Fiction by Karen Joyce
The first thing that went through her head when she heard that the Senators were being escorted to her camp by Gordon Grimes was: Hide the coffee. No doubt he would sweep in and blast out with a Hey Krissie, honey, you look great! How ‘bout a cuppa? as if ten years hadn’t gone by already since he’d been her thesis advisor.
Well she sure as shit was not going to be waiting on him when he showed up this time, Distinguished Visitors or not. No way. There wasn’t a molecule of sycophantic grad student left in her. This was her camp now and had been for the last eight years. That whole cult Gordon had enjoyed for twenty years with all those “Lake Hoare Whores” as he liked to call them after a few shots of Wild Turkey – that was a bygone era, that first blossoming of women field geologists putting up with whatever they were dealt with by the dominant culture. Gordon was about to find out that everything had changed: all those cute grad students were now postdocs, mountaineers, full professors like herself. His era was ten years and ten pounds ago.
At least ten pounds. Kris ran a hand across the soft flesh of her belly and turned sharply away from the wrecked package of broken Oreos on the table, her tongue furtively digging away at the crevasses of chocolate that were still stuck on her back molars, as if to hide the evidence. She pushed the plywood door of the Jamesway open and let it snap shut behind her, rattling the rack of test tubes that Slack had once again left on the floor. Goddamn it, she thought, if he does that while Gordon’s out here, that bastard will probably report us.
Outside, the Antarctic sun hit her like a halogen headlight. Fishing for her sunglasses, she could just barely make out the limno team spread out across Lake Hoare: four red coats bent like boomerangs at the other side of the spiky ice. She could see her own tent lit up by the sun on a far hill, a bright yellow triangle against the dun-colored rocks.
Then it came back before she could stop it: the vaguely nutty smell of him, the humid tent, the sharp rock under her Ensulite pad. The liquid amber light streaming in from all directions. Gordon’s glasses crunched and broken beneath them. How pissed off he’d been at her for days afterwards, like it was her fault. How the hell had she still managed to fall hard for him after all that?
Out of habit, she started toward the propane toilet before she remembered this morning’s “incident.” It was Slack’s week to maintain the thing, to make sure it didn’t fill up too high before the burners were lit. But of course he’d waited a couple of days longer than he should have and when he finally hit the IGNITE button, the damn thing exploded. Just blew up with every kind of excrement flung skyward twenty feet in all directions over that most pristine environment on the planet, the Dry Valleys. Well they ain’t quite as dry as they were before this happened, she reflected as she circled the damage. What great timing: the DV visit coming in this afternoon, with Gordon of all people escorting, and here was all this shit and toilet paper plastered everywhere, now frozen into every rock and cranny.
The only short-term solution she could think of was tarps. Cover everything and tell the DV’s to stay back, that there was a “sensitive experiment” going on. But that wouldn’t explain the smell. And Gordon was sure to ask what exactly was being studied, standing there with his pretty little mouth pursed in a fake smile, the center of the circle. She absolutely had to pull him aside and tell him as soon as he got off the helo, because the first thing the DV’s always ask for is the bathroom. And they didn’t even have some kind of bucket set up anywhere yet, unless Slack had taken that one on without having to be told.
Where the hell was Slack, anyway?
They heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter coming up the Taylor Valley just as they were securing the last of the tarps with rocks. Kris shaded her eyes against the sun and watched the insect dot resolve itself against the barren mountains, sprout a rotor and swing around like a pro skier to land on the tiny pad. She turned her head away from the furious dust storm till the rotor went limp, hanging down comically on either side of the helicopter like a pair of drooping ears. She watched a figure in a bright red coat open the side door and jump out, light as a rangey dog: Gordon. She would have known those springy legs anywhere, even after all these years.
He turned to help the others, their awkward feet in oversize cartoon boots searching like blind puppies for the helo’s steps. Then he turned around and spotted her.
“Krissie! Hey!” He sprinted down the rocks to her, his entire face a wreath of smile wrinkles. “God, woman, how long has it been!” He grabbed both of her hands before she knew what was happening and slid his eyes up and down her body before gathering her to him in a hug, hips and all. She instantly felt the heat fill up her windbibs: that man can toast bread just by standing near it, as Jill used to say. The rich animal smell her own camp-filthy body rose up around her as she pulled herself away. Had he noticed it? How could he not? Up close she could see the deep latticework of wrinkles that mapped every inch of his face. Served him right: he’d always prided himself on never wearing sunscreen, called them all a bunch of pussies for slathering it on.
