Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  One night I stopped by Laz’s room to talk about résumés. His room was decorated with camouflage netting, metal shooting targets, an artillery shell full of Christmas lights, and a mock rifle for which he was once summoned to answer after a “fire” inspection. The funiture was arranged around a flatscreen TV and a DVD player he had ordered over the Internet. Laz and I were going to apply for jobs at a camp in Kuwait. Laz pulled up their website, which showed the view from camp. In one direction a series of smokestacks blasted out gray plumes. All other directions showed a flat brown horizon with a gray haze floating above it.

  Laz’s eyes glistened as he regarded the desolate shithole.

  “Hey look here,” he said, pointing out that the camp boasted a burger stand called Uncle Frosty’s Oasis. “You should begin praying now that you don’t become my underling,” Laz taunted in an aristocratic slur, “for I will most certainly be without mercy. As I relax in my government-issue tent and receive correspondence on the fax machine, I will occasionally peek out from my doughy quarters and—should I find your pace unsatisfactory—bark out a piercing ‘Chop chop!’ only to see you tremble out there with the hired Bangladeshis. Perhaps if your pace has not diminished, I will do the same, regardless.”

  “Fuck that, Captain. I shall work at Uncle Frosty’s. And when your neck is on a chopping block for some monstrous act you’ve committed and your bewildered pleading rings through the dusty plaza, it will be I, in cap and uniform, name badge gleaming like the blade above you, who dispenses frosty shakes of rich vanilla by which the mob forgets its heated vengeance. Custom will demand that you be indebted to me for life, and you will live out your days in freedom but for a variety of interesting skin grafts rotated weekly.”

  “Hi-ho, sir, you weave a fantasy which neglects the improbability of even the filthiest bistro considering you as staff, unless perhaps it is to persuade the vermin in their walls to seek more reputable lodging.”

  Like most station residents who migrate around the world chasing cashflow, Laz has varied work experience, but he has stuck with marine and air cargo for over a decade. One time he worked in the woods in Alaska, hired by biologists to camp by a river and guard a fish tally device threatened by bears that Laz would shoot in the ass with rubber bullets. For a while he worked in a prison dispensing medication. He wore a white smock and scuttled between cells with a tray of paper cups holding an array of pills. He went into the cells and yelled out names for people to get their medication. At first, people just lay in their bunks and didn’t respond, or they would say, “Over here!” and try to get Laz to bring the paper cups to them. Laz sympathized with the prisoners’ goal to regain some of the power they had lost over their lives, but he was not going to play that game. He bellowed out their names until they fetched their pills. It went on for a week like that until Laz noticed one day that as soon as he began yelling names people lined up to get their meds as quickly as possible. He discovered that one big bruiser who was always trying to sleep had promised a beating to anyone whose name was called more than once.

  In the women’s prison they would tease and taunt him, asking him how he liked it and how big his cock was. They always wanted him to call the guard; when he did, the prisoner would bother the guard about this or that, and then the guard would be mad at Laz. One time a woman called out to him that she was sick and asked him to fetch the nurse. Having learned his lesson, he first asked what was wrong.

  “I barfed up a turd,” she moaned.

  “Miss, if you could barf up a turd, then you wouldn’t be alive right now,” he said.

  “I did!” she cried. “I barfed up a turd. I saved it in a cup.”

  Though we were still on the front end of winter, we had already seen most of the safety videos, because safety meetings were mandatory each week. For the meetings, Cuff and Cory would come down from the Haz Yard; sometimes Red and Jeannie would come up from Fuels. Sometimes Ben would stop by if Fleet-Ops was having a slow day. We squished together on the couches in the little Waste break shack and drank coffee or cocoa as the frozen creases in our clothes thawed and the wind screamed outside.

