Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with David E. Baker, CAPT, USN (Ret.) conducted on October 9, 1998, by Dian O. Belanger

DOB: I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with David Baker about his experiences in Operation Deep Freeze.

Thanks for talking with me, David. I'd like very much to start by asking you just to tell me a little bit about your background: where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, anything that will perhaps hint at how you ended up in the Antarctic.

DB: It's something that I've shared with a lot of people before, Dian. As a young boy I lived in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, the son of a minister who occasionally used in his sermons some of the adventures of Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Byrd. At the age of eight I discovered the diaries of those great explorers and by the time I was ten I had read all of Byrd's books—Alone, Skyward, Little America—Scott's diary, and some of Shackleton. I was fascinated by these adventurers, and from the time that I turned eight or nine or ten, it's something that I wanted to do—go to Antarctica.

I'd like to add something. When we lived in Wellesley Hills, Admiral Byrd's snow cruiser actually came through town on its way to the South Boston Navy Yard to be put aboard his ship to take to the Bay of Whales. I remember staying up late one night because it was due through Wellesley Hills on Washington Street sometime around seven-thirty or eight-thirty in the evening. Because the snow cruiser was so large they had to raise the wires along the road, and it was delayed. By the time that it got to Wellesley Hills where I was waiting on the sidewalk to see it go by, I had long since drifted off. So I never did get a chance to see it. That was 1937 or '38; I would have been five or six years old.

When I went to Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, I got to know an English teacher named Robert Bates. Bob had been the deputy leader of the 1938 K-2 expedition and subsequently the '54 K-2 expedition. One of America's great alpinists and president of the American Alpine Club, Bob was the faculty advisor to the Exeter Mountaineering Club (EMC).

My love of the White Mountains, combined with my interest in things polar and a love of winter more perhaps than of the summer, took me into winter climbing in the White Mountains. Bob Bates was an advisor to the Army Quartermaster Corps in cold-weather equipment and used the Exeter Mountaineering Club as a test resource for some of the cold-weather clothing and equipment that was being developed. This was in the late 1940s. The EMC also gave me the opportunity to learn about rock climbing and a little bit about mountain rescue.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 2

In 1949 I organized my own mini-expedition. We climbed Mt. Katahdin in northern Maine in March, the first climbers to be on that mountain that year. When we reached the summit it was thirty below zero. In the summer of 1949 I climbed Mt. Rainier. And then subsequently when I went off to Yale, I put together again another mini-expedition in the eastern Alaska range, so I also had that experience.

When I graduated from Yale, I went to the Navy's Officer Candidate School (OCS) in January of 1955. While I was at OCS—that's in Newport, Rhode Island—the Navy issued something called an AllNav. That's a message that goes to every ship at sea, every naval station and squadron. What it said is, "Wanted: Volunteers for Operation Deep Freeze." I thought, my gosh, my dream has come true.

So I asked about this, and they said, "You'd be best advised to wait till you're commissioned"—which was going to happen in May—"before you make any application." So I did that.

My great friend and mentor Bob Bates intervened in my behalf in the sense that he put me in touch with a fellow named Bill Field in Washington who was active in the pre-IGY planning. I'm not sure what his position was in the science field, but he was closely aligned with planning for the IGY.

I met Bill in Washington, D.C. en route to a duty station in Jacksonville, Florida. He picked up the phone and called Capt. Dick Black. Captain Black had been with Byrd prior to World War II, and he was the Base Operations Officer for Operation Deep Freeze.

I went over to the Old Post Office Building, which was where the task force headquarters was located and was introduced to Captain Black who was a wonderful, very non-Navy-looking fellow. His hair was a little bit longer than Navy captains should normally have, and he had a wonderful bushy moustache and a ruddy face. In OCS they told us you should never talk to a Navy captain until you're a little more senior than an ensign. So he was the first Navy captain I had really ever talked to.

He sat me down, made me feel comfortable, and said, "Tell me about yourself." I noticed that he had something on his desk but I couldn't see it because his in-out basket was between me and the top of his desk. I thought he might be doodling, but what he was doing was checking things off on a list.

So I started by telling him of my Mt. Katahdin experience, my cold-weather experience on Mt. Washington, and the fact that I'd had a couple of terms of forestry school at Yale and knew about surveying and cartography and so forth. I also told him about my climbing in Alaska. David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 3

When I finished, he said, "Well, is that all?" And I said, "Yes, sir, that's about all I can think of." And he said, "Let me show you something."

He handed me a piece of paper, and it was a list of, as I recall, seventeen things. It appeared that everything on the list had been checked off except two lines. I was so nervous at the time I really didn't look at what the two lines were because he was talking to me.

He said, "That list was going to be an attachment to a letter that we were about to send to the Army asking if they had any young officers with those qualifications." He said, "You have fifteen of the seventeen, and we don't have to send this letter to the Army."

I said, "Sir, what are the two that I don't have?" And he said, "Well, you're not a parachutist, but that's not a problem, we can train you in that. And you're not a dogsled driver, but we can train you in that, too." I said, "Well, sir, what's the job that you're going to send me to Antarctica for and winter-over for?" He said, "You're going to be a parachuting dogsled driver."

[Laughter]

DB: What he was saying is one, he didn't want to go to the Army to ask for their help. The other was that the other qualifications that I had—the mountaineering, the cold-weather work, probably some of the leadership aspects of planning a winter climb on Mt. Katahdin and organizing, as a college student, my own climb in Alaska—I think he felt those were things that were probably more important.

Like Norman Vaughan, who went to Admiral Byrd—and I could relate to that today—and said, "I'll do anything," and went on to become a dogsled driver, those are things that can be trained, I think, in a relatively short time. It takes years to become a really good dogsled driver, but I think you can master the fundamentals with the right kind of leadership and training in a relatively short time.

So that's exactly what happened. After completing Air Ground Officer School in Florida, I reported to MCB Special in Davisville, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1955.

In the late summer, I ended up going to Wonalancet, New Hampshire, to the Chinook Kennels, the same kennels that Admiral Byrd had gotten his dogs from for his previous expeditions. Jack Tuck, a contemporary of mine who graduated from Dartmouth, and a fellow named Tom McEvoy, an Air Force Tech Sergeant who had had experience working with dogs in the Arctic, and a wonderful Air Force Master Sergeant named Dutch Dolleman, who had been with Byrd in '38, David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 4

were already there. Tom and Dutch were to be our trainers and also participate in the selection of the dogs that would—two teams and some spares—go to the ice in the fall of 1955. DOB: Let me back you up a little bit. They really were looking for somebody to deal with dogs and that's how you got involved?

DB: Well, yes. The background of that, Dian, was that Admiral Byrd was a traditionalist in polar exploration. He felt even though we would certainly have helicopters and ski-equipped aircraft (helicopters had not been available prior to World War II, but certainly ski-equipped aircraft had been), the dog still had a place in polar exploration. I think he felt passionately about this.

I believe the Admiral laid a demand upon the Navy and said, "Look, I want to have dogs there." If you're going to have dogs, you've got to get dogsled drivers. I suspect that Admiral Dufek and his staff probably weren't terribly excited about this, but I don't think they had a lot of choice but to go along with it. It was a political issue. Admiral Byrd wanted the dogs, okay, we'll get the dogs.

DOB: All right. So continue your story.

DB: Here I was a young ensign commissioned three months, having spent much of my life in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, reporting for duty in Wonalancet, New Hampshire, at the beginning of the fall foliage time, staying in the Tamworth Inn. Our per diem was twelve dollars a day, and that went to pay for our room and board at the Tamworth Inn. The Chinook Kennels are just up the road. I was there just a couple of weeks ago just for nostalgia sake. The kennel is no longer there, it's a private residence.

DOB: How do you spell that?

DB: C-h-i-n-o-o-k.

DOB: Like the wind.

DB: Yes, Chinook. The woman who owned and operated the Chinook Kennels was Eva Seeley, S-e-e-l-e-y. Eva was not known as Eva, she was known as Short. I think we called her Mrs. Seeley. She was the widow of Milton Seeley, who had run the kennels and provided dogs to Admiral Byrd prior to World War II. She was a very interesting woman. I think she was probably a manic depressive. Some days she was high and other days she was crazy. [Laughs]

It was an interesting summer because she had contracted with the Navy to provide thirty dogs to Operation Deep Freeze. When I got there, we probably David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 5

had maybe eleven of the thirty. She was given a number of dogs by people who heard that Chinook Kennels was going to be the collecting place.

We had dogs from all over. We had a dog from Montreal named Kao, who started off as one of the mangiest creatures ever seen on earth and became one of our strongest dogs. We had dogs from as far south as Atlanta, Georgia. That particular dog, I think, was more German shepherd than it was either malamute or husky. We had dogs from as far west as Wisconsin. Many, many from the New England states.

DOB: They were primarily huskies and that type of dog?

DB: Huskies and malamutes, yes. One dog I remember in particular, Towak, T-o-w-a-k. Towak was the biggest dog I've ever seen. Towak, when he jumped up—I have to admit we allowed some of them to do that and Towak was not one you really wanted to argue about it. If he wanted to do it, you sort of let him do it. But I remember he could put his paws on your shoulders when you were standing and you'd look up at his head. He had the longest torso of any dog I've ever seen. More about him later.

Our job was to take these ultimately thirty dogs and turn them into two teams of eleven and eight spares. The way in which we did that was to hook them up on a daily basis to a stripped-down old Army Jeep that had the engine and body removed, but still had the seat, steering wheel, and a brake pedal. And that's really all you needed. The team would be hooked up to this Jeep chassis, and then we would run these dogs through the old logging roads around Wonalancet, New Hampshire, with the fall foliage. It was an extraordinary way to spend the fall of 1955.

