Blazing Ice (26 page)

The B-15 iceberg that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf and corked McMurdo Sound two years before had disrupted the annual sea ice formation in the Sound. This year, the ice edge lay eighty miles off shore, where fifteen miles was normal for this time of year. The tanker ship bearing the USAP's annual fuel allotment stood off that ice edge, waiting for icebreakers to open the channel.

One Coast Guard icebreaker tied up at McMurdo, standing down for repairs. Its sister ship anchored stateside, refitting in dry-dock. A Russian icebreaker, standing by to assist the Coast Guard, delayed its arrival at McMurdo Sound. We heard it was in Singapore. Desperate plans had been laid to shut down McMurdo and South Pole to skeleton maintenance crews if the tanker could not deliver. Into the middle of this perfect storm waded the South Pole Traverse.

Two weeks before our return we'd begged for a few thousand gallons of fuel from the top of the Leverett Glacier. Six days after we returned, U.S. Coast Guard and Russian icebreakers escorted U.S. tanker ship
Paul Buck
to the pier in McMurdo. The
Paul Buck
offloaded 6,115,744 gallons of diesel fuel.

Erick Chiang, the headman from NSF
,
stopped by my lunch table in the Mc-Murdo galley shortly after we returned from our third year. He wanted to see the fleet with me that afternoon.

“Sure. Got a truck?”

“We'll take the Chalet's. Meet me there at 1:00?” he asked, though it was more of a polite command.

The Chalet at McMurdo was the well-appointed office building that housed the big chair, where the senior NSF representative sat. The Chalet showed off polished wood floors, paneled walls, vaulted ceilings, ceremonial flags of the Antarctic Treaty nations, and two plush offices among lesser offices.

I walked into the Chalet and caught Erick's eye in one of the better offices. He was a handsome man, broad shouldered and muscled like an athlete, and clean shaven with jet black hair. His face and the set of his eyes suggested an Asian heritage. He stood a head shorter than me. He was always impeccably clean, even in his Antarctic gear.

With a nod, I signaled I'd wait outside.

In the other offices sat the contractor's staff, among them my boss's boss. While I grappled with how to do this job on the ground, they wrestled with managing the cost-plus contract, and with pleasing NSF. They wouldn't be happy to see me heading off with Erick.

I waited by the truck, alone with my racing thoughts, hoping for a glimpse of our future. Surely NSF wouldn't throw away three years. There was that bulldozer at the base of the Leverett. Nobody would leave it there forever. A
traverse sent to retrieve it may as well go the rest of the way. But maybe we were done.

Erick drove while I rode shotgun in the red NSF pickup truck. We left the stony ground and headed over the monotonous snow road to Williams Field.

“Tell me how it all went for you this year?” Erick asked.

Flag after flag zipped by our truck on the flat, white stretches of the Ice Shelf road to Willy. He knew how far we got. What did he want to know besides what he already knew?

“Erick, it went well. We solved all our mobility problems. Not one broken sled. Not one tractor broke down. No shuttling … everything worked.” Did he understand
no shuttling
?

“Our surface across the Ice Shelf held up. Nobody got stuck.” I continued. Did he understand when one tractor got stuck, the whole traverse stops?

“The biggest factor slowing our progress was that huge crevasse field at the far side of the Shelf. It took us weeks to figure a way across it. But once we did get through, the Leverett opened for us with welcome arms.”

“A big crevasse field, huh?” Erick asked.

Erick would not have read our daily reports, but I had expected him to know about the crevasse field that damn near scrapped our whole project. That meant nobody told him. Until now.

“Yep. Bigger and more complicated than the Shear Zone. If we hadn't found a way across that, we'd be done now and shouting,” I prophesied in hindsight.

We neared the winter yard at Williams Field where our sleds were parked. I pointed across the dash board toward the fleet: “That's our stuff over there. If you go around through those flags, you can drive right up to them.”

