Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  46 The Snowbug expedition.

  47 Black-Ops party: bystanders extract Barbie Doll from a winter-over’s Saran-Wrap-and-ketchup cocoon.

  48 Boozy the Clown in top form.

  49, 50 Found photos of “Natasha Petronovich,” used to entice a McMurdo ironworker to Moscow.

  51 Boozy the Clown and his frozen friend share a moment of slumber. (Photos: Erin McVoy)

  52 A technician humps the alien autopsy prop at the Black-Ops party.

  53, 54 The angry unicorn and the frontier penguin ride the wind in this winter-over drawing.

  55, 56 A crazed pig blooms flowers in the blood-red city in this painting by a winter-over.

  57 A company psychologist’s appeal to today’s polar workforce.

  58 Amidst a rash of end-of-winter controversy surrounding room-inspection penalties and bonus cuts, “rose-colored glasses” were dispersed to winter-overs.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE ICE ANNEX AND THE MEDEVAC

  There I was in a tent on the side of Mount Erebus, with the temperature at 10 degrees below, with snow buffeting the tent, and a planeload of mutilated bodies outside.

  —Constable Stuart Leighton, NZ rescue team

  You see on everything you see about Antarctica, there is going to be [a] photograph of a penguin, and so that is what people want to see.

  —Dr. Donal Manahan, Chairman of the Polar Research Board at the National Research Council

  WE WOULD NOT have to deal with the dead bodies, he said—just the wounded.

  As we hauled military-green stretchers into the airport shuttle, a graybearded, earnest man whom I had somehow never seen before explained that the vans, not the airporter, would pick up the dead bodies. The airport shuttle, with its tall, sloping, gray-tinted windows and high roof for standing passengers, was not designed to hold stretchers for victims of a disaster. So we practiced maneuvering the stretchers in a tight turn just through the narrow door before laying them across the aisle with the handles resting on the seat backs. It wasn’t too cold, but our frozen breath filled the cramped shuttle.

  In the summer I had not been allowed to volunteer for the Mass Casualty Drill, because I was already on the Spill Response Team. If a river of fuel thick with bodies were roaring down the hill, my duty would be to the river, but in the winter there was extra time to train for multitasking.

  The Mass Casualty Drill aims to prepare community volunteers and emergency personnel at the Firehouse and Medical for incidents with high body-counts. Traditionally, the scenarios are cataclysmic. One time a phantom helicopter crashed into the gym. The gym, piled with basketballs, hockey nets, and frisbees, was engulfed in imaginary flames. Invisible fuel leaked from the carcass of the helicopter, threatening to further aggravate the situation with imaginary explosions that might kill the already immobile victims pretending to be wounded. The helicopter was played by a Spryte (manufactured by Thiokol, the same company that made the O-rings for the space shuttle Challenger), and the flames and fuel were supplied by stern emails of officially sanctioned delusion. The victims were volunteers, feigning the throes of death and colorcoded by emergency response managers. Green tape meant the victim was “walking wounded.” A yellow victim was immobile, but not in need of immediate medical attention. Red would probably die without immediate assistance, and black was either dead or about to be dead, and so passed over for care.

  Recent drills had added the intrigue of a criminal element. In one, a loader stolen by some ill-intentioned community member crashed into 155, cutting off heat and power to the Galley. In another, an illicit still exploded, killing its shameful owner and starting a fire in one of the dorms.

  On November 28, 1979, 237 passengers and 20 crew flew over Antarctica on commercial tourist Flight 901 from New Zealand. The tourists took pictures, drank champagne, and ate a dessert called “Peach Erebus.” Then the plane hit Mount Erebus, snapping all of their ankles simultaneously. The wing engines were destroyed immediately by the impact with the mountain, but the tail engine continued to give thrust, and the plane tore into the snow and ice like the blade of an ice pick. As the aircraft disintegrated, passengers on the left side of the plane were thrown out, some tossed into nearby crevasses. Passengers on the right came out as flaming fragments. No matter which side they were on, Air New Zealand’s lawyers determined that each passenger was worth NZ$42,000 to next of kin plus NZ$240 for unchecked baggage.