We learned from Dutch Dolleman who was a master dogsled driver, there's no question about it, and Tom McEvoy. We learned not only the art of dogsled driving, but we also learned about the caring of the dogs, the repair of harnesses, and the repair of sleds.

The sleds were made locally just down the road from the Chinook Kennels, just between Chinook Kennels and the town of Tamworth. When I was there a couple of weeks ago, I noticed there was a little side road that bears the name of the craftsman, the carpenter that built those sleds, a fellow named Bickford. There's now a Bickford Lane that runs off of the road.

We kept asking, during the course of the fall, "Are we going to go to jump school?" At one time, there was a thought that we would go to Fort Benning; the Army had and still has today a jump school there. But that's either a six-week or an eight-week course, and obviously as we got closer and closer to the time that David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 6

we'd be embarking from the South Boston Navy Yard on the 30th of October, the likelihood that we could take that much time to go to jump school became less and less.

I'll never forget it. On a Friday afternoon in mid-October, we got a call from Washington. Actually I think Mrs. Seeley got the call. I remember running up the hill and taking the call and I think it was Captain Black saying, "You're to be at Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey, on Monday"—this was Friday—"to go to jump school. You'll be there one week."

Jack and I piled into my old Ford and we took off for Lakehurst. Tom McEvoy went in his own car. On Sunday night we checked in and Monday morning we started our training.

The training was remarkable. First we had to learn how to pack our own parachute. That's a prerequisite to become qualified as a jumper. We had to learn what it took, once you had landed, if there was a wind blowing, to collapse your parachute lest you be dragged forever across the ice. There were some terrible stories about jumps in Alaska where men had been dragged across the ice to the point where there was hardly anything left of them. I mean miles of dragging. So it's very important that you learn how to do this.

Doing this in the New Jersey sand was a whole other thing. They would get us lying face down or face up, feet first or head first—these are the different positions you started in—and fill the parachute with air created by an airplane engine mounted on a truck chassis. Two guys would sit on you, and at the count of three they'd get off, and you took off. The challenge was to get in a position where you were head towards the parachute canopy and face down and then pull in on the lower shroud lines which would dump the air and collapse the chute.

I remember they had three sailors out there in the middle of the field because at the far end of the field was a barbed-wire fence. If you didn't get collapse the chute as you approached that fence, they would run out and jump on the canopy and collapse it for you. Fortunately that never happened.

The thing that did happen is the New Jersey sand. It's very, very fine sand. It gets in your ears and your eyes and your teeth and your nose, and by the end of the day you look like you've been in the mines all day.

Learning how to pack the chute, learning how to collapse it, seeing some safety films and so forth took two days. By Wednesday morning we were ready for our first jump. Jack and I, the night before, had been at the Officers' Club bar rolling dice to see who would jump first. Jack won, so we had an instructor and Jack David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 7

and then me and then Tom and then another instructor in that order. The instructor in the rear was to make sure that we all jumped.

Most people who have gone to jump school don't believe this, but we jumped free fall; we had no static line. It was one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, and pull the ripcord.

Well I had decided in my mind that although Jack was going to go first, I was going to get down first. So instead of counting to three thousand, I counted to nine thousand. Because I went out right behind Jack, by the time my parachute opened I was well below him. The problem was that Jack weighed about thirty- five or forty pounds more than I did, and because we were jumping twenty-eight foot chutes, within seconds he was well below me. In fact he fell so fast that when he landed, he broke his leg. Tom in the next jump dislocated his shoulder because he also weighed a lot more, so then there was Dave.

By the end of the week, because of bad weather, I'd only made three jumps and it takes six jumps to qualify. They called Washington and said, "Look, we've had some problems. The Air Force Tech Sergeant has got a dislocated shoulder, the Navy j.g., Jack Tuck, has a broken leg, and Baker's the only one left."

Somebody said, "Well, you know, we've got to satisfy the Admiral so"—I think that's what they said—"we've got to have one qualified guy." So they said, "Okay, if he hasn't completed the training by noon on Monday, that's it, because we've got to send him back up to New Hampshire to get ready to prepare the dogs." This is the middle of October. We've only got a couple of weeks to go before we're loading the dogs aboard the Edisto.

On Monday morning, it was not a terribly good day but the wind wasn't blowing and it wasn't raining. They took me out to the plane, gave me a parachute, took me up, and tossed me out. When I got to the ground, there was a Jeep waiting for me. They picked me up, took me back to the airfield, I went back up, and by eleven-thirty that morning I'd made three jumps, we were checked out on our way back to Wonalancet with Jack Tuck in the back seat of my car with a cast on his leg.

And that's how I got to be a qualified naval parachutist. I think probably I'm the only person that you will ever interview who is a qualified parachutist and dogsled driver. I'm pretty sure that I may be the only one in the world.

DOB: That's quite a combination.

DB: Anyway, back up in Wonalancet, it was a major task to get everything ready. The dogs would be sent down in two increments. On the Edisto, the first David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 8

increment would be eleven dogs, Jack Tuck, and myself. The rest of the dogs would go later on the USS Wyandot with the other sleds and the rest of the equipment.

We got to Boston on Friday; I think it was the 28th of October. We spent Saturday loading out, and on Sunday we set sail on the Edisto. We left Boston on a rainy, dank, gray Boston day, and sailed out into the Atlantic with the dogs tethered on deck, for what was to be a fifty-day journey to McMurdo, through the Panama Canal, via New Zealand, Christchurch. The dogs never left the ship in the Canal Zone because we were fearful of some kind of canine diseases in the tropical area, and the New Zealanders are paranoid about rabies. They posed such extreme conditions for us to take the dogs ashore (actually to an island—double chains, double people on each dog, somebody with a gun in case a dog got loose) that we decided it wasn't worth it. So the dogs never left the ship in that entire journey.

Interesting things aboard ship. Sailors are an interesting lot. I won't say just sailors, but there are people who love dogs, and there are people who can take them or leave them, and there are people who are very fearful of dogs.

People often ask me, "How did the dogs fare on this long journey?" They fared pretty darn well in terms of their diet because the people who loved them would bring snacks to them from the galley. The sailors who didn't care one way or another—and there were very few of them—would just walk by them. The sailors who were afraid of them would bring snacks to them because they felt if they gave them a snack they could get by without a dog growling at them. These were very friendly dogs and I don't think many of them growled.

We had an enormous storm right after we crossed the equator. It started on Thanksgiving Day of 1955. During the storm the maximum roll of the Edisto was fifty-five degrees. The best way to describe this is that it's easier to walk on the bulkhead at that point than it is on the deck.

The dogs learned very quickly how to jam themselves in between things on deck so that they didn't get pulled back and forth. We positioned all the dogs on the ship so that they were protected from any water that was breaking over the deck, although it was inevitable that they would get wet. But we were still in a subtropical region when this storm hit, so the weather was not really cold. The dogs, I think, had a tough time but they were never lacking of attention.

The thing that probably was most interesting about how the dogs fared on this journey was that when we did get them on the ice in McMurdo on the 20th of December, we made seventeen miles the first day. The total was forty-four miles that we had to go from the edge of the ice into Hut Point. The first day was over pretty smooth new sea ice, new in the sense that it had just been laid down the David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 9

previous winter. The second and third day, we ran into ice that was two years old, ice that had been rafted up so that the going got tough.

The dogs had not been exercised—nor had we—for fifty-plus days, so they pretty well crapped out on us. We ended up doing a lot of pulling and pushing the sleds as we made that last twenty-seven miles. It took us two, maybe two-and-a-half days to make that last trek to Hut Point. By then, VX-6 had flown aircraft in from Dunedin and Christchurch, and the helicopters had been flying back and forth. The Weasels had been carrying cargo in on the one-ton sleds, and the D-2 Caterpillar tractor had been pulling some. So when we got to Hut Point on December 23rd, we had been on the ice the 20th, 21st, 22nd, yes, three-and-a-half days—when we got there, our base camp was pretty well established. The mess tent was up, the galley tent was up, the sick bay, administrative tents were up, the radio tent was up, and then we arrived.

Some observations from those first days: for whatever reason the people who had planned and loaded out the ships had decided that two things had priority— one was photographic equipment and the other was dog food. It seemed we had much more photographic equipment and dog food than we had the other kinds of things we really needed.

As you'll hear, I think, from Dick Bowers, this was the beginning of a very stressful period for a whole lot of reasons. The primary reason probably was that we had not anticipated that the edge of the ice in McMurdo Sound would be as far north as it was. The whole operation of offloading the ships was delayed—at this point remember we only had the Glacier and the Edisto there. The ships like the Wyandot, the Greenville Victory, the John Towle, were still in New Zealand.

The plan had been based on previous knowledge of McMurdo Sound provided by Shackleton and Scott. The anticipation was that the edge of the ice would be much further south. Well here we had the ice edge forty-four miles from Hut Point, and everything was going to have to be carried across the ice that distance into Hut Point. It's not like getting in your car and taking a forty-four minute drive, it's forty-four miles pulling a tractor train. It's a full day's work. The Nespelen was our tanker. They didn't have enough hose aboard that Nespelen to pump aviation gasoline the distance that we were at that time, so there was no question we had to break further in.

One of the questions became, is there another place we can put the base? Everything had, I think, been planned—Dick can tell you more about this—but everything had been planned on the basis that we would have a base at Hut Point, and our ice runway would be at the most southerly end of the sea ice at McMurdo Sound, and that was suddenly maybe not possible.

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It was some time before a decision was made. In the meantime the ice breakers were beginning to break the channel in. The combination of the channel being broken and the normal summertime action of McMurdo Sound—winds and current and temperature increase—resulted in the ice moving out.

