Remember the photo of the padlocked plywood crate of Army porn that surfaced during the first decade of the Forever War in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, a rumor has reached my ears of a mid-20th-century Navy porn trove in Antarctica. Not only is it substantial in size, it may well lie under the ice to this day, frozen in eternal preservation.
But I am ahead of myself. Our outposts in Antarctica have their own peculiar cultures and rituals, as all human communities do. If you’ve heard of naked polar bear plunges into the Arctic Ocean at various northern outposts, well, they do stuff like that along the coast of Antarctica, too. Bathing suits are sometimes seen, but in general it’s a clothing-optional-or-discouraged operation, except of course for your mandatory safety line.
So I was reading an amusing blog post that touches on all this: Stupid Traditions – Cold, Naked and Dumb. And there, as an almost-throwaway background historical detail, was this intriguing mention of the frozen porn cache, buried away somewhere deep in the snow.
An Antarctic culture, such that it is, didn’t happen until after the International Geophysical Year in 1957. That’s when year long habitation on the continent began and all the governing international bodies were established. But the culture on the ground wasn’t established by Antarctic treaty and the program managers heading their respective Antarctic programs, nor the first explorers, not even the transitory researchers. For the American program, the founding culture comes from the 1950-1980s enlisted men of the Seabees of the US Navy. Please allow your imagination to go wild with the Venn diagram of Navy, very old Navy traditions, inventive construction workers, and all men in their early to mid 20s. Accordingly, the base culture of Antarctica got a firm fraternity-like stamp. As part of the de-Navifying the stations when the NSF took over, the vintage old porn that used to be all over the place got buried in giant tri-wall boxes (note the plural) somewhere in the snow.
Emphasis, as they say, added by me. That’s all I know. The rest is speculation.
So, sometime in the early 1980s, the word came down. There’s a new sheriff in town. And probably civilian women! We gotta police up all this porn that’s, you know, knee deep in the rec areas. Put it in boxes and bury it out in the snow, it’ll be fine. This new civvie program may not last, we can always dig it up again when they all go home.
Let’s point out that Navy men are famously well-travelled. We’re probably not talking about Playboys and Hustlers and random titty magazines. If you’re headed to Antarctica in 1963 or 1972 you’ll want to curate the porn you put in your sea bag. You’re going to take only the best stuff! This might well include the high-dollar semi-illegal publications you bought on leave in Amsterdam or some French seaport. The starting point for our imaginations, in thinking about this collection, should probably be the Color Climax type stuff.
So, you might be wondering, what the hell is a “giant tri-wall box”? I can’t find information on common sizes, but tri-wall boxes are apparently made of super-thick cardboard, and the one (modern-ish) photo I found suggests they are dimensioned variably to fit on the different sizes of common wooden freight pallets:
Now think about the future. Specifically, think about future archeologists. When they come to excavate the historical sites of early Antarctic exploration, you think they won’t have millimetric ice-penetrating radar/magic that lets them find everything that was ever lost and buried in the ice? Sure, a lot of it is garbage — but what do archeologists love more than rummaging in ancient garbage?
Thus it seems to me completely inevitable that this enormous trove of well-preserved vintage porn, buried and lost now for forty years, will someday rise again from the ice. Even if it all got saturated at some point in a freeze/thaw cycle, photos printed on glossy clay-coated paper don’t quickly smudge or run. If you’ve ever seen water-damaged magazines, what tends to destroy them is mold, mildew, and insect damage. Not much of that in the ice! What’s more, these were technical people. They probably had 8mm porn loops, too. And a lot of those came in tightly-sealed metal film cannisters.
Who says archeology isn’t a fun job?
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