  Workers were brought by helicopter from Scott Base and from McMurdo, and a police team was flown from Christchurch. Reporter Michael Guy wrote, “[The first rescue workers] were confronted with a scene which defied description. Bloodied bodies, charred bodies, bones, unrecognisable pieces of flesh, wreckage. Handbags, money, cameras and a myriad of personal belongings—the pathetic impedimenta of violently terminated life—lay silently in the snow…” A psychological report by A.J.W. Taylor and A.G. Frazer on the rescue workers read: “Several mentioned the sight of heads with smashed faces, opened skulls empty of brains, bodies without feet, and corpses that were charred.” The Antarctic weather was sometimes a hindrance to the salvage operation, but also “made the task of handling bodies less unpleasant for them than they had expected it to be because there was no putrefaction and stench from decaying flesh.”

  Recovery teams worked in shifts, camping at the crash site and receiving food and body bags and other supplies by helicopter. Some bottles of champagne, wine, beer, and brandy had somehow survived the crash and were put to service.

  Skuas joined the recovery teams in searching the wreckage for human remains. “Bloody Skua birds are ripping the plastic bags open and eating bodies all over the site,” wrote one of the crew. In those days McMurdo was better armed, and lent a rocket-launcher to shoot the birds, but it proved too dangerous to use with all the oxygen tanks around.

  The psychology report described that some of the salvage workers “became angry as a response to their work, and they were able to displace their feelings onto convenient targets. Some displaced them onto the skua gulls, another onto those of his fellows who were cursing the gulls… Two were bitter about those who had formed premature opinions about the cause of the disaster, and resentful that because of the crash Antarctica might become anthropomorphised as ‘hostile and evil’…”1

  McMurdo old-timers say that the bodies were first stored in what is now the food freezer, then moved to the gymnasium, before it was finally deemed more efficient to store them at Willy Field, where they would eventually be flown. To sanitize radio communications, the body staging area at the runway was codenamed “Ice Annex” and the bodies themselves “Delta Cargo.” When Delta Cargo arrived by helicopter, workers at Willy unloaded the bodies, which “had begun to thaw and slither from the effect of the sun’s heat on the plastic bags. The juices frequently squirted out as the bags burst, and on one occasion a handler who caught the body liquids full in the face earned the admiration of the others as he wiped his face with fresh snow before continuing his job.” When they had stacked over 25,000 pounds of remains, they loaded them on a plane bound for New Zealand.

  The morticians and investigators in Auckland were met with 347 plastic bags punctured by bones and full of human flesh smelling of jet fuel and hydraulic fluid. As soon as bodies were identified, relatives of the Japanese passengers appeared in New Zealand with a Shinto priest and wanted to be flown to visit the crash site on the side of the smoldering volcano in Antarctica. In the following days some of the mortuary staff became vegetarian. One had a recurring dream “of being locked in an iron mask in a house with locked doors and windows from which there was no escape…”

  When the siren sounded for the Mass Casualty Drill, I went to the Firehouse and helped the other stretcher-bearers carry emergency equipment from the Mass Casualty Equipment Shack through the snow to the Firehouse. We wore yellow reflective vests. We rode in the airporters to the scene on the Scott Base road, where a head-on collision had been arranged. Three victims lay on the ground feigning concussions
and compound fractures and waiting for us to move them. Airporters idled. Fire engines and ambulances (one is named “Graverobber”) with proud flashing lights crowded the roadsides at the top of a slope that fed down onto the white rippled sea, stuck to the bottom of the twilit sky.

  Some of the firefighters were a quarter mile down the road looking for victims who may have crawled off to die. In past seasons victims have been overlooked, the most serious mistake emergency workers can make. In one drill, a vehicle driven by a pretend drunk rolled off the embankment and down the hill. The simulated drunk was an authorized handful, hooting and shouting and trying to bewilder her rescuers. Chernobyl, who had worked in McMurdo that year, was overlooked as he sat quietly in a gully with a serious imaginary head injury.

