Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  A few years back I went with my father to the fiftieth anniversary of the commissioning of his submarine. Many of the crew were at the reunion. Their skipper spoke. One by one afterward the teary-eyed, gray-headed veterans quietly thanked him. I asked my father about that. This is what he said then: “One out of every four men who served on a submarine in WWII died of it. These men are thanking the skipper for bringing them home safely. They are thanking him for the rest of their lives … lives they have gone on to lead, and the families they have gone on to raise.”

  I never forgot those old men gathered in that Fort Worth banquet room, grateful for those years—years that I still had in front of me. I had told that story to Katy, too. As I read her now, with the COO, she was saying, “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. First of all, I’m a professional miner, and I’m good at it.” I let that sink in. “If I want it to be safe, I’ve got to make it that way.”

  But the COO wanted policies and procedures, something in writing that my crew could read and sign off on. He would not let up.

  I did have the Federal Metal-Nonmetal Mine Safety Code of Regulations, published by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). And I’d consulted with Colorado state mine inspectors on ventilation issues for this very tunnel. My crew knew how I felt about safety. In our safety meetings, meetings required by both Federal Regs and by the new company’s own policies, I told them that safety is a deeply personal and shared responsibility.

  “Statistics are fine for suits in offices,” I looked right into the COO’s eyes. “They have no place underground. Here, you look after your partner, and your partner looks after you.”

  Katy vanished momentarily in the growing tension. Better to laugh.

  “But I do have my own rules for tunneling at South Pole, and I did write them down. They’re posted on the door to the top-lander shack on surface.” I struck a theatrical pose: “Wright’s Four Rules for tunneling at the South Pole!”

  With a laugh, Katy rematerialized. The COO wanted an explanation.

  “First rule: nobody gets cold. Simple.”

  It lacked the legal ring of a policy statement, and the COO looked puzzled. He had already felt the cold. That’s why we were in the warming shack.

  “When you get cold, you get preoccupied with your own discomfort. That takes your mind off your work. If your mind comes off your work, you’re going to make a mistake. If you make a mistake, you’re going to hurt yourself, and you’re likely to hurt somebody else. If you try and work through the cold, you’ll get stupid-cold. So if you get cold, stop work immediately. Tell your partners you are cold, and take immediate steps to restore warmth. There are a few places in the tunnel where you can do that. There is this shack here. We have a portable warm house in the other tunnel. There is the top-lander shack above us. And there is the heated cab of the tunneling machine itself. Nobody gets cold. Period.”

  He asked about my other rules. I rattled them off. Anything other than clean, white snow in the tunnel face, stop and investigate. Any tunnel footage not driven on line and grade is not worth driving. No writing on the tunnel walls. “That’s it. The rest is MSHA and Colorado stuff.”

  This cross-examination wearied me. Katy seemed entertained. But the white snow rule puzzled him again. I straightened my legs. My metal chair rang across the floor.

  Our tunnel drove through snow accumulated since 1956 when the United States first occupied Pole. Back then some U.S. Navy Seabee might have dropped a chain and the snow drifted over it. That chain could now be thirty feet below surface, as was our tunnel in places. Or deeper. What might happen if we tunneled into that chain with the tunnel boring machine? Or worse, with electric chainsaws when we were going at it by hand?

  “We found a piece of rope and a canvas trenching-tool cover. We found a parachute in the access trench. Last year, we tunneled through hundreds of nuts and bolts somebody spilled. No damage or injury. But the rule proved itself when we tunneled into pink snow.”

  A tentative smile drew across his face.

  “… A gasoline spill. I don’t know how old it was, or where the top of it was. But it stunk up the tunnel. I shut everything down until we could prove the tunnel air was breathable, and the stuff was not volatile. Gasoline and underground do not mix.”

  My other rules had deeper meanings, too. But he didn’t want to hear about them. “You’ve got a great safety record. I want to know what makes you tick.”