Half the crew was running borrowed gear back to town, but Russ was still out there “dinking” with something or other to make things just right for winter. Bearded and rough-looking like the biker he was, his overalls and hands bore the grime of his habitual labors. Russ was well known to Erick. Familiar smiles passed between them when we pulled up to the generator module.

“Howdy, Erick,” Russ welcomed him eagerly. “So you want to see your
stuff
?”

“Russ,” I interjected, “I'm going walk Erick over to our sleds. Can you visit with us for a few minutes in the living module when we get back?”

“Shoor,” he drawled. “Happy to.”

Erick had seen nothing of our fleet yet. So I showed him all the design improvements we'd made with the supplemental funding won after Year Two: a ski's reshaped nose, a foot wider overall; longer benches that held sled skis astride the tractor tracks; spreader bar sleds that dragged whole pairs of fuel tank sleds outside the tractor tracks. If these did not translate to mobility gains for him, at least he got a visual on what the taxpayers' money had bought.

When we joined Russ in the galley of the living module, Russ immediately asked Erick the big question: “Are we going back to finish the job next year?”

“We'll see what you can do for us, first. I just wanted to see what all this traverse equipment looked like,” Erick said.

Russ and I exchanged a questioning look.

“Well … has John shown you everything you want to see? Is there anything I can show you?” Russ's brimming enthusiasm could do us nothing but good.

“I have seen the sleds,” Erick explained with a quick wave of his hand. And then looking around our well-kept living module, he commented, “It looks like you take good care of this place. You must be comfortable in here?”

Erick was a sporting yachtsman who appreciated ship-shape. That was all Russ needed.

“Well here, look at this.” Russ opened a cabinet revealing a trash compactor we installed under the galley sink.

“You wouldn't believe what a fine thing this is. We only brought back three tri-walls of trash from this whole trip!”

Russ referred to triple-walled corrugated cardboard boxes used throughout the program. Our trash tri-walls measured four feet to a side. Did Erick connect reduced waste volume to space savings on a cargo traverse?

“And over here, look at that,” Russ said, pointing to an industrial sized microwave oven on the countertop. “It's even got
four
magnetrons! Want to see the engine room?”

Erick checked his watch. “I've got to be back at the Chalet.”

Russ and I, two on one, both wanted to know if NSF would fund another year. But Erick was probably tired of getting cornered in McMurdo by folks wanting something from him. Maybe that's why he came out to Willy. Now I heard his clear invitation to leave.

Driving back along the Williams Field road to McMurdo, Erick let me have it. “I would like you to run two traverses next year. I would like you to deliver as many LC-130 loads of cargo to South Pole as possible.”

“Erick,” I measured my words, “we are tooled up for a proof-of-concept project. We have yet to prove the concept. You are talking regular traverse operations. To do what you ask, you have to first pray that the ground will let us get there. Then we need to buy more sleds. We need to buy more tractors. And you need to send more money.”

“Why do you need more tractors?”

What a simple question. What a complex answer.

“We are in the best position to deliver tractors. They could be here at Mc-Murdo already, and we can drive them to South Pole. Next, we need fuel tank sleds. We don't have the capacity to get more than five tractors to Pole. And right now we are seeing that it takes four and a half tractors just to get ourselves there and back before we can deliver anything. We proved
that
in Year Two. Fuel tank sleds invest in future traverses, as well as next year's effort.”

“Why can't you do it with what you already have?”

“With what? I just told you we have barely enough to get ourselves there. And you didn't want that D8 we tried to deliver last month.”

“How many fuel tank sleds do you need?'

“At least sixteen. Four for each new tractor. We might burn two tanks worth for each tractor making the round trip. The rest of the fuel becomes deliverable cargo. LC-130's deliver a tank-full with each flight in their wing tanks, if that's all they're carrying. One tank sled, one flight.”

“Well, how much does that cost?”

There it was … Would there be a next year?

“If you're committed to seeing the traverse project through, what does it matter how much it costs? You buy the fleet now, or you buy it later. The stuff you're asking about has to go out for bid, but you'd be looking at $4 to $5 million.”