DOB: Before we talk too much more about work, I'd like to hear you tell me about Antarctica when you first saw it. In particular, were you right about what you thought you knew about it before you got there? What surprised you? What was there? What did it look like, smell like, feel like, sound like?

DB: My first memory was not of seeing the continent. My first memory was seeing an iceberg for the first time. A small tabular berg which we saw shortly after dinner one night a couple of days out of New Zealand.

The next morning was more spectacular in that we were into sea ice that was breaking up. It was quite soft and we went through it very quickly. The thing that I remember about that is the dogs sensed something and they became much friskier. They became much more active, much more animated on deck than they'd been.

DOB: Were they just cold?

DB: It was a combination of the cold, but I think it was something else, they truly sensed that the end of the voyage was near. I don't know what it was, but there was a marked difference in their behavior. Remember, we'd been out of the tropics for some time. It's colder but it's not terribly cold. But they realized that there was something different.

Our arrival in McMurdo Sound, I recall, occurred sometime around midnight or one or two in the morning. What I probably was not ready for, because most all the photography I'd ever seen had been black and white, was the incredible beauty of Antarctica. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. Mt. Erebus was there in all its glory, a magnificent mountain. The mountains to the west of us, clear. The clarity of the air, the blueness of the water, the whiteness of the snow.

The thing that struck me, Dian, was the enormous amount of variance of color. There was blue, but there were hundreds of shades of blue, in the water and the ice. The different shades of white, blue, and green on Mt. Erebus, the grays in there. It was an extremely colorful scene. So if you say what's my first observation as we came into McMurdo Sound, it was the extraordinary amount of color, and I don't think I was prepared for that. I think that most people who think of Antarctica think of it as the great white continent. It's not white. It's an incredibly colorful part of the world. Whether you're on the ice or you're under David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 11

the ice or you're looking into the ice, I think you get that sense. So that was, I think, what struck me right off the bat. I'm not sure of the rest of the question.

DOB: You've answered it. What evidence of human habitation or humans having been there—

DB: The first thing we saw upon our arrival at Hut Point was Scott's cabin, the cabin that he had built in his expedition in 1904-05. It was the cabin in which he had never lived because he found that he couldn't keep it heated. He moored his ship, the Discovery, just about the place where we were pitching our tents. During that winter he moved all of the things that he could off of the ship into the cabin which he used more as a storage facility. Since that time, the winds had blown the snow in there; it was completely filled with snow. I never saw the inside of it. Now it's been thawed out and it's been restored. But that was the first sign of any kind of habitation.

The first thing you see as you come around Hut Point or off of the sea ice is the cross in memory of Seaman Vince who was one of Scott's men who fell off into the sea.

The next thing, which even as I think of it now and visualize it was very moving, is we climbed up to Observation Hill and saw the extraordinary cross in memory of Captain Scott with that line from Tennyson which says, "To seek, to find, and not to yield," followed by the names of Scott and his party, March 1912. To stand up there and see that cross and look down at Scott's hut and then begin to see our base emerge was very moving. We climbed up there fairly frequently, just to climb up to the top of Observation Hill. We even went up once in the winter.

DOB: What was that, what is now McMurdo Station, McMurdo Base?

DB: It started off as just a bunch of tents. You could count them on two hands. We had two of our rescue tents that were distinctive because they were white with an orange panel across the top. We had a smaller tent in which Captain Black lived, and a couple of others, four-person or five-person tents, and the larger mess tent and galley tents.

In those early days while we were awaiting the decision—are we going to stay here or not—there was no attempt to expand the camp. There were not that many people; we were a small advance party.

When the decision was finally made to build the base at Hut Point, the first things that went up were the orange Clements huts and then some Quonset huts. This happened over a very short period of time. Much shorter than I think we had planned, because originally we thought we were going to get to Hut Point in late David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 12

December and be close to where we were going to build the base. The plan was to bring the ships in from New Zealand earlier and start construction here earlier.

We lived in tents until the buildings were complete, but even after we moved we still had a lot of work to do, a lot of finishing work. We had the buildings up, but we didn't have them finished. We had to put canvas caps on them, tie-downs, all sorts of things. All the wiring had to be put in, and that was a big task. It took quite a while. A lot of that work took place after the Glacier left.

DOB: Tell me about your job.

DB: I had several jobs. I had the job of being one of the team of dogsled drivers responsible for keeping the dogs, maintaining the dogs, training with the dogs.

We built a dog kennel of Quonset huts, but we didn't use the metal. Actually there was a building, and we extended from the end of the building. The kennel was covered with canvas so that the temperature in that kennel in the middle of the winter was very, very cold, but the dogs accommodated to that very well. It kept them out of the wind and that's the most important thing.

We fed the dogs seal meat, so one of the jobs that we had—it wouldn't happen now, of course, even if they allowed dogs in Antarctica—was to butcher seals. One of the things I will always remember is that in the summer, the dogs would eat the meat but leave the fat. In the winter, they would eat the fat but leave the meat. Somehow dogs know what's good for them.

DOB: And dogs are not on the ice now?

DB: No. The last dogs that I know that were on the ice were the New Zealanders'. They used them after the United States stopped using dogs for just a few years.

DOB: And the reason for that?

DB: There is no real reason to use dogs. With snowmobiles now and helicopters and Otters and C-130s, there's no role for the dog anymore.

DOB: But it's not—

DB: The other side of that is that the environmental considerations are very strong. We don't know if there could be viral infections introduced by dogs into the penguin community or the skua gull community.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 13

The combination of there not being a role for them anymore— although there may be some romance associated with it—and the fact that there are environmental considerations, no dogs are permitted in Antarctica.

DOB: Did you use the dogs a lot for work?

DB: We used them initially, Dian. They couldn't possibly match the carrying capacity or the speed of—they could match the speed of a D-2 perhaps, but they couldn't match the carrying capacity. The most we could pull with a dog team with a full team of eleven dogs was about two thousand pounds. Also the first few weeks after our arrival, the ships weren't out there to offload and the dogs were in pretty bad shape. Their pads were pretty well chewed up from the trip in. So the dogs were never of any real value in cargo hauling, unlike what we heard today when Byrd used them.

The other thing that we had to do was to maintain the dogs and ourselves in a state of readiness in the event that we did have to use them. The likelihood of ever having to use them for rescue purposes was extremely improbable. There were a couple of occasions when we sort of went on alert, but we never did use them for a rescue. Even though I was jump qualified, we really weren't equipped to jump the dogs in. But we could have put them on a plane and taken them somewhere, and then used them to go from wherever the ski-equipped plane landed to wherever we had to rescue somebody.

Say you couldn't fly a helicopter in, for example, because it was too far away. We could have put the dogs in an R4D, flown them three hundred miles, taken them out of the R4D—which is actually what they did when they went to the South Pole later—and then harness them up and work your way through crevasse country to wherever the downed aircraft was, load up the survivors, and bring them back out.

But that never happened. If you think about the fact that we had a refueling capability using the R4D, we could've hopscotched helicopters into a relatively inaccessible area, so that even though we couldn't have flown them directly to McMurdo, we could've flown them into a place where we could have provided the fuel cache, and then flown them another leg in and so forth.

So it was not practical, but we continued to exercise the dogs throughout that late Antarctic fall. During the winter we did not, and the following spring we continued to exercise them then. That was good for us; it kept us fit. It gave us a different perspective.

That's the most important thing as far as my Antarctic adventure is concerned— that I experienced so much of what was the old and the new. When you're out in David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 14

a tent on the ice and wind's blowing sixty-five miles an hour and you're in a sleeping bag, albeit a down bag, not a fur bag, working a Primus stove which probably is exactly the same design as Shackleton's or Scott's Primus stove, there's a real connection with that past.

And then you go back to camp three or four days later. The storm's over and you take the dogs and you're back at McMurdo. You put the dogs away and you walk into the mess hall, which is warm, and that night you watch a movie.

We had that enormous contrast between what was before, that which had excited me about the Antarctic to begin with, all that reading I'd done, and the present. Now I hear about the conditions down there, it's very, very different than what we had.

I think most of the scientists that are down there now and support people, when they hear people talk about what it was like in 1955, say, "My gosh, you mean you didn't have closed-circuit television?"

There were other differences. We had, I think, just two and they truly were outhouses. I think we had two three-holers. We all remember that because they really weren't heated. I mean they were heated but they weren't heated below, so there was no great lingering. Originally they didn't put any kind of shielding around the outside, so when the wind blew the wind tended to blow up through the three-holers. This created some problems. The way we solved that is to place a number of big tin cans full of small rocks that we gathered up around the base. You had to wrap the toilet paper in the rock to get it to go down; otherwise, it was likely to come back up again. This was a problem until they put plywood around the base. They were raised up so they could pull what we called "honey buckets." They were fifty-five gallon fuel drums that had been cut in two.

DOB: You said you had other jobs besides the dog stuff.

DB: Yes. I was the base communications officer. I really didn't know an awful lot about communications, Navy communications or any kind of communications. But I fortunately had a wonderful chief and some very qualified radiomen.

We had to put up the antennas. That was a whole other experience trying to put them up and keep them up, anchoring them into the terrain, subject to high winds.

Then the whole experience of learning how to communicate in a polar region is very different than anyplace else in the world. The equipment we had was all World War II. Whoever made the decision—I'm speculating now—but I think the decision was, "These guys are going off to Antarctica, what do we have that we David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 15

don't need?" I don't think any of the equipment we had was state-of-the-art as of 1955. I think it was state-of-the-art as of about 1943. (It was all vacuum tube at that time.)

