Antarctica (26 page)

By now, if you don't have to go outside, you probably won't. Unless you have some purpose out there, even just a few minutes at -90°F and a blowing wind isn't much fun any more. There is, however, one magic temperature that you might still be waiting for. If the temperature hits -100°F you will immediately hear an announcement on the station loudspeakers: ‘The temperature is now minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit'. This is your cue to go racing for the sauna. Somebody will probably have started firing it up already. It usually only goes up to a maximum of 180°F so you will probably have to put the thermostat in some water to get it to creep up to the important (and sweltering) figure of 200°F.

You will sit there, naked, until you can hardly bear it. Then, and this is the important part, you will leave the sauna, pull on some bunny boots and a face mask—but strictly no other clothes—and run out into the snow. If you are really hard core, you will run, naked, all the way to the Pole and back. This is not recommended for the fainthearted. In fact, it's not recommended for anyone. But if you do it, you will have experienced an instantaneous temperature change of 300°F and become a member of the legendary—and highly exclusive—‘300 Club'.
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A less insane way to celebrate your presence on the ice takes place on 21 June, the Midwinter Festival. Cooks begin planning the menus for the feast weeks in advance. Everybody dresses up. Across the continent, all wintering bases exchange specially designed greetings, usually in the form of photos of the winterers with some additional message inscribed over them.

It is around now that relationships with the outside world may start to break down. The headquarters for the US support staff is in Denver and winterers often complain that they have little or no understanding of what life is like down here. ‘People in Denver are in a completely different world,' says Jake. ‘Few of them have wintered and they have nothing to base any of their demands or requests on. You can be standing there on the phone saying “OK, so, you want me to go out and count all of the cargo chains. They are under seven feet of ice and it's a hundred below and . . . you want me to count 'em? We're not going to use them until a month after you get here, so maybe we should count them when it's sunny and warm and there are all kinds of new people here who aren't frozen.”' When he really wants to throw someone from Denver off balance, he simply asks them: ‘can you feel your fingers?'

In 1997 the cook decided to roast some turkeys for the midwinter feast. There were twenty-eight people on station and twenty-two frozen turkeys. The request went out for permission to use some of them. Permission was denied. Word came from Denver that the turkeys had to be saved for station opening. For station opening! When new flights could bring in turkeys galore, and freshies that the wintering Polies could only dream of! ‘Midwinter is a big deal here,' says Robert. ‘We get Midwinter greetings from the White House. But we weren't allowed to cook our turkeys. It went all the way up to the National Science Foundation. Finally they said OK but it was too late, because the turkeys would have taken too long to thaw.'

To be successful, any winter station manager has to be an excellent mediator. He or she has to maintain the respect of the wintering crew while also keeping sensible relations with the outside world. And though the resentments from the winterers are easy to understand, the people in the north can sometimes also be in the right.

When the midwinter celebration is over and there is nothing more to look forward to but long months of darkness and cold, life turns in on itself, and the station becomes even more of a pressure cooker. ‘It's like a colony here,' Larry says. ‘When it's dark out all the time and you're in one building you get the impression that you're in some Stanley Kubrick movie heading out towards Jupiter 9. Nothing goes unnoticed. If you do something more than twice it's a habit.' NASA has spotted this phenomenon and there have been many attempts to do biological and psychological studies on wintering Polies, to see how a genuine Moon base might play out, or one on Mars.
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One thing researchers have learned is that as the winter progresses you will start to lack T3, a hormone produced in the thyroid that winterers seem to divert from the brain to the muscles. There is also evidence that your core body temperature will drop by a degree or two, even if you don't go outside. Perhaps it's the lack of sunlight, or disrupted sleep patterns, or the cold. Perhaps it's a psychological effect associated with being thrown together in a small group, and unable to leave. But the symptoms seem to be real.

Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘winter-over syndrome'. Polies call it ‘going toast'. Everybody becomes at least slightly toasty in the depth of the winter. The first sign is that you stop paying attention to the way you look or the way you smell. People get a thousand-mile stare. While talking to you, they will trail off in mid-sentence, without noticing. And if you're toast enough, you might not notice either. You might walk into a room repeatedly, each time forgetting why you have come. You might step out of the shower wondering if you are on your way in or out. You might sit in the galley quietly crying over your plate, then leave it untouched and wander out again.

‘We all know we go toast,' says Jake Speed, ‘and it's true you can't remember one thing from the next, what day of the week. I think the people who struggle the most are the ones who try to hang on to those normal constructs that are part of our day-to-day society. Look around you—you're not in Kansas any more. If you try to turn it into Kansas you will not survive. Just relax, go with the groove. You wanted this winter experience, and when that last plane took off you were happy. Well, this is what it really is. So just hang in there.'

Jake knows better than most how to do a successful winter. He says that good winterers will have a positive approach; they'll stem poison; they'll have a sort of peaceful resonance. Bad winterers can't handle themselves, and so can't handle other people. They'll either cocoon themselves in their rooms or come out and start stirring things up.

Polies call the bad version of the syndrome ‘burnt toast'. ‘That's when people get really bitchy, and want to pick fights,' says Jake. ‘It gets to the point where you can be in the galley and someone could be on the other side of the room and just their presence is so unsettling that you can't stand it. People begin to figure out—OK, he goes to dinner at 5:30 so I'll go at 6:15. It's not even necessarily conscious. It just begins to work its way out.

‘Mid-July to mid-August is mean month. It's OK to go up to someone then and say, “I fucking hate you” for no reason, no instigation. Instead of saying “good morning” you just tell them right what you think. All inhibitions are gone, and all the filters are off. You don't even know you're doing it.'

