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concern. It was a question of
time
.
    â€œDave Bresnahan, this is John Wright. I’m calling from the Denver office. And I’d like to talk about the traverse project. Is this a good time?”
    â€œI’ve been expecting your call.” Dave was the operations and logistics officer for the U.S. Antarctic Program. He was NSF’s sponsor for the project.
    â€œDave, I’ve been here a week going over reports and gauging the support I might get. I’m happy to find high quality in Evans’s legacy documents—”
    â€œYou should see the smile on my face to hear you say that, John.”
    Dave might have sat in a cubicle like mine, in some endlessly bigger government office, but he sounded comfortable. Perhaps he sat at a deluxe executive desk in its own room. With a door. When the SPIT project lost its funding, Dave had instructed Evans to leave a record that the next person could start right in on. “Very happy indeed to hear your opinion. We had no idea how long it’d be, or even if we’d start up again. And if there’s ever another hiatus in the project, I’ll want you to leave the same kind of trail.”
    â€œIf I take the job, I will. But we need a reckoning about that. This is not a three-year job. I read the draft proposals while I was at Pole. And I wrote back that it was a five-year job at a sane pace, a four-year job with luck. Now that I’m in the office, I find the project is slated for three years. We don’t know the terrain, and we do not know what kind of tractors or sleds will work on it. Three years assumes we know everything at the outset, and that ain’t so.”
    Dave’s voice became less familiar, less friendly. “We’re going to fund the project incrementally. We’ll take stock of lessons learned each season and fund the next step. And we’ll hope to get the concept proved in three years.”
    Dave had advanced the cause in little steps for more than one decade. And he was passionate about the project. But three years was not entirely a matter ofreckless bravado; it was a matter of what he could sell. A longer project would not have sold in the upper echelons at NSF. The contractor wrote what Dave told them to. As for me, the nature of my employment through the support contractor would not be full time, rather individual contract employment from one six-month period to the next. The incremental project funding Dave described offered no promise for the project duration.
    â€œThree years is too fast,” I declared.
    â€œYou let me worry about that,” he said. “You are the right man for the job. Call any time, with any concern you may have. And keep me informed.”
    â€œIf I take the job, I will.” We hung up.
    Even with the promise of support from NSF’s sponsor, pay-go was vulnerable to a three-year pass-fail. On the flip side, the support contractor’s cost-plus contract held no incentive for project success, only for its duration and the total dollars spent on it. Where were my allies? I’d just hung up the phone with one.
    The footpath winding around the Denver office park, where the contractor’s huge building was only one of many, followed a drainage stream that babbled over artfully placed rocks in a manicured streambed. The sun overhead warmed the crisp, spring air. I strolled alone.
    A years-old conversation with a mechanic in the McMurdo shop came to mind. My traverse partner and I had managed a field fix on our fifteen-ton Delta truck on the frozen waters of McMurdo Sound. With radio support from the shop, we completed our delivery to Marble Point, and we drove our vehicles back to town.
    There I met the mechanic foreman in the eight-bay cinderblock “Heavy Shop.” Folks spoke of him with awe, for he’d been in the program a long time and had worked at remote outposts on the continent. He looked like their stories painted him: a shaggy-bearded,