The net of it was that we had almost exclusively CW, Morse code communications, occasionally using the ham radio equipment we had which was state-of-the-art. Collins Radio had provided us with that equipment, and they gave us the current stuff. So we did have ham radio contact with friends and family, but that was very sporadic.

One of the things I remember so clearly about the CW communications is that when it was good, it was quite good. When it was bad, it was nonexistent! We were communicating with the naval communications station at Balboa in the Canal Zone, for example. That was the most reliable contact as far as naval communications was concerned. The CommSta in Washington, D.C., I think we may have used that occasionally but not often.

But what happens is that when the atmospheric conditions deteriorate, it's almost as if somebody turned off the equipment. You can go from hearing a signal to not hearing anything, hardly even hearing a hiss, in a matter of seconds.

And of course the enormous amount of communications, particularly in resupply, in ordering equipment, and making recommendations for the subsequent year, meant that these messages were all sent in Morse code.

[End Side A, Tape 1]

[Begin Side B, Tape 1]

DB: I had a first class radioman named Marino who had, I think they call it a fist, but it was recognized throughout the Navy, because every radioman who uses a speed key has a signature. It's their style of sending, and he was truly remarkable. A couple of others, they were all good. Robbie [Pittman], Dale Powell, Audrey Garrett was the chief, they were really top-notch people.

Let me tell you one example of a communication that to me was a challenge and involved a person whom you may interview, in fact two people: Dick Bowers and Jim Bergstrom.

Shortly after the Glacier left on its way back first to Little America and then back to Norfolk, Virginia, Jim Bergstrom fell off of Dick Bowers' shoulders when he was trying to get him up on the roof of the BOQ. When he fell off, he broke both elbows. One as I recall had nineteen bits of bone in it, and the other I think had nine.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 16

Our doctor, Ike Taylor, took x-rays of Jim's elbows and created a three- dimensional grid, plotting every bone chip, and then sent a message—you can imagine the detail of this message—locating each bone chip in the elbows and also describing the size and position of the chip and its orientation and asking for advice.

The questions were, do you go in there and remove the chips? Do you cast the arm? If you cast the arm, do you cast it straight, cocked, ninety-degree angle? The text, as I recall, was a three- or four-page message, single-spaced, all alphanumeric. The most difficult kind of message to send because it's like a coded message, it has no contextual meaning.

The message went to Naval Hospital, Bethesda, and came back almost immediately with a response telling us to evacuate Jim to the nearest naval hospital. I remember Ike Taylor wanting to send a message back, which the commander nixed, saying, "Yes, we'll comply. Send ambulance." Somebody in Washington at Task Force headquarters picked up on Bethesda's response at the same time and got hold of the duty officer over at Bethesda and said, "Hey, these folks are not where we can send them an ambulance or even a Medevac aircraft."

DOB: Was this during the night?

DB: This was during the beginning of the winter night. Jim went around until he was evacuated in early November. Jim went around with one arm cast straight out and the other arm at a ninety-degree angle during April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and he never lost his sense of humor. He was just terrific. A real extraordinary fellow. Eventually the Navy discharged him with a medical discharge.

Jim wanted to fly so much for the Navy that he exercised those arms while flying for commercial aviation out of Minneapolis or Duluth, and ultimately managed to pass the Navy flight physical and went back on active duty and retired as a Navy captain. Have you met him?

DOB: Yes. I'm working with him on the project. That's great.

DB: So there's two jobs. My third job probably had the greatest significance in terms of the South Pole base. The Seabees that would be going to build that base at the South Pole had all worked under terribly difficult, arduous conditions during the winter night—those that had been out on the runway, for example, working at forty, fifty, sixty, seventy below zero. However, there's a major difference between working in extreme temperatures for even twelve hours a day and then David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 17

coming back into a warm mess hall and warm berthing quarters and coming back and getting into a cold tent.

So what I did is I ran a survival school for everybody who was going to be going to the Pole. This entailed some classroom lecture work, learning about the equipment that they'd have available to them, and then spending a night in the survival camp. Manhauling sleds—we used those little fiberglass banana sleds. They would manhaul their equipment. If it was Bill Bristol, for example, the photographer, he would carry his photographic gear. If it was Smoky Lease, he'd carry his surveying gear.

We would go out and spend the night out there, actually right where the New Zealanders were to build their base around the other side of Observation Hill. It was about forty to forty-five, fifty below zero spending that night out there.

It was really a learning experience. A lot of people, even today (and I've done a lot of survival training, when I came back from Antarctica, I was a survival instructor in the Navy for a year-and-a-half down in Pensacola) for some reason, think that a sleeping bag may be inherently warm, and they don't realize that if you've been out on the trail and it's forty-five below zero and you unroll that sleeping bag and you slide into it, the inside temperature of that sleeping bag until you get into it is forty-five below zero. Another thing that's very, very hard to convince people of is that the best way to sleep in a sleeping bag is without any clothes on because the clothes that you had on during the day, 1) are not designed to sleep in, and 2) you've inevitably sweated in them and so they're going to be very good in conducting heat away from your body. The idea of getting into that very cold sleeping bag and taking your clothes off is not something that's terribly appealing to most people.

The whole business of learning how to prepare a meal—

DOB: Wait a minute. Talk about that. How do you convince people and what is the technique for surviving in a sleeping bag?

DB: First of all, I found that the best way to do it for starters is to explain the physiology of it, the physiology and the physics of it. In other words, first of all you've got to convince them there's nothing warm about the sleeping bag. The warmth from the sleeping bag is going to come from you, and the best way of getting that warmth into that sleeping bag and maintaining that pocket of warm air around you, obviously, is to put as little as possible between your source of heat and the sleeping bag.

A down sleeping bag is a lot more efficient as an insulator than the clothing that you've been wearing while you've been working. There's some very dramatic David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 18

figures available on the amount of energy that the body produces when it's working, even walking as compared to sitting or lying down or sleeping. So you show those numbers to people, and they say, "Oh, okay, my furnace really gets turned down at night, so I've got to use the most efficient insulator that I can possibly use in order to sleep comfortably."

If you can't convince them, I had a situation where a person who shall remain nameless could not be convinced and insisted upon wearing some inappropriate clothing which was for Air Force flight issue rather than Army issue. He was the kind of person that sweats profusely. When he got into his sleeping bag, he would not take that clothing off. It wasn't until he got so distressed that he was virtually in tears that I said, "We're going to have to take you back. I'm going to have to call the base and they're going to have to come and get you." And he said, "No, I don't want that to happen." So he shed his clothes and within thirty minutes he was asleep.

So if you couldn't convince them with logic, ultimately their body convinced them there's got to be a better way, because they would see other people not suffering and they'd see me and I was pretty comfortable.

The tents we had, Dian, could be heated up very quickly with a Primus stove, presuming there was no wind blowing. So you could be pretty comfortable in a tent with a minimum amount of clothing on.

Unfortunately, the sleeping bag is almost at ground level. You've got an air mattress underneath you, but the minute you turn the stove off—it might have been twenty above or even thirty above with the stove on—but the minute you turn the stove off, within seconds the inside of that tent is going to be pretty close to what it is outside.

DOB: You don't leave the stove on.

DB: No. There are two reasons for that—there's probably more than two reasons. One is it's impractical because you can't carry that much fuel with you. Secondly, there's a danger in keeping the stove going with carbon monoxide poisoning. A lot of polar explorers have succumbed to this. The lack of practicality in leaving it on, plus the damn stoves are very noisy.

DOB: What's a Primus stove?

DB: Primus is a Swedish stove. It's unlike a lot of the new American design stoves that are quite quiet. The Primus stove makes a roaring sound, and it's sometimes quite comforting to have that.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 19

DOB: P-r-i-m-a-s?

DB: P-r-i-m-u-s, or Optimus is of the same design. If you see photographs of Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen's time, you'll see a stove that if I were to show you a modern Primus, it looks very much the same. The design has not changed very much.

DOB: Describe it. What's the principle?

DB: The fuel is kerosene; however, you prime it with alcohol, denatured alcohol which you put in a little cup which is right underneath the burner. You ignite the alcohol which ignites very quickly and heats up the kerosene, converting it into vapor- gas. Gasoline is not a good fuel to use in a tent because it's so flammable. If people hadn't died from carbon monoxide poisoning in tents, they'd burned themselves up. Or if they hadn't burned themselves up, they'd burn their tent up and they might as well burn themselves up. So you use kerosene which does not have as low a flashpoint.

You put the alcohol in this little cup that is underneath the burner. Then you pump up the stove five or six pumps, which forces the kerosene up into the burner when you open the valve. The burner has now been heated by the alcohol burning which vaporizes the kerosene which then ignites. When it ignites, it further heats the little burner ring, so that more fuel comes up and, within a matter of a few seconds, you've got this pretty intense burner going.

The thing that you have to be careful of is that if you get too much pressure in the fuel tank, and the kerosene comes up too quickly, it can spray up and not ignite soon enough. Then you start getting a pool of fuel that's now flowing over the cup and down over the top of the stove, so when it does ignite you've got a whole other kind of problem. You've got too much heat at that point, in fact if you aren't careful you may have a real blaze going!

DOB: Is this a stove that you can cook on?

DB: Oh yes. The primary purpose is not for heating. The primary purpose really in those conditions is for cooking. You simply cannot afford to carry enough fuel to keep yourself warm. That's not the purpose, so you benefit from the heat while you're cooking, but it's not really why you're using the stove unless, you know, in extremis.

