The word came down in a phone call during the northern summer a year earlier following our first season’s success in crossing the Shear Zone. Its impact carried over through the entire project, and waxed especially acute the year of our disappointing advance across the Ross Ice Shelf. The word denied the very nature of our project.
I had been seated at my manager’s cubicle in the Denver office and reached for the handset, glancing first at the “Caller ID.”
“John Wright speaking. That you, George?”
My phone offered a choice of several ringtones. I’d selected a woman’s voice that mechanically but pleasantly asked, “Are you there? Are you there?” I usually caught myself at the last second, amused, before answering, “Yes, I am here.” Thus, most of my phone conversations began with a smile on my end.
“Good morning,” came the familiar and cheerful voice of George Blaisdell in Washington, D.C.
After an exchange of pleasantries, George came to the point, “John, we need you, along with all of us, to refrain from using the word ‘road’ in connection with the South Pole Traverse Project.”
A telltale tik-tik-tik-ing of a computer keyboard sounded in the background of my earpiece. George was multitasking. I was bewildered.
“What’s up? We built a road across the Shear Zone, and we’re going to build a road to the South Pole.”
The National Science Foundation was crafting the environmental documentation for future traverses. The word had New Zealand and Australian environmental coalitions spun up about a highway cutting across the continent. “Road” conjured images of traffic. It misdirected attention from the numbers of LC-130 turboprop flights we might save. Attention that would be better focused on the fuel savings and emissions reductions for cargo delivered by a surface traverse.
Yet a photo of our D8R Caterpillar loading onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 in New Zealand appeared in the Christchurch newspaper last year. Its caption proclaimed: “THE ROAD TO THE POLE!” I thought that language came from the NSF. I thought it expressed high-level, programmatic brio.
“George, the French have been running a traverse for years. The Russians run from Mirny to Vostok. The Australians, the Germans, and for all I know the Japanese and the Chinese programs all run traverses. Is this opposition directed at their programs, too?”
“No … it’s pretty much directed at us. We’re the biggest kid on the block, and people like taking shots at the United States.”
George was an engineer with a specialty in snow and ice pavements. We were making a road, a road made of snow. And we were going to traverse it with tractors and sleds, just like those other programs did. I couldn’t imagine someone of George’s background not calling a road “a road.” Now he pressed me in the unique way a program officer at NSF could lean on a contract worker.
“I need your cooperation to not use the word ‘road.’”
“What word shall we use in place of ‘road’?” I chortled, an edge to my voice.
“We don’t have one for that. ‘Traverse’ works. ‘Route.’ ‘Trail.’ All I can say is: In this office we will not use that word in connection with the project.”
“George, you’re a messenger here, right?”
“That’s right,” he allowed, gratefully.
I gripped the phone, feeling my jaw tense. “Message delivered. This is big. I need to think about what it means. Talk later?”
“Any time,” George agreed.
I hung up and, leaning way back in my chair, stared at the office ceiling. No more frontier attitude … don’t want any cowboys … don’t call it a road … What does it mean?
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.”
Norbert and Scooter studied the map. Crary’s track ran around the edge of the Ice Shelf. All his snow strength measurements came from along that track. We were cutting across the middle of the Shelf, where Crary didn’t go. We had crossed his track back near the Shear Zone. We’d cross it again somewhere up ahead.
“You see these closed contour loops he’s mapped around the middle? Where we are right now?”
Scooter and Norbert nodded. Those contours indicated what Crary believed would be the softest, weakest snow. He had to extrapolate those values over a hundred miles because he wasn’t here.
“Scooter, do you think your TG snow is the same soft, weak stuff Crary was talking about?”
“I want to look over this report more closely,” Scooter said. “But I think so.”
“If it is so,” I speculated, “then there’s hope that we’ll come out of this swamp. Up here closer to the mountains, where Crary went, the contours show a harder surface. Now let me show you this other one.”
The other report was only a half-inch thick. It collected contributions to a traverse conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1994. NSF sponsored it and CRREL hosted it. The list of attendees named French and Russian traverse experts, Caterpillar tractor dealers, and other snow vehicle manufacturers. Names like Dave Bresnahan and George Blaisdell rang familiar.
