A View From the Bottom of the World: It’s No Place Like Home

David Fischer ground his teeth at a television monitor. In the scrolling list of incoming military cargo planes, one blinking squib silently heckled him.

“TwO, Pt Hlls, 8:30.” A tourist.

Down here?

Within minutes, the private Twin Otter charter from the Patriot Hills refueling camp skittered down the South Pole’s groomed ice runway. The tiny orange aircraft looked like a dragonfly that took a wrong turn at the rain forest.

On a brilliant summer morning in December, the temperature climbs to minus 25. But a gale bullwhips across the two-mile- thick glacier that extends forever in every direction, generating windchill that can freeze your eyelids.

The South Pole is perhaps the most arduous place this side of outer space.

And it’s Fischer’s domain. As manager of the United States’ permanent station here, he runs perhaps the world’s most desolate and important scientific outpost. He also directs round-the-clock construction of its $153-million replacement for the National Science Foundation.

The Pole is off-limits to all but approved researchers and workers. But in the last few years, charter flights carrying wealthy tourists and adventurers began to appear on the frosty horizon, just as a decade earlier cruise ships began landing passengers on Antarctica’s handful of environmentally sensitive beaches.

An Unwritten Code of Hospitality

There may not be much to see but white. There isn’t even a penguin for a thousand miles in any direction. But standing at the Pole remains a rare experience in a world of been there, done that.

Fischer and other officials wince at the idea of their outpost as an attraction, especially as diesel bulldozers and cranes help to erect the new station’s steel skeleton.

But visitors will come--one or two at a time, uninvited, during this research season. There’s little anyone can do to stop them.

No nation owns Antarctica; 43 nations have signed treaties to protect and study the icebound landmass as large as Mexico and the United States combined.

The Pole is one of three large U.S. stations staffed year-round, even during the Pole’s eight months of pitch-black winter. The unwritten code of the ice compels its crew to help anyone who makes it as far as 90 degrees south latitude, invited or not.

“We don’t encourage visitors,” Fischer explained. “People don’t realize that we’re at 10,000 feet here. So in addition to being cold, they show up dehydrated and suffering from altitude sickness.”

Or worse. A year ago, three skydivers were killed when their parachutes failed to open over the ice runway.

The tourist arrived a few weeks after that tragedy. Emotions at the station were still raw, and word of the small plane’s safe touchdown spread quickly. Who was this visitor? A brash tycoon like Ted Turner? Another Amelia Earhart?

Nobody expected Penelope Teesdale.

Fischer found her in the cafeteria, hunched and shivering like a lone sparrow on a frozen telephone wire. Her down snowmobile suit was still fastened at the neck, and she’d pushed up her protective face mask just enough to sip steaming tea from a mug offered by her charter pilot.

Teesdale, a 73-year-old writer, had left New York three days earlier, defying a chronic heart condition and vowing not to stop until she stood at the bottom of the world.

Her twin-engine plane equipped with skis awaited, engines running. The frigid drop-in cost about $20,000, as much as two seasonal workers’ wages.

“I’m surprised I’m here,” Teesdale chirped from beneath several layers. “I didn’t even know it was possible until a few months ago.”

Fischer managed a wan smile and a welcome. He made sure somebody could dash outside to snap her photograph at the ceremonial pole marker. He arranged for a heated van to chauffeur her to the plane.

He even pretended not to notice as her pilot helped himself to cookies for the 2,000-mile return flight to Patriot Hills and South America.

“We pump some hot liquids into them and give them a quick look around,” Fischer said. “We get them on their way in a couple of hours. There’s no place to put them.”

No kidding. As work on the new research station enters its second season, the Pole is becoming an icy Hooverville.

The dome’s original sleeping quarters for 33 men was opened in 1975. Now 200 men and women cram into every available bed, including the infirmary’s, and sleep in shifts. Prefabricated bunkhouses of plywood, canvas and plastic stretch down the glacier in a polar version of suburban sprawl.

It is nicknamed Summer Camp and, like many camps, it has an unlimited supply of fresh water. But melting ice with $12-per-gallon fuel makes showers, laundry and flush toilets occasional luxuries. And the long walk to a community bathroom can be slippery and teeth-rattling, even when the sun is blazing at 3 a.m.

The NSF guarantees one amenity: comfort food. Unlike early polar explorers, residents will not have to eat their sled dogs. Crews dine freely on steak, fish, pasta and an array of desserts. (Ice cream is a big favorite. Go figure.)

