A certain breed of musical always starts with a 'Happy Village Song.' The real world rarely reflects the tropes of musical theatre, but I found myself reaching for exactly this convention when trying to describe the atmosphere of McMurdo. I know I'm not the only one – it's something that gets commented on by many visitors, and is why so many of its people come back year after year.
The modern theory for this is that there is no WiFi and no cell phone service, so people aren't engrossed in their devices and are forced to speak to each other. It's also possible that the communal dining arrangements, where everyone eats at roughly the same time and you generally end up sharing a large table with strangers, contributes to the social cohesion as well.
But these are not unique to McMurdo. I went to high school in the '90s, when no one had a cell phone and WiFi was a distant dream. We all had lunch in a crowded cafeteria at roughly the same time. The population of my school was about twice McMurdo's, but even in smaller subsets of the student body, the happy village feeling was hard to come by. Why doesn't McMurdo split into factions? Why is the mixing so happy and so widespread?
There must be something else. An obvious factor is probably the Antarctic character, discussed in the last post – the people who self-select for Antarctica just tend to be more open and amenable than your average joe, and this goes a long way towards establishing and perpetuating a happy village. The aforementioned disillusionment with status on The World's terms is also likely involved, as this is a motivator of cliques: you can't limit yourself to associating only with 'the cool kids' if you roll your eyes at the concept of 'cool' and don't care how highly others think of you.
I think there's another factor, though – a very small one that is easy to overlook, but whose ramifications multiply far beyond its tiny self, and that is what I call the McMurdo Wave.
McMurdo Station has trucks and vans, but for the most part people get around on foot. There is a lot of heavy machinery about as well, not least the massive graders which smooth out the soft gravel roads more or less constantly. Humans are small and squishy, and they share the roads with nothing smaller than a Ford pickup, so there needs to be a protocol to make sure accidents don't happen. A pedestrian must make eye contact with a driver, to make sure they're aware of you. But how can you tell you've made eye contact, especially when you might both be wearing goggles? Simple: you wave at each other. Every time you come into proximity with a vehicle, you wave, and they wave back, and you're good.
This very quickly becomes a habit, and you start waving at everyone, regardless of whether they're in a vehicle or not, and they of course wave back because they're in the habit too. And so connections are formed. It's impossible to go around in a self-absorbed little bubble; you must acknowledge and accommodate other people, it's the rules. And once you've smiled and waved at someone, and they've smiled and waved back, you are, to each other, sentient human beings, and not 'just' the cleaner, the dish washer, the heavy machinery driver, the snooty scientist studying who-knows-what about invisible whatevers, doing your thing in isolation. You might recognise the other sometime and, encouraged by the welcome of the wave, start a conversation. It's a remarkably easy ice breaker: I am an old friend to social anxiety, but the convention of the wave was enough to say 'I don't mind if you want to talk with me' and made it much easier to do so. With such glue is a happy village bound.
McMurdo Station exists to serve science. Without the science, the graders would not need to keep the roads in good condition for the trucks, because the trucks are only there to enable the science. The Galley and its cooks and dish washers and cleaners and Frosty Boi repairmen are there to feed the scientists, and those whose work supports the scientists. The scientists – or as they are known on the Ice, 'grantees' – have had to compete fiercely for a handful of grants to come down at all, and are afforded more privileges and freedoms than most of the base population. Such an environment is structured quite obviously with a small group of elites at the top of a massive support pyramid, and as such is prone to rather feudal attitudes. In different ways, I have seen this at work in two very different places: Both Disney and Cambridge attract people who've worked very hard to get to the top of their field, and both are massive machines which exist to allow these people to concentrate on doing what they do best. In both places, the experts exist in a bubble where all that matters is their work, and the essentials just sort of happen; no one thinks twice about the invisible people who keep the machine running.
To my great surprise, this social hierarchy was inverted at McMurdo. There were certainly cool kids amongst the grantees, but if you wanted the real rulers of the roost, you found them in the support staff. Grantees work like hell to get to Antarctica, but are generally only there for one or two seasons before leaving again. They're housed in the 'transient' dorms, so don't get embedded in the company of long-timers. Those who've invested themselves in the running of the base, who come down year after year because the same work always needs doing, have become the Establishment. And, despite their privileges, the grantees know this. They can see how the base runs, and it's obvious that the people who really matter aren't them, around whom the machine is structured, but rather the people who keep the machine running, and without whom there would be no machine at all. The support staff have the real power. Those I met who were at the top of the implicit McMurdo hierarchy never had the sort of job titles that reflected their status. Astrophysicists come and go, but wastewater treatment is forever.
I wonder if the grantees take this attitude back to The World with them. If, getting to know the dish washers at McMurdo, they acknowledge the dish washers at the university cafeteria. I hope so, but I'm not confident ... it's too easy to slip back into old habits when back in the old paradigm. It's a valuable lesson for us all, though. I never really stopped waving at people when I got back home; most of them didn't notice, or ignored me, but it made me feel more connected, and happier in consequence. People say the pandemic has made everyone much friendlier: we're craving social contact, and on the rare occasions we have the opportunity, we make the most of it. Why not try the McMurdo Wave and see what happens?