“Check this name,” I turned the page. “Russell Magsig.”
Their eyebrows rose. I added, “Our Russell has been in on this for a long time. Respect that. But here’s what I want to show you now …”
The next section represented glaciologist’s contributions. I’d never met Robert Bindschadler or Gordon Hamilton, but I had heard their names around the program a lot. Their notes described criteria for selecting the Leverett route across the Transantarctics. We were not there to debate that. We were going to test it. But their list of criteria included features they thought should be avoided: abundance of crevasses, steep slopes, blue ice, and “depth hoar.”
“Scooter, the alpine mountaineers in my home town are always talking about weak depth hoar layers at the base of the snow pack. They predict avalanches on account of it. As I understand, that stuff is pretty much the same as what you’ve been digging here?”
Scooter nodded, his eyes wide open and attentive. “Right. The old timers used to call it depth hoar. These days we call it TG, and the process that makes it is kinetic metamorphism. It ain’t going to avalanche on this Shelf, of course, but it’s the same stuff that collapses under your tractors as you squirm through it.”
“Thank you. I thought so. Those glaciologists thought depth hoar should be avoided. And I reckon we know why, now. You put those guys together with Crary’s projections and you have this big swamp. Had I understood that ahead of time, I might’ve made a strong argument for building a road across it first, before we brought out heavy loads to break trail.”
Scooter cocked his head. “Hey, nobody can blame you, John.”
“Blame’s beside the point. That’s dinosaur bones. I’m looking at that three-year schedule to complete, and wondering how big this swamp is.”
We got our first indication on December 27 that second year, still headed south. Quite suddenly in the afternoon, all our tractors started riding up on top of the snow. The overcast that obscured our skies for weeks rolled back. Golden glints of sunlight reflected off the distant mountains now rising for the first time on our southern horizon. Scooter invited me over to his snow pit that evening. I dropped down beside him.
“Look at this, John.” He pointed out the various layers exposed in his pit wall.
“No BBs. Is this all WF snow?”
“A lot of it is. But look at these layers with the finer grains. This is equi-temperature stuff.”
“What? ET, now?”
“Just another name. But check this … it’s bonded. It doesn’t spill.”
I stood up in the pit, studying the new mountains. “You suppose they have anything to do with this snow being here? I’m talking about weather and wind up close to them. Not like those foggy doldrums behind us.”
“Could be. There’s a lot more to learn.”
“If we’ve just come out of three hundred miles of swamp, then that would be wonderful.”
But we would wait a year to find out. The next day was December 28. There was a red mark on the calendar. We turned around to run back on the road we’d built behind us.
Snow accumulates in Antarctica to such an extent that, over time and depth, it compacts itself under its own weight. It squeezes the air out of its mass until it becomes dense ice. When that ice cracks, you get a crevasse. If you’re building a road across Antarctica, crevasses are a terrain problem that will slow you down, or kill you. We understood this, and sometimes our knowledge flowed back to the mountaineers.
Matthew Szundy had rotated in for Scooter as we retreated from our farthest south. His boyishly handsome, clean-shaven, and smiling face loudly proclaimed: I am ALERT!
During our retreat, we stopped at a place we called the George Trend to explore for crevasses that might be lurking there. Blaisdell had called my attention to a satellite image where he noticed a staggered array of linear features cutting across our path. If the features themselves weren’t crevasses, they might be telltales of crevasse country. Our outbound trip proved that a hundred-foot-wide, twenty-mile-long path through the George Trend was free of crevasses. That was good enough for us then. But on our return, I wanted to see if we could actually find a crevasse there.
Matthew and I went exploring in the PistenBully. He ran the radar, and I drove. Over two days we ran one-mile squares on both sides of our trail. Cloudy skies gave us no surface definition. I navigated by GPS. But even had there been clear skies, we had no landmarks. At 120 miles from the Shear Zone, the peaks of the Transantarctic Range hid below all our horizons.
While we mapped out one of our western squares, the clouds broke a tiny bit. A shaft of bright sunlight struck the snowfield in front of us, and cast an oddly curved shadow on the snow. I broke Matthew’s concentration. “I don’t believe my eyes. Do you see what I see? Is that a hill in front of us?”
