Blazing Ice (19 page)

An image of another guy in the executive branch came to mind. He looked me right in the eyes through the television screen. “That depends on what the
meaning of the word ‘is,' is.” Nobody wanted duplicity associated with our project.

I shook my head, rising from my ergonomic chair to take a stroll outside. I might find fresh air, and clarity.

The day was pretty and fresh. The few clouds brought soothing, long views of the Front Range Mountains to the west. My thoughts wandered as I strolled through the parking lot. Imagine grabbing the radio in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf: “Stretch, I must insist you not use that word.”

We all built roads. And that's what we called them. Don't get off the road. Got to work on the road. We didn't run helter skelter over the sea ice on those Marble Point traverses. We built and groomed a road from the snow resting on top of the sea ice. When the snow road set up, curing into a hardened surface, we flew across it. Deadheading back we covered the sixty miles in three and a half hours. Because we had a road.

I could tell the crew, “NSF does not want us to call it a road, this thing we're building to run our tractors on.” We'd still call it a road. And I'd suffer their snickers for a short while during the season.

But in presentations to folks in the contractor's office, to folks at NSF, and at times to journalists, I had to be on my toes because “road” was instinctive. It reached far back into collective human memory. The road to perdition. The swan's road. Road as “way.” Don't go down that road. Take the high road. Road map. Asphalt road. Macadam road. Dirt road. Snow road.

What are the consequences of not calling a road a road?

George Orwell described “Newspeak” in his classic future fiction
1984
. Newspeak deliberately limited vocabulary's range for the masses. In that future world Newspeak eliminated nuance and shades of meaning from interpersonal discourse. Argument, opposition, debate, all vanished. That was Big Brother's object.

There were no Big Brothers here. There were just people like George, Dave, me, Russ … we wanted this traverse to become reality. Who were we fooling?

If we weren't building a road after all, then we were just driving a tractor over a map. On paper we'd arrive at South Pole in no time. But we had to
break trail first, and we had to build a road-in-fact to make that trail stronger and smoother. Across the street, orange State of Colorado dump trucks were busy maintaining the road.

Build. Maintain.

If we took away “road” from the language of our project, then we ignored the fundamental nature of the project. And we confronted unreal expectations for it.

Unreal expectations for time and money … those are the consequences of not calling a road a road.

I told Dave this was not a three-year project.

Our road was made of snow.

Most animals in groups will not wander aimlessly across a snowfield, breaking their own trail. Breaking trail is hard work. With a herd of caribou migrating across the snow-covered coastal plain of northern Alaska, for example, one caribou in front works his way through knee-high snow. Each following caribou beats the trail down more and more. The trailbreaker's job rotates once in a while, but the herd moves forward in a long thin wedge, compacting the snow, making the path stronger. By its own traffic the herd makes a road.

The United States Antarctic Program builds fine snow roads. With vigorous effort, we've even built snow pavements that support a loaded C-17 cargo jet on wheels. There's not much to it in concept: compact the snow. Get on top, and stay on top. Drag and groom the surface. Smooth it and keep drift snow down. The hard part is breaking trail in the first place.

It
was
hard, but even in the last year of our project my boss's boss stunned me when he casually dismissed our efforts, reducing them to: “It's just a matter of time and distance.”

“Well,” I countered dryly, nonplussed, “there is the small matter of terrain.”

We had CRREL mobility engineers working with us throughout the project, combining their ideas with ours, to derive mechanical mobility solutions. But our mountaineers often gave our best insights into the nature of the terrain that impeded our mobility. Their contributions were important to us. Because of them, I can now speak somewhat authoritatively about it.

For example, near surface, the snow is porous. Air transpires through the mass. When the local weather is stable over a long time, individual snowflakes
re-form into angular grains, like sugar crystals. The grains do not immediately bond with their neighbors but remain a loose aggregate of tiny beads. Snow scientists have technical names for this snow form. When we found ourselves in vast areas of the stuff, we called it a “swamp.”

