Then, out in the Dry Valleys, the hut they ate their meals in was kept warm, but not exceptionally so; really it was only warm relative to the outside. The dorm huts were a little hot and stuffy, but it was possible to sleep out in a tent of his own. That was really cold, so cold that the sleeping bag he slept in weighed about ten pounds; it took that much goose down to hold in enough of his own heat to keep him warm. He stuck his nose out of this bag to breathe, and that repeating injection of frigid air reminded him that it was really cold out, even though it was sunny all the time. The continuous light was strange but he soon got used to it.
The problem was that extreme cold somehow led to thoughts of temperature itself, and to warm up their freezing hands after a session of field work, they would heat the dining hut to quite a high temperature, which would make for a stuffy steamy room, and Frank found himself slipping down the slippery slope. Out at this remove from any possibility of relief, freak-outs would be at best inconvenient, at worst a disaster. Medevacs by helo were rare and expensive, he had heard them say. So he had to stay cool. But sometimes he could only hide a freak-out and hope it would go away soon and not come back. Sometimes he torqued his eyes like he was watching a Ping-Pong match.
And they had a sauna hut there. He stayed away from it, of course, but one night, going out to his tent in the bright daylight, he passed it just as a group of scientists burst out of it half naked in bathing suits, shrieking in delighted agony at the instantaneous extreme shift of temperature, evaporative steam bursting off their bodies like they were big pink firecrackers. That sight, which ought to have been beautiful, and their shrieking, which sounded like pain though it was ecstasy, set him off instantly. His heart pounded so fast and hard that he went light-headed, then suddenly fell to his knees and pitched face first onto the snow. No warning, just the sight of the pink firecracker people, a racing heart, then he found himself laid out on the hard cold snow. He had fainted right in front of them. The sauna-goers naturally helped him up, and someone took his pulse as they lifted him and cried out in a panic, Hey feel this tachycardia, my God! Feel it! They said it was 240 beats a minute. Within two hours a helo was thwacking down to medevac him out of there. And once medevacked to McMurdo, and his condition and past experiences made fully known to the NSF brass on site, he was accused of lying on his application form and shipped back home.
19
We had been at sea for something like eight years. They said they would pay us when we landed but everyone knew they wouldn’t. Wouldn’t pay us, wouldn’t land us. We were slaves. If we didn’t work they locked us in our cabins and didn’t feed us. We went back to work.
The food was trash, including fishheads and guts from the take, but it was that or starve, so we ate it. And we worked, we had to. Set the lines, ran the reels, tried to keep our fingers and arms out of the way. That didn’t always happen. The southern Atlantic is rough, the Antarctic Ocean even worse. Accidents were common. Often guys just stepped over the rail into the water. One guy waved goodbye to us before the whitecaps rolled him under. We knew why he did it. It was probably the best option, but it took courage. You could always imagine something would happen to change things.
Then one day it did. A ship came over the horizon, this wasn’t unusual, it happened all the time. Not only fishing boats like ours, either slave ships or not, there was no way to tell, but the transport ships that came out to transfer our catch into their holds and resupply us so we didn’t have to land. That was the way they did it. We didn’t even know what countries they came from.
So it looked like a transport ship, and it approached us, and it was clear the captain and his mates thought the same. The people on this ship must have known the signs and fooled them. Then after it came beside us and we had grappled it, men jumped over the side holding guns pointed at us. We put our hands in the air just like in the movies, but it would have been a funny movie, because most of us were grinning and it was all I could do to keep from cheering.
We were herded into the cabins and locked in. When the newcomers came into our cabin and asked us questions we answered eagerly. Maybe they were just pirates who would put us back to work for someone else, or even kill us, but even so we told them our stories, and who the captain and every single one of his men were. They left us in there and came back later. Get on our ship, they told us. We did what they said, not knowing what it would mean. All the slaves climbed a ladder onto the bigger ship, that was eight of us. All the captain’s men and the captain were left on board our boat. That was five of them. They said some stuff but the men with the
