Interview with an Equipment Operator
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Is this your last season?
It will be. I'm going down there, but I don't care any more.
How many times have you said that before?
Twice.
But now you really think you're done?
I don't know if I'm ever going to go back down, but I'm saying I'm not. The ice has changed so much. It's weird. If I look at it from when I first went down to where it is now, it's completely different.
How has it changed?
Back then, there were Jamesways in McMurdo. The galley was ghetto, and had the O-side and the E-side. The Christmas decorations were up all season. The trucks were all beat up. No one was worried about anything. Now, the galley looks like a cheap ski lodge. Everyone complains. The dorms are getting better and better. Now there's radiant floor heating. The bathroom floor is heated! [laughter] All the 203's have radiant floor heating! [In compliance with some arcane governmental building code concerning adjoining passageways, what were once dorms 203, 204, and 205 are now called 203A, 203B, and 203C. Now there are three dorm 203's.] The store used to be hilarious. You could go in there and get a bottle of Jack for five bucks. They only had lame Navy Antarctic shirts. There were no souvenirs. There was nothing. Maybe that stupid postcard with the Elvis painting was still there, but that was about all they had.
Right. In 1958 McMurdo had three kinds of beer: Budweiser, Pabst, and Schlitz. Now there's twenty kinds of Pinot Noir. The library used to have a military history collection. Now it's all pop psychology and self-help books and Stephen King novels.
It's just changed. When I first signed up to go down there I expected nothing short of living in a tent and maybe killing a seal. I didn't know. Then when I got down there, a barefoot dude was playing a fiddle in my Jamesway. My room had a little bed and a coathanger holding a broken piece of glass as a mirror. I had my clothes hanging on coat hangers from the roof. There was a little hole in my wall where snow blew in when the choppers divebombed the Jamesway. All the guys in that friggin' Jamesway wanted to kill the helo pilots. They'd fly overhead and it would shake the whole building. Later that night in the bar the pilots would be bragging about how close they got to the Jamesway. So snow would blow through the hole in my wall. My refrigerator was the floor beneath the bed. I just slid stuff underneath there.
Once a lady came up there. She was walking around the Jamesway saying, "Oh my God! They have people living like this? Living like barbarians? Like cavemen?" She went on and on. There was crap everywhere. Literally, it smelled bad, it looked bad. She flung open my curtain and said, "This is disgusting! This is sickening!" And I was just lying in bed looking at her. It must have looked like a homeless shelter up there. The floor was torn up. There were hairballs all over. No one cleaned.
You'd hear guys whacking off up there. Then you'd hear them groan. Then you'd hear quiet or you'd hear a sock coming off his foot. It was amazing how well your hearing would work up there. Or the noisy furnace would run and that's when he'd be whacking off. You'd hear his bed squeaking until the furnace stopped and then you'd hear:
chk
chk
chk
chk
chk.
Then after a few seconds he'd realize that he didn't care, so you'd hear, chk chk chk chk chk. Then you'd hear a come-soaked sock flopping down on the floor. Lively.
But the scariest thing was when these guys would come in really late at night, when the main lights were shut off. If you didn't have a little pocket flashlight like I had, you couldn't see, and if you were wasted, like these guys always were, you'd hear KABLAMM! The guy would go down the hall reaching for the walls, but the curtains would give and he'd fall into people's rooms. All of a sudden you'd have a three hundred pound plumber falling into bed with you at four in the morning.
At night it was a struggle to walk up the hill. There used to be a mattress halfway up the hill and you'd see guys off to the side lying down to take a rest in the cold. The wind whipped down that hill. A guy would have his coat over his face and you'd pat him on the shoulder and pick him up.
It seemed there was always someone passed out in the bathroom. The bathroom was always warm for some odd reason. Or people would crash out in the laundry room on top of the dryer.
In order to get to my room I had to go through the lounge where there'd be all the guys with no shirts and barefoot, with the fiddle and the whisky bottle. It was so raw. I thought, "Look what happens when you let men go amuck."
I was one of the last to leave the Jamesway before it was torn down. Dorms 210 and 211 had just opened and everyone was moving down there. Everyone was gung-ho to get out of the Jamesway, but I liked it, and so did Skuaman. He took over half a Jamesway because everyone had moved out. He devised a net system to catch skuas. [Skuas are large Antarctic gulls.] He'd throw some food down and when a skua would come in he'd pull a string and a net would fall. The bird would try to bite him so he'd hold its beak until it finally calmed down. Then he'd feed it something and it would hang out on his leg for a second. He trained a couple of them. He'd sit on the porch and play his guitar and his little skua friends would land by him.
Last I heard, someone saw him in a phone booth up here in Christchurch, but I never saw him again.
Can you tell me the penguin story again?
I was sleeping in the Jamesway and all of a sudden I heard this laughing and bumping down the hall. For a while I continued to hear giggling. Then I heard a noise that was not a human-made noise. I opened my curtain and saw a penguin frantically coming down the hall, a little Adelie penguin. Some guys picked up the penguin and threw it in bed with this guy who was wasted, and then took photos. One of them had snagged the penguin down by the water intake pipe. He threw it in a pillowcase and brought it up there.
What about the drugs? The cowboy and the cocaine?
There were so many drugs. The best drug story comes with the [winter] airdrop [in 1995]. Cocaine came down. Hash oil came down. Really good weed came down. Acid came down. Everything.
At airdrop, you light the barrels on the runway, and then everyone celebrates. When the plane flies over, all this crap starts flying out of the back. The parachute didn't open on the load of freshies, so it blew up and made this big salad crater.
That night you'd walk down the hall and smell so many drugs. There were already people growing that winter, but more came in than ever.
There was this guy Trent. He had the hash oil and the cocaine. He'd get so blown on coke that he'd be running around with one cowboy boot on. One night Vicki and I were macking out on the back porch of 210 and we saw Trent. He was soused. He said, "I just did all these lines. I don't give a fuck anymore. I'm going to find the highest thing in McMurdo and I'm going to jump off it." So we watched him scurrying up the way wearing one cowboy boot. Cowboy boots in McMurdo don't work, so he just kept eating shit on the ice. I thought, "That sucks, because if he goes and kills himself then there's no more hash oil."
He ended up getting busted. That was the "Just Say No" winter.