Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  Finally, someone delicately asked Jordan about the aliens:

  “Many of us came here to verify something we’ve heard: Did you come here to meet someone? What do you expect to see out on the plateau? Why did you come here?”

  Jordan replied: “I’m here to do maintenance on data collection devices for the AGO sites.”

  As was polite and proper, no further questions about aliens were asked, and people began to leave.

  The new town psychologist was facilitating several community support groups, including a Women’s Group, a Men’s Group, and a Diversity Issues Group6. The psychologist had put flyers around town that read, “Need a place to talk? Support Groups starting soon…” The flyer was a soothing green with puffy bright yellow lettering. In its center smiled a beady-eyed clown made of primary-colored plastic. Its face, hands, and feet were agreeably rounded and smooth, as if to be safely gnawed by toddlers. When the support groups drew low turnout, she sent out an all-station email assuring employees that the group discussions, though sponsored by the company, were confidential.

  The psychologist worked for Nicoletti-Flater Associates, a company hired to administer psychological screening for wintering Antarctic personnel. Winter-overs’ employment packets included a handout, “Bypass the Winter Blues” by company co-founder John Nicoletti. The article outlined tips for minimizing “depression, irritability, apathy” and other psychological problems brought on by the disruption of the “body’s circadian rhythms” by prolonged darkness, extreme cold weather, and “trying to co-exist with a small group of people.”

  Besides his stated expertise in cold weather psychology, John Nicoletti had been a police psychologist in Denver for over 25 years, and was an expert in crowd control. At a conference on campus riots held at the University of Northern Colorado, Nicoletti told a group of law enforcement and university workers, “The earlier you intervene, the higher the probability you can prevent a riot,” suggesting that a riot is what happens without professional intervention. Nicoletti said, “When you decide to assault, assault with enough intensity that they know you’re serious. You’ve got to look mean and quick and foreboding. This is not a touchy-feely time. You’ve got to come in as one big scary thing.” He also suggested that water cannons are very effective but look bad on videotape. “We have to assume that rioting will occur,” he said, “—that’s where we have to come from, so then we’re prepared.”

  The McMurdo psychologist came up to the Waste Barn one day to speak with the Waste Department about Stress Management. It was the end of a long week with heavy trash flow from Pole. We sat in the breakshack in our dirty Carhartts that had been ripped on metal from climbing in the CD flatracks, our gloves smelling of Food Waste, our sleeves sticky with beer from sorting Glass.

  She described to us tunnel vision—when most of the world turns black and closes in on you—and told us that stress alone can give a person tunnel vision, and it can happen in an instant.

  An instant? I fretted. I suddenly remembered all the clanking and crashing and rattling that I had grown accustomed to. I thought of how the details of each day are obscured by familiar patterns. I worried that all of life’s sleepwalking moments would one day simultaneously demand accounting. The psychologist was an expert. I began to pay close attention. I did not want to suddenly get tunnel vision.

  The psychologist was upbeat. Ready to make a million friends. She told us that we could talk to her in her office in the library anytime, and that she was hired to help the community and thus would have nothing to do with employees’ winter psychological evaluations. She had powers of confidentiality. She told us that things were not easy here in this environment. But there are things you could do to recognize and relieve stress.

  I was gripped as if by a thriller. The psychologist appeared to recognize how weird were all the little moments, even when just trying to relax. For example, each day before work I would drag myself out of bed in time for a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the 155 smoking lounge beside the barbershop. The stale chamber was outfitted only with couches, ashtrays, and a television. Few talked in the smoking lounge, because when we heard people talking they sounded stupid, saying things to each other like they were talking only to each other, even though the rest of us could hear them too. So we smoked and watched television, usually in silence. One day in particular I remember about a dozen of us, all haggard men in torn and filthy polar clothing, solemnly chain-smoking in the dark until the start of our shifts, silently watching a gardening show. It was not that anyone wanted to watch the gardening show, but that’s what was on. The channel had most likely been selected an hour before by an early riser. Those who filed in later had watched whatever he was watching. Perhaps Bonanza. But once the early riser had left and Bonanza was over, each person who arrived believed the current channel had been selected by someone in the room, or possibly by everyone in the room. There was a sense that the channel was intended. Very rarely, someone would enter the filthy den and say, after a few minutes of watching The Flintstones, “What the fuck is this? Anyone watching this shit?” We were all watching it, but everyone shook their heads. The channel-changer would be fortunate if there was a ball game on another channel, which would be greeted by a murmur of approval. But if the other channels were no better, like a soap opera or the news, then sometimes the channel-changer would murmur, “Shit, nothing on…” but now he was in a pinch. In the warm ashtray smell of the lounge, he was to blame for whatever stupid show we watched, even if he returned to the original channel.