  Most of us had seen most of the videos at least once. Videos were preferable to verbal meetings, where we would agree that no fewer than two people should hold a ladder being climbed and that no one should ever walk on ice while working outside. These notes would be recorded and turned in to satisfy the Safety Representative, who was just as easily appeased by our watching a video, which was more fun and far less trouble. We had several times watched Shake Hands with Danger, in which a variety of errors made by careless workers leads to dismemberment. We were tired of The Roll of the Drum, a classic cataclysmic compendium of workplace injury, in which an incongruous snare drum announces severe injuries involving heavy equipment. Later in the film, when you hear a drumroll, you know a fantastic collision will occur and the operator will become deformed or disabled. We had seen Remember Charlie twice. Charlie’s main qualification to instruct was having had most of his skin burned off in a chemical explosion. Charlie said he was just like us, hating the safety equipment, trying to take shortcuts so he could get off work early, and then one day he was floating in a burn unit acid tank surrounded by the screams of the dying. Charlie had worked for an oil company in the southern states, and was now paid by the oil company to give safety lectures. To put it another way, once he had a terrible accident, Charlie was given a full-time contract that involved travel. We’d watched even the video about restaurant safety, the main point of which was not to leave boxes lying around on the kitchen floor. I liked to remember this video when I saw the ironworkers standing on the slippery beams of a two-story unfinished building in the howling wind, faces masked and goggles fogging.

  The main theme in the safety videos is that horrible results occur when one ignores Safety. The videos promote self-preservation as crucifixions promote brotherly love. The result of watching them was that over time we became jaded about safety warnings and numb to the carnage that results from ignoring them. Since we had depleted the supply of safety videos from the Safety Representative, Jane had begun hitting up the Fire Chief for videos. So we went from watching videos about slippery floors and proper lifting techniques to watching bodies being pulled from the wreckage left by the Oklahoma City bombing.

  One day we watched a video called Alert 3: The Crash of United 232. The back of the video case called the story “a tragedy turned to triumph,” which meant, in Emergency Response lingo, that the flaming carcass of the airliner was subdued with extinguishing agents, an impromptu morgue was established (chosen for the presence of floor drains), and the bodies were successfully tracked through the forensics process without losing any of them. We listened to witnesses describe how the plane ripped open on impact and some of the passengers, still buckled into their seats, tumbled down the runway end over end, eyes wide open and alive, until they weren’t anymore. Between horrifying shots of the plane smacking against the earth were inspirational keyboard music and flyover shots of sunsets and monuments in Sioux City, Iowa, where the crash occurred. When the video ended, I knew I never wanted to fly again, unless it was to vacation in beautiful Sioux City.

  The highlight of our Safety Program was a video released to Jane with a whisper from the Fire Chief that this one was not for everyone.

  At a restaurant in Texas a gunman drove his truck through the front door and shot people as they devoured chicken and spuds from the all-you-can-eat buffet. The police officer in the video remarked that the gunman’s tactic of blocking the exit by driving through the door was effective, in that buffet-goers who fled to the rear of the restaurant were consolidated for easier murder. The gunman had placed one of his empty guns on a plate with mashed potatoes at the buffet line. We were shown repeatedly the restroom antechamber where the gunman finally shot himself in the head. Many lingering close-ups showed slain diners with food on their clothes and napkins over their faces—in respect for the dead, said the police officer. Repeatedly we saw
images of pudgy dead people slumped over on the floor after their last meal. Finally, the officer explained to the camera that although this was a terrible tragedy, the situation was dealt with professionally.

  The morning of the medevac flight, 30 people in parkas lined up with their orange bags outside the HR Office, to fool the HR Guy into thinking they’d all decided to quit. The atmosphere was jovial, and someone from FEMC brought the Tin Man, a man-sized mascot of theirs with a phallus through which margaritas and sangria are dispensed at parties. He was reported by someone as indecent to the HR Guy, who told FEMC to get rid of Tin Man. He was sealed in a coffin, to be stored on a cargo line until a safer era.

  Eleven people were flown from McMurdo, and the station doctor was evacuated from Pole. NSF was quiet about the McMurdo evacuation but enthusiastic about the second annual doctor evacuation. This time the flight actually was in the middle of winter. Though more slobbery papers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post tried to recapture the magic of the previous year with headlines of the “mercy mission” and the perilous journey, the American press was only mildly interested this year. The doctor had gall stones.

