Phil Jacobsen
Antarctica, McMurdo and Me
May 04, 2006
One Person in Our Community
In the book, The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard says that in coming to Antarctica "Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal."
For an Antarctican, reading The Worst Journey in the World is like a Christian reading the Bible or a geek being able to quote from the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the books, not the movies).
The Worst Journey in the World is a very thick book with very few photos or drawings. Simply getting through this book is a journey nearly in and of itself. In the final chapter some of the last words say, "but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal."
I was riding a stationary bicycle in the Winter of 2003 when I read those final words about the worst journey in the world.
Friendships form fast in Antarctica and when I saw that sentence the sweat from exercising soaked my shirt and I cried. The winter was one month away from being over, and I figured I would see very few of these people ever again. At the time, I planned to never come back to Antarctica. I had been a dishwasher for nearly a year and the pots and pans had taken their toll on my brain. I wanted to wash my hands of this place. When, in fact, I just needed to get the hell out of the dish room and back to Antarctica.
One of the people I was lucky to meet that winter was a painter named Jim Julian.
If it wasn't for Antarctica I would most likely have never met Jim. Sometimes you might say that the reason you wouldn't meet someone is because you don't "run in the same circles." With Jim this isn't true, because Jim doesn't run in any circle. I don't know if you'd even call what Jim does as running in a straight line, because he is more like the period at the end of this sentence.
For instance, take the Galley where the community gets together and meets for meals and conversation three times a day. There are four different sizes of tables in the Galley. The rectangular table sits six comfortably, the circular seats eight, the square tables seat four and the smallest table, sometimes referred to as the Suicide Table, accommodates one and can kind of fit two.
By the time I get to lunch, breakfast or dinner, my friends are always sitting at a rectangular table. Usually there are seven or eight of us crowded around the six person table. Sometimes we consider moving to a circular table, but change happens in McMurdo at glacial speed. We bump elbows and turn our trays sideways (or "portrait") so we can all eat our lumpy oatmeal or Szechuan beef as a group. Commiserating about the weather, the food, the recreation, the weather, our jobs and the weather.
There are usually several tables crowded to portrait tray status. Like I said when I paraphrased what Apsley Cherry-Garrard said by saying "friendships form fast in Antarctica." We're all sledging down here and that is worth a "great deal."
Sometimes when I'm crowded with my group of friends, I'll look down at the lower level in the Galley and Jim is sitting at a table for two by himself.
In 2003 I wrote a story about Jim (it's the last story at this link) and ended it with that Cherry-Garrard quote about friendship.
In 2003 Jim was a painter, this year, like last year he is a janitor. A lot of people use the job as janitor for a low-level job to get to Antarctica. Then they come back after finding a different job that pays more and deals with toilets less.
Jim is a janitor, as best I can tell, because it doesn't use his brain. It's like the company gets his body 10 hours a day, but he gets to keep his brain for all 24 hours.
He's been coming down for seven seasons (four times a janitor, once a painter, the hellish job of dishwashing and the dreaded outdoor work of being an insulator helper). I met him his fourth time down here, and when he invited Penny and me into his dorm he said, "This is the first time I've ever had anyone in my room."
We were invited over to see his artwork. This is one of the reasons why he keeps coming back to Antarctica, to work on his drawings. His pictures were meticulous and perfect. One picture, he said, he painted four or six times just to get the right hue.
This season Jim was planning to possibly draw that same picture nine more times or work on a new art project until the day Craig, one of my friends from the rectangular table, asked Jim if he wanted to be in their band.
I don't know if the question was posed to Jim on a lark or how it came about. I recall Craig saying something like, "It's time Jim gets out."
For Jim, I thought, one is company and two is a crowd. I felt like seeing Jim in a band would be like watching Stephen Hawking walk and talk. Sure there's brilliance in the chair, but the chair is where he's always been.
At first Jim would say, "Yeah I'm in a band, but I'm just going to hold a guitar close to the amp and play feedback. The rest of the band will play the music."
One morning at the rectangle, Craig said, "Jim fired our drummer."
I said, "I thought Jim was just playing feedback, how could he fire anyone?"
