Hardcover(1ST COOPER)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780815411239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2000 |
| Edition description: | 1ST COOPER |
| Pages: | 184 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.26(w) x 9.22(h) x 0.68(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
I had gotten to know George Barber, a nature photographer, in Christchurch, New Zealand, where we had shared a motel room in a quiet neighborhood after a flight from California, via Samoa, in an Air Force C141, the Starlifter. He was about my age, turning forty. The intensity of his brown eyes reminded me of Picasso's, yet he was quiet, softspoken, at times almost shy. He was on the tall side, had light brown hair prematurely graying at the temples, attractive features, and a prominent Adam's apple. He was lean, wiry, muscular, yet, oddly, could have passed for a scholar, an academic. I liked his musical voice with its touch of a drawl, and his dry, intelligent, quietly ironic manner. He was married, childless and lived in San Francisco.
The water heater in our room had inadvertently been set to produce steam, and Barber barely missed scalding himself as he twisted the handle the wrong way to turn the shower off. Was this an omen? I would later have cause to wonder about it, because during the upcoming icebreaker voyage he would sometimes appear to be on a death-defying mission. We bought a first-aid cream at a pharmacy downtown near the cathedral, which he applied on the burned places.
And now we sat next to each other on the flight down to Antarctica in a Navy Hercules, the work-horse plane, with its four turboprop engines, its silvery pylon tank under each wing, and with its capability of lifting off on wheels and landing on skis. All the Herc's seats were occupied. The plane was too crowded with clothes and baggage for much moving about. A young crewman handed out pinkplastic earplugs. I squeezed and inserted them. They slowly expanded in my ears but I could still hear a loud roar, occasionally punctuated by hissing. The engine noises were so great that when I unplugged my ears for a try at chatting with Barber I soon felt at risk for a free tonsillectomy. The variations in temperature were crazy, as a guy proved with a small thermometer he had brought with him. They ranged from 55 degrees to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. A cockpit crewman said a circuit breaker had gone bad and that it couldn't be replaced at this time.
People reading, sleeping. Several playing bridge. One civilian's head shaven except for a crewcut scalp lock. A stout young Navy woman horsing around. Aft, a mountain of baggage strapped and chained down. Barber peed into a little aluminum funnel while standing precariously on the baggage, his privacy partly shielded by a plastic curtain.
We managed the midday meal, a great event because it broke the flight's eight-hour monotony, by balancing it anxiously on our laps and proceeding with the careful, tiny gestures of brain surgery. I buttoned up and fell asleep. When I awoke, sweating profusely, we were flying over a white, cottony world that hurt my eyes when I tried to observe it through one of the few portholes, but it apparently didn't trouble Barber, whose Picasso eyes, also unprotected, and giving the impression they were enamelled, were fixated on the remarkable world out there.
People crossed themselves as we passed the Point of Safe Return—meaning that beyond this point we had insufficient fuel to return us to New Zealand and that we had to continue toward McMurdo Station on Ross Island come what may. The bolts on the plane's naked walls, icing up, had turned white. Everybody donned polar clothes as we prepared to land, so we were sweating as we touched down bumpily on skis. We taxied for what seemed a long time on the ice of Williams Field. Having had tail winds, we arrived an hour early, at 5:00 P.M. McMurdo time. McMurdo's time was the same as Christchurch's. It was now January, and Christchurch, on daylight savings time, was eighteen hours later than New York and twenty-one hours later than L.A. McMurdo in summer had round-the-clock daylight. The station was eight hundred and forty nautical miles from the Pole. The sun moved counterclockwise, at McMurdo dipping by midnight. At the Pole it didn't dip at all.
We were hit by bluish polar sunlight on leaving the craft. Barber and I had been here separately before. Standing on the ice of Williams Field and staring at Mount Erebus, we were momentarily bewildered. Barber said he felt he had lost something in not arriving slowly. "You move so fast it takes you time to catch up with yourself." Vast, white Erebus, an active volcano, beautiful, large, pure, majestic, and only one of three on the planet to contain a red-hot lava lake in its crater.