  A story from Agence France-Presse was unique in reporting on the dual evacuations. The reporter did not understand why one of the evacuees had a black eye and broken facial bones that required reconstructive surgery. The reporter was also curious about why the plane went to pick up four people, and returned with 11. “Eleven men [sic] came back, and reporters were blocked from access to the aircraft as its passengers departed Tuesday night. In contrast to the lack of information on the McMurdo rescue, reporters have been swamped with details about the condition of a sick U.S. doctor who was rescued Wednesday from the Amundsen-Scott-South Pole station.” A New Zealand military administrator said the lack of information on the McMurdo evacuation was for “political reasons.” An NSF spokesman said it was an HR issue.

  CHAPTER 7 NOTES

  1 The anthropomorphization of Antarctica precedes aviation disasters, however. As if the wind and cold each bore intent, these elements have often been described as hostile or merciless or malevolent, precisely by those walking pouches of warm blood who saw fit to tramp into the heart of Antarctica swaddled in canvas jackets. Even better-equipped military expeditioners have described their achievements as those of overcoming malevolent forces, or of conquering an enemy, as Richard Byrd wrote: “From the war there was a heritage of powerful new weapons which could be adapted for exploration and turned from fighting men to overcoming the even more malevolent elements which guard the secrets of Antarctica.” Ernest Shackleton once described his Antarctic experience as the “white warfare of the south.” An advertisement by Bell Helicopter boasting of the twin Hueys once used in McMurdo said, “All Antarctica seemed to conspire with the elements to keep them down.”The stock footage of Us versus Them sounds good, and it is still repeated, but with diminishing spunk. If Antarctica is still an enemy, it is a mild one whose secrets are “unlocked”, like an unfriendly foreign intelligence agency. If Antarctica is still an enemy, then it is one who welcomes platinum-credit tourists. The cry of ‘Charge!’ fizzles at the thought of vacationers wandering around the South Pole like campers at a roadside plaque.

  The conventional theme of struggle against a ruthless and malignant foe is worn out and in need of replacement. Almost any mythology will do. The robust market of civilization has yet to vend on the continent all but the most popular brands of legend. Despite that Shackleton was a Freemason, for example, and that Antarctic history is teeming with Freemasons, the occult fellowship, including Scott and Byrd, has been uncharacteristically lazy in raking its exciting and colorful Masonic legends over the barren continent. Obediently aping the simplest sentiments of conquest, young or aspiring Masons have not yet planted the Eye of Horus at the world’s southernmost Entrance to the Temple of Solomon. Had a true Freemason been consulted during the 1979 Erebus crash, surely Antarctica would not be suspected of hostility or of “evil” but of murder, to which the passengers of Flight 901 were accomplices. An astute Freemason would understand that this was an act of vengeance, by brooding forces, for events ancient but not forgotten.

  The central figure in Freemasonry is Hiram the Builder who in the Bible was a worker from the industrial-sounding city of Tyre. King Solomon contracted Hiram to build pillars and to do some heavy construction on the House of the Lord. In the Phoenician city of Tyre, a hub of paganism, your average pillar represented Melkart, the god of the City, the first Builder, and the inventor of “all the things useful to man.” Hiram the Builder, a born-and-bred Phoenician, not only built Solomon’s pillars, but he named them, thus professionally infusing the monotheistic House of the Lord with the pagan pillars of the Phoenician Cult of Melkart. According to ancient mythology, Melkart’s association with pillars symbolizes his union with the earth and the trees. Water was his enemy. He slew Prince Sea and King River, and he was the first to navigate open seas, riding upon a tree trunk. Melkart (as god of Hiram the Builder, the central figure of Freemasonry) was born and thrived in an ancient world without Poles, where civilization grew from great rivers mastered so as to irrigate fertile soils, and in a time when a vast realm of frozen untamable water could only be fiction.

