Blazing Ice (27 page)

Both Alger and Lever were solid teammates in the field. Both lent technical credibility to whatever came of our workshop proceedings.

Finally, Dave Bresnahan joined us. Dave's passion for the traverse matched ours. His involvement went back well before Evans's project, and he, like Russ Magsig, had been around when
Linda
went down. Dave knew that when
terrain
came up, the topic was not casual. His presence certified NSF's interest in the outcome of our workshop. He could steer us toward the fiscally doable and prepare his own intramural arguments supporting our conclusions back in D.C.

Our agenda flashed onto the screen. My welcoming comments focused the next three days:

“We are here to see what we can do with
one
traverse. We are not here to dally with the impossible. We have unexplored terrain in front of us, and apparently limited funding, if any, behind us. We have limited
time
as well. Against our agenda, we have deafening background noise: NSF's wish to offset as many LC-130 loads as we can, and second … to run two traverses next year.”

Each year, the program had accumulated cargo backlogs to Pole with shortfalls in planned airlifts. The traverse had not caused those problems. If anything, NSF's sporadic support for traverse development contributed to that backlog.
Time
now did not permit the matrixed analyses NSF demanded to justify its use of taxpayer money.

“We are going to set the background noise aside until the afternoon of Day Three,” I looked squarely at Dave. “I have two reasons for doing this, against which there is no argument. The first is: we can only pull so much load. The number of LC-130s we could offset is a direct function of what our drawbars can pull. Right now, almost all we can pull is invested in getting
us
to Pole, not in delivering cargo. The second reason is simpler: any second traverse requires that the
first
traverse succeeds. Otherwise, the second traverse is not
second
. And we have not proved we can get the first traverse through.”

Hypothetical futures that could not come to fruition in one month were off the agenda. Biscuits on the family table were at stake for two of us in the room. Turning our dream into reality in the near future was at stake for all of us.

“So this is what I need you all to help me with: let's see what we can do with
one
traverse. Everything else comes after that.”

Three weeks later, on April 19, Erick showed up in the Denver office. In a closed-door session, squeezed between his more important meetings, we met in my boss's boss's small office. Erick wore the neat gray suit, yellow shirt and blue tie he'd arrived in that morning. I wore jeans and a long-sleeved tatter-sall shirt. Both my bosses were present. Their boss was present, too. So was George Blaisdell. His engineering background could translate our mobility issues for Erick. George sat beside me.

“So you want to buy another Caterpillar MT865 tractor?” Erick opened. He sounded familiar with our workshop's concept of operations.

“Another tractor, yes … we've proven that need in each of Year Two and Year Three. But not an MT865. The procurement window for that option closed five weeks ago. It'll be another Case,” I corrected him.

“But you're delivering South Pole's MT865. Why don't you just take that back to McMurdo, and run a second traverse with it?”

Erick must have been way out on a limb proclaiming two traverses. He was not
that
familiar with our Con-Ops.

“Erick, we're delivering tractors and sleds and a small amount of bulk material cargo. In one traverse, if we get through, we'll offset eleven flights. If we take those same tractors and run them back and forth a second time, not only does the total number of offset flights go down, but South Pole does not get to use the tractor. And we don't have the cargo decks to haul more than one plane-load worth on a second traverse.”

Our most favorable scenario depended on delivering tractors, not on taking them back. Taking them back meant we had to take on fuel at South Pole, fuel LC-130s delivered. There'd be a net loss in offset flights. It was a complicated formula, and I knew Erick was smart enough to get it. But I think he had a simplistic vision that he just could not, or would not, shake. He passed over the subject.

“What are these red-sleds I see on your proposal?” he asked, still running the fiscal comb through my line items.

“We still need to haul more fuel with us to run this traverse,” I explained. “The lead time window closed on our steel-tank options eight weeks ago. The red-sleds and bladders, and all the stuff in that group, are an idea we came up with in Year Two. They're the only things we can get in the time remaining
and
field a traverse this coming season. Note the cost of two of them is 20
percent the cost of one steel tank sled. Two red-sleds, with bladders on top, give us four thousand gallons. One steel tank gives us only three thousand.”

