Icebound by Jerri Nielsen

Author:Jerri Nielsen [Nielsen, Jerri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

The Sea Change

The Navy psychologists who studied group behavior on polar expeditions recommended an event like a party or special dinner at least once a week, to give those in isolation something to look forward to. We, at the Pole, were happy to comply. Traditional holidays were even better excuses to party, and on the first weekend in June, we celebrated Memorial Day.

Tool Man Tim Briggs, the construction supervisor and a great social director, opened up the cavernous new garage construction site for an all-day barbecue. Mike had spent the past two months welding a huge metal grill for the event and christened the barbecue, which was big enough to hold a large human (we tested it with Giant Greg), by cooking up some ribs for the party. Roo provided vegetarian fare.

Tool Man found a smoker, constructed by some forgotten winter crew from an empty fifty-five-gallon drum, and made delectable smoked trout and salmon. When Tim wasn’t a contractor, he did commercial fishing on Lake Superior and in Alaska.

We had plenty of refreshments, music, and games. The multisection garage, enclosed under a new archway, had been transformed for the party. The electrician’s shop, at the rear of the building, now featured a full-size Ping-Pong table. Food and drinks were offered in the carpenter’s shop, at the center of the building. Horseshoe and blowdart competitions were held in a large open area in the front of the garage. The guys had built a regulation horseshoe pit, complete with boxes filled with sand-blaster sand and horseshoes shipped to the Pole from Tool Man Tim’s shed in Minnesota. The dart gun was made from a five-foot piece of electrical conduit and the darts were regular dartboard darts with the feathers replaced with paper cones. The blowgun was so well engineered that we could sink darts a quarter of an inch into the plywood backdrop behind the target from a distance of twenty feet.

The wonderful party seemed to reunite the community. It was good to see happy astronomers hugging happy ironworkers and looking very much like the brothers they had become.

I had to be ready to remove darts from people’s eyes and treat concussions from misdirected horseshoes. Thankfully we had no significant injuries all day, although I did hold an impromptu clinic. I brought a pen and paper and medications to the celebration and set up a barrel under a construction light for an examination area. No one was willing to leave the fun to go to the hospital. I saw six cases of facial frostbite, one presumed fractured great toe from a sledgehammer, one case of moderately severe foot dermatitis, and one case of facial cellulitis—all without leaving the party.

For big events like this, some Polies wore their personal “colors”— Carhartt jackets decorated with slogans. Big John’s was particularly flashy, with devil’s horns drawn on the back with colored markers and the inscription evil son of a bitch (a reference to my response to one of his clever, biting comments, which I no longer remember).

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