Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  We also began to watch more TV. Ivan and I held weekly gatherings to watch old Star Trek. We watched Star Trek because outer space is where it’s at. It’s the final frontier, not some half-assed backwater frontier. On Star Trek there was no chance that once they entered the darkest reaches of space the criteria for their ten-year mission bonuses would be rewritten. When a succubus on an alien planet sucked the salt from a red shirt’s husked corpse, the Enterprise Safety Department didn’t remind the crew that alien succubi “are your responsibility.” Mr. Spock didn’t perform mind melds on the crew, send the results off to Starfleet Command, and then tell the crew that the results of the mind melds were none of their business. Unless they had been infected by a malicious energy vortex, the crew was not tense and angry, and we could presume that those who liked to direct plays or play music or write newsletters were free to do so without interference from Captain Kirk, who couldn’t hide his annoyance whenever he encountered totalitarian alien cultures. The Enterprise, whatever its faults, did not need a Quality Assurance Representative.

  One day, as I was wearily loading pasta onto my lunch plate, Gail, the salad-maker who had taken me with her on the seal odyssey, came out of the kitchen to talk to me.

  “You are going to love this,” she said. Gail was a fellow connoisseur of The Program’s small golden moments. I stepped away from the food line.

  “The Galley’s about to run out of certain foods,” she said. “And underordering food is in the Galley metrics.”

  “Metrics” is a potent word around town. The “metrics system” is one reason NSF slipped Raytheon the support contract. Each department has a “metric” that, if bungled, will reduce NSF cash to Raytheon at the end of the contract year. A command accompanied by “metrics” implies that all other concerns are overridden, as there will be a follow-up report during or after the task’s completion. “Metrics” means it’s time to bust ass. The power plant has a metric for minutes of power outage, Fuels has a metric for spills, and the Galley has a metric for food supplies, so that Raytheon could take a pay cut if some staple were underordered. Gail said that after the recent food inventory had been completed, Denver instructed that nearly depleted items be kept in inventory so as to comply with the metric. This meant that if, for instance, the Galley had only one more case of powdered milk, it was to remain in the warehouse so that, on the books, milk had not been underordered. No milk would be served, but milk would officially be in adequate supply.

  In mid-July, just before one of our monthly two-day weekends, we received an email saying that a problem with the water intake pipe had left the town officially on water shortage. We were supposed to cut back on showers, do no laundry, and eat from paper plates in the Galley.

  The email had little effect. It was hard to imagine dying from thirst. While we could imagine getting permanent nerve damage from exposure to fuel, or falling in a crevasse, or dying from exposure in a snowbank, it was impossible to imagine being in a nice hot shower that suddenly ran dry, or trying to suck dribbles from the drip tube beneath the ice machine. It was hard to imagine this when we could melt snow in the microwaves in our rooms.

  One morning someone posted this flyer in several places along Highway 1:DUE TO WATER SHORTAGE, RESTRICTIONS WILL BE IMPLEMENTED AS FOLLOWS:

  Job Points + (.125 x Months on Ice)

  = Gallons H2O/Day

  All Allocations Non-Transferable

  STRICTLY ENFORCED

  Have a nice day...

  At this time the baker had been on an unofficial strike for a few days.1 Her desserts were exceptionally good and often elaborate, but the community that gobbled them in great quantities had shown no gratitude for her efforts. Her means of protest was to put out pre-packaged frozen baked goods: small crumbly apple and cherry pies still in the tins, “confetti cake” with multicolored sprinkles still on the cardboard circle, and factorymade cookies. Many thought nothing of it, and some were happy for more familiar fare, but a few pastry-snobs could be seen at the dessert counter grumbling, “confetti cake.”2

  The baker’s protest—that people in a community should be grateful for each other—rested on misconceptions about the town. When one thinks of a town of a few hundred, one imagines the local shopkeeper sweeping his sidewalk and sneaking free candy to the children. Old men in rocking chairs pet dogs at sunset and wave to passing visitors. One might even expect such things of a small town in Antarctica, without the dogs and children of course, and expect firm handshakes to be delivered after the local barnraising for the newest office module.