I'll give you an example of an extreme situation. In one of the training runs we made, we took the dogs north to Cape Evans where Scott's camp was, the one from which he went to the Pole.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 20

Our lead dog, Turk, somehow got loose during the night. We don't know how, whether the chain around his collar froze up or the clip broke, but he got loose. I remember lying there—it was blowing outside, we were in the middle of a three- day storm, the first night of a three-day storm—and I kept feeling this thing bumping me. There were three of us in the tent and I was on the outside; one person in the middle, Dick Bowers, two people on the outside, Jack Tuck and me. And I kept feeling this thing hitting my hip.

I was trying to ignore it because I had a feeling it wasn't a seal, it wasn't a penguin, it wasn't the wind just blowing, it had to be a dog. But it was one of those things where you say, "I know it's probably a dog but if it's a dog I've got to get up and do something about it, but it's damn cold out there." However, finally I did.

Turk had gotten loose and fallen into a little tidal track between the land and the sea ice. His paws were frozen blocks of ice. We had to bring him into the tent. We used the stove to thaw out his paws and get the ice out of them between the pads.

The funny thing about this experience is that Turk decided that the inside of that tent was pretty nice. Every time we ever took him out after that, when you took him out of harness, he started to tug you over towards the tent. You cannot imagine what a dog smells like who's been warmed up in a small tent. [Laughs] We'd been thawing out his seal-blubber-soaked coat.

DOB: So tell me more about the survival stuff and getting these people trained for the Pole.

DB: We had, I think, the best of the best in terms of a highly motivated and very bright crew. Because they knew they were going to the Pole and they knew that the conditions at the Pole were going to be far, far more arduous, far more rugged than anything they'd encountered at McMurdo, they were open to suggestions. They also knew that once they got there, because by now they knew what the weather's like in the Antarctic, they knew that they might be there for a while before they could get into something other than a tent.

I've done a lot of training in my life, and one of the big issues in any education or training program is how motivated are your students. I had very, very highly motivated students. I must also say that I had some initial skepticism, so we tried to overcome that in the classroom work and then we put the finishing touches on when we went on the trail.

DOB: They were skeptical?

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 21

DB: They were skeptical, I think, yes.

DOB: Of what? If they were able to do it or—

DB: No, no. They were skeptical of some of the, I guess you might say, theories. It's like trying to show somebody a wind chill table the first time. It's thirty below zero but the temperature's really only ten above. How can it be thirty below zero? They think, "I can handle that." A lot of people who have said that of course haven't handled it, to their detriment and in some cases to their death.

There are a lot of little tricks that you can tell a person about, but you really have to learn it the hard way. For example, if you put snow in a pot and you put the pot on top of a Primus stove and you're not aware of the fact that the bottom of that snow is going to melt and vaporize and that there's not going to be any liquid in the bottom of the pot, then the bottom of the pot's going to melt out. That's a hard way to learn that, but it's better to learn it at a training survival trip at Hut Point or on the other side of Observation Hill than it is to learn it at the South Pole.

There are certain times when you're going to have to use your fingers—to change the film in a camera, to do any kind of thing that requires that your fingers touch metal—you have to be aware of what you can and cannot do. Taking a mess cup and putting it to your lip, if the cup is thirty below zero and you put it on your lip and you've got a little saliva on your lower lip, you're likely to freeze your lip to the cup. And if you pull it away right away, you're likely to take some of the skin away with it. Those little things that you learn.

You learn about what it's like if you take your stuff into your sleeping bag, you have some dry clothes that you bring in with you so they're ready to put on in the morning. You learn the value of that the hard way.

You don't leave your boots outside. People did that. And of course a pair of leather boots, even a pair of rubber boots, but leather boots particularly, will become hard as rock and it takes a while to get them warmed up.

DOB: So where do you put them?

DB: You keep them in the tent with you and you usually put them close around the sleeping bag. They'll still stiffen up but they may not freeze up as hard as rock.

So you end up organizing yourself in the tent in ways that make it really much easier to get up in the morning. Believe me, Dian, that's one of the great challenges in life. Inside the tent is not necessarily the same temperature as outside because you've got some body heat that's keeping it warm unless the David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 22

wind's blowing. If you haven't prepared the night before for how you're going to get up—for example, you certainly want to have a source of water in the morning without having to go outside to scoop some snow up to put it in the pot—so you want to take care of that the night before. If possible, you have actually a source of water in your sleeping bag. You take your canteen and you take it into the sleeping bag with you so it's warm.

If you can pour fresh water over snow, you can accelerate the process of melting snow. If you just start off with snow, then you've got a much longer process to create water than if you start off with some water and add snow to it. It's that kind of thing that you have to think about.

DOB: Did you go to the Pole?

DB: No, I did not. My job during summer operations had to do more with communications and maintaining the communications, not only the ship-to-shore, but also our base communications with the Pole and also with aircraft.

Unlike most places in the world where there's a division between the base communications, base-to-base, base-to-ship, or ship-to-base, and the aviation part of communications, at McMurdo, we had all of that centralized in the comm shack. Once the aircraft got outside of the immediate range of McMurdo, for example, aircraft en route to the Pole, were in communications with our radio system, not with any like you have today, FAA control towers and all that kind of stuff. It was all centralized in a radio shack.

Because the whole aircraft operation was really critical, our commanding officer didn't feel he wanted his communications officer to be absent. I'm not sure that was necessary but that was his decision. By the time that things sort of settled down and there was an opportunity for me to go to the Pole, it was too late.

We were starting to curtail flight operations because much of everything that was to be done at the Pole was done. The important thing then was to get the scientists to the Pole because remember, this was the beginning of the IGY.

DOB: Did you ever go there?

DB: Not the Pole, no. There was no need to and quite frankly I didn't miss anything.

DOB: Okay. So how long were you there?

DB: The 20th of December 1955 to, I think it was the 5th of February 1957. For the total elapsed time away, you really have to start from the time we left Boston, that's the 30th of October; it added up to almost a year-and-a-half. I have never David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 23

calculated that to the day, but basically November, December . . . well, sixteen months.

DOB: Admiral Byrd was—

DB: Admiral Byrd was with us then, although we saw very, very little of him.

DOB: Did you meet him?

DB: I met him, yes.

DOB: What did you think?

DB: I thought he was a very old man and not well. I felt sad because he had been my hero and I felt that—we all knew about it, Dian—there was a conflict between the two admirals. They each had their own ship, and Admiral Dufek was the man in charge; there's no question. He was commander, Task Force 43. Admiral Byrd's role was more honorary. I guess it didn't seem right to me. I think a lot of people did not have the historical knowledge that some of us had about his role in Antarctica. I think it was confusing to people. We had two of these admirals; one seems to be really in charge and who's the other guy? The other guy was the one that made it all happen in years past. To see him not well, rather frail was sad. I mean it was extremely important for him to be there, I think. Mentally, emotionally, I think it was something he had to do, but I think it had to be troubling for him to . . . .

DOB: To be in charge but not really in charge? DB: Yes. He wasn't in charge of anything really. His son was with him, and I have vague recollections of him. I think he was a lieutenant commander. I think his main job was to take care of his dad.

DOB: What did you think of Admiral Dufek?

DB: I liked him. I didn't have an awful lot to do with him, but he was, I felt, a reasonably decisive man. I think he was generally well regarded by his staff and by others.

DOB: And who was in charge at McMurdo?

DB: A fellow named David Canham, Lt. Comdr. Dave Canham. I don't know whether you ever met him, but you've heard a lot about him or if you haven't, you will.

DOB: Tell me about him.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 24

DB: Aviator. I think Dave was probably the strongest person of all of our crew at McMurdo in terms of leadership, decisiveness, motivation. I think that the problem that I had with Dave was that Dave rightfully did not see the value of the dogs, and so time spent with the dogs—keeping the dogs, feeding the dogs, caring for the dogs, exercising the dogs—was time that wasn't really contributing to the mission.

As I look back from the point of view of my rank, I retired as a Navy captain, and perhaps even when I was lieutenant commander, had I been in that same role I probably would have seen myself much as he saw me.

We were really short-handed. Everybody in camp was doing double-duty. I was doing the communications bit, I was doing the survival training bit, and I was doing the dog bit. There was not a person in camp who wasn't doing at least two or three jobs.

All of the officers at one time or another did mess cooking—unheard of in the Navy. It just wouldn't ever happen, yet we did it, and we did it because Dave Canham said, "We've got to relieve the guys who really know how to drive the tractors and do all those other things that we can't do, and the way we do that is we don't make them mess cook. We'll do the mess cooking." So we all took turns and everybody did it from Ike Taylor, the chaplain, John Condit, everybody.

DOB: I don't know enough about your connections particularly on the ice, so let me just ask you. Was there a person that was there that you were particularly glad to have there or that you particularly admired? And it can be more than one.

DB: There were more than one. Dick Bowers is certainly one.

DOB: Why?

DB: Well, Dick, one, is a gentleman; two, is bright, innovative, thoughtful. I guess today we'd say cool hand Luke. I'm sure there must have been times, but I cannot remember a time, when I ever saw Dick in a flappable situation. He knew what had to be done, and there were a lot of occasions, Dian, when things didn't go very well.

Dick and I were talking earlier today, we were so naive, we made a lot of mistakes. Not only we as individuals, but the whole operation made some assumptions about what we were going to do under certain circumstances that I think were almost foolish, perhaps foolhardy.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 25

Our whole communications system, as I mentioned earlier, used all this antiquated equipment. I mean it was disgraceful, but we learned to live with it. Sometimes we were better at it than others.

But Dick had an enormous amount of responsibility on his shoulders because he was truly the CEC officer responsible for getting the South Pole base built. And that didn't just start when we first flew in people to the South Pole. That started way back before we ever left Davisville.