Struggling across the snow swamp in Year Two, we'd dreamed of floating huge loads across the Shelf on hover barges pulled by tractors. That was experimental technology forbidden to us from the beginning. But those dreams spawned our last-ditch solution with the red-sleds today.

Immediately after that field season, I'd found a maker of flexible fuel transport bladders. These were large pillows of rubbery fabric filled with fuel. At eight feet wide and a variety of lengths, they were ideally sized for us.
And
, they were available off the shelf.

The recovery skis we put to good use that year inspired us to try large plastic sheets to carry the bladders. CRREL engineers gave us the final design work, and we found a plastics maker who could make the sheet-sleds to their specifications. The sheets, with the bladders on top, would lie directly on the snow.

“Think they'll work?” Erick asked.

“I don't know. But I want to try them across the Ross Ice Shelf. If we get out two hundred miles, I'll have emptied enough from the steel tanks to transfer the bladder contents into them. The risk is two hundred miles, not the whole route. I'll test them in McMurdo before we launch. If I have any doubts about their performance on the red-sleds, I'll put one bladder on a flatbed sled and haul only an extra two thousand gallons instead of four. If I do
that
, you lose one LC-130 load of bulk cargo.”

Erick winced slightly. He didn't cotton to losing a planeload to an experiment.

“We have to amend the Initial Environmental Evaluation to try this,” I persisted. “But it is in the spirit of proof-of-concept … what technology
will
work?”

He winced again, perhaps at the sound of “environmental,” perhaps for the cost to prepare the amendment.

Or did he wince for something else?

Recently, the third and highest floor of the Denver office had seen auditors from the Defense Contracts Audits Agency in residence for a week. I'd no specific idea why they were there, but maybe it was no coincidence that relations between NSF and the support contractor lately seemed less than congenial.

Erick looked squarely at me. I looked squarely back. All other spectators faded into peripheral gray. Erick had been in my tunnel once at South Pole, just him and me then, just straight talk and respect. Perhaps he was judging whether he still heard straight talk, or carefully rendered company-man talk.

“Very well,” he ended our meeting. “I will approve your $636,000 proposal, including the Case tractor and the red-sleds. And we will call it
proof-of-concept
.”

Erick's declaration hung in the air for a long moment. Then, with our eyes still fixed on one another's, I nodded slowly: “Thank you.”

Nothing more needed saying. I left the cramped office and wandered back to my cubicle. At $636,000 now, and another $340,000 in fiscal year 2006 to run the show in the field, Stretch had been right. That was a million-dollar decision turning us back from SPT-18.

The last of the breakfast crowd
shuffled slowly out of the McMurdo galley, heading off to shops and meeting places to start their day's work. We gathered at our headquarters, an abandoned round table in the corner of the dining room, near the windows.

At round tables in earlier years, we took turns closing our morning briefing with a thought for the day: a poem, line or two of prose, a quote from memory. Spreading the inspirational message duty diluted the oratorical tendency of some and opened fascinating glimpses into the souls of others less prone to speak up. This morning I asked Russ to open our meeting.

“What was that quote you gave us a couple years ago from Jonas Salk?”

Russ had described seeing a girl in an iron lung once. Years later he spied a pile of iron lungs in a scrap heap. Now he leaned back in his chair, rolled his eyes, and searched out a memory residing in a far corner of his brainpan. “Polio gone forever. Lemme see … yes … I think it was …” Russ opened his eyes and leaned forward: “
You can only fail if you give up too soon
.”

That started our Year Four.

Around the table sat Russ, Stretch, and John Van Vlack, our new mechanic. They'd been on station since late August bringing our tractors and sleds out of hibernation. John V. had several years on the Ice working out of the McMurdo Heavy Shop. Clean shaven, sandy hair short to the point of bald, and deeply freckled, John V. was ready with a smile and pleasant to work with.