“It's a question of how much we money we have
now
,” Erick said.

Meaning how much is left in this fiscal year?

“Erick, how would you run two traverses and get around the environmental documentation? All we're permitted now is to run the proof-of-concept. Three years. Do we amend the initial evaluation to extend another year? Call
the first traverse the proof-of-concept, and the second one
regular operations
? As far as I know, the comprehensive evaluation covering regular operations is still in draft.”

“The proof-of-concept is over,” Erick declared flatly. “But I hadn't thought of the environmental business. You let me worry about that.”

“The
concept
has not been proved!” I heard the edge to my voice. “And you can't pretend that it has just by saying so. We've still got three hundred miles to go. What's that like?”

“We are not spending any more money on the proof-of-concept project.”

It was a budget category, a line item Erick just vetoed.

I did worry about the environmental business, though. Any screw up and the world's environmentalists would be on us like a curse. Many already thought we were building a superhighway over the pristine continent. That was a nutty impression born in an office and spread by errant pens. I worked in open collaboration with NSF's environmental consultants. We found common ground in safeguarding against fuel spills. It meant life or death for us. They looked at long-term environmental degradation. Our proximate interests were identical: no fuel losses.

And getting two traverses through next year when we hadn't got one through yet required the
full support
he'd once declared. Next month Erick would have to give me $4 to $5 million that he didn't have now to hustle tractors and sleds in time for airlift next August. If we waited any longer, build-slots at the tractor factories would be purchased by somebody else. The lead time to build sleds was nearly gone already. We'd lose two months or more at the get-go just to get the paperwork through the contractor's office.

“You need to be thinking in terms of two traverses next year,” Erick declared again, adamantly.

We drove onto the dirt of Ross Island, thus completing our traverse of the McMurdo Ice Shelf to Williams Field and back, in a fat-tired pickup truck over a well-groomed, hard-packed snow road. Erick's reality lay in a fiscal land. Mine was on the snow somewhere between McMurdo and South Pole. I connected with Erick as well as he connected with me: not well.

Back at my McMurdo cubicle, in a building far removed from the Chalet, an e-mail awaited me from my boss's boss: “Next time you want to make an appointment with Erick Chiang, you need to clear it with me.”

My contract expired in May, after the write up of Year Three. If no money showed up by the end of March, the proof-of-concept project
was
over and I was gone.

My bosses remained indifferent to the project's future, yawning: “NSF will decide. There's only so much money to go around.” They were right. It was the same cost-plus no matter where the money went. But as full timers, they enjoyed the luxury of waiting out their jobs to the end of the ten-year contract five or six years away. But I and my crew of seasonal workers were passionate to make this traverse a reality. We wanted a big win for the Antarctic Program. Fighting for our project's future also meant fighting for our jobs.

In late March, I convened our Second Over-Snow Mobility Workshop in a small meeting room of the Denver office. The room opened directly onto the sea of cubicles surrounding my desk. A long oval table dominated the room that was well equipped with computer links, projection equipment, whiteboards, and a dozen plush executive-style caster chairs. That was more than enough chairs for the five of us in conference.

Russell Magsig looked comfortable wearing slacks and a polo shirt, so different from the torn overalls he wore while peering into the inner workings of some tractor. After I promised Russ that we'd have showers, I asked him what role he'd like to play in the traverse future. He wanted a guiding hand in designing and selecting equipment for the future fleet. And he wanted to look after its readiness in the long term. I always involved Russ in key skull sessions like this one.

Two CRREL faces were in the room, including Russ Alger, the University of Michigan snow scientist who had joined us for short stints each of our three years. His work related regional snow quality to our mobility. He'd been on the Leverett with the Evans's team in 1995. His field notes and personal counsel diverted me from the prescribed line up the glacier to locate our own successful route.

Jim Lever, mobility engineer, had also joined us those years. He'd experienced our frustrations at the Shoals of Intractable Funding and our triumph on breaking through. He'd scrambled up the Leverett with us and shared our deep disappointment all the way back to McMurdo.