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.
Fatalities are rare now, but in the bloodiest years, the first 30 years or so after World War II, an NSF safety report records that only three deaths were related to field activities: a scientist at Byrd Station disappeared, a research diver died from an accident beneath the ice, and a man died of a fall at Asgard Range. The other 40 or so American deaths during that period were more run-of-the-mill. Most were from plane or helicopter crashes, as when an aircraft cartwheeled during landing in 1956, or when, as recorded in an NSF report, an “aircraft landed in poor visibility conditions, and a few seconds later exploded.” Many deaths were from tractors falling through the sea ice, and one went into a crevasse. People have been killed offloading ships and planes, crushed in loaders and trucks, scorched by an exploding fuel drum, and electrocuted in a ship’s engine room.
But it is not risk in the face of industrial mishap that brings to the continent legions of people who wear Teva sandals over wool socks. When I asked people why they first came to Antarctica, they said they wanted to climb mountains, ski glaciers, hike, and see wildlife. At first I was shocked, not by the particular answers, but by their unanimity. Surrounded by people talking about climbing, skiing, paragliding, kayaking, or rafting, I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing down here.
The main draw for many who go to Antarctica is a love of nature.2 I find nature creepy and disturbing. No matter how staggering the horizon, wilderness only reminds me that I must eventually return to the colony. The great outdoors is at best a sideshow curiosity, and at worst an unreliable informant. For example, working at a fish cannery in the Aleutian Islands, I admired the austere hills and the white bulbs of cloud that could grow above them in an instant, as if the hills had ideas, but the natural image seemed a treacherous deceit. I preferred those more honest times inside the cannery at a meaningless task among the decaying machines and the vast architecture of technology. I preferred the aggressive hiss of a highpressure hose echoing through a yellow-lighted room of stainless steel bins, with drains thoughtfully placed for the chemicals and the blood. I preferred those times when the tranquilizer of cosmic perspective could not reach me.
In contrast to the sobs of praise that accompany any barren stretch of dead backdrop, McMurdo Station is often called ugly by those who came down for sport. On his way to Pole from McMurdo by ski, Eric Philips, a member of the “Icetrek” expedition, stopped at Willy Field to talk with some grunts. They eventually went back into their job-shack, and Philips, who had a corporate sponsor, a huge insurance policy, and a satellite phone, wrote of them, “I pitied their restriction, bound to the confines of the Mactown environs by their work, by safety regulations, and by a general satisfaction with their experience of a civilised Antarctic wilderness. I was glad to see the door shut.”
The resilience of mankind in Antarctica is inexorable; even the constant bleating of those who whine for permanent silence and infinite pristineness dissipates into an insignificant Buddhist drone beneath the soothing rumble of fleets of machines with pulsing hydraulics.
McMurdo is beautiful. A construction site exposed long enough to a rattling generator grows a building. Each growling machine drags a fumbled leash of diesel exhaust. A line-up of washing machines waits to be executed at the metal baler. In a janitor’s closet in 155 a ladder leads to the attic, where a door opens into the sky. In the winter darkness, falling puffs of snow are bathed in the luminescent blue of a welding torch. A contingent of cylindrical acetylene tanks watches over a pile of inventoried triangles. In McMurdo one can warm up from the cold by a generous furnace, and fuck to the sound of helicopters.
A week into December I went out to the ice shelf with the women