Mountaineer “Scooter” Metcalf had joined us in the second field season when we were stuck in the Ross Ice Shelf swamp. We didn't understand it as a swamp at that time. All we knew was our tractors sank in it, our sleds broke in it, and for us to make any headway across it we had to split our trains and shuttle. When Scooter stepped off the Twin Otter, he stepped into a group of frustrated stiffs wooden-headedly slogging south. His voice carried a high-pitched edge, mimicking a wise-cracking comic, and we adjusted to our new seventh man.

Scooter spent his first day on the trail riding with me in the
Elephant Man
.

“They tell me in McMurdo you're a pretty serious guy … a no-nonsense boss,” Scooter opened the conversation while I was busy.

I'd just started the
Elephant Man
rolling, pleased we hadn't wallowed into the snow right away. His question hung a bit longer before I looked across the cab. “Well, that's McMurdo.”

“They told me you're hard to get along with,” Scooter said, staying on point.

“Then that depends on who
they
are.”

Many people would say that. I preferred keeping an amused distance there. But this was not McMurdo. I needed to rope in Scooter right away.

“I'm glad you're here, Scooter. Understand, though, you have walked into a scene where we are finding and solving problems daily. Some we can solve now. Some we can't solve this year. There's not much you can do about that. But I've got some problems you can help with.”

“Problem solvers, eh?” Scooter interjected, gazing through the windshield past the colorful tractors against the featureless white ahead.

“That's right.” I looked across the cab at him until he looked back at me. “Do you know anything about us?”

“Not really. This is my first time on the Ice. You guys are all Ice veterans. I've heard some names, and what some people say about them.”

“Like I'm hard to get along with?” I looked ahead again.

“Yeah. Like that. And that you never smile,” Scooter cracked back.

“That's my
face
, Scooter.” I sighed.
Elephant Man
was still on top of the snow. “We have two superb mechanics. Russ Magsig has been coming down to the Ice since Christ was a corporal. He's got phenomenal experience down here, and we all learn from him. Russ will rarely sit down and talk with you, though. Pretty much a hermit. John Penney served several years at Pole as chief mechanic. I worked with him there. John is articulate, keenly intelligent, and you should credit him with far more ‘stuff' than you might if you thought him ‘just a mechanic.' You'll be working with John Penney. He's captain of the flagging crew, and he's a natural teacher. You'll wind up rotating through different jobs on his crew.”

“That's the radar crew in the PistenBully?”

“Right.”

Norbert ran the radar on that crew. He came out, like Scooter, to a group that was beat up already. They'd have that in common. Norbert would teach Scooter how to run the radar.

We jostled over the snow at three miles per hour, staggering our tracks with the tractor in front of us. “Then you've got James McCabe and Stretch Vaitonis. Both of those guys are superb equipment operators. Both are gentlemen of the highest caliber. If you think redneck, rough, and crude when you think heavy equipment operator, then you think wrong when it comes to those two.”

“What about you? What should I think when I think
you
?”

“You're finding that out right now.” I caught his eye across the cab, again.

We weren't a military operation, and I didn't expect blind allegiance. We were an egalitarian group. Individually we were an introspective lot, relishing time alone in our cabs, left to our own thoughts. But we enjoyed fellowship and banter at the end of the day. With all the experience we'd amassed, and the unknowns we faced, everybody's input was equally valuable. I happened to be the headman, and I made the decisions when a decision was necessary. If I made a dumb decision, every one of these guys would say “Fuck you!” I would, too.

“Have you made a decision yet?” Scooter asked, still sounding smart with me.

“I have.”

“Well … ?”

“We're going to keep going south until half our time or half our fuel runs out. We're going to find out what it takes to cross this damn Shelf. And then we're going to turn around and go back. That is my decision.”

A long silence followed as the
Elephant Man
lunged forward over the virgin snows. Soon enough, Scooter would see a tractor sink or a sled break. Then he'd stand off to the side and watch us fall into our routines.