Matthew looked up from the radar screen and out the windshield: “You don’t believe your eyes? That looks like a hill to me.”
“What’s a hill doing out here?” Matthew was new to the Ross Ice Shelf. Did he get how weird that was?
“Maybe we’re in a trough?” he suggested.
That would mean we were in a bottom, looking up, with another hill behind us. And we hadn’t felt any slope-change by the seat of our pants. We’d never have seen this hill if it hadn’t been for that shaft of sunlight.
We went ahead to find out what the radar saw. Matthew reported the stratigraphy beneath us rose as we started climbing. It flattened out as we crested the hill. That meant some sort of fold lay below us, an anticline of sorts.
We continued into a broad, sunlit stretch of flat ground.
“STOP!” Matthew cried.
I let go of everything. The PistenBully automatically stopped.
“I got a crevasse,” Matthew turned the computer screen toward me.
He was on it. The clear black needle-form in the radar image was probably ten feet in front of us now. It looked narrow, like a crack we could drive over. But it was too small to account for what we’d seen on the satellite images. I looked right into Matthew’s bright blue eyes.
“Good job. You know, I teased those CRREL guys all the way from the Shear Zone out to RIS-1. They never found a single crevasse on the open Shelf. But here, on your first day out, you found one! You are good, man! You are much better than those CRREL guys!”
“But I thought finding no crevasses was good?” Matthew puzzled over my praise.
“Finding no crevasses is good, but it didn’t stop me from teasing them. Now I’m teasing you.”
Matthew laughed uneasily. He was brand new to our haggard mob and needed to fit in right away. He knew his routine job would be running the radar and looking for crevasses. He’d dealt with alpine crevasses as a guide, but these were Shelf crevasses. And our job was to get tractor trains through, not paying clients on foot.
That evening in our galley, long after the crew retired to their bunks, I slouched wide awake on the galley bench. All the scenes of our ignominious defeat in the snow swamp replayed for me on the ceiling. I plotted solutions, but I wondered if NSF would receive our horror stories as whining complaints or as lessons learned. Matthew surprised me as he stepped in from outside.
“Hi, John. You’re not asleep?”
“No, I am cogitating.”
“Me, too. Cogitating. Been thinking about crevasses,” Matthew confessed.
“Have a seat?”
He dragged the caster chair out of the comms booth and sat across the floor from me. My legs stretched across to a stool on the other side of the galley table.
“I’m concerned about these crevasses. I’m not sure we’re paying enough attention to them,” Matthew said. I saw where this conversation was headed.
“Well, that’s actually an old joke,” I replied.
Matthew’s neck straightened. “What?”
“A very old joke,” I repeated. “You know the story of the blind men and the elephant?”
“Yeah, I know that story,” Matthew said, probably wondering if he was getting through to me at all.
“Okay. One blind man says an elephant is like a tree. Another one says it’s like a wall. And another one says it’s like a snake … You with me?”
Matthew smiled at the twist his earnest conversation had taken. I was going to enjoy this.
“Well, I’m talking to my hometown Rabbi,” I continued. “Marvin Paioff, the smartest man I ever met, and our conversation turns to Jews’ preoccupation with anti-Semitism. ‘Marvin,’ I said, ‘I had a college buddy named Jeff Schwartz. We shared an English literature class together. Every time we had to write a paper, I’d explore my favorite theme of medieval knighthood. Jeff would explore anti-Semitism. So it’d be ‘The Value System of the Red Cross Knight in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’ for me. For Jeff, it’d be ‘Anti-Semitism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.’ Now, Marvin, that’s what Jeff was interested in. Exploring anti-Semitism. He did it every chance he got. And I explored chivalry, every chance I got … until I understood it to be licensed hypocrisy. But I’ve noticed over the years that many of my Jewish friends have Jeff’s same infatuation with anti-Semitism. Why is that?’ Do you know what he told me?”
Matthew, thoroughly lost, was nevertheless intrigued. “I have no idea what Rabbi Paioff told you.”
“He told me the same thing I just told you.”