  I listened to the psychologist carefully. As a backstage participant in the field of behavior modification, perhaps she would explain the indistinct variable ratio schedule of approval and negative reinforcement that rained down in daily emails. Maybe she would translate in which cases the artificial and material reinforcers in our contracts were authentic and in which cases they were just part of the shtick, to be later revoked. The psychologist might even reveal the Solomon’s wisdom behind it all, and a design for frontier social control, thoughtful and well-executed, would clearly emerge from the smeared napkin-plan of The Program. I was on the edge of my seat.

  The psychologist suggested that we go to bed early, quit drinking coffee, and quit smoking.

  On Thanksgiving7 weekend we had two days off instead of one. The Galley made an extravagant meal and people dressed in their finest. Many men bring down one suit and tie for these occasions, and women often pack at least one dress. On the tables were cards sent by kind people, such as the members of the Covenant Congregational Church in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, who wrote: “…we hope the important research you are accomplishing more than makes up for all the hardships you encounter.”

  Speed, an Equipment Operator from Pole, stuck in McMurdo by weather after a winter at Pole, had met AGO Jordan, and invited him to eat with us.

  When someone asked Jordan what he did at home, he said he was studying lightning and then, in order to describe the fundamentals of his research, went into a detailed description of how a radio works.

  I was focused on the cheese and salmon on my plate, and was pondering scenes from the previous evening in my room where I insisted on playing Brujeria all night, and maybe it was the dark metal vibe that led the editor of the NSF-sponsored Antarctic Sun to demand that Ben stab him in the arm with a fork. Ben made a practice stab on the cutting board, leaving four deep gouges from the prongs. Ben said, “You probably won’t be able to use your hand afterward,” but the editor didn’t care. He was drunk. We were all drunk. It was a two-day weekend. I wouldn’t allow the transaction in my room because I knew Ben would do it, just as he had once attacked me with a vacuum cleaner outside in the snow, and there was no reason for the editor to lose a hand if I could halt the game of chicken with a spontaneous policy prohibiting blood on the carpet, though I would have loved to see it.

  I lost track of what Jordan was saying about radios and lightning, but I appreciated his thoroughness, and he was sincerely curious about local
operations. We told him about the ice pier in Winter Quarters Bay that is formed like a cake with alternating layers of ice and dirt and attached with cables to the shore. We told him about the year the ice pier had outworn its useful life, and the Coast Guard was charged with towing it out to sea, but it broke into fragments that they surrounded in dinghies, scratching their heads in the middle of the bay, and how the replacement ice pier split in half last summer and had to be stitched together with cables. We told him how the hill above town is scraped by dozers to collect dirt for spreading on the icy roads, and how buried beneath the town’s surface are deposits of scrapped wood, metal cables and barrels and charred debris from the trashburnings at Fortress Rocks, and how the entire town is saturated with fuel, and how the Navy in the winter used to push barrels of bad fuel onto the ice where they would disappear into the bay come the summer thaw. We told him that Laz’s ass was likewise a repository for piss, but Laz argued that he was good for no more than two liters.

  An NSF Rep was walking around to the tables serving pumpkin pie. The time-honored tradition of a head honcho adapting a servile role on a holiday was performed gracefully, and people laughed nervously and snapped their fingers for more pie, which he obeyed amidst a chorus of mitigating thank-yous.

