After he left, I sat on the edge of my twin bed for an hour considering his advice. Faith had seemed anathema to every endeavor I had undertaken in my life; I found solace in fact, comfort in evidence. I was patient enough to wait for data. When personal tragedy touched me—as when my parents died within one month of each other when I was seventeen—I turned to probability density to parcel out the likelihood of such an event. That a likelihood could even exist brought me the kind of comfort that the well-meaning words of believers did not.
Still, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had summarily dismissed the very idea of faith; summary dismissal, I knew, was not something in which a true scientist engaged. I began to grapple with the idea proposed by some of the senior members of Olive Grove that scientific research and “sound reason” consistently supported the truth of a loving, transcendent god. I knew I would never accept the Bible as a work of literal history, and my church mentors accepted this, but the idea of a sovereign “creator”—for so long an idea that had nothing to do with me—became a great comfort.
For the first time in my life, I began to believe in something other than my love for my wife. I wasn’t a true believer yet, but I was on the road to Damascus.
*
On January 30, 2003, I received a call from Representatives Bayless and Calhoun. There were sounds of celebration in the background. “I have news, Dr. Pavano,” Bayless said. “We just got out of a closed-door meeting with the head of the National Science Foundation.” The line seemed to pause for a moment, creating a parenthesis in the celebrations, and I pulled the phone away from my ear, only to realize that Eric was calling me on the other line.
“Pavano, you there?” Bayless shouted.
“I’m here,” I called back into the mouthpiece.
“Pack your bags, Doc, you’re going to Antarctica.”
It was only as I heard the hard c in Antarctica, which no one seems ever to notice, that I realized how badly I wanted to go.
The New York Times
March 21, 2004
South Pole Station: No End in Sight for “Occupation”
With the ambush of its personnel in Fallujah and an “illegal occupation” in Antarctica, the defense contractor Veritas Integrated Defense Systems is struggling to contain what could be a substantial blow to its operations. Citing the occupation of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where Veritas provides support staff, as a “major and unnecessary distraction to global operations,” CEO Daniel Atcheson Johnson has sent a team of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to help end the shutdown of the U.S. research station.
Last week, Republican Sam Bayless of Kansas and his colleague on the Congressional Budget Committee, Representative Jack Calhoun of Tennessee, delivered on a promise to freeze the station’s budget if no agreement could be reached with the head of the National Science Foundation, Alexandra Scaletta, over proposed changes to the agency’s guidelines that would make it easier for scientists skeptical of climate change to gain access to federally sponsored research sites.
At the heart of the shutdown is Frank Pavano, a heliophysicist who has voiced skepticism about global climate change. On a grant from the NSF, Pavano spent four months at Amundsen-Scott Station and the ice-coring camp at West Antarctic Ice Sheet before he was involved in an accident with another NSF grantee that Representative Bayless claims was a result of a consistent pattern of harassment.
It was in response to the alleged harassment, initially reported last fall, that Representative Bayless and Representative Calhoun demanded the NSF adopt formal protocols to ensure that “scientists with minority views” are provided with equal access to federal research sites and grant dollars. Ms. Scaletta, however, has refused to yield, and with the White House unwilling to enter the fray, the standoff has led to a temporary shutdown of operations at America’s most remote research facility, which is currently being illegally occupied by ten individuals, a mix of NSF grantees and Veritas contractors.
The president has so far resisted calls to send in the National Guard to forcibly remove the individuals who refused to board the last scheduled flight out of South Pole. Sources familiar with the situation indicate that, with operations in Iraq intensifying, the president wants to avoid distraction. Others, however, argue that this is precisely the reason why he may be open to intervention.
operation deep freeze
The sky began changing in early February, as the sun began its monthlong descent. Shadows were weirdly elongated, stretching toward a horizon that consumed the sun bite by bite. Once the sun had fallen out of sight, Cooper knew from the handbook, it would lighten the sky for two more weeks of “civil twilight,” when Venus would be visible. Nautical twilight would follow, draining the sky of its pink blush. By the end of March, after the last flights had departed, all would be dark. This process was typically of great interest to the Polies, capped off, as it was, by the annual Equinox Feast, but anxiety over the possible shutdown had cast a pall over everything. Tucker decided to move the feast forward by five weeks in order to boost station morale—and, Cooper suspected, because he knew that in five weeks, there was a very good chance that no one would be here to celebrate the true equinox.
Preparations had been under way for a week when the letters from the NSF arrived in Tucker’s in-box, with instructions to distribute to the grantees immediately. Cooper and Sal, who had been in Tucker’s office when the letters had arrived, were the only other Polies who knew about them. All three agreed it made no sense to ruin the Equinox Feast with news that the station, and all the ongoing experiments, was going to be shut down.
On February 10, the galley transformed into Le Cirque. Pearl, Denise, and Doc Carla had hung strands of ice-blue Christmas lights across the ceiling that twinkled in the wineglasses set on the long table. The support beams were festooned with cheap silver tinsel, and battery-powered votive candles flickered in the corners of the room. The cloth napkins were removed from storage, and Kit had folded them into bishop’s hats before placing them on the plates. Bonnie’s absence—she’d flown to McMurdo the day after the bottle-throwing incident at Sal’s lecture—was noted, and a place was set for her at the table, next to Dwight.
Everyone arrived in the one nice outfit they’d packed—Birdie wore his kilt, Dwight his formal cloak, and even Floyd had donned a polka-dotted tie. In the galley bathroom, Marcy lent Cooper her four-year-old purple metallic eye shadow. After pulling on the floral empire-waist dress she’d rolled into a ball and shoved in the deepest corner of her duffel back in Minneapolis, Cooper pulled her hair into a low, messy bun at the nape of her neck, and impaled it with bobby pins.