We had a hard, bumpy, tracked-vehicle ride on the Ross Ice Shelf. On land we transferred to a heavy truck, which dropped us off at the Chalet in McMurdo, a wooden building in the Swiss style, where we received our room assignment from Harry Easton, the McMurdo rep (representative) of the National Endowment for Science. Easton, tall, cool, long-haired, was new to us both. He had a tiny mouth, like a dash, an odd feature in so gangly a body. I didn't notice its size when it was open, so was it the lips that were tiny'? Did such a mouth mean something? Nature? Nurture?
I could still hear the painful thunder and feel the massaging vibrations of the Herc. I remembered the gentle, swaying trees on the River Avon banks in Christchurch, and the heat rising off the tarmac at Harewood Airport. McMurdo Sound, which I saw from a window, was frozen, but the Chalet felt toasty, even a little overheated. Easton looked authoritative in it, as if he had spent several austral summers here, though this was his first.
"If sunspot activity doesn't hold up their flight in Cheechee. Paduani and Markovsky will arrive day after tomorrow," he told me.
Sunspot activity, by affecting the earth's ionosphere, could severely disrupt radio communications in Antarctica. Cheechee was a code name for Christchurch.
Ben Paduani and Peter Markovsky were my colleagues on the three-member Antarctic Observation Team. We were scheduled to go to the Antarctic Peninsula, where we would visit a number of foreign Antarctic stations to check for possible violations of the Antarctic Treaty. In two or three days we would board the Coast Guard icebreaker PENGUIN, demilitarized for Antarctic duy, for the thirteen-day Southern Ocean voyage to the Peninsula. The PENGUIN was currently breaking ice in McMurdo Sound several miles north of McMurdo. George Barber would join the ship too. However, whereas the Observation Team would have a vacation while on the PENGUIN, Barber would photograph aspects of the ship and the Southern Ocean.
As Harry Easton reached for a sheet of paper on his desk his head entered a shaft of brilliant sunlight that burnished his straight blond hair, revealing single, streaked, golden strands. For a moment I had the illusion he was a woman, an image shared by Barber, as the latter told me in our quarters that evening. Surprising me, and causing me to wonder about his sexual orientation, George Barber also told me it would be interesting to shoot a section of Easton's hair up close, and that he could imagine the composition and colors of the finished 11x14" print.
Easton's hair brought Wild Bill Hickok's to mind. Poor Wild Bill, who, like Barber and me, had been in his fortieth year when he was shot dead in the back by a drunken coward in the Number Ten Saloon in Deadwood City, Dakota Territory, while playing poker, holding a pair of aces and two eights, unable to draw to a full life.
"What if Paduani and Markovsky are delayed?" I asked Easton. "Will the PENGUIN leave without them?"
"Not to worry," Easton said.
"You can hold the ship for them?"
Easton replied with a little shrug, which I assumed meant he had a certain authority over the ship's movements, at least in the McMurdo region. Again a motion of his head caused strands of hair to glow.
I don't remember why, but he mentioned some odd behavior by Jack Tourneau, the PENGUIN's captain. On going ashore by helicopter for a first look at McMurdo, Tourneau had loudly stated that the amount of litter at the station was "a disgrace" and that a number of the station civilian personnel were "lazy and incompetent." He had also publicly called the U.S. Antarctic program "a civilian boondoggle." And there had been a flap between him and Easton because Tourneau had refused to manifest George Barber on the PENGUIN for the Antarctic Peninsula area without rewritten orders from Easton, calling Easton's current orders "too damn vague." Also, he had referred to Barber as a "freeloader."
"What's between you and Tourneau?" Easton asked Barber. "He bristled at having to take you to the Peninsula." Easton pronounced it Peninshula.
"Don't know the guy," replied Barber, frowning.
"Why did he call George a freeloader?" I asked.
Easton shrugged. "I know this," he said. "If George is a freeloader, so is Jack Tourneau. So are most of us down here. But please don't quote me. I have a very full plate. I don't need to add to the flap he created."
"But why did he pick on George?"
"If I knew that I'd be a genius."
McMurdo's black hills and roads gave the station the look and feel of a mining camp. Porous volcanic rock everywhere, crushed to gritty dust in the lanes. Meltwater rivulets, running down the hills, crossed the station on their way to McMurdo Sound. Strong smell of diesel fuel. Smell, taste and feel of volcanic grit in the intensely dry air. Clouds of earth dust from noisy, heavy trucks passing nearby.