Planning for and positioning of the equipment and dealing with the problems when we discovered that it wasn't the right equipment or we didn't have it or it wasn't in the right place at the right time was a constant challenge. Dick was instrumental in building the base at McMurdo and supremely instrumental in building at the South Pole.

I have great admiration for him. I had it then and I have it today.

Jim Bergstrom—I have great admiration for Jim because again, unflappable, terrific sense of humor, just a real class act. And companionable. We lived very closely together, and when you have that closeness, you learn about people very well. It was not an easy thing all the time. We had some problems within our small living group. We had one man who was an acute alcoholic. We didn't know that when we got there.

DOB: What can you do about something like that?

DB: Not much. He was a civilian. We had another man who was . . . what's the word I'm thinking about . . . was truly antisocial. In fact, he went to Antarctica because he didn't like people, and he felt that by going to the end of the earth that he could get away from people. He caused a lot of friction. He didn't like Dave Canham, Dave Canham didn't like him. He was almost mutinous in his behavior, and that created a very difficult situation.

When you have on the one hand someone who's an acute alcoholic and can be disruptive, and you have somebody else who's not fitting into a very, very small community, the other folks that are left have got to make some adjustments.

John Condit, our chaplain, our Catholic chaplain—a wonderful guy and did much, I think, to maintain the morale and spirit of the other ninety-two people in camp. John conducted Catholic services and also Protestant services.

DOB: He did the Protestant service?

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 26

DB: Oh yes. Organized a choir . . . I sang in his choir along with Jim Bergstrom and Dick Bowers. But two funny stories about John Condit. One was that he used his position and isolation to do some recruiting, to bring some of his flock back into the fold, Catholics, but he also used it to do a little bit of recruiting. One of the things he would do when he brought someone into the "fold" is he would send a message back to the local parish from wherever this young man came from, sometimes to the family. This message would also go to the Chief of Chaplains, and the Chief of Chaplains at the time was a Protestant. Ultimately the message came in from the Chief of Chaplains basically saying that John should cease and desist his recruiting efforts. [Laughs]

Another funny story about John—and I may be the only person who knows this. I have shared this story before, but I was the one who was there. Our mid-winter's party was a combination of New Years, Christmas, Labor Day, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Thanksgiving, all rolled into one.

Mid-winter in the Antarctic is something special, and it was particularly special for us because it represents that now you're halfway through, but for us it was one of the first times—it may have been the first time—when we really had a letdown and we could take a deep breath and not be stressed out about how much was left to do. Most of the buildings were fitted out, the electrical system was working, and so forth.

Well, that night there was a dispensation on the part of the medical officer of medicinal alcohol, and beer was part of our ration. John probably had more than he should have had. Some of his "flock" shared their ration with him. The next morning I was the duty officer. I had been up in the power generation building where we also had our washing and drying machines, and I was on my way back.

Remember, this is the middle of winter so it's dark, and as I came back down the hill, I met John coming out of the chapel. I said, "Good morning, Father John," and he said, "It's not a good morning." I said, "I'm sorry to hear that." He said, "I disgraced myself last night, and I've really lost my credibility," or words to that effect. I said, "What makes you think that?"

I can't remember how long he'd been a chaplain at that point, but he said, "You know, I've held Sunday mass for a thousand Marines, I've held it for as few as four or five sailors or Marines, but this is the first time that I've ever held Sunday mass and no one has shown up." I said, "John, I want to make you feel much better about today. This is not Sunday."

[Laughter]

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 27

DB: Of course in his tradition, if you're going to have a big party, it was always on Saturday night. So I think I did make his day.

DOB: Were you ever truly scared?

DB: Yes. On several occasions. Let me tell you probably the most scared that I've been, maybe not in my life but certainly up to that time. After the last sunset, we—Jack, Dick Prescott who was a young sailor assigned to help us with the dogs, and Clay, I can't remember his first name—decided to take the dogs out for one last run out on the ice for an overnight.

We headed directly out towards Mt. Discovery, so basically we were going southwest across the sea ice. We got out about probably six or seven miles and we stopped. Remember, this is dusk now, the sun has set but we still have a couple of hours of daylight—and we stopped to rest the dogs.

As we stood there we sensed that the wind was picking up. And it picked up very, very quickly. In a matter of seconds it went from almost a dead calm to blowing probably thirty or forty miles an hour, and for the next hour or so we struggled to get one of our two tents up. It was blowing so hard, Dian, that literally we had to crawl on our stomachs.

We drove ice pitons in to hold the sled in place, and then we used the sled as the anchor for the windward side of the tent. Then we put Clay and Prescott inside the tent and had them try to brace against the A-frame as we cinched up on the guylines.

The thing that was so terrifying, in addition to the intensity of the wind— fortunately it wasn't that cold, it was probably about ten degrees—the thing that was so terrifying is that we were terribly afraid that this tent was going to shred itself, and the wind was awesome.

But the other thing that probably Jack and I worried about more than our two sailor companions was that both of us had read all of Scott's journals, and we remembered the example not dissimilar from ours when they had this terrible storm and they were out on the ice, and when they woke up the next morning they were on an ice floe, detached from the rest of the sea ice in McMurdo Sound. That's what went through our minds during that night is that with this enormous amount of wind, the ice that we were on would break off, and if we blew out to sea and then subsequently didn't blow back in again, all was lost. That was going to be the end.

DOB: Surely they would miss you.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 28

DB: They would miss us, but they had no way to come get us. They had no plane, they had no helicopter. We had a helicopter but it had been grounded because the rotor had separated, the laminate had separated. I don't think we had a boat, and there's no way that anybody could have come and gotten us, so that was it.

DOB: Did you talk about this at the time?

DB: No, I think Jack and I kept thinking about these passages. What happened when the storm was over, I'm not sure it was Scott that was actually set loose but it was some of his men, but the wind did shift and begin to blow from the north. In Scott's diary, there are pen and ink sketches of them leaping from ice floe to ice floe.

What happened is that at almost the stroke of midnight, it went from blowing sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour to a flat calm. Absolute not a breath of wind. What we had survived was what I think is called a katabatic wind. Have you heard that term before?

DOB: I have but I don't know what it is.

DB: When cold air collects at a higher elevation, it's held in place—I'm not technically qualified—but it's held back by a dam of air, a temperature inversion in a glacier, in a valley. But eventually the air dam will break just like a dam breaking and this stream of super-cold air comes shooting down like a flood of water, like a flood you might have in the southwestern United States, flash floods. It will come down the glacier and when it reaches, in our case, the sea ice, it begins to play out.

Our weather officer said that had we been on a twenty-foot tower, we probably would have been in the flat calm. It is like water. It's this cold air that's coming streaming down, down the glacier, and spills out over in our case the sea ice, and ultimately the reservoir drained. We were camped in the middle of that flood of air streaming off of the Polar Plateau.

DOB: What happened to the dogs?

DB: The dogs curled up, as they do in a storm like that, and they stick their nose under their tail, and the blowing snow covers them up. That happened to us a number of times when we had storms. DOB: They don't blow away?

DB: No, they're tethered down. When we stop with a team, the first thing you do is, if you're on the ice, you put an ice piton in either end of the line. That line has eleven short chains attached to it, and each dog is attached to one of those David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 29

chains. It's kept so that each dog is far enough apart so they can sort of rub noses maybe but they can't get at each other. When the storm comes, they just lie down and curl up and the snow blows over them and that serves as an insulator for them.

DOB: What are you proudest of from your Antarctic experience?

DB: Well, I guess it's a very general thing, and that is having realized a dream. That's important to me. I think more important to me than others who've gone, who went with me or afterwards, because that dream had been with me for a long time.

DOB: You had wanted specifically to go?

DB: Yes. And to have gone in those conditions with the dogs and had those experiences, I think that's what I'm proudest of. I'm proud of having been part of the beginning of something. I think it's much more exciting to be part of the beginning of something than it is to be part of the end of something. I've always liked projects where you did something, you created something.

DOB: You were a pioneer.

DB: I was a pioneer. We were part of building those bases. We were part of learning something about this incredible part of the world. The thing that I've enjoyed in the years since then is the sharing of that excitement with the hope that some of it's going to rub off on some kid. I must have talked to ten thousand people since I've come back.

I made a movie film of this while I was down there. It's probably a unique film in the sense that it is a combination of dogsleds and airplanes and tractors and people. And I was really the only one that was in a position to do that, to make that film of that combination.

So when I talk to youngsters—and I've talked to kids from kindergarten, first grade on up through high school and beyond—what my objective has been is to try to somehow take the dream that I had and say, "Hey, you can have one, too. It doesn't mean you have to go to Antarctica. You might want to go to the bottom of the ocean somewhere or you might want to climb a mountain or you might want to go into space. There's all sorts of things that you can do that don't require you to go to a place like Antarctica. But if I can go to Antarctica, then so can you."

And that gets back to something else I wanted to share with you about Brian Shoemaker. I'm not sure I told you this before, but when I was in intelligence David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 30

school I showed my film—this is the connection of what's come after—I showed my film to the officers, the staff, and the students at the intelligence school in Washington. This was the summer of 1961. Brian Shoemaker was a classmate of mine. I was lieutenant, and he was just out of pre-flight, probably been commissioned just a few weeks.

I didn't realize this until many, many years later when he introduced me to his command at Port Hueneme, introduced me as a guest speaker one night. He stood up and said, "I want to tell you something about Captain Baker. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for him, because I sat in the back of a class in intelligence school as a young ensign and watched his film and heard him speak, and I decided I can do that, too."

DOB: Did you have a sense of the history of the moment?

DB: I think so, yes. I did because I saw a certain continuity starting with those earlier explorers, more of the twentieth century than prior to that, starting with Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and then Admiral Byrd. And here we were.