No sooner had he finished the introductions (in which he neglected to mention that she, Dr. Kris Hartwood, Professor of Geology at Ohio State University, was the Principal Investigator out here at Lake Hoare) than sure enough, one of the female DVs asked if it would be possible to use the “rest room.”
“Absolutely! But first, Gordon, can I have a word with you?”
She pulled him down the path a few feet. “Gordon, we had a bit of an accident this morning with the....”
He stood there smiling at her, watching her face, obviously not listening.
“Propane toilet? It...ah...there was a little accident with the burner....”
“God, Krissy,” he said, shaking his head as he reached out to take the thumbs of her mittens in each hand, spreading her arms wide. “It’s so good to see you again. You look great, you know that?”
She had to fight the urge to tell him that no one had called her Krissy for the last ten goddamn years, at the same time every fiber of her body thrummed like a harp in the hands of a master. Turning her head away from him towards the DVs, she realized that all of them were watching the scene with the blank, expectant faces of farm animals waiting for hay.
“Thanks, Gordon, that’s very sweet. But we have kind of a problem right now, OK? No toilet.”
Her eyes instinctively shot up to the camp, hoping to find Slack up there setting up some kind of barrel-slash-tarp arrangement like she’d told him to do. Or something, anything. But Slack, of course, was nowhere in sight.
Gordon turned away from her and shouted up to the DV array, “Why don’t we all head up to camp?” He gestured effusively with his wiry arms. “Get everyone settled and then maybe we can all sit down for a cuppa. What do you say, Krissie?”
There it was: the cuppa. She stared straight at him through the greasy bangs that framed her eyes. Her chest suddenly felt cinched, her breath puffy. Before she knew it, she felt herself pulling in enough air to get out, “Absolutely, Gordon! Pete’s Coffee, just like you never left!”
By the time she’d gotten a 5-gallon barrel and a tarp set up as a “rest room” for the visitors and made her way back to the main Jamesway, she found all of them sitting around the dining room table in the Jamesway hut, listening to Gordon. Slack was laughing gently at every conversational pause, standing by the stove as he poured hot water through a filter full of coffee. The parched air sucked up its essence and filled the Jamesway with the complex phenolics of an upscale San Franciscan cafe. It never ceased to strike her as an impossible luxury at this geographic extremity. But it was an immutable camp tradition that had come before her and would most likely stretch on till the US Antarctic Program money dried up like a Texas oil well.
The DVs were sitting quietly, bunched together around the table and nodding like spring-headed dolls in the direction of Gordon, who was expounding upon the glory days when men worked hard, drank harder, and weren’t afraid to give each other a bad tattoo with a needle and some ink. It was all so familiar – like listening to an old cassette from a box left over from her college days. I wonder how many brain cells I still have that are devoted to this crap, she thought. Next he’s going to show them the pork chop, no doubt.
“Here!” he said to them, pulling his fleece over his head. “Look at this! THIS is what I’m talking about, allright?” He pulled the neck of his ancient T-shirt to one side, baring his shoulder. She tried not to notice his muscles, wiry and tight as ever. And there were those blondish armpit hairs peaking through, the color of his beard, his hair. And there it was: the pork chop, the blue inky outline blurred by time but still recognizable.
“You see that?” he asked them, looking up at them with the zeal of a preacher. “That’s Antarctica, the continent of Antarctica. Can you see that?”
The DVs rose politely out of their chairs and pulled their glasses away from their noses.
“THAT’S a real Antarctic tattoo, allright?” Gordon said triumphantly, as if challenged. “THAT’S what the old days were like, back when the only women were just a bunch of pictures stuck on the wall of the U-barrel!”
He turned to her and smiled brightly. What was he trying to say? That women had ruined everything?
“Hey now, don’t get me wrong, that was then and this now. And the present belongs to women like Krissie!” Not researchers like Dr. Kris Hartwood, she noticed. Just Krissie.
Slack had finally finished with the coffee and came around, pouring it with genteel ease into the camp’s permanently stained melamite cups. The woman who had needed to use the rest room asked if there was any cream for hers.
“Sugar and creamer are right there on the table there,” Slack replied as he carefully poured the next cup.