  In reality, the little polar town has a strict division of labor, and neighboring departments try to foist responsibility on each other for even the most inexpensive cargo damage. Overt interdepartmental favors, such as loaning tools or materials, chap the hide of anyone invested in the chain of command. There is the occasional exhortation to departments to work together better, but efforts to that end generally implode on conception, because scapegoating is the primary form of interdepartmental communication. New bureaucracy-busting plans are forever being formulated and implemented. Progress is achieved by addition, never by subtraction. In every department, people are busy at their jobs. The repaired truck goes out and a broken one comes in. A mopped floor is dirty again within minutes. Dumpsters never stop filling up. FEMC has two years worth of backlogged work orders. The desserts get eaten as fast as they’re made. Everyone works in the same ceaseless tide. Pats on the back seem as pointless as heating a shack that has no door. Supervisors have been criticized for writing positive evaluations.

  Though the advantages of a rigid division of labor are obvious in the weekly reports and spreadsheets, the disadvantages appear as mysterious aberrations, as problems to be solved individually. A sensitive baker realizes the icy divisions and brings attention to them, if only for a pat on the back. The Operations Manager calls on our sense of community so a water shortage doesn’t affect operations.

  But that’s not our department.

  On the Sunday of our two-day weekend, we voted to decide the Winter-Over 2001 t-shirt design. The winning design would be emailed to New Zealand and the shirts sent down at Winfly. There were about ten designs hung in Highway 1 for consideration. Laz submitted a design with a generic male figure fucking a screaming penguin. Above it was the ordinance from the Antarctic Treaty that disallows “molestation” of animal life without a permit from NSF. The pocket design said, “Sure, I fuck penguins, so what?” This sketch was covered with a piece of paper warning that the design might offend. Some of the others were polished four-color Photoshop efforts featuring unmolested penguins. One had penguins holding hands (wings, actually), with Antarctica at the top of the globe.

  One design was from someone who apparently learned to draw by studying fusion-rock album covers from the 1970s. It showed a penguin waving a cowboy hat and riding an angry unicorn with flames pouring from its nostrils. The crazed unicorn was charging through wispy blue strands of wind erupting from the mouth of a blue cloud with crazed eyes. The cloud’s breath coagulated to read, “Ridin’ out the storm.” The design with the penguins holding hands won with about 30 votes.

  The next day we got an email saying that the problem with the intake valve had been fixed and the water shortage was over. “It’s amazing how a community can come together during a crisis like that,” Ivan said.

  The hint of dark blue in the sky and the imminent arrival by plane of the t-shirts reminded us that Winfly was just around the corner. Winfly, the season from mid-August to early October, brings two opposing emotions: relief that soon you will be in Christchurch lavishly spending instead of working, and disgust that from the first Winfly flight until then you will once again cram together with a roommate, find the Galley crowded, and encounter daisy-fresh assholes running around asking where you’re from. Yet, a lot of friends would fly in, there would be new women around (or “Winfly Pussy” as Jane liked to say), and there would be furious storms, so Winfly was not without welcome diversi
ons.

  But even though we spotted Winfly on the horizon, it was still very much winter. Ted the Racist was fired from the Heavy Shop. He had already been banned from buying alcohol and from going in the bars, and now he had pulled a knife on someone, which was important news for the Projected Mayhem Index, though the asbestos incident had confounded our notion of what constituted mayhem, resulting in a kind of Mayhem Inflation that calloused our senses. Ted the Racist was still receiving paychecks, but no bonus, and was technically still hired as a “consultant.” Whatever the official reason for this, we knew the paychecks were a payoff so he didn’t go apeshit and hurt someone.

