We’ll have a party tomorrow to celebrate.
I’m sorry to report that this is the last entry in this file of Dr. Griffen’s laptop. He took a last inspection run on February 6, and on the way back to camp he took a shortcut that left the snowmobile road, which is clearly flagged. Visibility was good, so no one is sure why he did that. Usually he stuck to the flagged road, just like the rest of us. It’s normal practice on glaciers, where crevasses can be covered with old snow and completely invisible. And taking the shortcut wouldn’t have saved him much time anyway. So we are all mystified.
We were in the dining hut waiting for him, and when about an hour had passed, our mountaineers got worried and went out to check. Another thing we do is usually travel in twos. But Dr. G wasn’t always meticulous about that, and since the entire work space of the project was within sight of camp, none of us were. I mean you’d go to check on a pump or whatever by yourself, and to your tent by yourself, to the bathroom and so on. Just normal.
So when the mountaineers couldn’t find him in a quick tour of the wells, we sent one crew up the pipeline to see if he had gone to check the spillway and had a snowmobile problem. The rest of us made the circuit looking for snowmobile tracks leaving our road system. It was all we could think to do, since we could literally see the whole surface of the glacier, and no sign of him. That in itself was deeply worrying.
It was Jeff, one of our mountaineers, who followed a snowmobile track to an unobtrusive hole. He then came back and got Lance, the team’s other mountaineer, looking grim. They went out to near it and then stuck in some ice belays and roped up, and walked over to look in the hole. We watched from the dining hut, standing around silently. Lance belayed Jeff, who descended into the hole. He disappeared and was gone about, I don’t know, twenty minutes. It seemed longer. Finally he reappeared and climbed out and stood there, then walked back to Lance. They conferred; Lance put out an arm and held him by the shoulder. They hugged. They looked our way, saw us. Jeff shook his head. We understood it as clearly as if he had said it: Dr. G was dead.
That was a bad night. We sat around the dining hall, stunned. Jeff sat by the stove looking grim and distant. Of course when he got back to us we asked him what had happened, but he could only say what was obvious. Dr. G had driven off course, his snowmobile had dropped into a hidden crevasse. He went on to say the snowmobile was stuck about twenty feet down, and Dr. G’s body under it. Jeff didn’t say what condition the body was in. He didn’t want to inflict that on us, I guess, or didn’t want to compromise Dr. G’s privacy, I don’t know. Sophie and Karen were crying, and we all cried from time to time. Dr. G had given most of us our jobs, and several of us our educations, our careers. He was one of the old iceheads, the ones who keep coming back, the true Antarcticans. Jeff didn’t cry, nor did Lance. Lance was concerned about Jeff, he didn’t care about Dr. G. Beakers were always doing stupid things and getting killed, that’s why every team in Antarctica is required to have mountaineers as part of the group, to keep them safe. But you can’t lead them around on leashes, and if they break protocol you can’t stop them, even if you insist on protocol at the start of every deployment, go through the drill with the utmost seriousness, which truthfully many mountaineers are not good at mustering. So Jeff and Lance were grim, but not because they felt responsible. They were going to have to go down in that crevasse the next day and get Dr. G’s body into a bag, and haul him up to the surface, and get the body on a sled and back to camp. A plane from Mactown would be in tomorrow, if the weather allowed. They already knew about it there; their voices sounded shocked, sympathetic, the usual.
We sat around drinking. Damn, we said. Why? we said. Some of us talked about the bathtub graph. People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they’re first learning it, and then when they’ve known it forever. These were the two periods with higher rates of accidents, while the in-between was a stretch of low accidents. So the graph looked like a bathtub. People who fly planes fit that graph really well. Working on glaciers is somewhat the same.
That’s