She reached tentatively toward the plastic shaker before waving it off, her hat tassles making small arcs under her chin.
“No, I mean cream, real cream. Or milk, I’m not fussy. This stuff is just...chemicals and whatever. Terribly unhealthy. People don’t realize.”
As Kris jumped up to see if there was any UHT milk left in the refrigerator, she wondered if the woman had any realization of where she was right now, how far off the deep end of the planet this field camp in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica was. Most of these DVs, they had no idea: straight out of Washington, D.C. to the seventh continent on a four-day boondoggle at the American taxpayer’s expense. The stream of them out of McMurdo was relentless. How many of them could find this place on a globe with two hands and a flashlight?
Kris rooted around in a cardboard box under the sink and dug out their last container of New Zealand cream, the one they’d been saving for the Christmas holidays. Setting it down on the table in front of the unfussy woman, she looked up to see Gordon watching her with eyes so deeply slitted with wrinkles, it was hard to believe he could see out of them. The room seemed to stall out in an uncomfortable silence.
His T-shirt fell back across his triceps as he leaned against the counter. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a whole new era. New people, but the same old science, huh?” Did he wink at her, or was that just the flesh around his eyes flapping meaninglessly? That clinched it. Time for the throw down.
“Actually, Gordon, it’s definitely not the same old science anymore,” she said. “With what we’ve found this season up on Mt. Feather, we’ve come a long way towards disproving your theory that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melted off during the Pliocene. Categorical evidence, in fact.” She could feel the prickly heat of a fight pumping the sweat out – why hadn’t she taken off these awful wind bibs when she first came in?
Gordon shifted to the left, a languid smile pulling his cheeks into parallel sets of erosion lines. Slack set the coffee pot on the table and retreated to the shadows. The wind sucked at the door, pushing and pulling it against the door jam like an angry child.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the Congressmen, “welcome to science in the real world! What Dr. Hartwood is referring to here is an ongoing debate on the part of geologists about when the continent of Antarctica went cold. Did it happen all at once? Or did the glaciers come and go over a period of millions of years?”
“Ah yes,” nodded a gentlemen with a thick Senatorial mane of hair that stuck out to the side of his head like a flag. “Global warming, and all that.”
“Global climate change, John,” corrected the unfussy woman. “That’s what they’re calling it, not global warming. Isn’t that right?” She looked up at Gordon for confirmation.
“Yes, absolutely, global whatever you want to call it!” he replied. “As long as it doesn’t happen in the near future, because if this place melts, Krissie and I will be out of a job!”
The polite laughter was drowned out by the helicopter rotors. Gordon looked at his watch and stood up. “Gentlemen, ladies, I’m afraid it’s time to head over to Marble Point for lunch!”
The wind whisked them briskly toward the makeshift pad, where Gordon assisted the DVs aboard before running back to her.
“Krissie,” he said, drawing one of her leprous gloves between his hands. “It’s so great to see you again, honestly. And I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but it looks like I’ll be seeing a whole lot more of you in the near future!” His eyes disappeared into their folds of impish skin.
“Really? And when would that be?”
He looked back over his shoulder and waved a finger at the pilot as the props came up to full speed.
“I just got funded for a special project, working up at Mt. Feather. So I’ll be back here in a month and be based out of here through New Year’s, at least. How great is that?”
The dust sandblasted them, beaten violently by the circling props. She covered her mouth and looked out across the frozen lake. Gordon pulled her against him and said something to her ear before rushing away.
She ducked down and covered her head as the helo swooped over, casting a shadow across her like an enormous raptor. Standing up, she looked back toward camp and saw Slack stretching into a perfect triangle, leading her grad students in the first Yoga pose of the morning session. Trikanosona, he called it; every pose had a Sanskrit name. This constant Yoga-ing - Slack was corrupting the camp with it.
She wiped her nose and looked up toward Mt. Feather and the Sirius Formation around it. There was Beauty in it, if you could take a slow breath and see it. Or Truth, if only she could pull it out of those rocks like a tooth.
But in the meantime, she had to get all these shit-covered rocks cleaned up.
Karen Joyce has worked for the United States Antarctic Program since 1990. She splits her time between McMurdo Station and Denver, Colorado.
Image: Ventifacts, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Alan Campbell
Fri 10 Feb 2006