“What?”
“That it’s a very old joke. And he asked me if I knew the story of the blind men and the elephant?”
“But what’s the joke?”
“Oh … you want to know that?”
“Yes!” Matthew demanded.
“Okay. I was wondering. A U.N. delegation studies the elephant. When they’re done, they write up their reports. The United States representative turns in his: The Use of Elephant Manure as an Agricultural Crop Enhancement. The German’s report is titled The Elephant as a War Machine. And the Frenchman writes about The Love Life of the Elephant. You know what the Israeli’s paper is?”
“No,” cried Matthew, now grinning from ear to ear.
“Anti-Semitism and the Elephant.”
“Aw jeez,” he laughed. “I thought we were talking about crevasses!”
“We are talking about crevasses. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
Matthew gestured with open palms and open mouth, as if to say, “What? What?”
I took a more serious tone. “You’re a mountaineer. You’ve seen a jillion crevasses. You’re a crevasse expert. If you’re like other mountaineers, you figure you’ve got a lock on crevasses. Am I right?”
“Yes,” Matthew said forthrightly, now more engaged with the subject. There was no backing down in him. No false modesty. He was going to work great for us.
“Okay. Matthew, you’re a mountaineer, and you’ve got a lock on crevasses. Think about old, gruff Russell. He was in the Shear Zone when Linda went down. He saw that huge bulldozer disappear with two guys on board, so Russell knows something about crevasses.”
Matthew’s attention grew.
“Think about Stretch. Stretch has run that eighty-six thousand pound D8 Cat right up to the very edge of crevasses. Right there in the Shear Zone, last year … He filled them full of snow and drove over them. Stretch knows something about crevasses. And those two guys are in their bunks, not twenty feet away from you.”
My point began to dawn on Matthew.
“Now me,” I said. “I have a feel for how huge masses of material behave under stress. And I’ve studied and studied this route. I know something about crevasses. My first choice is to avoid them. Our problem is we’ve got to find the crevasses before they find us. My second choice is to destroy them. Like we did in the Shear Zone. You’re a mountaineer, and a damn good one I understand. You know something about crevasses, too. But you haven’t got a lock on them. See what I’m getting at?”
Matthew nodded deeply.
“We all think about crevasses all the time,” I said. “And you can be sure every one of us is scared to death of them. That’s why I’m up late at night and can’t sleep. I’m looking ahead to the Kelly Trend, wondering what crevasses may be lurking there tomorrow.”
Matthew sat back in his chair. I never moved my legs, or changed my slouching posture. I wanted to relax, and I was doing a fine job of it.
“I’ve enjoyed our conversation, John,” Matthew said before retiring to our bunkroom.
“I have, too, Matthew. I’m glad you’re with us,” I complimented him. “And if Jeff Schwartz were here, he’d have something to tell us about anti-Semitism and the crevasse.”
Matthew went to bed, laughing. An hour later, so did I.
Back in the “real” world, Raymond Lilley, an Associated Press writer from Wellington, New Zealand, reached me by e-mail while I was still in McMurdo. We’d just concluded the second year’s slog across the Ross Ice Shelf, and I would be heading home soon to the real “real” world. The contractor’s manager of public communications referred Lilley to me.
Lilley’s beat included the USAP’s doings, particularly those emanating from Ross Island. New Zealand claimed the island as its territorial dependency. The first 640 miles of our route to the base of the Leverett Glacier started at Ross Island and ran right across New Zealand’s claimed sector. The traverse project was big news.
Lilley’s interest was not one of territorial encroachment. The Antarctic Treaty Nations set aside all such issues when they agreed how nations should get along on the continent. Instead, the issue of public interest for Lilley ran toward the boldness of our undertaking, the environmental consequences of ongoing traverse operations, and the historical nature of the project. New Zealanders were particularly fascinated by the project since their man, Sir Edmund Hillary, had been the first to drive a tractor to South Pole. Fifty years later, here come Americans talking tractors in terms suggesting traffic.
Lilley asked good questions, referring to that which we were building as “road.” Answering him challenged my lexicon as I sought to avoid using that word. Excerpts from the e-mail interview ran:
Lilley: What was the toughest part of the road-forming?
