Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  Franz brought out awards of recognition for some of the Galley staff for their hard work. A few weeks earlier the Galley staff had been unable to attend the traditional All-Station winter photo because it had been scheduled during lunchtime, so that other departments wouldn’t miss a minute of work. Now, as Franz dispensed their awards, made from a template and printed in bright primary colors on the office printer, we applauded.

  Just before the first Winfly flight, we had a final All-Hands Meeting. The NSF Rep read us a handful of dates and temperatures associated with Winfly, then reminded us not to get too territorial toward the Winfly people, as everyone had by now become protective of their favorite lunch tables and coat hooks. The doctor stood up and reminded us that Winfly marks the beginning of “the crud,” a stew of freshly imported germs that would easily plow through our lazy immune systems.

  Franz stood up and said niceties and then opened the floor for questions. I raised my hand and Franz called on me.

  “Will our bonuses be affected if we ask questions at these meetings?” I asked. The Galley burst into laughter.

  “Not if that’s your only question,” Franz said through the laughter.

  “What other questions would affect my bonus?”

  “I think it’s on the I-Drive,” he joked, and addressed the HR Guy at a table in front. “HR Guy—Disciplinary questions?” Now there was no laughter. “Did you have anything in particular?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to get in trouble for asking questions.”

  “Throw it out there,” he said.

  “At one All-Hands Meeting we were told that we had three chances to clean our rooms…”

  “Yep.”

  “I heard a rumor that there’s up to three people who’ve been charged money and they haven’t had those three chances. I want to know if that rumor’s true.”

  “If that’s the case,” Franz said, “it’s an HR issue which is confidential and none of any of our business.”

  Franz covered the frosty ripple of murmurs by restating himself and someone mumbled “When are you gonna run for office?”

  A woman got angry and stood up and asked Franz why we should be held accountable for violating publicly stated policies that were inaccurate and unreliable.

  Franz listened to her politely, then said that whether it was one or two or a hundred people, it didn’t matter, and that it was a confidential HR issue.8 Any more questions?

  Silence.

  I began clapping and a weak applause started and died quickly.

  “Thank you,” said Franz, “that’s very sincere.”

  Franz drew names out of a hat and gave us prizes of t-shirts and hats and other old stock that wouldn’t sell at the store.

  CHAPTER 10 NOTES

  1 During Byrd’s first expedition, the baker quit baking bread for a week to protest some of the crew’s loud parties.

  2 “Talkers” are most obvious at the computers or in the Galley. “Potatoes,” they say, as they scoop up potatoes. “One new message,” they say as they check their email. “Glass,” they say as they put a glass bottle in the glass bin at the recycling area.

  3 The Safety Department had once sent an email to all supervisors with the subject heading “Important Directive from Raytheon.” The “important directive” was that future safety reports should be submitted in “10 pt Times New Roman Font.”

  4 “Sandcrab,” says Behrendt, is slang for “civilian.”

  5 On October 26, 2000, in the afternoon, the Foreign Names Committee, with full endorsement of the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, officially declared, with electrifying decisiveness, that the ocean surrounding Antarctica might be addressed, for U.S. Government purposes, as the “Southern Ocean,” as it has been illegitimately named for decades. The gravity of the landmark resolution was not lost on the reeling Committee, who wrote in their masterfully titled “Foreign Names Committee Report” that “The Committee’s most significant decision during the reporting period [April-October 1999] was the adoption of the term Southern Ocean as a standard name for the body of water surrounding the continent of Antarctica.” It took this network of responsive agencies just under one year to embrace the dream and, with it, to forge a new reality.

  6 In 1971 social psychologists at Stanford University put an ad in the paper for volunteers to join in a study of prison life for a wage of $15 per diem. Of those who responded, two dozen participants were selected on the basis of their “normal, average, and healthy” responses during the psychological screenings. The participants were randomly divided into “guards” and “prisoners.” The psychologists told the guards only to “maintain law and order,” not to hit the prisoners with their billy clubs, and that if any prisoner escaped from the “prison” (the basement of the Stanford University psychology department—with offices converted into prison cells) then the experiment would be terminated. Other than that they were left to their own devices. The guards decided that the prisoners should refer to the guards as “Mr. Correctional Officer,” while the prisoners were referred to by their numbers. On the second day, some of the prisoners ripped the numbers off their smocks and made fun of the guards. “The prisoners were punished in a variety of ways. They were stripped naked, put in solitary confinement for hours on end, deprived of meals and blankets or pillows, and forced to do push-ups, jumping jacks, and meaningless activities.” The guards also created a “privilege cell” where obedient prisoners were rewarded with better food and a good bed, which created “suspicion and distrust among the prisoners.” One of the experimenters wrote that “the group pressures from other guards had a significant impact on being a ‘team player,’ on conforming to or at least not challenging what seemed to be the emergent norm of dehumanizing the prisoners in various ways.” Before two full days had passed one of the prisoners was released by the psychologists for pathological reactions to stress. “[W]e worried that there had been a flaw in our screening process that had allowed a ‘damaged’ person somehow to slip through undetected,” wrote another of the experimenters in “The SPE and the Analysis of Institutions.” “If we can attribute deviance, failure, and breakdowns to the individual flaws of others, then we are absolved.” The guards woke the prisoners in the middle of the night, and tried to abuse the prisoners when they thought the psychologists weren’t watching, though the psychologists had secretly set up cameras. Another prisoner broke out in a full body rash and was released from the experiment. Though the study was meant to last two weeks, it ended after six days because the participants “were behaving pathologically as powerless prisoners or as sadistic, all-powerful guards.” The experiment was approved by the university’s Human Subjects Review Board on the condition that fire extinguishers be available, since access to the basement was limited. “Ironically, the guards later used these extinguishers as weapons to subdue the prisoners with their forceful blasts.”