Barber and I were to share a room. It was on the ground floor of a rectangular two-story building sitting on stilts to avoid heavy buildup of snowdrift. Two single beds, two closets, two red armchairs, an overhead light, a floor lamp, bed lamps, a coffee table, a linoleum floor and steam heat. I thought, "Cool. I'm on Hut Point. Robert Falcon Scott lived a little way from here in mighty different style." We made up our beds, washed up and strolled toward the enlisted men's mess for dinner.
"Sure you don't know Tourneau?" I asked.
"Positive."
"So why did Easton ask what's between you and Tourneau?"
"Don't know," said Barber, shaking his head.
"Tourneau's a jerk."
"Or a trouble maker."
Soft, evening light. Lilac-washed sea ice. Light blue sky. White and Black Islands showing icecliffs. The beautiful Royal Society Range in the west, beyond wide McMurdo Sound. A red-painted Coast Guard cutter with white superstructure and high radar and other towers, squatting on the scarred ice of the Sound. It was the PENGUIN. Who would have imagined the events that would soon occur on it? Certainly not I—Hank Elkins, D.C. bureaucrat with the resonant baritone.
We ate near some young men with long, untamed hair, indifferently washed sunburned faces and hands, brown or blond beards, and dirty, baggy clothes. Five Kiwis with flowing hair, heavy beards, heavy dusty boots, plaid woolen shirts, brown tweed trousers. Jokes and laughter. A young Kiwi woman was explaining to one of them that she was a graduate student in biology, studying parasites in Antarctic cod and trying to culture them. We took long, absorbing looks at the several women present, knowing there would be no females on the icebreaker journey and few women on the Antarctic Peninsula, where we were heading.
I recalled being stunned' by the sight of real live females the last time I had left Antarctica, landing in the heat of Christchurch. And stunned by green grass and by little people (kids) and by trees. I remembered an Antarctic joke. A couple of helicopter pilots brought an artificial Christmas tree down from Christchurch and planted it in Wright Valley, one of the deglaciated Dry Valleys. Flying some greenhorn civilians on a brief tour, they pointed out the tree far below as an example of extraordinary and still-unexplained Antarctic life-forms. They pulled it off with straight faces, and with riotous laughter over bourbon in the McMurdo wardroom afterwards. Meanwhile the visitors, still awe-struck elsewhere at the station, felt graced to have witnessed the miracle. O ye little fishes, how I loved Antarctica and its wild jokes, some, like the treacherous weather and the even more treacherous ice (not least the snowbridged crevasses and falsely solid-looking bergs), unplanted.
We returned to our room and turned in, grateful to whoever had rigged cardboard blinds that reduced the fierce light seeping through the drawn red curtains. The low-hanging sun shone like a spotlight. Scientists coming and going, some preparing to go into the field, others impatiently waiting for delayed cargo. During the night I was vaguely aware of helicopter sounds, winds, voices, door slams.
* * *
For Barber there was trouble on the PENGUIN from the start. There were six of us guests on board: the three members of the Observation Team, two young ornithologists from Point Reyes, California (called birders on the ship), and Barber. However, whereas five of us were quartered in Temporary Officers' Quarters (TOQ), Barber had been assigned to Chief Petty Officers' Quarters (CPOQ) even though there was no shortage of space in TOQ. The five of us were shepherded politely by a lieutenant senior grade down below to our quarters, but Barber was led through what felt like a maze of old-time steerage to his quarters by a large, overweight, overbusy, frowning, coughing chief petty officer named Bob Flynn to the darkness of Flynn's own rack, where Flynn pointed to the rack above his, growled "This is yours," and abruptly left.
No matter that both sets of quarters were on the same deck, one below the wardroom. They were worlds apart in several ways, as Barber soon learned. Compared to his quarters, those in Temporary Officers' Quarters were almost elegant, a fact painfully visible to him, for he had to pass the TOQ whenever he went to and from the wardroom or the bridge. The TOQ racks were wider, had no ladder and pipes for occupants to contend with, had chests of drawers for clothes and were well curtained for privacy. We other guests had each other for company when relaxing away from the wardroom. whereas when Barber wasn't in the wardroom he was the sole civilian in a nest of military men.
