Big Dead Place

Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson

I picked up PCDR's worn copy of Big Dead Place in the volunteer lounge at Santo Domingo office. When I discovered it amongst the shelves of Greg Mortensen and Isabel Allende, I couldn't help but feel moved by the hand of fate. I had researched jobs in Antarctica back in 2009 when I started to rethink my place in the world and ponder the dark corners of the job market illuminated in books like Nickeled and Dimed and The Working Poor and the prospect of work in the so-called Highest, Driest, Coldest Continent still holds a special place in my imagination similar to that of work in the canneries of Alaska.

In Big Dead Place, Nicholas Johnson gives a candid, unpretentious account of the seasons he spent working as a general laborer in the Waste department of Antarctica's McMurdo Station. Through ambling, disjointed stories and anecdotes from his own experience, accounts from coworkers, and material clearly gleaned from researching heroic era of Antarctic exploration a picture emerges that is equal parts Catch 22, The Office, and another book I once read called A Working Stiff Manifesto. I think the following passage does of good job of conveying the author's tone:

"[After arriving in Antarctica's McMurdo Station for my first winter, I realized] I would be stuck in an outpost with all-you-can-eat desserts and and endless procession of theme parties. A small town where phone numbers are four digits but the budget is nine digits, where everyone had frequent flyer miles and no one had wisdom teeth. A town that courted ambassadors and senators with luxury accommodation in Building 125. A town with disco clothes and high-power microscopes. A town where a pet snail from a head of lettuce faces execution by government mandate. A town where going outside requires authorization. A town responsible for divorces. A town where corpses have reportedly been stored in the food freezer and where it is illegal to collect rocks.

This was America, I realized, all in a tight little bundle.

And there were no more flights out."

I remember thinking to myself, as I took in the chapters and paragraphs Big Dead Place with the kind of slow relish usually reserved for novels by J.M. Coetzee and Cormack McCarthy, that I would be sad when it ran out. And it's true. Now that I've finished the book, I feel as if I've finished running down the clock at work with a delightfully sarcastic friend who has a gift for creative self-expression and who shares my odd fascination with things most people never discover because it doesn't occur to them to look or them.

Peace Corps Book Club Part 2: River Town

On a Valentine's day unlike any other, I spent another ninety minutes with the CRPCA book club, this time in the welcome company of Peter Hessler. He is author of River Town, a book about the time he spent teaching English at a college in China's Sichuan Province. As I began to read Hessler's book, it's understated charm slowly began to infect me until the reading of it became a careful indulgence, something to be savored. I found myself poring over it's pages, often re-reading sentences to be sure that no edifying morsel of stark, expressive prose was left unexamined.

Perhaps what stands out to me most about Hessler's stories in River Town is the compassion with which he manages to capture the people and events of his time overseas despite countless baffling, often humorous examples of what makes the Chinese culture so inscrutible to the American mind. What makes the book even more interesting is the fact, we learned, that it was written in just eight months during Hessler's difficult reentry period following his time in the Peace Corps.

In a delightful turn of events, my good friend Stephanie Austin turned out for the book club and we proceeded to have a Valentine's day evening, conspicuously free of flowers and lovers' sighs.

Peace Corps Book Club

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a book club hosted by the Columbia River Peace Corps Association (CRPCA). The month's book was Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle by Moritz Thomsen. While Moritz's grasp of prose is undeniable I think any review of his first book is incomplete without the added perspective of other returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCV's).

As I discussed the book's (and indeed Mortiz's) strengths and weaknesses with about eight returned volunteers the consensus seemed to be that Moritz's service, while profound and largely unprecedented, by today's standards was deeply flawed. In particular everyone disapproved of the author's mingling of finances with his host community, and his blind devotion to his projects.

However, we also agreed that it was very accomplished in expressing certain undeniable realities of class interaction in the third world and, in general conditions endemic to being on outsider in a foreign culture. Passages like the following one prompted lively discussion that helped to bring to life for me the shared vision of these veteran volunteers.

I had always been aware of the jealousies in the town, but now I began to see that I had underestimated the power to order the live of the people. It began to get through to me. Ramon Arcos, drunk, buttonholed me on the street. He wanted ten sucres to get drunker and when I said "No," he said I was a bad man who helped only the rich like Ramon Prado and Alexandro. "Rich?" I cried. "They're the poorest people in town." But, of course, it wasn't true anymore. Ramon was about to get his hundredth chicken, and Alexandro was up to seventy. A year ago they had been among the poorest people; now they were about to be the richest. There was real dissatisfaction in Rio Verde about the job I was doing, and every day I heard reports of my favoritism. Rumors reached me that a couple of old wise guys who knew all about the Peace Corps were telling everyone that I was making money off the people, that the chickens I sold should be gifts, and that the loans I was making did not have to be repaid. It was part of my job to give people money, they said.

For more excerpts, check out this link:

http://clipboarding.blogspot.com/search/label/Living%20Poor