  The week after Thanksgiving, Jordan began approaching lunch tables and telling people that aliens would arrive at noon on Thursday, November 30. The aliens would come down from the sky to meet Jordan in the open lot between Medical and 155.

  A local prankster made signs showing the spaceship from the movie Independence Day with the caption “We Are Coming.” Someone else made pictures of the top of nearby Ob Hill and various landmarks in town exploding from laser blasts. These were posted on the I-Drive8, communal space for photos on the local network.

  On Thursday, November 30th, a co-worker and I were banding flatracks all morning at Fortress Rocks. Absorbed by the task, we lost track of time and came down late to lunch.

  As we hung our coats in Highway 1, people were filing in from outside and a male and female NSF Representative were pacing the hallway. She said, “What should we do?” He said, “Well, I know what I’m going to do…” and he began ripping down the “We Are Coming” posters while his colleague stood in the hallway menacing those who toted alien paraphernalia. “What are you doing with that?” she asked a woman who walked by with an alien mask in her hand.

  At noon Jordan had been outside waiting for the aliens. 50 people that Jordan had met at the lunchtables came to meet him. They were wearing alien masks and glittery bobbing antennae from the Rec Office costume closet. They had showed up to see what would happen, and stood in a group nearby, watching as Jordan wandered the dusty lot looking to the sky.

  The NSF Representatives and some other higher-ups had heard about the gathering crowd and showed up to keep things in line, one of them taking video. They surrounded Jordan. Then someone wearing an alien mask raced up on a four-wheeled Polaris, did a few circles in the lot while the crowd of aliens laughed and cheered, and sped off. Recovering from their temporary confusion, the bigwigs corralled Jordan into Medical.

  Later that evening Jordan was still in Medical; the word “lockdown” was used. He was manifested immediately and flown out the next day. A memo to the Commander of Operation Deep Freeze (CODF) described the evacuation of Jordan: “…a civilian patient began exhibiting erratic behavior. He described events about ‘aliens’ coming to McMurdo. He had been previously examined in Christchurch by a psychiatrist and deemed not acutely psychotic. However, due to his increasingly bizarre behavior, it was decided to transport him back to CONUS.”

  The abduction was hot on the grapevine and would certainly be talked about for years.

  That Saturday, after work, lounging with the Fuelies on some cargo in the sun, an administrator told us she had seen the Photoshopped pictures of destruction on the I-Drive and was scared that Jordan was going to blow up the town. Before noon on Thursday, while Jordan was waiting for the aliens, she had driven her work truck down to Scott’s Hut to avoid the explosions.

  “Are you joking?” I asked.

  “I’m not joking,” she said severely. “At home I’m a grade school teacher. We’re trained to pay attention to these things.”

  CHAPTER 2 NOTES

  1 The bottom of the barrel are Hotel California and MMI (Mammoth Mountain Inn) because they are far from the Galley next to the thundering Helo Pads and the walls are so thin that the neighbors can be heard humping or vomiting in the trash can. If you live here, everyone else’s room is bigger than yours.The Lower Case dorms are nearly identical except for 210 and 211, which were designed by a Hawaiian architect. They have high ceilings and uneven heating. Recently, Lower Case dorms 204 and 205 were renamed 203B and 203C, circumventing an arcane code concerning the number of simultaneous building renovations. Now there are three dorm 203s. If you live in the Lower Case dorms, everyone else’s room is not really bigger than yours, but it appears so because their furniture is arranged differently.

  The most desirable rooms are in the Upper Case dorms, 206-209, the large brown dorms with three stories. Dorm 209 is special in that 209 Bayside rooms have a view of the sea ice and the Transantarctic Mountains. 209 Bayside is full of managers and old salt. Some people with enough Ice Time to live in 209 choose another dorm instead, because 209 is considered stuffy and the walls have ears. If you live in Upper Case, your room is bigger than everyone else’s.