On the shores of McMurdo Sound—you've got Hut Point with Scott's first expedition, you've got Cape Evans with Scott's second expedition, you've got Cape Royds with Shackleton's expedition, you've got Cape Evans where Shackleton was—Shackleton wasn't there but his men were there waiting for him to come across from the Pole in his Endurance expedition in 1916-17.

I'd camped in the lee of all three of those buildings. Let me tell you another story, and this one involves Dick Bowers and Jack Tuck and myself. We took the dogs down to Cape Evans. It was one of these training exercises, pre-going-to-the- Pole things. As you probably know, the dogs did go to the Pole. They did take dogs to the Pole because they weren't sure that when they landed the aircraft they would really be at the Pole, and if the Weasel didn't work that they had dropped in by parachute, then they would need some way to get from where they landed to where the Pole actually was, and that's what actually happened.

So Dick and Jack and I went up to Cape Evans and set up our tent in an open area, rocky area, frozen area, in the lee of Cape Evans, Scott's cabin. I say in the lee, how do you know where the lee is? The wind generally blows out of the south, plus the fact you can see where the drifting snow was. There were two big drifts on either side of the lee side of Scott's cabin, and a hollow area in between. To the north it just opens up onto the sea ice.

The first night we were there, an enormous storm hit us that lasted for several days. We began to worry, as we had in that previous fall, with the intensity of the wind, that if that tent should begin to rip—and it only takes seconds once that first David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 31

rip appears the thing is turned to shreds. Jack Tuck remembered in a photograph, one of Ponting's photographs of the cabin, Cape Evans, he remembered a small narrow window under the eaves of the hut that was up above the pony shed.

[End Side B, Tape 1]

[Begin Side A, Tape 2]

DB: . . . if we lost our tent, we would need some shelter. That's the only way one is going to survive. Dig a hole in the snow and pull yourself in, or you find someplace else. In this case, Jack remembered seeing this window.

Now the window was totally covered with snow and ice. What we did is we crawled up on the snowdrift along the side that went up to the roof of the pony shed and then crawled across the pony shed roof, and with our ice axes, we chipped away the snow and ice from around where we thought the window was. Sure enough there it was. It was held in by a couple of nails that were sort of bent over. We pried the window out, it popped out rather easily, and looked in.

The only light really that was coming in was coming in over our shoulders. What we saw was the interior of a cabin that looked as if someone had stepped out just a few minutes before, and if we waited around for a few minutes they'd be back. There was a long table that stretched out right in front of us. It had cups on the table that were full of cocoa, frozen, there were still some crackers, jam, bread on the table—

DOB: They didn't clean up after their last meal.

DB: They didn't clean up, no. There were sweaters and dog harnesses hung on the hooks, there were dirty dishes in the sink, in the galley which is beyond the table.

We lowered ourselves head first, and I remember very clearly, Dian, I had a feeling that I had really entered some kind of sanctuary. It was truly a religious experience for me. It was—I'm not sure it's the proper use of the word—an epiphany, but that'll do for now. It was a very emotional time, perhaps made more emotional by the recognition that we had found a place that was a sanctuary, could be a sanctuary to us. I had this enormous feeling that our predecessors were—if we just sat down and waited for them, they'd join us in a cup of cocoa.

That cabin, although built by Scott as part of his expedition to the Pole, had actually been used by Shackleton's Ross Sea support party five, six, seven years later, because Shackleton's cabin at Cape Royds was a drafty, terrible place. David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 32

Given the choice of using his original Royds cabin or using Scott's cabin, Shackleton's men elected to use Scott's old cabin.

So the last occupants had been Shackleton's support party, not Scott's men. And the reason they left so quickly is that they had been there for some time waiting for—they'd put in caches and so forth and waiting for their leader, Shackleton, to come over the hill. Of course the leader was floating around the Weddell Sea and was never going to come over the hill.

When their relief vessel finally came, it arrived fairly late in the summer, actually into the fall. I remember that in the journals, they had a lookout posted and suddenly the vessel's there and the skipper says, "All aboard coming aboard and I'm leaving." So there wasn't a lot of time to clean up things, and that's the way it was.

But there's one thing about that experience I want to share with you. This is speculation on my part; I've never heard anybody who could validate it or dispute it. But as you look at this table—there are photographs of this table in Scott's book, The Last Expedition of the "Discovery"—you'll notice that on the one side behind the table is a wall. It's actually a wall made of shelves. The wall is made of wooden cases, the bottoms of which had been knocked out, and that formed a perfect wall, and at the same time you've got a bookcase or shelves.

Those shelves, those boxes, had all sorts of things in them. Some of them had crackers, some of them had what appeared to be chemicals or science bottles for specimens or whatever.

But in the middle of that wall was one case that was intact. The bottom had not been knocked out, and it was a case of French champagne. I hope it's still there. But whether or not that case was there from Scott's expedition, I've always wanted to believe that it was. And when he didn't come back, his men didn't touch it. And when Shackleton's support party lived there for those two years plus, they knew what it was and they didn't touch it. That's my interpretation of it.

DOB: And you didn't touch it.

DB: And we didn't touch it, no. Now we touched it with our eyes, but that's all. I can still see it now; it's a lasting impression. So it was a tremendous feeling of being part of something. If I put you in that situation now, you couldn't help but feel, holy mackerel, this is a very special place.

DOB: Thank you for sharing that. I don't know if I want to go back to more mundane things or not.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 33

I know that when Shackleton finally got to South Georgia—I guess it was where he was rescued—he said, "I'm Shackleton, and when was the war over?" and it wasn't. How aware were you on the ice of world events and their impact, and what were the big issues?

DB: Wonderful question. I'm glad you asked it because I would guess that most of us, perhaps all of us, were aware that we might be in Antarctica longer than just a year. There was a very strong possibility in our minds in 1956 that the world was not a very safe place, and if a nuclear war broke out, the last thing on anybody's mind would be coming back and pulling a hundred and seventy-plus men out of Little America and McMurdo Sound or on the other side, Weddell Sea, Ellsworth, or any of those places.

Many times, Dian, in the course of that long winter, I thought about that. I thought about the possibility that if nuclear war did break out and we were ultimately rescued, that we would be going back to a very, very different world than we had left.

I think we could have survived for a fairly long time if war had broken out. We really had enough food to last us for more than just a year. We had enough fuel if we'd been careful. We could've started eating seal meat, catching fish, and so forth. Seals probably would have been our primary staple.

But the knowledge that if war broke out, one, we probably wouldn't be leaving within the year, and two, when we did leave we'd be going back to a world that would be totally different than the one we left. It was a thought that occurred to us, or to me, more during that long winter night than once the sun came back.

The other thing that—I'm not sure I shared this with anybody since I came back— but there were places in our camp that, I think because of the wind patterns, were scoured of snow, areas where either the snow had been but then disappeared, or there was no snow. I think at least a few of us began to think that maybe we were in an area of potential volcanic activity.

I know that I spent more than one night lying there thinking, what the hell are we going to do if Mt. Erebus decides to erupt? This is a volcano and it is fairly far away, but this whole island is of a volcanic origin. So what do we do?

I think I felt this responsibility more than most because I knew the problems of survival. I knew what it would mean if we would have to evacuate all or part of our camp.

I spent a lot of time in my mind sort of contingency planning, wondering how we would carry this off if in fact the camp—for not necessarily an eruption, but what if we had sulfurous fumes that began to come out of the ground? What would we David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 34

do? Where would we go? How fast could we go? Where would we locate? What would be a safe place to locate? Would the ice be a safe place or was there someplace else on Ross Island we'd have to go to?

DOB: Did you have an answer?

DB: No. We went out, I think—I recall that people made some temperature measurements of these places that had no snow, and we determined that they were as cold as anything else. But you begin to imagine things under those conditions. Perpetual darkness, I think, does strange things to the mind. And I think severe conditions do strange things to the mind. There are reports of people hearing voices, hearing sounds that don't make any sense under those conditions.

DOB: How dark is it?

DB: If the moon is out, it can be quite light. But when there's really no moon and there's no aurora, it's dark. I mean it's not dusk, it's not dawn, it's dark. It's black.

DOB: For how long?

DB: It's really black I'd have to say—my memory probably isn't terribly accurate—but I'd say for a couple of months. I'd say all of June and all of July.

DOB: And then do you get sort of a sense of light days before you see the sun?

DB: Yes. I have in my movie a wonderful shot that I took across McMurdo Sound after the sun had gone but the sunlight was still on the mountains. Remember, those mountains are thirteen, fourteen thousand feet high, so the upper half of the mountain is bathed in sort of pinkish-orange. Everything else looks like a black and white photograph.

So what we had, even after the sun went for the last time, was enough sun coming to illuminate the upper parts of the mountain, and then the days get—well even here, the days get longer, or shorter in the case of the coming of winter— the days get shorter and shorter and shorter, and pretty soon it's perpetual darkness. And then months later you get that spring beginning. Just a little bit of light that comes, and then a little bit more and a little bit more, and then suddenly the sun comes up.

DOB: But not for very long.

DB: Not for very long, no.

David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 35

DOB: But there's hope.

DB: Yes. And then it's more and more and more, and then pretty soon it's there all the time. DOB: What effect does that have?

DB: I found it very invigorating. The first summer, spring, summer, fall of '55, '56, one of the tasks that fell to me was to, either using the dogs or using a Weasel, go out and make corings of the ice. Once we lost Willie Williams through the ice in a D-8, understandably a lot of the people who were driving the tractor were reluctant to be pulling stuff across the ice. Understandably we also wanted to know how fast the ice was melting, and it melts from beneath. The way we did that is that we went out and made ice corings along the tractor train route hopefully knowing that if the ice is still five feet thick or six feet thick, as it was in many places, that we were perfectly safe.

