocol.”

  “I’ll give them my meal—they can split it.”

  “Again, that’s kind and selfless, but simply not possible.”

  The Swedes smiled at her and set their trays down. Pearl had turned away in time to catch Bonnie searching the bookshelves for Enchanted Broccoli Forest. She watched as Bonnie’s fingers danced from spine to spine and back again.

  Soon, lunch drew to a close, which meant it was time to stack the dirty trays on a dolly. Cooper approached Pearl with her tray, and asked about the Swedes. She wanted to ferry some food out to them. It took Pearl a minute to see the possibilities of such an operation—it wasn’t until Cooper mentioned the expired ramen that it hit her. Pearl could facilitate this breach of “protocol,” but as head of the kitchen, Bonnie would get the blame.