Preparing meals requires the sort of advance planning they don’t teach in culinary school. Ingredients require days to thaw in the 37-degree “cooler.” (Down here, the refrigerator is where you go to warm up.)

Cook Dave Zybowski of Arvada, Colo., satisfies the workers’ cravings for meat, potatoes and dinner rolls.

But Zybowski hankers for more exotic fare in a frozen world with little sensory stimulation. “I’ve ordered supplies for Thai food,” he said. “They should be here in February.”

A tasty menu can’t make up for the dangers of living in an aging facility. Even a small fire means quick death if it knocks out heat and electricity.

One alarm proved the point.

Minutes before dinner, volunteers on “house mouse” duty bustled around the cafeteria, filling napkin dispensers and wiping down tables. In an alcove, two women decorated an artificial Christmas tree with silver garland. Holiday tunes jingled on the boombox.

Suddenly the emergency klaxon blared, and everyone lunged for parkas. Station manager Fischer, walkie-talkie crackling, thundered into the subzero chill of the dome to assemble the fire brigade. Moments later, he trudged back inside, relieved.

“False alarm at 5:13 p.m.,” the intercom droned. “Lamb chops burned.”

The circumstances can be trying, especially for older researchers, who are dubbed “beakers” after the old-fashioned laboratory jar.

Like Teesdale the tourist, they are obsessed with the Pole--but for a different reason. It is a unique place to conduct science.

A Unique Place for Scientists

It’s such a simple, extreme, pristine environment, and it’s been that way for so long, that scientists can more readily detect the ozone hole and other environmental changes, and trace their sources. The skies are crystal clear; the air, ultra-cold and dry. That makes it a superb space observatory, too.

“We’re not down here because we love the Pole,” explained University of Chicago astrophysicist Robert Loewenstein, who traveled the half-mile from the dome to his telescope on cross-country skis. “If there was a better place for astronomy, that’s where we would be.”

The Pole is more often described as a small town where everyone knows and helps each other. Maybe too small. Especially when nature calls in an amorous way. “If you decide to do something with somebody at 2 a.m., everybody else knows about it by 5 a.m.,” muttered maintenance worker Erika Nelson of Hood River, Ore.

Twenty years ago, the first women on the ice required military escorts. A woman’s voice on a radio would be followed by wolf whistles and heavy breathing. Today, women account for one-third of the summer work force and are treated as equals by co-workers.

In return, the Pole exacts its toll equally.

Studies show workers in extreme cold require three times longer to complete a simple task. That’s because the brain’s chemistry produces more of a hormone required for physical activity and reduces levels of those engaged in problem-solving.

“Just unbolting a little metal shed took me three or four hours,” Nelson said. “You just can’t seem to pull it together down here.”

If conditions seem harsh now, just wait until winter.

In mid-February, the last aircraft skims the ice runway and banks north. A skeletal crew of 28 “winter-overs” stays behind, waving until the plane vanishes into the orange twilight. Night will reign until October, when spring, the sun and the airplane return.

This winter, for the first time, NSF will double the winter crew, adding construction workers to complete the new station’s heavy equipment garages.

Inevitably, winter-overs become discouraged by the perpetual cold and dark. That’s when it will be time to party, Antarctica style.

The station’s most exuberant residents wait until the thermometer plunges below minus 100. They strip naked (footwear allowed) and pile into the 200-degree sauna. Then they rush outside and dance around the geographic South Pole marker. They call themselves the 300 Club, reflecting the sum of the temperature extremes.

“It feels like heaven,” said science technician Chris Cleavelin. “I have done this incredibly idiotic but somehow liberating feat three times.”

It’s part of what makes life at the Pole intriguing, if illogical.

Sun shines for four months, but cold is intense and pervasive. The location is utterly isolated, yet the station is so crowded that privacy is erased. The place attracts fiercely independent personalities, yet cooperation is vital.

Station physician Dr. Will Silva is hooked. A self-described “odd duck,” he left a family practice in Seattle vowing to find a job where patients aren’t treated “like cans of pumpkin.”

Silva envies the physician who will be working in the new station’s expanded clinic. His portable X-ray machine and darkroom date to the 1930s.

“We work under no illusions here,” Silva said. “There is potential for serious trauma. Casualties would be very high.”

One thing the new station, or even tourism, cannot do is tame the Pole. That suits most people here just fine.

“This is the closest that I’ll come to going into space in my good life,” Silva said. “It’s the final frontier.”

Joseph B. Verrengia reported part of this story while a National Science Foundation visiting journalist to Antarctica in 1997-98.