  2 Forty million years ago, Antarctica was home to a giant carnivorous bird called Titanis, nicknamed the “Terror Bird.” The New York Times (“Fossil ‘Terror Bird’ Offers Clues to Evolution,” by Walter Sullivan, Jan. 31, 1989) wrote, “The bird’s head was longer than that of a horse, and it presumably used its massive, hooked beak to tear apart its prey, after striking it down with one of its huge clawed feet.” Crazed and insatiable, the feathered beasts slaughtered giant armadillolike mammals for their brutal birdie feasts. A researcher from the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, CA, said it was “probably the most dangerous bird ever to have existed.”

  3 Standard usage, though less common, allows “skua” to mean “contribute to the skua pile,” such as, “I figured someone would want these sponges shaped like human organs that expand when placed in water, so I skuaed them.”

  4 The Housing Coordinator who had received the death threat had, amongst her other achievements, made a new policy that skua piles were off-limits to winter-overs, who had formed the skua piles to begin with. This policy ended with her covert departure at Winfly.

  5 Though most people are very conscientious about sorting their trash, Construction Debris nonetheless remains a community favorite. CD is the category where one should put mixed floor sweepings, an inseparable chair made of metal and plastic and cloth, or a broken mirror, but when no one’s looking it means “anything goes,” and is where people sometimes like to throw bags of trash from their room that they don’t feel like separating.

  6 “Diversity” is mentioned just often enough to scratch some statistical itch. The Program is overwhelmingly white.

  7 From K at Pole: “We have had a helluva Thanksgiving. The beakers supplied all the wine; so you know where the night went…hell in a handbasket. It was awesome. Last week this chick got busted giving a blowjob in the upstairs bathroom…not once, but twice in the same night. This past weekend she was making out with any woman that would. Wow, I tell you. She propositioned Speed and I one night in the bar; and she continues propositioning me. Oy.”

  8 I-Drive might commonly be heard in contexts such as “Did you see your picture on the I-Drive? Why were you carrying a mop at that party?” or “I went to Cape Royds last week and took 42 pictures of penguins. I put them all on the I-Drive.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  LITTLE AMERICA

  We are anticipating that our expectations will become yours as well.

  —Welcome to Raytheon memo

  Someone has been trying to influence my mind.

  �
��True/False winter-over psych eval

  FROM THE FIELD CAMP come many of the greatest Antarctic stories. Here early explorers scrubbed their eyes with cocaine to ease the pain of snowblindness and then went to bed with bellies full of pony meat. At the field camp, paper-thin tents shudder beneath katabatic blasts of freezing wind, stoves sputter a stingy flame, and a few trudging specks haul shovels through a cold world where extra food and equipment cannot be bought at any price. The compilation of infinite suffering of those so isolated from society is an entrancing lesson that seems never to wear thin. The field camp—remote, minimal, and inconvenient—is the underlying image on which other Antarctic images are built.

  Fingees arrive ready to work at remote field camps. When they instead find themselves beneath 155 chipping away at a glacier of frozen urine1 deposited by staggering Naval ancestors, or shoveling on a snowy hillside looking for a load of buried pipe lost in the shuffling of expendable supervisors, that’s when they realize that they have been tricked, and they begin to pine for the rugged field camp, where they can show what they are made of. Volunteering for what they imagine to be a daunting task, eager fingees are soon told by the old warhorses to get in line.

  Field camps are desirable destinations. Given the chance, most people would work in the wind and cold surrounded by glaciers and nunataks at Lake Fryxell rather than work in the wind and cold surrounded by ditches and buildings at McMurdo Station. The stakes are as high as they have always been, but risk of death in the frozen wilderness has been reduced by the airplane, the radio, the emergency-homing beacon, the GPS unit, the satellite-tracking Orbcomm device, and improvements in clothing. Field camps have stereos and laptops. Abundant field camp provisions include New Zealand white cheddar, smoked meats, and lots of chocolate. The McMurdo field support Food Room dispenses dozens of beaten copies of The Joy of Cooking. Field camps are established only during the summer, and few scientists or employees stay at a field camp for more than a few weeks at a time. But field camps lack running water and may be cut off from communication by solar flares, so they provide the caliber of inconvenience that makes for an attractive struggle against nature, where mortality is as apparent as the tent and the radio. Nonetheless, in modern USAP history, most Antarctic fatalities have been related to transport or industry.