My Last Continent: A Novel(2)
At least once on every voyage, someone will ask me how I do it—how I can live for weeks or months at a time down here, going from ship to tent, dealing with the harsh conditions, spending so much time alone. They will ask whether I’m married, whether I have kids—questions I rarely hear asked of a male naturalist. But because I want to keep this gig, I will bite my tongue and smile. I’ll tell them I know penguin breeding habits well, but human connections are another thing entirely and are especially complicated when it comes to the Antarctic. I’ll offer up a bit of the continent’s history, overflowing with stories of love gone wrong: The polar scientist Jean-Baptiste Charcot returned home after wintering on the ice to find that his wife had left him. Robert Falcon Scott, who died on the continent, never even knew about the rumors that his wife had strayed while he was away. And of course I have stories of my own, from my complicated and still-evolving history of love on the ice, but these I’ll never share.
The brochures also highlight the fine dining, the fitness center and sauna, the library, the business alcove with its computer terminals and satellite phone—all the things that remind our passengers that they’re never far from the comforts of home. These passengers can’t understand that I prefer a sleeping bag on hard icy ground to soft sheets in a heated cabin. That I’d rather eat half-frozen food than a five-course meal. That I look forward to every moment away from the ship, when I hear the voices of penguins and petrels and feel farther than ever from the world above the sixtieth parallel.
WHEN I WAKE early the next morning, the other bunk in my cabin is empty. My roommate, Amy, must be up on deck, looking for albatross and petrels. Amy Lindstrom is the ship’s undersea specialist, but she’s just as fascinated with the creatures hovering above the water—and the Drake offers glimpses of birds we won’t see farther south.
I should drag myself out of bed, too, but instead I prop myself up on one elbow and watch a wandering albatross just outside the porthole above my bunk. I’m always mesmerized by these birds who dominate the skies over the Southern Ocean; they spend months, sometimes years, at sea, circumnavigating this part of the planet without ever touching down on land. I observe the albatross for ten minutes, and he doesn’t once flap his wings. He occasionally lets the wind lift him above the ship, out of my line of vision, but most of the time he glides a few inches over the waves, just out of reach of the roiling whitecaps.
I turn my head when I hear the door creak open, but I know it won’t be the person I’d expected to see by now, the one I most want to see.
“Rise and shine,” Thom says.
His tousled hair is spiked with more gray than I remember. I haven’t seen Thom since we last camped out amid the penguins on Petermann Island five years ago, doing APP research, and yesterday, during the madness of getting passengers boarded and settled, we’d hardly had time to exchange more than a few words. Like most of the islands we’ll visit with passengers over the next week, Petermann is inhabited only by Antarctic natives—birds and seals, lichens and mosses and algae, various invertebrates. Despite the long hours we put in there, counting penguins and crunching data, it’s a quiet, peaceful existence. And now I know Thom and I will fall into the same rhythms, on land and on sea, alone or surrounded by tourists. We usually work in a companionable near silence, having learned each other’s moods through weeks together at the bottom of the earth.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Glenn sent you.”
He nods. “It’s showtime.”
“What’s next, costumes? Batons?”
“It’s as good a time as any to make an appearance,” Thom says. “It’s a ghost ship right now. Last chance to eat a meal in relative quiet.”
I sit up slowly, realizing by the steadiness of my stomach how much the waves have lessened, and while it’s not exactly Drake Lake out there, I have no excuse to keep hiding down here.
I swing my legs over the side of the bunk. Because I shower at night and sleep in my clothes, I only have to pull back my hair before I’m ready to go.
I let Thom lead the way to the dining room and observe the slight limp with which he walks, the result of a fall into a crevasse on his first trip to Antarctica, more than a decade ago. Despite the swaying of the ship, despite my own need to let my hands trace the bulkhead for balance, he does not need to hold on to anything.
We sit down at an empty table with plates of toast and fruit, our full coffee mugs sloshing. The dining room is vacant except for a steward walking through with a tray, on his way to deliver nausea-calming ginger soup to one of the bedridden passengers.
“You’re right,” I say to Thom. “Gotta love a ghost ship.”
He nods. I look at him for a moment, then ask about his kids, his wife, how it feels to be back. We usually don’t spend a lot of time talking about our personal lives. But I have a question I need to ask him, and I want to ease into it.
After Thom fills me in on his wife’s new job, his kids’ transitions into the first and third grades, I bring it up. “So you were called in sort of last minute?”
He nods. “I contacted Glenn last year, thinking I’d be ready to come down again now that the kids are older. He said he didn’t have any openings, but then he called a couple of months ago, asked me to fill in.”
“For Keller?” I ask.
“Yeah.”