  Bingo! Now he wanted to know about me, not just what I did. I already trusted Katy, but the COO’s motives were unclear. I raised my eyebrows. “That’s personal. Are we going to keep it that way?”

  “Yes.”

  So I trusted him, and I leaned forward in my chair once again.

  “Do you have a family back home in Colorado … a wife and kids?” I asked, friendly enough.

  “No. My family, parents and brother and sisters, all live back east.” He answered a question of mine for a change.

  “Where back east?”

  “Boston.”

  He was MIT … even though Boston and every other place in the world was north of this particular dog-house.

  “Here’s what I know about you now: You don’t have any kids. You’re not married. But your parents and siblings are alive. They care about you, and you care about them. You ever seen or handled a mangled body … a dead or a live body?”

  “No.”

  It was just statistics in New Zealand.

  “Who gets hurt when you get injured in this tunnel?”

  Silence.

  “Do you think it’s just the guy you carry out?” I asked, then looked over at Katy.

  “If Katy falls down the manway, you think it’s just her? You’d be carrying out a lot of people. You’d be carrying out her husband. I don’t even know him. And you don’t know him ’cause he doesn’t work for you.”

  An elegant summary eluded me in that frosty plywood dog-house.

  “If it was you we were carrying out, we’d be carrying out your parents, your brothers and sisters. Your whole extended family. Your neighbors. The ones who love you.”

  I’d worked at mines where folks got seriously hurt, sometimes once a month. Sometimes they got killed. Somebody always stood outside the portal holding a hat for the widow, and we’d drop money in it. But you could never undo what happened. It was devastating to those people. I hated that. Safety was not a statistic for me.

  “I know a little bit about each of my crew. I make that my business. Dave Watson, over in that other tunnel right now, has a son, same name as my son. When I look at Dave, I see both him and his son. If I hurt Dave in any way, I have hurt his family. Any questions?”

  “No.” He’d found whatever he was angling for.

  I looked down at my feet, finished. It got quiet. Only the electric heater’s hum, vibrating against the dog-house floor, remained. I did not like recalling the terrible damage wrought upon people and families I was beginning to remember.

  Our breathing had built up frost on the plywood walls of the dog-house. Ice crystals formed half-inch-long whiskers over our jackets, hair, and faces. My heated performance stunned Katy. The COO, I judged, had rested enough. Now he needed to get his warm blood moving.

  My chair scooted back across the frosty floor when I stood up. “There’s a mighty fine tunnel to finish showing you. A beautiful piece of work. Down yonder, another thousand feet, is the end of it. There’s a fifty-foot ladder where we can climb out through the escape raise. Let’s see where we come up?” I smiled.

  The cold blast of tunnel air assaulted our warm faces when I slid the plywood door open.

  With the tunnel job finished at Pole in February 2002, I found more work in McMurdo that season driving a truck at “Ship Off-Load,” an exciting annual event for USAP workers on the Ice. Open water to see for a change, and all that went with it: waves and ripples instead of ice and cracks, and boats bigger than any single structure in McMurdo.

  First came the icebreakers openin
g a channel in the sea ice. If the wind blew the ice chunks north, open water emerged in the channel and brought whales. Then came the U.S. Merchant Marine tanker delivering several million gallons of fuel. Finally, in February, the container ship tied up, loaded high over her decks with a rainbow spectrum of shipping containers.

  For a week every worker on station bustled around the container ship. McMurdo was full of noise: air brakes exhaling, engines straining, transmissions whining, and back-up alarms beeping. Ship’s cranes swung containers down onto trucks. Trucks drove the snaky roads around town and into forgotten crannies. Forklifts of all sizes unloaded the trucks. Ground-pounding pedestrians checked off cargo as stuff came out of containers. A year’s supply of food, goods, and construction material came off that ship. Then three or four days into the cycle, everybody changed direction. Equipment slated for retrograding, and the accumulated waste of a year or more headed back from other nooks and crannies down to the ship, bound for the landfills and scrap yards of the United States. We kept little waste in Antarctica.