  7 “At first, any suggestion of a comparison between people in the Antarctic who were in the mould of heroes with prisoners might seem to be either objectionable or fanciful. But both groups were in such geographical isolation and insulation from the outside world as to suggest that in some ways their behaviour might be similar… The prison analogy was to recur at different points in my research, and for me it now no longer remains an enigma. Essentially, adversity can be made tolerable when the boundaries of oppression are identified.”—A.J.W. Taylor, “Antarctic Psychology.” In a 1981 New Zealand study of the effects of Antarctic isolation on hypnotizability and pain tolerance, Paparua prison was used to simulate cramped Antarctic conditions for preliminary experiments with equipment before going into the field. (The results of this study showed that the sensory deprivation of Antarctic isolation increases hypnotizability. The Antarctic environment enhances the power of suggestion.)

  8 When I asked their manager about the “secret” fines, he wrote: “I knew exactly what the fines were for (as did the [fingee employees]), but I just disagreed with them. Essentially they couldn’
t be Housing fines because all the people passed their room inspections within 24 hours of the first inspection. So, [Franz and the HR Guy] said they were for non-compliance—not following instructions, namely not having their room “ready for inspection.” [The HR Guy] insisted that they should get a written reprimand for failure to follow instructions and that one reprimand meant that they lost all their bonus. Management was being kind by only fining them $350 rather than taking all their bonuses. I disagreed with the written reprimand and also asked where it said that one meant a lost bonus. I never saw that in my Terms of Agreement, did you? At that point it just became a pissing contest to see who had the power, and they had the power.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FAITH IN SCIENCE

  We must balance respect for life with the promise of science.

  —George W. Bush

  Ah! hurry, do hurry; out there, beyond the night, those future, those eternal rewards … shall we escape them?

  —Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

  THE FIRST WINFLY PLANE arrived at the end of August, signaling the final stretch of winter, with six weeks to go before Mainbody. Winter-overs received brown lunch sacks full of fresh fruit and vegetables. The Galley was loud with new people. Those who came in on the plane were cleancut, tanned, and wearing fresh Carhartts. Fingees with tucked-in shirts all huddled together, looking around in bewilderment. They had just recently been through Orientation, where they had heard about sexual harassment and diversity. Winter-overs got testy when the Winfly people helped themselves to the fresh fruit in the food line.

  The day before the plane came in, I was busy banding a Food Waste triwall in the Waste Barn when Bighand came in.

  “Hey Bighand.”

  “I need a bag,” he said.

  I showed him the roll of plastic triwall bags. “Like this?” I asked.

  “No! Not that kind of bag! A bag! A bag I can put all my shit in! My boots and all my shit!”

  Bighand had a temper because he was being sent out on the plane. I took him outside to the skua boxes we’d recently collected from the dorms, and we looked through them for luggage. While I continued searching, he walked to his idling truck and spoke to someone in the passenger seat.

  “Tracker! Shut the fuck up!” Bighand listened for a moment. “Tracker! Close your fucking mouth!”

  Bighand came back over. I showed him a battered cloth suitcase. “How about this?”

  “Fuck. Well, I guess it’ll have to do.” Those were his last words to me. He threw the suitcase in the back of the truck and drove away.

  The first plane took Bighand away and brought mail. Ivan had ordered French sailor shirts. I ignored six months of receipts and bank statements; they reminded me that soon I would be keeping money in my pockets, and using telephone books, and standing in lines and seeing ads for credit cards.

  While I had been here all year, Raytheon had sent to my P.O. box monthly issues of the company magazine, Taking Care: Health Information You Can Count On. One article, “Kindness Is Its Own Reward,” said that “being kind is contagious.” It suggested, “Tape coins to a pay phone with a note saying that anyone who needs it can use the money,” and said that “These random acts may lead to a new way of living—one that is positive and full of compassion.”1 An article called “How Do You Deal With Anger?” said, “You may feel trapped with people and things that make you feel angry,” and suggested, “Try slow, yoga-like exercises to relax muscles and ease tension.”

  There were articles about how to detect and treat poison ivy and how to avoid getting Lyme Disease from ticks in the woods, recipes for cooking with fresh tomatoes, and an article called “Garden Therapy: Cultivate Your Mind” about the healing power of plants: “When you see a seed turn into a plant or flower, it’s nature’s magic.”