Wright: It is all work, and none of it easy. Last year it took us 3 months to go 3 miles across a crevasse field. The tough part of that was the tension of working in a place full of dangerous, hidden crevasses. This year we went out to 425 miles across the snows of the Ross Ice Shelf. That was breaking trail … a long, slow slog in soft snow. The toughest part of that was always urging for more distance and having our hopes thwarted by the soft snows.
Lilley: Will that work stay in place, particularly through the shear zone?
Wright: Yes. I need to qualify that. The improved surface—marked by bamboo poles with flags—will remain compacted and harder as a result of our work. It will stay in the same place relative to the flags. But “in place?” No … the Ice Shelf on whose surface it is built is dynamic … in slow, fluid motion. So, the improved surface we built moves with the flow of the Ice Shelf. We have measured 6.5 feet per day in places. But as the ice moves, it takes the flags with it, and so we know where the improved surface is … next to the flags. “Particularly through the Shear Zone?” Our passage through the Shear Zone—made last year—remained intact and fit for passage this year. The passage was about 1,000 feet farther north than when we left it last year (due to Ice Shelf movement), and about 100 feet longer (the ice had stretched). We located 5 new crevasses on our crossing. These were juvenile features, not big enough to require mitigation … yet. We keep our eye on these, as well as the other 32 we dealt with last year.
Lilley: What is the length of the ice road now, after two years driving/forming it?
Lilley: Do you have a guesstimate of the time pole trips will take once the road is through?
Wright: Early feasibility projections performed by engineers at CRREL (US Army Corps of Engineers—Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratories) in 1999–2000 estimated 20 days outbound and loaded, and ten days return deadheading—a 30-day round trip. Any update on that estimate should await the actual completion of the passage.
Lilley: How different are the tractors you use from the Fordson tractor Sir Ed Hillary and the expedition used to reach the pole?
Wright: I thought Sir Ed Hillary drove a Massey Ferguson? Anyhow … “how different are they?” You have seen Hillary’s. Pretty small. Not meant for cargo delivery … that wasn’t his purpose. I believe he was hauling his own expedition supplies and air dropping supplies as well. Not unlike a “science traverse” today. Conversely, we’re aiming to haul not just stuff we need, but a whole lot more stuff that is needed at South Pole. So we have heavier tractors, heavier loads, more horsepower, the advantage of modern engine and tractor technology and far more years’ experience in the Antarctic environment than did pioneer Hillary. My hat’s off to him.
Lilley: Do you think the pole road an attainable goal? (What I mean by this is whether, given such obstacles as the shear zone, bad weather, etc., it can become a functioning road in your estimate?)
Wright: Yes.
Lilley: Is it possible/likely the road could be used outside the strict summer season?
Wright: Doubtful. The limiter would be the unavailability of emergency support in the winter months.
Lilley: Does the “road” have a working name?
Wright: No.
Lilley wrote an eight hundred word piece that incorporated our interview, adding text and quotes from other sources concerned with environmental impacts. Among the more interesting speculations were those for environmental impacts of incidental tourists who might want to use the road. Lilley’s article went out on the AP wire under the title “Ice Highway being cut to Earth’s Last Frontier.” Other news media picked up the story, and the headline freely changed as local editors adapted it to local interests. An Arizona Republic article, printed in Phoenix, called it “Interstate 10 Below.” A friend at home told me radio announcer Paul Harvey decried the idea as a dumb waste of U.S. taxpayers’ money.
After Lilley’s article came out, NSF amended its public communications policy. Henceforth, all public statements about our project would be cleared through Peter West of the NSF’s Office of Legal and Public Affairs. West addressed a large convention room filled with Annual Planning Conference attendees. He explained that of all media inquiries he fielded for NSF at-large that year, over 60 percent of them focused on the South Pole Traverse project.
Meanwhile, I never called it a road. Not to Lilley anyway. Remote Over-snow Antarctic Dragway worked. R.O.A.D. But that depended on what the meaning of the word road was.
At some point politics’ swamps and jargon’s crevasses would stop progress altogether. We needed to get back to pioneering the real thing.