It was impossible for him to socialize in CPOQ, because as a civilian he didn't have the liberty of the CPO lounge, with its huge color blowup of a HUSTLER centerfold: a spread-eagled blond young woman wearing high black boots, pubic hair shaved, open vulva gleaming with oil. At times, feeling he was being observed with intense curiosity (possibly mixed with hostility) by the indigenous occupants of Chief Petty Officers' Quarters, he wondered if they suspected him of spying on them.
The TOQ had a temporary feel, like hotel or motel rooms, so a visitor felt comfortable in them, whereas the CPOQ had a feeling of permanence—they were people's homes at sea, where Barber could easily feel he was trespassing and where he had to behave cautiously, if only because there were always people asleep there, day or night, which was why the sole source of light was the red bulb over the head's door. Some of the men didn't trouble to draw their rack curtain. Others, like Barber, lacked one.
Barber didn't care to ingratiate himself by flicking on the overhead light, the only general light available. At times he could vaguely grope his way by the red light, but sometimes, for reasons unknown to him, this light too was off. He was helped by a tiny flashlight, made in France, he had brought along, whose rays just barely showed him the way. But often, finding himself without it, he had to grope to keep from bumping into things. Inside the head the light was blinding.
His rack was located at the end of a dark corridor between rows of racks. The corridor was so narrow he had to navigate it sideways to avoid brushing against curtains or, God forbid, human bodies. There was nothing to sit on except the deck. To reach his rack he had to climb a narrow metal ladder with rungs that were little more than toeholds. Some of the ship's plumbing (massive' pipes, some insulated, some bare) threaded its way in several levels just above the length of his rack, so it could be hazardous to sit upright suddenly, a fact he learned the first night on board when he slammed his forehead against hot metal, which disoriented him for a couple of hours and caused him to resolve never again to wake up bolt upright.
He had no space, covered or otherwise, into which he could put his clothes when he removed them, so he hung the hangable ones from the cold pipes. For his shoes, watch and other small items, he made use of the dusty top of an adjoining metal cabinet, which someone else was using for a similar purpose. A lot of this Barber did by feel, for, unlike the other rack lights in CPOQ, his wasn't working.
The temperature of his quarters was curious. There were times when he was reminded of McMurdo's sauna, and he understood then why some of the crewmen, not one of whom he ever saw wearing pajamas (they slept in their underwear), didn't draw their rack curtain. Mostly he felt he was in the tropics, except for the times when he half froze.
Once, he was standing on one foot while removing a boot. Suddenly the ship lurched severely and he was flung into the curtained rack on his right, which turned out to his intense embarrassment to be occupied, and by Chief Bob Flynn. Flynn usually kept his curtain drawn, whether he was in the rack or not.
The large-bodied chief, who had been lying down, sat up, glared at Barber as the latter disentangled himself, and growled angrily, "What the hell's going on?"
Barber mumbled an apology and an explanation as Flynn slowly, angrily and skeptically disappeared behind his curtain.
On another occasion, when Flynn was absent, Barber was again thrown into Flynn's rack, this time as he was preparing to climb the steel ladder to his own rack. Surrounded by curtains, Flynn's rack was like a tiny room. Barber saw pinups on the rack's ceiling, snapshots of a naked young woman with outspread legs. "What's all this about pinups?" he wondered. "What's the point—when there are no women around? Why make themselves even more horny than they are? Is it to remind themselves they're heterosexual?"
* * *
The assignment of his rack bewildered and humiliated Barber. He felt singled out for derision—here, take this crazy CPOQ rack and shove it, you're not good enough for officer quarters. He recalled how differently he had been treated the previous year on the DECEPTION ISLAND, another Coast Guard icebreaker, when that ship had cut a channel in McMurdo Sound. The channel made it possible for resupply ships to service McMurdo in the austral summer. McMurdo Sound was deeply frozen during winter. He had been assigned a cabin adjacent to the captain's, had regularly dined with the captain at the latter's invitation, had used a desk in the captain's cabin at the captain's insistence, and had shared the captain's head. The captain, a gentle, reserved, softspoken man with a thoughtful air, had offered Barber a tour of the ship and had placed the ship's helicopters at Barber's service whenever they weren't in official use. Unlike Barber, the captain didn't cotton to Antarctica.