This is also when territorial troubles can start to play out, when it really starts to matter if someone is sitting in your chair. Last winter, Larry, Jake and a friend named Jed Miller made a joke out of the mad territoriality at the station. They put a tablecloth, made out of a bed sheet, on their favourite table in the galley. In July they started drawing on it, dividing it into imagined terrains with little mountains and landscapes. Larry's was called ‘Larryland'. Jed's was Jedanasia. Jake's territory was the smallest. They called it the ‘United Front of Jake Insurgence'.

‘He was the rebel that we were constantly trying to quell,' says Larry. ‘If you look at him, he's like the rebel of the station; I mean, have you seen the state of his Carhartts?' Jake was constantly moving his plate into Jed's territory. Jed hated this. Napkins would fly. Food would fly. ‘We had a beautiful centrepiece as well, a lit-up Christmas tree about eight inches high, when we turned it on it would glow red. That was our thing. Our table was our world.'

But that was also about the time when the galley broke out into what became known as the ‘light wars'. ‘One guy, Chuck, would come into the galley and flick on five or six extra lights at a time,' says Larry. ‘Some people who miss the sun like having bright lights but to others it was like vampires having garlic thrown in their faces. There would be hollering and screaming. It almost turned into a fistfight.

‘Chuck enjoyed doing it every day, and finally one day he was outnumbered. The people who hated the extra lights would alternate at turning them back off. Chuck turned them on, someone went out of the galley all the way down to the end of the hallway, came back down the corridor, came in another entrance and turned the lights off again. And then they'd go round the whole thing again. Lights on. Walk down the hallway, back to another entrance, lights off again. There was yelling, fists, insults, sneers. Eventually everyone had to sit down and talk about it; station emails were sent; management got involved. We ended up with alternating days with the lights higher or lower. It's almost embarrassing to think of it outside winter.'

‘Everyone's allowed a couple of toasty psychotic episodes,' says Jake. ‘As the first glimmers of light come over the horizon, the good ones start to make up. “I'm sorry I called you an asshole . . .” The bad ones just keep going.'

The stories of the bad ones, the ones who couldn't hack it, are legion and legendary. One year, the AST/RO guy tried to ski the 800 miles back to McMurdo in the dark with just a few chocolate bars in his pocket. He made it about ten miles before someone noticed he was missing and brought him gently back. There are other, perhaps apocryphal tales: the man whose friends shaved his head when he was drunk—and it took him three days to notice; the winterer who took a more novel approach to escaping to McMurdo by solemnly packing his bags, bidding everyone farewell and then trying to walk there on a treadmill.

Polar madness isn't limited to the South Pole. In the 1950s an Australian was locked away for most of the winter after he had threatened people with a knife. In the 1960s a Soviet scientist killed a colleague with an axe because he was cheating at chess. In 1996, the cook at McMurdo had to be isolated after he attacked someone with the claw end of a hammer. In 1983 the doctor at Argentina's Almirante Brown Station on the Peninsula hated the winter so much that his bags were packed and ready for days before the relief ship steamed in. When the incoming crew broke the news that there was no replacement available so he would have to spend another winter there, the doctor promptly burned the place down.

The various different programmes have tried many ways to guard against the crazies. The best way, most winterers say, is to look for people with mixed motivations. If your work is your life, and something breaks down while you're there, you could go crazy. If you're only there for the romance and adventure, and discover how little time you can spend in the Great Outdoors during the winter, you could go crazy. Paradoxically, it also seems to help if you're not the sort of person who needs to resolve issues right here and now. One study of French winterers showed that the ones who performed best were neither extroverts nor assertive. Everyone goes a little toasty and you're better off letting most of it slide.

‘You've got to be able to take everything,' Jake says. ‘The toasty psychotic episodes, the gossip—this place is the biggest gossip mill of all time—and let it all just roll out. It doesn't matter that you can't tie your shoes any more; it doesn't matter that so and so said something about you; it doesn't matter that somebody tried to stick a spoon into someone else's ear at dinner. You've got to let it roll off your back. If you allow these things to matter too much in the winter, you'll become consumed by them. And then I can't help you.'

The National Science Foundation puts every potential winterer through a psychological test known in Antarctic argot as Psych Eval. The results are never published, leaving some wags to suggest that the people who come out as unbalanced are the ones eventually chosen.

The satirical website
Big Dead Place
has a more cynical take on the procedure: ‘Nearly every paper worth its salt written on the selection of winter-over personnel at isolated polar bases has come to this conclusion: psychological profiling is not an accurate method of determining who will or will not successfully integrate themselves into a polar community. Questionable introverts have flourished because of their tolerance of personal idiosyncrasies, and shoe-in extroverts have been shunned at bases for their relentless neediness.

‘Psychological profiling can help weed out the claustrophobic, the hypochondriac, and the manic-depressant, but when July rolls around . . . one begins to wonder whether there is as much to fear at the winter base from the overt psychotic as there is from the covert neurotic, that is, the “normal” member of society. Though apparently both of these types have no trouble passing the Psych Eval, the psychotic at least provides the community with a few laughs and occasionally a little excitement to spruce up the daily grind.'
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Other programmes such as the British one ignore the lure of psychological testing and rely on personal interviews, which seem to work at least as well. But it's also striking how many of the people brought into the American programme already know someone down here—and the same applies to the French, British and Italian
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programmes, too. It's not so much nepotism as the power of personal recommendation in weeding out the unstable and unsuitable. If space agencies really want to send a small number of humans out into a space colony, when choosing who to send they should probably begin by trusting their own instincts.