"He fired the drummer. Pass the napkins."
No one in the band talked about what Jim was playing, but my curiosity starting piquing. Jim lives four or five doors down from me and I started seeing guests coming in and out of his room.
Three years ago Jim had a bed made to military precision, a picture of Merl Haggard on the wall and Jim in his room. Now he was having company? One of the guys going in and out of Jim's place was Nathan. I didn't know Nathan before I came down here, but I know people who know Nathan because Nathan is a musician from Portland and he has played music with Lana Rebel, the singer for the band the Juanita Family, who I listen to on my iPod. It's even rumored that Nathan once sung back-up vocals with Steely Dan.
Nathan brought down nearly a recording studio of musical equipment for this winter and he was sharing it with Jim, but Nathan was sharing little with me on what was going on behind closed doors. Once he let slip, "Jim can do things with a guitar that I can't."
I thought this meant, "For instance: Jim plays shitty - and I can't."
My roommate Tad works once a week at Gear Issue or what I call the Costume Shop in McMurdo. He said, "Something is going on. Every week I work, Jim comes in looking for a new costume to wear when his band plays."
Passing Jim on station as he was mopping the floor or cleaning a bathroom, I'd ask him how his band was doing, "Oh, okay," he'd say looking at his mop head, "I just play feedback and then Nathan plays this psychedelic sound on his keyboards. And I'll be using the same kind of guitar and amps that Jimi Hendrix played. For feedback."
Last weekend, Jim's band "Captain Butterfly" played at the community weekend party. Like all bands who supposedly are going to suck, Jim's band played first so they wouldn't ruin the party. I got there early, because I had a feeling this was not just one song of guitar noise.
Captain Butterfly was introduced by Jim's sophomore year janitorial co-worker Ben. Ben has an almost diarrheal way with extemporaneous words, saying something like, "Suckled in the cocoon of the womb of Mother Nature, Captain Butterfly has metamorphosised on stage tonight to spread his wings." Certainly there were then references to genitalia, fecal matter and space docking, and finally Captain Butterfly walked on stage.
Jim wore a tight leopard skin shirt that revealed his Janitorial muscles, his midriff and black leather belt holding up a pair of regular ol' Levi jeans. He was further outfitted with bug-eyed glasses, antennas, plastic flowers in his hair and, of course, butterfly wings. Nathan was a golden lady on keyboards. The singer was an aboriginal Dorthy. The drummer was a monkey and the bass player was weird.
Everyone in the band started playing and then Jim, transformed from the period in a sentence into an exclamation mark. He became Captain Butterfly.
He held the guitar away from the amp, in the wrong direction to play "just feedback," but in the right way to play guitar.
After the weekend, on Monday, Jim was in my building taking out the trash, I said, "Jim, Captain Butterfly was brilliant."
"Oh, no. There were a lot of mistakes." He was no longer Captain Butterfly. He was Jim the Janitor.
"I thought you didn't know how to play guitar."
"Well, I guess I do. I haven't played in 20 years, but I guess I can play. I can hear a note and then play all around it."
Jim played around the note, between the note and underneath the music. His fingers danced up and down the neck of the guitar. When Nathan said, "Jim can do things I can't do." He meant, "Jim can play the fucking guitar."
"Those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal." And I was a good deal lucky to see Jim play, because Captain Butterfly was billed as a "One Time Show." I think during the introduction, Ben said, "The life of Captain Butterfly is shorter than that of a fruit fly. He is here for only one night. Then he'll have sex with everyone in this room and die."
Unlike Jimi Hendrix, some musicians can be raised from the dead, as Jim was walking down the hallway with an armful of trash, he said, "You know, after playing the guitar I went to bed that night. Then I woke up with this baseline in my head."
Posted by Phil Jacobsen on May 04, 2006, 10:15 AM
For an Antarctican, reading The Worst Journey in the World is like a Christian reading the Bible or a geek being able to quote from the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the books, not the movies).
The Worst Journey in the World is a very thick book with very few photos or drawings. Simply getting through this book is a journey nearly in and of itself. In the final chapter some of the last words say, "but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal."
I was riding a stationary bicycle in the Winter of 2003 when I read those final words about the worst journey in the world.