  The Heavy Shop was bubbling with unrest. The mechanics were grumbling. The Heavy Shop foreman had been promoted this year from his previous position as a welder, despite having one season attacked the stereo with a hammer. Now that he was foreman, he simply turned up the shop radio if the mechanics were playing country, and turned it off when they were playing classic rock, even though he spent most of his time in the office.

  He decreed that bumper stickers were to be removed from every machine in the fleet when they came in for maintenance. None of the stickers were remarkable, usually asking “Where the heck is Wall Drug?” or advertising some podunk bar in the remote Midwest. The Heavy Shop GA, charged with scraping the stickers from the machines, was soon told to make exceptions for certain stickers: one for “This is a non-smoking vehicle,” and one for “Idaho” (the foreman’s home state). Jeannie asked the GA about the “Visualize Whirled Peas” sticker on the fuel truck. The GA said that the foreman hated it most of all, and that the policy was probably an effort to get rid of that one sticker.

  The Firehouse was also having troubles. Because of air quality problems caused by the Firehouse ventilation system, the firefighters had been moved to 155 to sleep during their shifts. One of the firefighters had reported to Medical with complaints of nausea, dizziness, and chest pain. When other firefighters reported similar symptoms, the doctor researched the effects of long-term exposure to fumes of the jet fuel that heats the building and found it could lead to convulsions and death, so he brought the problem to the attention of Safety.

  Safety was too busy formulating emails about the importance of reducing the overall injury rate to futz with nonscientific, subjective symptoms.3 One of the firefighters wrote an email to her mother about the bad air, and her mother became concerned. She contacted OSHA, who suddenly had no weight in Antarctica, before calling NSF, who didn’t respond. Finally the angry mother contacted a North Dakota senator who faxed a letter to NSF, at which point the firefighters were immediately moved out of the firehouse to sleep in 155 until the ventilation problem was fixed. The whole mess was covered in the Bismarck Tribune.

  By the end of July, Bighand was officially cut off from the bar. The Station Manager began looking out his office window a lot, reporting people who didn’t stop completely at one of the few stop signs in town. Some days were so cold that the hydraulics on the machines barely moved. During these spells, the metal baler could barely even crush a barrel. Tires would freeze with flat spots overnight, and our machines sprang glycol leaks every couple of days and had to be taken to the Heavy Shop.

  At the end of July there was an All-Hands Meeting at which the Housing Coordinator, a cheerful woman named Ellie who was universally described as nice, explained the Winfly Housing rules and expectations for room inspections. She said that we had three chances to pass inspection, with penalties from $350 to $500 if we didn’t pass the third. Her PowerPoint presentation explained room assignment, with a humorous theme of “It’s Not Me,” pointing out that all Housing allocations were made in Denver. Friends chose friends to move in with, and others opted for random roommates who would come in at Winfly.

  Ivan and I decided to share a room in 155. For a few hours here and there after work throughout the end of July, we cleaned our trusty winter rooms and prepared to move. Once Ivan began choking up:

  “Remember that time I was cleaning the shower and you were cleaning the toilet? Ah, those were good times, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they certainly were, my friend, they certainly were. Remember that time I needed the Comet when you were finished with it?”

  “I do remember that, as if it were yesterday. Those were golden days, my friend. Remember that time I was cleaning the shower and you had to hold your horses for the Comet? Remember that?”

  “Like a withered blossom clutching but the memory of fragrance I do. Flawless times, flawless. Hand it over.”

  “Great god, what an awful stain! I am scrubbing the shower, and I may be some time.”

  On August 1, Winfly room assignments were posted on the Housing bulletin board. There were problems, and the grapevine throbbed with controversy. Half the window rooms in 155 had been reserved for Winfly people, so a steamed winter-over wrote to Denver Housing: “You are telling me I am unable to get a room with a window because somebody who has been in Denver or any other place with ‘sunlight’ for the past seven months needs one more?”