  Antarctica, with its colossal useless beauty, is no place for Melkart, the inventor of “all things useful to man”. Stolid before a lake or the largest river, which can be put to industrious tasks, Melkart is but a puny micro-god before the lording power of Captain Icecap. Even should he import the sturdiest oak as his vessel, he would be unable to break far through the ice shelf before its wintry power matured, engulfing the frustrated lackey and sending him back to the coast to scratch out a place for himself on Ross Island. Intent on proving his mettle, planning to build a Hall of Pillars, or perhaps a more unassuming House of the Forest like the one his devoted vessel Hiram built for Solomon in his prime, there is not a single tree to be found, and even if there were, only the smallest fraction of the continent consists of exposed earth or rock suitable for building. Even were he to find a few good acres and import enough supplies to build a great Hall of Judgment, his existence would be contingent on a camping permit, his domain that of a few vacant lots in a sprawling hostile empire.

  Melkart, siphoning strength from earth and trees and fire, has been murdered by Antarctica, which each year draws more tourists admiring the beauty of absence, of uselessness, of what defies life to exist. Melkart, a god of utility, is an obsolete deity ambushed by an opponent he could not have foreseen. (Similarly, Hiram the Master-Mason was killed by three builders—perhaps McMurdo, Pole, and Palmer?—who “planted themselves at the Three Entrances of the Temple.”) According to Phoenician legend, upon Melkart’s death his wife “wreaks a bloody vengeance upon one of his many murderers. She cuts him with a sickle, winnows him with a shovel, scorches him with fire, grinds him in a mill, and then scatters his flesh over the field as food for the birds...” Then, after death, Melkart becomes God of the underworld: in Greek myth, a region named Erebus.

  2 One day after the birds were killed, while Ronne was away on a helo trip, someone stole the two penguins. Later the headless penguins were found lying in the main tunnel, and one of the heads had been put in the seat of Ronne’s personal tractor.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DISASTER CITY

  do you eat. what kind of animals. do you see.

  —curious 7-year-old correspondent to McMurdo worker

  Nothing is changing on them except the wording.

  —HR responding to concerns about mid-season changes to bonus criteria

  TO THE GREAT DELIGHT of the McMurdo community, the medevac of 11 people and one from Pole led to conspiracy stories by some of the shadier news outlets on the Web.1 Some said a virulent disease had been unleashed from the ancient lake under Vostok, where a clandestine agency was drilling to uncover a lost city, and Antarctic personnel were stricken with plague. That table salt was flown to Pole during the medevac was regar
ded as an ominous indication of the secret drilling because, as we learned from a website by Michael Bara and Richard C. Hoagland, “Salt is crucial to survival in outdoor conditions in Antarctica. The air is so dry, that unless someone exposed to the outdoors there has a good supply of salt, they are likely to face the possibility of death by mineral depletion and dehydration.” Frantic engineers were draining the crucial salt supply! Pouring salt on their faces and in their clothes to endure the winter cold as they burrowed to Atlantis! The conspiracy theorists had done too much bad research, and it was the simpler points that led them astray: “Obviously the Base, after years of operation, would have a pretty good handle on just how much salt is needed until the next re-supply plane arrives. So how is it that they suddenly find themselves desperately without any of it left?!” The dedicated conspiracist assumes that The Program is a sleek sorcerer, a master at layered deception and covert treachery, rather than the bloated carnival barker it more closely resembles, willing to use any trick up its sleeve to keep the show going. Pole ran out of salt because someone didn’t order enough salt, just as the next winter Pole would run out of beer.

  Upon the approval of the local Operations Manager, we began planning a Black-Ops Party to be held in June in the Waste Barn. We researched the Chupacabras (the Goatsucker) that plagues South American villages, appears on the Web in grainy photographs always as a smudge in the distance, and sounds suspiciously like bored teens making slurping noises. We had decided that Antarctica’s goat deficiency proved the Chupacabras’ decimating presence.