Friendships form fast in Antarctica and when I saw that sentence the sweat from exercising soaked my shirt and I cried. The winter was one month away from being over, and I figured I would see very few of these people ever again. At the time, I planned to never come back to Antarctica. I had been a dishwasher for nearly a year and the pots and pans had taken their toll on my brain. I wanted to wash my hands of this place. When, in fact, I just needed to get the hell out of the dish room and back to Antarctica.
One of the people I was lucky to meet that winter was a painter named Jim Julian.
If it wasn't for Antarctica I would most likely have never met Jim. Sometimes you might say that the reason you wouldn't meet someone is because you don't "run in the same circles." With Jim this isn't true, because Jim doesn't run in any circle. I don't know if you'd even call what Jim does as running in a straight line, because he is more like the period at the end of this sentence.
For instance, take the Galley where the community gets together and meets for meals and conversation three times a day. There are four different sizes of tables in the Galley. The rectangular table sits six comfortably, the circular seats eight, the square tables seat four and the smallest table, sometimes referred to as the Suicide Table, accommodates one and can kind of fit two.
By the time I get to lunch, breakfast or dinner, my friends are always sitting at a rectangular table. Usually there are seven or eight of us crowded around the six person table. Sometimes we consider moving to a circular table, but change happens in McMurdo at glacial speed. We bump elbows and turn our trays sideways (or "portrait") so we can all eat our lumpy oatmeal or Szechuan beef as a group. Commiserating about the weather, the food, the recreation, the weather, our jobs and the weather.
There are usually several tables crowded to portrait tray status. Like I said when I paraphrased what Apsley Cherry-Garrard said by saying "friendships form fast in Antarctica." We're all sledging down here and that is worth a "great deal."
Sometimes when I'm crowded with my group of friends, I'll look down at the lower level in the Galley and Jim is sitting at a table for two by himself.
In 2003 I wrote a story about Jim (it's the last story at this link) and ended it with that Cherry-Garrard quote about friendship.
In 2003 Jim was a painter, this year, like last year he is a janitor. A lot of people use the job as janitor for a low-level job to get to Antarctica. Then they come back after finding a different job that pays more and deals with toilets less.
Jim is a janitor, as best I can tell, because it doesn't use his brain. It's like the company gets his body 10 hours a day, but he gets to keep his brain for all 24 hours.
He's been coming down for seven seasons (four times a janitor, once a painter, the hellish job of dishwashing and the dreaded outdoor work of being an insulator helper). I met him his fourth time down here, and when he invited Penny and me into his dorm he said, "This is the first time I've ever had anyone in my room."
We were invited over to see his artwork. This is one of the reasons why he keeps coming back to Antarctica, to work on his drawings. His pictures were meticulous and perfect. One picture, he said, he painted four or six times just to get the right hue.
This season Jim was planning to possibly draw that same picture nine more times or work on a new art project until the day Craig, one of my friends from the rectangular table, asked Jim if he wanted to be in their band.
I don't know if the question was posed to Jim on a lark or how it came about. I recall Craig saying something like, "It's time Jim gets out."
For Jim, I thought, one is company and two is a crowd. I felt like seeing Jim in a band would be like watching Stephen Hawking walk and talk. Sure there's brilliance in the chair, but the chair is where he's always been.
At first Jim would say, "Yeah I'm in a band, but I'm just going to hold a guitar close to the amp and play feedback. The rest of the band will play the music."
One morning at the rectangle, Craig said, "Jim fired our drummer."
I said, "I thought Jim was just playing feedback, how could he fire anyone?"
"He fired the drummer. Pass the napkins."
No one in the band talked about what Jim was playing, but my curiosity starting piquing. Jim lives four or five doors down from me and I started seeing guests coming in and out of his room.
Three years ago Jim had a bed made to military precision, a picture of Merl Haggard on the wall and Jim in his room. Now he was having company? One of the guys going in and out of Jim's place was Nathan. I didn't know Nathan before I came down here, but I know people who know Nathan because Nathan is a musician from Portland and he has played music with Lana Rebel, the singer for the band the Juanita Family, who I listen to on my iPod. It's even rumored that Nathan once sung back-up vocals with Steely Dan.