"Look at those mountains," he said. "Nothing but ice. You can't profit from it. If we drilled for oil I'd understand why we're here. It's different in the Arctic. I don't get it. I find it hard to understand why anybody would want to come back here. But you hope to, right?"
They were standing on the bridge. The ship, heading south toward McMurdo, was cutting a channel in McMurdo Sound, the ice of which now, in the austral summer, was about six feet thick.
"I can't get enough of this place," said Barber.
"Different folks, different strokes."
A little later a couple of crewmen said in Barber's presence they hated skuas because skuas attacked Adelie eggs and chicks. One, on a lower deck, cast a line overboard, meaning to fish among a group of skuas scavenging the ship's garbage in the channel. A lieutenant junior grade, standing near Barber and aware of the captain's liking Barber, leaned over the gunnel and said, "I don't think that's a great idea." The crewman reeled in his line and disappeared.
What did Barber's rack assignment mean? I recalled Easton's saying Tourneau had complained Barber was a freeloader, and asking Barber, "What's between you and Tourneau?" Why was an unobtrusive, affable guy like George Barber, a nature photographer with an excellent national reputation, being discriminated against? And by whom? By the captain, Jack Tourneau himself, with his small head, curly reddish hair and girlish hands?
Understandably, Barber and I became increasingly aware of Tourneau, especially at the abysmal, ancient movies in the wardroom each evening. It was strange to see Tourneau enter the wardroom briskly while all stood at attention, walk rapidly to his captain's chair and sit bad-postured like a smug adolescent. His loud, vulgar laugh exploded regularly during the films. He felt free to do that, as if he was showering his officers and his civilian passengers with lordly gifts. Lapping up the movies, he laughed his head off, destroying the little gray matter in it. His guffaws at the cheapest gags were echoed by his stooge, Lieutenant (senior grade) Sonny Peterson, the young operations officer with the poker back and the soft, large ass that threatened the seam of his Coast Guard trousers.
Tourneau and four or five cronies, Ben Paduani always included, played poker nightly on a round table at the aft end of the wardroom, two players occupying the long wall bench and Tourneau invariably using a captain's chair, his back toward Barber and me, as if to underline the message that he was deliberately ignoring us. We usually hung out at the dining table. He ignored me only when he saw I was in Barber's company. His back was small, and his hands were small and feminine, with nails that were far too pretty for a seagoing military man. And he wore a striking ring on his left pinky, which Paduani told me was a one-carat Burmese ruby flanked by two small diamonds. The mounting was massive: twelve pennyweight of 22K yellow gold, with a circular stripe of 18K white. White bezels surrounded the diamonds, a yellow bezel the ruby. Loving poker, Barber wondered if Tourneau and company were playing stud or draw, and what the stakes were, and if he would be invited to join the game. Poor Barber, how innocent can you be? After all, the captain refused eye contact with him, and had him live in a kind of steerage while voyaging on the world's worst waters. It made me think about Barber. Spit in a guy's eye and he thanks you for the moisture.
It could have been argued that Barber's rack was a temporary situation and that one should be careful not to make a typhoon out of a squall. But we were scheduled to voyage for almost two weeks on the PENGUIN in the world's notoriously most turbulent waters. Furthermore, being quartered in CPOQ inevitably caused a psychological distance between Barber and the other guests, myself excepted. In essence, though like the rest of us guests he had officer rank while on the PENGUIN and therefore hung out and dined in the wardroom, he lived with the chief petty officers. Because I had grown to be very fond of him, I took a particular interest in his odd circumstances. I asked a number of people why Barber was being quartered in CPOQ. They didn't know.
Barber had a fine sense of humor, which could easily be directed at himself, so the comic side of his situation was by no means lost on him. Still, it graveled him more than I expected, causing me to wonder if there wasn't also, under his balanced, cool, calm, scholarly demeanor, a paranoid streak. And I kept being made aware of the intensity of his Picasso eyes, which belied his otherwise calm, mild, almost academic expression. It was strange to me that this exceptional talent should occur in such a mild person. Was there another, explosive side to him?