  The firefighters called for stretcher-bearers, and we hurried out of the airporter to the wounded, who were getting chilly from lying prone so long on the cold ground. We collected two victims and joked with them about their mutilations as we drove back to the Firehouse and carried them inside.

  The Firehouse garage served as the emergency room. Casualties with imitation hypothermia and lacerations were stood over by calm rescuers scanning folders of paper. Bright yellow “Do Not Cross” tape separated the treatment area from the wounded queue, and from the waiting area for the stretcher-bearers. The yellow tape crisscrossed the garage at chest level, obstructing transport of victims.

  After the drill, once the Firehouse garage had been cleaned up and the oxygen tanks put away, the doctor invited us to the classroom in the back of the Firehouse for a debriefing. Here I once took a fire extinguisher class and saw a movie in which fire researchers set up a room with tasteful upholstery and chairs and lamps and curtains, then torched it all and filmed it. Pictures of summer and winter fire crews from seasons past hung on the walls, and in the back of the room were beautiful pictures of burning houses, elegantly arranged.

  The doctor told us he thought the drill went well. Someone asked how many victims a Mass Casualty Incident requires. He said that three simultaneous victims would tax the resources available in McMurdo. My interest waned during a dispute about how best to get people to muster for the drill, so I was looking around. The guy standing behind me was already watching me. I didn’t know him, but had probably greeted him a few times in the halls. Our eyes met, but mine suddenly felt like the glazed marbles of stuffed game.

  His name was Perry. One of his co-workers, a law student named Wilson, told me stories about him. One time Wilson was bent over scraping something off the floor in the 203 remodel when he looked up to see Perry standing over him with a length of two-by-four in his hands, poised as if to bash Wilson over the head.

  “Hey Perry,” Wilson laughed.

  Perry was giggling.

  “You got me good there,” Wilson said.

  Perry lowered the two-by-four, still laughing.

  Perry told Wilson a story of his childhood on the farm. The family dog had a litter of pups, and Perry’s father told him that if Perry didn’t find a home for the pups he would kill them. A few days later Perry was sitting on the porch idly popping shots at birds when one of the pups crossed the yard in front of him. He shot it; the bullet ripped through its skin above its shoulder blades, and most of the skin on the puppy’s back flew off, the remainder hanging off in tatters. The pup ran into the barn where the rest of the litter was. When Perry went into the barn, the other pups had surrounded the injured one, and when Perry approached, the biggest pup started growling at him. He put the gun to its head and shot it.

  “Then I shot the other one,” Perry giggled.

  One of his favorite jokes was to approach Wilson with a tape measure and take his measurements to see how big to make his coffin.

  “I think our crew is all right because we’re his buds,” Wilson said, “But I think everyone else on station is in the red.”

  Wilson explained that Perry didn’t like it here at all. He wanted to winter at Pole. Wilson had told Perry that if he didn’t like it here he probably wouldn’t like it at Pole either. Perry had told him he wants to be out away from everything.

  Though at first I suspected Perry was a psychopath, my later conversations with him convinced me that he wasn’t so bad. Sure, he had a brooding and distant temperament, and he would probably snap someday, but in these remote places you have to learn to get along with people. As for my hasty judgment based only on a few stories, there are countless tales of explorers devouring dog brains and pony meat. Though most are tales of survival, some aren’t. On the Discovery expedition, Robert Scott, disgusted by their eating each other’s shit, ordered a litter of pups killed. Once Richard Byrd and some other men, standing on the ice edge, stabbed whales with shovels until they bled, which got the men so worked up that one suggested exploding one of the whales with dynamite. John Behrendt, a seismologist at Ellsworth Station under Commanding Officer Finn Ronne, described how Ronne and an assistant once caught and killed two penguins to take back to the Smithsonian Institute:First the Great Antarctic Explorers jabbed the birds in the eye with an ice pick hoping they would die when the brain was pierced—they didn’t. Then they kicked them down and stood on their heads. Next they tied ropes around their necks and dragged them back and forth across the snow in an effort to strangle them and clean the blood off their breasts.