We already speculated on the roots of our disappointments. Popular culprits ranged from soft snow and high ambient temperatures to tractor tread and sled designs. Meanwhile, we were stuck with it for the year. Virgin snow lay in front of us, and behind us lay no road but that which we'd built. Putting a fully loaded, even overloaded, traverse fleet into the trail-breaking business had been a mistake. NSF expected we'd make it to the top of the Leverett this second year. We'd be lucky to get to the base of it.

“What would you like me to do besides run with the flagging crew, John?” Scooter asked.

“One component of our difficulties
is
this soft snow. You mountaineers have your own take on snow, and I need some of that. I want you to do your mountaineering thing and teach me what you learn about it.”

“Like dig snow pits? I can dig snow pits for you!” Scooter sounded enthusiastic now. We'd dug a few pits back when Delaney was with us, but we hadn't kept it up.

“Excellent, Scooter. Meter-deep pits ought to do it. Our troubles are in the top two or three feet. We've got to work hard to sink farther than that. I'll ask Norbert to help you.”

From that day on, we had snow pits at every campsite. Scooter and Norbert measured snow densities and temperatures down the walls of their pits. They correlated that data to the snow layers they exposed.

We didn't have a rammsonde, the standard snow science penetrometer for measuring the unconfined, compressive strength of snow. Instead, Scooter used a mountaineer's trick for empirically deriving the same information. He measured resistance to penetration along the pit walls by jamming things into it. A knife measured the hardest, most resistant end of his scale. A pencil, then a finger, then two fingers, four fingers, and, finally, a fist graded down to the
soft end. Scooter and Norbert went the extra mile by including measurements of our rut depths near each pit.

One flat-light day, I looked around the module sleds and spotted Scooter's head floating in the whiteness two hundred feet away. Just his head. Floating nearby, at Scooter's chin level, Norbert's crouching form took notes. Towering above all, Stretch patiently leaned against a floating shovel and stared down at Scooter. The colorful phantasms drew me over.

“What do you see in this one?” I asked from the pit's edge. Scooter's incorporeal form had now materialized into his entire body down in a hole.

“This is the stuff that's giving you troubles.” He scooped out a handful of grainy snow near the bottom of the pit wall, and held it out on his black gloves. The grains were the size of small BBs. “This is TG snow. Uniformsized, facetted.”

“TG?”

“Temperature gradient. It's weak stuff.”

“That's like what Delaney showed us from his little core tubes. It doesn't stick together,” I recalled.

“Yeah. Well, most of this pit wall is TG snow. But see this thin layer here?” Scooter pointed to a layer three inches thick, a foot below the surface. Its finer grains stuck together, laminated. “This is WF snow. It's stronger. You want more of this stuff,” he declared.

“What's WF?”

“Wind fucked … It's my own term. Some call it wind slab. Stand over here on this edge of the pit.”

I stepped where he indicated and the ground gave way under my weight. The WF slab cracked. The TG material supporting it collapsed, spilling a pile of icy BBs onto the pit floor.

“See?” he asked.

“QED,” I answered.

“Right. Whatever that means. Anyway, all the pit walls show mostly TG snow below the surface crust. Just a few thin WF layers. Altogether, that don't support squat.”

“Copy that, Scooter. Then the best we can hope for as long as we're in this stuff is to smash it down, and hope it sinters into some sort of pavement by the time we turn around and go back.”

“Road building is your thing. Snow pits are mine.”

Back in the living module I pulled out a couple of references from our traveling library and opened them for Scooter and Norbert on our galley table. One was a thick copy of Albert Crary's glaciological studies from his late-1950s science traverse, when he'd circumnavigated the Ross Ice Shelf. I turned to the contour map on which he'd plotted snow strengths.

“Crary distinguishes between hard and soft snow on this map. The contour lines have numerical values. He doesn't give their units, but I think they derive from rammsonde measurements.”