  Often during the cycle, a ship’s crane might stall, or a ship’s hatch must be opened to the ’tween-decks. The delay would bring the flow of trucks on the pier to a standstill for an hour or more. Then truck drivers, equipment operators, cargo handlers and dockhands freely mingled in the shadow of the big ship playing catch, joking, and laughing. A joyful sense of the end of season filled the atmosphere. Many of us would go home soon.

  During such a lull at another offload several years before, the pier supervisor asked if I would bring my bagpipes down to the pier and play a tune. Happy to oblige him then, bagpipes became a nine-year offload tradition. I kept the pipes in my truck after that, but I always waited for an invitation to play.

  That’s how it was the year I finished the tunnel job at Pole. I drove my truck down to the pier. The Kiwi pier boss hailed me. “Hey mate! You bring your pipes this year?”

  “I did,” I answered, smiling.

  “Well, play us a tune!”

  I broke out the pipes, climbed atop the empty flatbed deck of a waiting truck and started to play. The “Free Man’s Whistle,” a high-lonesome wail from out of nowhere, first turned heads. Leading into the rousing “Scotland the Brave” brought shouts of joy from the dock hands. Many at the pier looked forward to the return of the pipes.

  As in past years, the truck on whose deck I stood started rolling forward slowly. We circled the pier starting our own makeshift parade, breaking the boredom of idle minutes that had grown to an hour. The pier boss suggested, “Shall we give them a tune in town?”

  “Fine by me,” I shrugged.

  The truck drove slowly off the pier, and climbed the high road into town. We crept past the galley where half the town crew was already at lunch. I got winded then, so I signaled the driver I was ready to quit. He stopped the truck. I jumped off the deck to the ground.

  While I was stowing the pipes in their case, an angry voice sounded behind me.

  “That was a dumb-ass thing to do! You are flaunting the very culture I am trying to change!”

  I turned to face a complete stranger, a middle-aged fellow whose pale, clean-shaven countenance exhibited his displeasure. Culture?

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I am the director of safety, and you are making a mockery of the safety culture I am trying to create in this program.”

  The man had just announced his importance. So I responded: “Okay. I copy you don’t like bagpipes on trucks. I promise: no more bagpipes on trucks.”

  Then I turned my back, climbed into the cab, and told the driver, “Take off before he gets a good look at you, too.”

  Culture, in the sense the man had just used, was new to me then. I’d always thought of it in anthropological terms, or as describing high-class art. Now it was a borrowed word that had crept into boardrooms and become corporate jargon. Like paradigm change, not quite what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You had to know the jargon to get the message. But I had to laugh at myself. At first I’d thought he didn’t like Celtic music.

  The contractor fired me that day for “violating the corporate safety culture.” It hired me back the same day when I explained the fellow’s authoritative anger was probably more aroused when, in the face of abusive language, I turned my back on him and refused to engage in conversation. Funny how organizational culture worked.

  Back at the pier to finish the offload, I found the crew had all heard about the incident. “What happened?”

  “Ah, nothing. No more bagpipes on trucks is all.” I shrugged.

  The corporate safety culture was founded in statistics. But I had my own notion of what safety meant: does someone get hurt?

  The number of times someone gets hurt is the safety metric. A favorable metric benefits the contractor: monetary reward, perhaps greater productivity, maybe a prize. When a COO, or a safety director, proclaims his intention to reduce the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) to a more acceptable number, I listen for clues. Is there a compassionate interest in a real human being?

  Two months following the ship offload incident I accepted the job to head up the traverse project. I found myself in a large meeting room in the contractor’s Denver office. A dozen of us, including my boss, gathered to hear about “A New Culture of Safety.”

  The safety director stood at the front of the room before a screen displaying his PowerPoint slide show. He showed charts and numbers depicting Total Recordable Incidents reported by the previous contractor. He broke them down by category and type, explaining what was recordable and what was not recordable. And he explained how the Incident Rate was calculated.