  Some people who’d selected Winfly roommates were instead given random winter-over roommates or told to move to different dorms. Jane, who had agreed to prepare for a Winfly roommate by the end of August, was told that another winter-over was moving into her room and that she had to be ready for room inspection immediately. She thought it was just a paperwork error.

  Jane went to the Housing Office. There, Franz told her to contact Debbie in Denver. Jane called Debbie one morning, while Thom and I were there drinking coffee. Debbie told Jane to talk to Franz. Jane told Debbie that Franz had told Jane to talk to her. There was talk of “miscommunication” concerning the Housing policy, and Jane asked what, exactly, the Housing policy was currently. We couldn’t hear what Debbie said, but Jane responded, “I’m not being unreasonable.”

  Following the phone conversation, Jane wrote an email to Franz telling him that she had consulted Debbie in Denver, as he had suggested, without satisfactory conclusion, and that Debbie wouldn’t tell her what the new Housing policy was.

  Franz immediately sent for Jane to come to the Chalet for a meeting with him and Ike, the Operations Manager, for whom we all had great respect. Jane asked Ike if this was a disciplinary meeting, and he told her it was not—otherwise HR would be involved. Franz eventually told her that if she didn’t comply with her Housing assignment by August 8, her bonus would be affected.

  The hardships of moving one’s clothes and books and wall hangings and junk to a different dorm in Antarctica in one’s spare time are unlikely to stir the sympathies of even the busiest packrat, and are ultimately of minor importance, just as the South Pole itself is little more than an unremarkable point in a landscape of unrelenting monotony. But Jane’s Housing struggle is illustrative. There were a few different forces at work. An order to move immediately, retracting the options given at the All-Hands Meeting, was in practice an order to work longer days. NSF policy is that no one will get time off work to move, and to vacate and clean quarters inhabited for a year takes more time each night if done within one week rather than five. Most important in this story of a doomed struggle against power, August 8, the date by which Jane was supposed to have vacated and cleaned her room, was an arbitrary date set roughly two weeks before the first Winfly flight, a line drawn in the sand.

  Jane had always put in longer workdays if it was necessary, but to do so because of a management “miscommunication,” and with no benefit to anyone, seemed unnecessary to Jane. Until the first flight arrived three weeks from now, her existence in one room or another made only the difference between two cells in a spreadsheet.

  For working outside in the wind and cold, shoveling, sawing, welding, whatever it is that you do, The Program, in periodic memos and emails, will tell you that you’ve made a “sacrifice” for “science.” But the cold doesn’t consider your sacrifice. The cold doesn’t care about you one way or another. The cold is not trying to use you in a media spin. Nor is it trying to
make an example of you. You do not blame it, begrudge it, or believe you can profit from an insincere alliance with it. Your experience with the cold is so personal that you hardly ever mention it.

  To work a long day in the cold was one thing, but to give up even ten hours of spare time for a low-ball glitch in paperwork, visible to everyone involved, was not the kind of sacrifice Jane wanted to make.

  Franz: What you’re trying to get at—you’re trying and trying and trying and trying to do everything you can to stay in your room—

  Jane: To make something fair—

  Franz: Right. And I’m saying you’ve got two choices, because that’s what policy decision—

  Jane: Okay, if I don’t move out of my room, I want to know what the consequences are going to be—

  Franz: I’ll write you up. It’ll be documented and it will affect your bonus.

  Jane: It’ll affect my bonus how?

  Franz: Because it’s a written warning—

  Jane: How does one write-up regarding not moving out of your room affect your bonus? Obviously I’ll be recommended for Level A, B, or C. Does it move it down one level? Two levels?

  Franz: I’ll have to check with [the HR Guy], I’m not sure, but it’s insubordination.

  Jane: Can you get back to me with that in writing?

  Franz: No.

  Jane: Why?

  Franz: Why, why, why is—

  Jane: I want to know how my decisions are going to affect me. Why is that so surprising to you?

  Franz: It’s not surprising to me.