  The garden therapy article had been included in the magazine’s April issue, which had been published about the same time the Greenhouse Attendant had left on the medevac flight and Cuff from Haz Waste had volunteered to keep the Greenhouse up and running. He worked three or four extra hours a day, before and after his other job, and his long hours had assured the community a small but welcome supply of fresh vegetables through winter.

  Greenhouse Attendant is a full-time position, and Cuff’s supervisor put in the paperwork for Cuff to receive the wages of the Greenhouse attendant for those hours he spent in the Greenhouse. His bosses approved this, but the HR rep, who worked near brewpubs with salad bars in Denver, did not approve, and said that Cuff should be paid seven dollars an hour. She told Cuff it would not be fair to pay him more than those who worked part-time to help Housing, which was short-staffed because some janitors had quit just before winter started, finding it not worth the pay to stick around. Cuff kept the Greenhouse running, because if he had decided not to do it, there would have been no salads for the latter part of the winter. Some in town might have blamed him, as if he had just walked in and turned off the garden.

  Sasha believed that the documentation of her meetings with the HR Guy and Franz omitted some of their discussions, so she tried to bring a coworker to one of the meetings. “This is not a courtroom,” the HR Guy said, and told him to leave. She asked to have all their meetings put in writing and entered into her file. The HR Guy said that doing so would only be worse for her. She insisted. She printed out the complete digest of emails that had so far been exchanged and asked the HR Guy to include them in her file. He did so, but Sasha was called to HR every couple of days to discuss the consequences of her latest email outside the chain-of-command, or her latest email to Housing to ask again what—because no one on the ice seemed to know—the new policy was, and he didn’t always document these meetings. Sasha said that if these meetings were official proceedings, then she had a right to have them documented.

  “You have no rights down here,” he told her.

  Over 80 years before a DA erected barriers against the eating of toast, before a supervisor cleared a room to shower behind a closed door, before a manager confiscated a shower curtain, Mackintosh, the leader of the Aurora expedition, realized one day with horror that one of his party, Dick Richards, had so far been plodding alongside him through blinding blizzards without signing the customary agreement with Shackleton that limited the publication of their personal experiences. In Shackleton’s Forgotten Argonauts, Lennard Bickel wrote that, as they camped at a grim and vacant latitude, their flesh made brittle by cruel squalls on their trackless slog through a frigid desert, “There and then Mackintosh pored over a sheet of paper, writing in pencil the form of contract as he recalled it. When it was done he called Richards to his tent to sign the document.”

  “You might need this,” the HR Guy told Sasha as he handed her a brochure on travel insurance. He had called her in from work. She had cut short a briefing for new employees, donned her parka and hat, and walked down the road to 155 and into the warm HR Office to be given a brochure she would throw away.

  “Is that it?” she asked, confused.

  He laughed.

  On Monday the grapevine confirmed that Sasha was going to be fired. It was solid, because someone saw her name on the flight manifest. She just hadn’t been told officially, and no one knew yet what the cause of the termination would be. Her sarcastic emails, her persistent questions, and her impertinence had stirred hostile sentiments, and it had been inevitable that she would breach some arcane protocol that could rationalize her dismissal. Eventually she would make a mistake.

  On the common drive on the network, Sasha had found a publicly available “Supervisor Progress Form,” which she printed and retitled “Station Manager Progress Form.” She left the rest of the form the same, including the official company logo at the top. She made copies and passed them out in the Galley on Sunday.

  “Is this one of those funny papers I heard about?” asked one of the managers who had just flown in.

  “No, it’s a Station Manager Progress Form,” she said, and handed one to him, while Franz stood fumi
ng nearby.

  Sasha was really asking for it.

  She was called into the HR Office on Monday to sit before Franz, the HR Guy, and her supervisor.

  That morning Franz was overheard in the HR Office saying, “I’m going to try not to enjoy this too much.”

  Franz: We’re here to talk about the Station Manager Progress Form. The final resolution of it is in this letter—let me read it: “[Sasha], effective immediately your employment with RPSC has been terminated. On Sunday the 26th of August you were observed distributing a Station Manager Progress Form. When you were questioned about where you found the document you admitted to creating the document using company letterhead. The creation and distribution of unofficial company documents is strictly forbidden. Termination of employment per the RPSC Terms of Agreement, Section 18, include loss of your bonus and no travel fund. You will be given a ticket to return to your airport of departure on the first available flight. Due to your actions as stated above you are also no longer eligible for rehire.”

  HR Guy: Here is your redeployment information. Your room inspection checklist needs to be done. [Ellie] will probably take a look at inspecting your room tomorrow morning after Bag Drag. [The HR Guy handed Sasha some paperwork stating that if an employee is fired, they are not eligible to continue paying company insurance rates.]

  Sasha: Okay.

  HR Guy: Tonight you need to start packing and get ready for Bag Drag. Housing will do your inspection after you Bag Drag at 8:30. You need to work on getting the rest of your checkout list signed off on.