I remember very clearly being out there once and coming back—I was in a Weasel—I saw a D-2 Caterpillar tractor and he was stopped and had the sleds out behind, and the driver just was sitting there. In fact he wasn't sitting in the tractor, he was sitting some twenty, thirty yards away from the tractor.

I drove over and I said, "What's the problem?" He said, "It started to go through." I said, "What do you mean, 'it started to go through?'" He said, "I was driving along and suddenly I could feel it drop."

I knew what it was, but it was terribly hard to convince him what the problem was, and that is, as you may know from your interviews, Dian, you get melting of the sea ice on the surface which then may freeze. So you've got a very thin, relatively thin film of ice, a pocket of water, a layer of water, and then the solid sea ice underneath.

Well what had happened is as he drove across that upper film of ice, it dropped down about six inches and he thought the end of the world was there. So I had to convince him, first of all, that I had done ice corings and that there was plenty of ice there, and secondly, that there was this film of ice and that's all there was to worry about. Finally I was fool enough to get in the cab with him.

I climbed up there with him—the D-2 was still running—so I climbed up there with him and he exercised the levers and we took off, and I rode with him for probably ten minutes or so. That was enough to give him his confidence back. But I must say, though, that the doors were open. [Laughs]

But, back to the invigoration, those ice coring trips meant being out on the ice for a long time, and if you have cold weather, clear weather, and if you have David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 36

something that doesn't tax you in terms of enormous physical expenditure—in other words you're not running alongside a dog team—and if you have perpetual light, you can stay awake for a very long time.

DOB: So your body clock adjusts? DB: Yes, your body clock adjusts. And I think that it was not unusual for people to be out for well over twenty-four and maybe as long as forty-eight hours, I don't know. My recollection is that I was out once for over two days, and I don't recall, other than maybe a catnap, in that time of ever getting into bed or into a sleeping bag.

One interesting thing about (you mentioned the clock) in those early days at Hut Point when we were messing out of a tent. We had four meals a day. We had a noon meal, a midnight meal, a six-in-the-morning meal, and a six-in-the-evening meal. The six-in-the-evening and six-in-the-morning were powdered scrambled eggs, and the other two, as I recall, were some kind of stew meat. That meant if you got up and looked at your watch and said, "Oh my God, it's five o'clock or five-thirty or six o'clock, I'd better go get myself breakfast," you might actually be going and having dinner. [Laughs]

DOB: You might not know which one it was?

DB: You wouldn't know what it was because we only knew if it was scrambled eggs, it was six o'clock.

[Laughter]

DOB: I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about what we've been talking about this weekend, and just your own sense, first about the treaty. What is your sense of the likelihood that Antarctica can be preserved for science and peace?

DB: I think it's pretty good. I think there's enough force in the world, enough reasonable people, enough momentum behind science to preserve this. On the other side of it—the balance that we're trying to maintain here—the world's resources certainly are being diminished, but to my knowledge Antarctica does not possess the quality or quantity—quality's the key word—of resource that would make it economically practical to really do any mineral exploitation. The other side of that is the marine exploitation.

DOB: What if they found gold in them there hills?

DB: I don't think it would be gold. I don't think it would be precious metal in the sense of gold, platinum, so forth. Even then, I think that the enormous cost, one, of its mining and refining and getting it out of Antarctica, all of that process— David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 37

[Interruption]

DB: I have some familiarity with mining operations because I worked for Bechtel for a number of years, not in the mining division but I'm aware of what it takes to develop a mine in Indonesia or western Australia or up in northern Canada. What it takes is a hell of a lot of money, and it's an enormously risky operation. And then once you get it out of the ground, you've got to get it back to where you can do something with it. You would certainly not develop any kind of a refining process because refining of any kind of ore or metal requires an enormous amount of energy which is not allowed in Antarctica.

So my feeling is that even if they were to find relatively large quantities of high- quality ore, it would have to be a very different world before it would be economically feasible. The opportunity perhaps to recover that kind of—if we needed that whatever ore it was, our ability to recover or recycle will develop faster than our ability to do the mining.

The fishery side, the non-mineral side of it, I'm not as optimistic about. I'm really scared about that, and it's not just Antarctica, it's all of our oceans. I look at what's happened in the north Atlantic. I look at what's happened off of the Scandinavian countries, what's happened in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm really worried.

So my issue is far greater than the Antarctic Treaty insofar as marine, fishery, environmental issues. That's a very big part of it, but I think that we have to look at it on a global level rather than just in the Antarctic.

DOB: What do you think about tourism in the Antarctic?

DB: I think it's important that we do it, and for the reason that somebody made this afternoon, Dian, and that is if we are going to protect this place, which I think we must, then we have to provide visibility to it. The people who will see it are people who are generally of higher education, of some wealth, and hopefully some influence. So I see it as an educational process.

I would like to see us expand our exposure to Antarctica, whether it's through Imax or other films or educational programs. I think it's important that we teach our children about these parts of the world that are so important to us and yet are so isolated.

That's one of the roles that I've tried to play in the last forty-plus years, speaking to school kids about this. Not just to try to inspire them to find some adventure and dream about an adventure and do it, but to make them realize that this place David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 38

is a very important place. It plays an enormous part in our lives whether we like it or not. It does and it will.

People talk about El Niño, if you want to understand El Niño, you'd better start understanding the oceanography of our planet.

So I think tourism is important in that regard. I also think it's got to be very, very carefully directed and administered. I do worry that we—as somebody said today, you cannot put a hundred people a day, even only for a few months, into a place without having some impact on it. Let me give you an example, not of tourism but of an impact that I don't think anybody really thinks about at McMurdo. When I was there, I was a member of the McMurdo Sound Ski Club. I still have my little membership card. There were about five or six of us in the club, and we used to climb up on the hillside behind the camp and ski down that hillside.

DOB: Observation Hill?

DB: No. Observation Hill is here, the camp's here, it's the one over here, more to almost the east. No one has done that probably for twenty years, maybe longer, because the dust and the diesel exhaust from the camp settled on that snow field and ultimately melted that snow field, and it's never snowed enough to replace that and it never will.

So it's that very subtle kind of thing that we don't think about, the dust from a helicopter that lands in Dry Valleys or anywhere else, the exhaust from equipment, all can have a profound effect on a very—I mean it's a hell of a big place, but still. I work on the theory that very, very small events have major implications later in life, in our own lives as well as in our global lives.

DOB: All right. Suppose you're an artist and you could capture on one canvas the essence of the Antarctic experience for you. What would you paint; describe it to me.

DB: It's probably fairly easy to describe it because I have a photograph of what I would paint. It would be Mt. Erebus. It would be from the ice looking back towards that ice tongue that emanates from Ross Island out into McMurdo Sound. It would have a dog team in the foreground, not close foreground, but in the distant foreground so you could see this line, the dogs, the sled, one person, the ice tongue, Mt. Erebus, the blue sky and the different shades of blue of the sea ice, because as you know it's a very mottled effect where the snow is collected sometimes on it and some places where it's cleaned off. The dogs almost in silhouette, and then the ice tongue because it's got a whole other kind of series of blues and greens and whites and grays, and then Mt. Erebus itself David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 39

with the blue sky behind it. And maybe just a little bit of steam or smoke coming out of the top.

Now when I tell you that vision, I also have eyes in the back of my head looking across at the other side of those incredible mountains. So that other vision probably has that late afternoon sun on them and sort of a rosy pinky glow.

DOB: The Trans-Antarctic?

DB: Yes. But the first image is that of the dogs.

DOB: What haven't I asked you that you just really wish I would?

DB: Oh, I haven't given you a chance to ask very many questions. I think I've described pretty well my feelings and the people who were important to me, my experiences, my fears, the times I was really afraid, the unreasonable fears of the fact that we were going to be sitting on a volcano.

It was a life-changing experience for me.

DOB: Oh, I meant to ask you that. Paul Siple wrote that one's character and personality are profoundly affected, and nobody goes away the same.

DB: Absolutely.

DOB: How are you different?

DB: In every way. I grew up, I learned a lot about myself, I learned a lot about my fellow human beings, I think I learned more about what's important and what's unimportant in life. I use my Antarctic experience practically every day of my life. I use it a lot in my personal life.

I also use it a lot in my professional life because one of the things I do as a consultant is team building. I often talk about the similarity between putting a group of people together to accomplish objectives and putting a dog team together.

Putting a dog team together, you have to recognize a whole lot of relationships. You have to recognize the vertical relationship, up and down the team, up and down and diagonally. There's a lead dog and then you have two point dogs, they're the first two paired dogs behind the lead dog. Well that first left-hand point dog is a little conscious, sometimes more than a little conscious, of the dog that's running behind him. You know, is that dog behind him friend or foe? Does that dog behind him want to take a bite out of his tail or not? How about the dog David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 40

beside him? What about the dog diagonally across from him behind him? So you have all of these complex relationships going on.

Well what's the difference between that and a team of humans? We just don't put people in harness to accomplish objectives without having to think about their relationships. These relationships, these relationships, and these relationships. I use that in my mind and I also use it in some of the seminars.

I think the purity of Antarctica—that may not be the right word—the simplicity, the basicness is a good reference point in life. You see all of the pettiness that surrounds us so much of the time and it's sort of nice to be able to go back and say okay, there are some things that are very important in life, and they were sort of encapsulated in that experience. You get down to basics pretty quickly when it's sixty below zero and it's blowing hard and you're totally isolated from the rest of the world. DOB: It lets you know what's important.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate your talking with me.

DB: As you can probably tell, it was a great experience and I love talking about it.

[End of interview]