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.
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.