Blazing Ice by John H. Wright Read Free Book Online

brakes exhaling, engines straining, transmissions whining, and back-up alarms beeping. Ship’s cranes swung containers down onto trucks. Trucks drove the snaky roads around town and into forgotten crannies. Forklifts of all sizes unloaded the trucks. Ground-pounding pedestrians checked off cargo as stuff came out of containers. A year’s supply of food, goods, and construction material came off that ship. Then three or four days into the cycle, everybody changed direction. Equipment slated for retrograding, and the accumulated waste of a year or more headed back from other nooks and crannies down to the ship, bound for the landfills and scrap yards of the United States. We kept little waste in Antarctica.
    Often during the cycle, a ship’s crane might stall, or a ship’s hatch must be opened to the ’tween-decks. The delay would bring the flow of trucks on the pier to a standstill for an hour or more. Then truck drivers, equipment operators, cargo handlers and dockhands freely mingled in the shadow of the big ship playing catch, joking, and laughing. A joyful sense of the end of season filled the atmosphere. Many of us would go home soon.
    During such a lull at another offload several years before, the pier supervisor asked if I would bring my bagpipes down to the pier and play a tune. Happy to oblige him then, bagpipes became a nine-year offload tradition. I kept the pipes in my truck after that, but I always waited for an invitation to play.
    That’s how it was the year I finished the tunnel job at Pole. I drove my truck down to the pier. The Kiwi pier boss hailed me. “Hey mate! You bring your pipes this year?”
    â€œI did,” I answered, smiling.
    â€œWell, play us a tune!”
    I broke out the pipes, climbed atop the empty flatbed deck of a waiting truck and started to play. The “Free Man’s Whistle,” a high-lonesome wail from out of nowhere, first turned heads. Leading into the rousing “Scotland the Brave” brought shouts of joy from the dock hands. Many at the pier looked forward to the return of the pipes.
    As in past years, the truck on whose deck I stood started rolling forward slowly. We circled the pier starting our own makeshift parade, breaking the boredom of idle minutes that had grown to an hour. The pier boss suggested, “Shall we give them a tune in town?”
    â€œFine by me,” I shrugged.
    The truck drove slowly off the pier, and climbed the high road into town. We crept past the galley where half the town crew was already at lunch. I got winded then, so I signaled the driver I was ready to quit. He stopped the truck. I jumped off the deck to the ground.
    While I was stowing the pipes in their case, an angry voice sounded behind me.
    â€œThat was a
dumb-ass
thing to do! You are flaunting the very
culture
I am trying to change!”
    I turned to face a complete stranger, a middle-aged fellow whose pale, clean-shaven countenance exhibited his displeasure.
Culture?
    â€œWho are you?” I asked.
    â€œI am the director of safety, and you are making a mockery of the
safety culture
I am trying to create in this program.”
    The man had just announced his importance. So I responded: “Okay. I copy you don’t like bagpipes on trucks. I promise: no more bagpipes on trucks.”
    Then I turned my back, climbed into the cab, and told the driver, “Take off before he gets a good look at you, too.”
    Culture
, in the sense the man had just used, was new to me then. I’d always thought of it in anthropological terms, or as describing high-class art. Now it was a borrowed word that had crept into boardrooms and become corporate jargon. Like
paradigm change
, not quite what Thomas Kuhn meant in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
. You had to know the jargon to get the message. But I had to laugh at myself. At first I’d thought he didn’t like Celtic music.
    The contractor fired me that day for