  “Now this is the existing culture of safety,” the safety director said, “and this is how I want to change that culture …” He turned to face a new slide on the screen.

  “Of course we don’t want anyone to get hurt,” he interjected, looking back over his shoulder. The new image bore simple black text across a plain white background: “NO MORE FRONTIER ATTITUDE.”

  “I don’t want to see any more frontier attitude in this program,” he read from the screen. “That’s gone. A thing of the past.”

  I was supposed to explore for a route from McMurdo to South Pole. Lewis and Clark were supposed to find a route linking the Missouri River to the Pacific coast, through their own frontier. Our mission was not as grandiose as theirs. We’d be well supported by any comparison. And we, as a country, weren’t trying to colonize the place, nor prepare the way for civilization’s march. But we were tackling a continent. “Frontier” meant remote, unexplored, dangerous, and wonderful. The dot at the bottom of my grandfather’s 1918 Rand McNally globe is surrounded by a watery Antarctic Ocean, enclosed by an archipelago of islands, all labeled unexplored. That wasn’t that long ago.

  Yet in this room paneled with acoustical walls and lit by filtered fluorescent lights, “frontier attitude” meant something undesirable.

  I raised my hand: “Would you explain what you mean by ‘frontier attitude,’ please?” He remembered the bagpipes, though his expression remained blank.

  “‘Frontier attitude’ is responsible for the culture of safety that exists in the Antarctic program, the culture that has produced the high TRIR.” He fished for words. “I don’t want to see any cowboys in the program.”

  When he spoke the word “cowboys” his shoulders rose to his ears, his palms turned out towards me. He gave a couple of quick nods to co-opt my understanding.

  I knew what he meant. He implied a reckless character. But a lot of displaced cowboys and cowgirls came to the Antarctic program. They were among the most versatile, resourceful people down there. They could make a bad situation into a better one working with almost nothing. I needed cowboys on my crew. But I decided to shut up. The impression I was forming disturbed me: Did these guys just not get it? Were they that much out of touch with the nature of our work, with the nature of that place? How far out of step with them am I?

&
nbsp; When the meeting broke up, my boss caught me deep in thought in the long hallway separating the massed cubicles from the meeting room. “There’s something you should know,” he said, softly. “When your name was discussed for the traverse project manager, the COO spoke strongly against you. He said, ‘I have heard his safety philosophy directly from his own mouth. He is opposed to our corporate philosophy. I don’t think we want him for the job.’”

  I cursed, silently.

  “What did you think of the meeting?” my boss changed the subject.

  I looked around to see who else was in the hallway. “I think the safety director just told me Antarctica is not a frontier.”

  4 French Connections

  Getting started, the hardest part of any job, became easier with a generous boost from Patrice Godon and the French Antarctic Program. I might’ve met Patrice a year earlier, but something got in the way.

  I was off contract following the third year of the tunnel project and at home when an unexpected e-mail from Steve Dunbar landed. When I heard from Steve, and that was rare, I paid attention.

  “Do you think any of these scenarios will work for you?” he asked.

  Steve managed USAP Field Science Support these days. His note came at the head of a long e-mail string originated by unfamiliar names. It mentioned timetables and places foreign to me, and had circulated between high levels of the USAP and the French Antarctic Program. I scrolled down until my eyes lit upon my name.

  Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001

  To: Stephen Dunbar

  Subject: FW: Participation of NSF personnel to Dumont d’Urville/Dome C

  Steve-I assume John knows he’s going?

  BRIAN STONE

  Research Support Manager

  National Science Foundation

  Office of Polar Programs

  Do I know I am going where?Dumont d’Urville and Dome C? I’d overhead those names from passing conversations going the other way in a McMurdo hallway since 1993 when I first started in the program. Russ once said something about digging out a buried airplane there. But Brian Stone was asking the question. He’d worked logistics for the support contractor before his cometlike rise took him to NSF’s Office of Polar Programs. I paid attention when Brian Stone spoke, too.