Nathan brought down nearly a recording studio of musical equipment for this winter and he was sharing it with Jim, but Nathan was sharing little with me on what was going on behind closed doors. Once he let slip, "Jim can do things with a guitar that I can't."
I thought this meant, "For instance: Jim plays shitty - and I can't."
My roommate Tad works once a week at Gear Issue or what I call the Costume Shop in McMurdo. He said, "Something is going on. Every week I work, Jim comes in looking for a new costume to wear when his band plays."
Passing Jim on station as he was mopping the floor or cleaning a bathroom, I'd ask him how his band was doing, "Oh, okay," he'd say looking at his mop head, "I just play feedback and then Nathan plays this psychedelic sound on his keyboards. And I'll be using the same kind of guitar and amps that Jimi Hendrix played. For feedback."
Last weekend, Jim's band "Captain Butterfly" played at the community weekend party. Like all bands who supposedly are going to suck, Jim's band played first so they wouldn't ruin the party. I got there early, because I had a feeling this was not just one song of guitar noise.
Captain Butterfly was introduced by Jim's sophomore year janitorial co-worker Ben. Ben has an almost diarrheal way with extemporaneous words, saying something like, "Suckled in the cocoon of the womb of Mother Nature, Captain Butterfly has metamorphosised on stage tonight to spread his wings." Certainly there were then references to genitalia, fecal matter and space docking, and finally Captain Butterfly walked on stage.
Jim wore a tight leopard skin shirt that revealed his Janitorial muscles, his midriff and black leather belt holding up a pair of regular ol' Levi jeans. He was further outfitted with bug-eyed glasses, antennas, plastic flowers in his hair and, of course, butterfly wings. Nathan was a golden lady on keyboards. The singer was an aboriginal Dorthy. The drummer was a monkey and the bass player was weird.
Everyone in the band started playing and then Jim, transformed from the period in a sentence into an exclamation mark. He became Captain Butterfly.
He held the guitar away from the amp, in the wrong direction to play "just feedback," but in the right way to play guitar.
After the weekend, on Monday, Jim was in my building taking out the trash, I said, "Jim, Captain Butterfly was brilliant."
"Oh, no. There were a lot of mistakes." He was no longer Captain Butterfly. He was Jim the Janitor.
"I thought you didn't know how to play guitar."
"Well, I guess I do. I haven't played in 20 years, but I guess I can play. I can hear a note and then play all around it."
Jim played around the note, between the note and underneath the music. His fingers danced up and down the neck of the guitar. When Nathan said, "Jim can do things I can't do." He meant, "Jim can play the fucking guitar."
"Those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal." And I was a good deal lucky to see Jim play, because Captain Butterfly was billed as a "One Time Show." I think during the introduction, Ben said, "The life of Captain Butterfly is shorter than that of a fruit fly. He is here for only one night. Then he'll have sex with everyone in this room and die."
Unlike Jimi Hendrix, some musicians can be raised from the dead, as Jim was walking down the hallway with an armful of trash, he said, "You know, after playing the guitar I went to bed that night. Then I woke up with this baseline in my head."
Posted by Phil Jacobsen on May 04, 2006, 10:15 AM
More Captain Butterfly on the Web
bigblueglobe, Saturday, May 06, 2006, Captain Butterfly???
Jeff Inglis, "Bottom of the Food Chain," The Antarctic Sun, 28 Jan 2001, p. 7.
Ben Murray, "The Dirt on McMurdo," The Antarctic Sun, 4 Nov 2001, p. 4.
Mark Sabbatini, "No Place for Commercialism," The Antarctic Sun, 23 Dec 2001, p. 9.
Jeff Inglis, "Bottom of the Food Chain," The Antarctic Sun, 28 Jan 2001, p. 7.
Ben Murray, "The Dirt on McMurdo," The Antarctic Sun, 4 Nov 2001, p. 4.
Mark Sabbatini, "No Place for Commercialism," The Antarctic Sun, 23 Dec 2001, p. 9.
Text © Phil Jacobsen | Last Update: 8 May 2012