  After they dragged them around camp from the airdale building to the garage, the one with the injured wing died. The other got up, and with blood streaming from its eyes tried to walk away. Finally Ronne kicked it down and stood on its neck until it died. The whole operation took over an hour.2

  Ronne’s books include Antarctic Command, Antarctic Conquest, and Antarctica, My Destiny.

  So when Perry, who lived two doors down from me, put up his first door decoration—a grainy black and white photocopied picture of a deer being hit by a car, its body contorted in the split second just after impact—it was as if a famous explorer had moved in next door.

  Laz had had a sore neck for a few weeks, and it didn’t seem likely to go away. He could endure the soreness, but it also interfered with the movement of his head. So, when all else failed, then and only then, he went to Medical. The doctor looked at Laz’s neck and told him it would be fine and to treat it at work by applying a hot moist rag four times a day. Laz, who spent most of his time working outside, remarked later, “Yeah, I’ll just stop by the hot moist rag bin every now and then.”

  Medical is to be avoided at all costs. If you go in with a health problem, you come out with a political problem. Sometimes we are told there are no punishments for going to Medical, but there are plenty of indicators to the contrary. One woman told me she went in for an icepack and was denied it, but was then stuck with the full consequences of the paperwork for a recordable injury.

  The minute you enter, you begin the paperwork, and the paperwork follows you back to work, where you’ve just made more work for your supervisor. Someone up the chain checks in with a friendly personal email to “see how you’re doing,” while sending out mass emails complaining that “things” flow downhill and they’re feeling a lot of pressure about Injury Rates. While Denver ostensibly encourages the reporting of injuries, Denver has also awarded cash to departments with the best safety statistics, in practice encouraging concealment of injuries. That the right hand and the left hand don’t communicate is illustrated by the following excerpts from separate memos:

  “It has been brought to my attention that some employees are of the belief that if you are injured and go to medical for treatment it can or will somehow he held against you and your bonus. I want to tell you all right now that there is absolutely no truth to that.”

  —Safety Guy, October 26, 2000

  “Our safety and health performance will play a role in determining not only our contract award fee, but also each of our individual deployment bonuses.”

  —RPSC President, July 26, 2000

  Whether one is following orders or merely requires routine medical advice, eve
n the least serious trip to Medical has a way of snowballing into a “situation.” If a medevac flight is imminent, the repercussions of reporting an injury are even dicier, because it matters little if the doctor thought you were fine. A corporate executive with no medical credentials in an office far away could ultimately pull you out against the McMurdo doctor’s recommendation and terminate your contract under “medical” auspices, as is illustrated in these email excerpts from the RPSC Program Director to a McMurdo physician (April 2001):

  “…you may make a call for an evacuation, but the final approval is neither yours or Charlie’s—it’s the National Science Foundation’s, based on my recommendation.”

  “Based on the information I’ve received on the case of the patient with [diagnosis deleted], I believe it prudent that we evacuate him along with the others.”

  “We’re fighting a losing battle with Corporate. The Legal department doesn’t want a repeat of the [patient name deleted] injury situation. I’m afraid [other patient name deleted] will have to depart.”

  Each day more people got scheduled for the medevac plane. Besides the legitimate medical evacuees and the cost-effective manager-selected evacuees, it began to look as though there would be some shitkicker evacuees. An ironworker threw a drink in the face of a bartender, who then threw the ironworker on the floor. The ironworker, who had recently attacked someone with a pool cue, was certain to go out on the plane. A painter who was wrestling with the Kiwis over at Scott Base crashed his face into the corner of a table and would be flown out for reconstructive surgery. Two guys at the bar had a heated argument over who had been to Black Island more times. One threw a bottle at the other, cutting his hand. The incident might be overlooked, or not. We would find out when the plane arrived.