Judy Goldsberry rejoined us. And Brad Johnson finished his Greenland job in time to help us start this one again. Tom Lyman, our mountaineer from
Montana, brought back his curious mix of high-tech savvy and basic earth-sense. He'd been with us through the heart of the Shear Zone.

The young marine I met on the plane home that first year now joined us. Capt. Greg Feleppa had been called back to service in Iraq. I found him a year later working the parts window at the heavy shop.

Of the five of us who returned, Stretch was the most reluctant. Our exasperation on turning back was, for him, particularly acute. Many of us felt we weren't getting any younger. Maybe we'd not physically qualify for another year … if there were another year. We couldn't then penetrate the rationale that turned us back when we were so close to the Pole. We'd all felt robbed.

I cajoled Stretch last April, “If
you
had not left
your
bulldozer at the Leverett, we wouldn't have a Year Four. Are you going to let some other guy take your title: The Man who Drove the Bulldozer to South Pole?”

“I'll think about that,” Stretch answered in an e-mail.

I later sent him our Con-Ops for Year Four and asked the straightforward question: “Are you in?”

His reply came back, simply worded. “I'm in.”

Every one of us was “in” this October, gathered around the breakfast table. I looked across to Rick Campbell, our traverse coordinator. Rick was the skinny, ponytailed fellow who'd met me with a pile of reports my first day in Denver. He'd briefed Brian from the field support office in McMurdo before Brian took off in
Linda
. The only one of us employed full time, Rick was allotted half of that full time toward traverse support. His heart was 100 percent with us.

“Rick, tell us where we're at with our stuff coming in, please, sir.”

“Happy to.” Rick flipped open his stenographer's book and ran down the list.

A C-17 delivered our fourth fleet tractor: a new red Case Quadtrack. Counting the Pole's MT 865, our launch fleet now numbered five. We'd pick up a sixth, Stretch's D8R, at the Leverett. Then we'd deliver both the MT865 and the D8R to Pole.

The same plane brought our fuel bladder sleds. Environmental permission to use them came while we were at McMurdo, rigging for launch.

A few odds and ends were still missing, like 1,500 green flags on ten-foot bamboo poles. These would mark our new trail and restore markings on the old. Two weeks before launch they'd been put on a boat in California and sent to New Zealand. They wouldn't arrive on-Ice until mid-December.

“On a fucking boat?” I shot back at Rick, who had the unfortunate duty to inform me at my McMurdo cubicle.

We'd scheduled them for airlift to Christchurch, then airlift again to the Ice. Airlifting was a penalty we paid for late project funding. Meanwhile, NSF had been leaning on the contractor's logistics group for delinquent deliveries. The pressure filtered to the purchasing group which changed the
required on station
dates to reflect a new
on time
performance. The new on time for us would occur a month after we left McMurdo.

My boss was on the Ice occupying a closed-door office around the corner from my cubicle. “Did you know about the boat?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, plainly surprised.

I, our whole project, needed all the time in the field nature would give us to get that one traverse through. My e-mail to the logistics group pleaded our need for the missing items, begging for any way possible to get them to us and not delay our launch. On the copy list I included my boss, my boss's boss back in Denver, and Dave Bresnahan, who was on the Ice. We were all in the loop.

Forty-eight hours later a return e-mail from my boss's boss chastised me for including Dave on my original, breaking the chain of command. The scolding recalled a desperate scene from a familiar movie where all the Zulus in the world were busy wrecking a British square. A frantic soldier in the center tried smashing open an ammunition crate with his rifle butt. The supply sergeant threatened courts-martial, insisting the crate be opened according to regulations: by twisting the screws out with a screwdriver.

Dave was the top of the chain, and he'd told me to keep him informed in that first phone call I made from Denver. I promised if I took the job, I would. Dave could order our stuff delivered with priority, if he felt it was a priority. I returned an e-mail to my boss's boss in Denver, asking simply, “Did you know about the boat?”