My Last Continent: A Novel(30)
We float along the edge of an iced city, the bergs rising out of the water like skyscrapers. The sea has arched doorways into the sides; the wind has chipped out windows. In the distance, several conical formations tower over the bay, with deep crevasses in their sides, as if enormous claws have slashed through them, drawing blue light instead of blood.
Keller turns his body in to mine, looking over my head at the drifting icelands beyond. Within days, even hours, these icebergs will be unrecognizable—the water will turn them around, flip them over, wash away a little more from below. The icescape we’re viewing now no one’s ever seen before, and no one will ever see again.
“What do you love most?” he asks.
“About you?”
He grins. “About the icebergs.”
I rest my head against his shoulder for a moment before answering. “I love the way some of them look like houses. How they seem to have doors and windows and awnings and porches. It makes me want to climb inside and live in them.”
“I wish we could.”
He runs his hands up my arms, over my elbows to my shoulders. I want to shed my naturalist’s jacket, and strip him of his tourist’s coat, as he pulls me forward and kisses me, finding a slip of bare skin at the back of my neck. In the near silence, the lick of the water against the Zodiac fills my ears, and I feel as though I, too, am floating, buoyed by his hands.
Moments later, the boat lurches us back to where we are—we’ve drifted into view of the Cormorant, a dark shadow behind a thickening layer of mist, and the wind is increasing, blowing snow off the tops of the bergs.
I murmur into his neck, “We should get back.”
“Not yet,” he murmurs back, and as we stand in the gliding boat I sense what he’s thinking: We are like the ever-shifting, ever-changing ice—and whatever happens next, wherever we end up, we’ll never be quite the same again.
FIVE DAYS LATER, after disembarkation, Keller and I spend the night in an Ushuaia guesthouse, not knowing when we’ll see each other next. We speak very little, even during our last moments together, when, in the sharp, bittersweet morning air, I stand with him on Calle Hernando de Magallanes as he puts his bag into the cab that will take him to the airport. He turns to me, and I press into the heat of his body, his arms around me, his fingers on my back. I want to feel the roughness of his hands one more time, his tall lean body against mine, skin to skin. I slide my hands under his pullover, landing somewhere between cotton and fleece, knowing as I do that I won’t be able to reach any further, that this is as far as I can go.
FOUR DAYS BEFORE SHIPWRECK
Bransfield Strait
(62°57'S, 59°38'W)
There are no portholes in the exam room of the medical suite, and though I can feel that the sea is calm, my nausea is getting worse. I’ve managed to put off Glenn’s insistence on a doctor’s visit until today, and now I’m hoping my queasiness is only because I can’t see the horizon. I know Susan has something stronger than meclizine for seasickness—she doesn’t prescribe it except in extreme cases, but I’m getting to the point where I think I qualify.
I always feel a little out of sorts when I can’t see the ocean—which is strange for someone who grew up in the Midwest and spends most of the year landlocked in Oregon. Growing up, I loved the water and would often swim in Shaw Park’s public pool in Clayton, Missouri. I’d dive off the ten-meter platform, pretending it was a seaside cliff. I’d put on my mask and snorkel and imagine that people’s limbs, in their myriad shapes and sizes, were sea creatures. I’d see their colorful swimsuits as brightly hued fish.
My other favorite place had been the geodesic dome at the botanical garden. My father used to take me there when he was in town, which wasn’t often, and the rainforest inside, with its tropical humidity and mist, with waterfalls and wildly exotic plants, made me want to explore the world. By the time I was in junior high, my neighborhood had gotten one of the first outdoor-gear stores in greater St. Louis—it was a small store, but just walking through its narrow aisles felt like adventure. I’d try on the extreme-weather clothing and imagine myself at one of the poles.
I didn’t know back then that I would, in fact, end up spending much of my life in one of the polar regions, and, over the years, I’ve come to think of the continent not only as a place but as a living, breathing thing—to me, Antarctica has always been as alive as the creatures it houses: Every winter, the entire continent fattens up with ice, then shrinks again in the summer. When I’m here on the peninsula, looking out at the green and white of young ice and the deep, ancient blue of multiyear ice, I feel as though the bergs, too, are alive, sent forth by thousands of miles of glaciers to protect the continent from such predators as the Endurance and the Erebus, the Cormorant and the Australis.
And this is what worries me.
Keller knows as well as anyone that the Australis isn’t equipped to take on these icy sentinels. He knows what an iceberg looks like underwater, that beneath the exquisite beauty above the surface is a sharp, jagged, nasty thing that will destroy ships if they attempt to pass too close. Even for an experienced captain, miscalculating the distance is not difficult to do, with the constantly shifting winds and waters, the continual calving of new icebergs. Charts of this heavily traveled area have regions not properly surveyed, and every captain knows there is nothing more dangerous than unseen ice.