My Last Continent: A Novel(38)
I rest my head on his shoulder. “I’ll tell you about her over a beer on the Cormorant.”
He holds the tag up toward the light, and we look at all its scars—its numbers and letters, its scuffs and scratches—and I sense he’s thinking, as I am, of these tags and their long and mysterious journeys, from the hands of researchers to the left flipper of a penguin, to the hundreds of miles of seas where they forage for food, and, finally, to the sloppy wet deck of a fishing boat, before they make their way back to where they came from, completing a full and tragic circle.
THREE DAYS BEFORE SHIPWRECK
Whalers Bay, Deception Island
(62°59'S, 60°34'W)
The first time I saw Deception Island, I thought I’d been struck color-blind. Under a steel-hued sky, the landscape is all gray, black, and white, with streaks of snow melted into the sharp, serrated black hills that form a horseshoe around Whalers Bay. As the Cormorant passes though Neptune’s Bellows—a passage so narrow that most early seafarers missed it, giving Deception Island its name—her white-and-blue reflection bounces off the dark mirror of greenish black water. The island is awash in varying shades of light and dark, the only color coming from human sources: the ship, the bright red parkas crowding the main deck.
As we prepare for our landing, thoughts of what to do with the news I received from Susan run through my head. Of how to tell Keller. It now feels stranger than ever that he’s not here with me, and I’m counting the days in my head, my thoughts skipping ahead to when there’s a possibility, however remote, that I’ll see him again.
I certainly can’t e-mail news like this, but I dread another awkward ship-to-ship phone call, afraid of what I’ll hear in his voice when I tell him—that this news may be not welcome but instead a painful memory of all that he’s lost.
I think of the emperors, the devoted males who guard the eggs—this is Keller. The depth of his devotion would equal that of the birds, while I’ve avoided motherhood. But nature has a way of surprising us, of overpowering us, of reminding us that, no matter what we believe and no matter how hard we try, we’re not in control after all.
Thom and I direct passengers into a Zodiac, which I then maneuver across the expansive, colorless bay toward the island, easing through the sunken, watery caldera of the peninsula’s most active volcano. The penguins don’t build nests here, on the unstable black volcanic sand, and their absence gives me a lonely feeling as I pilot the Zodiac toward the beach. When we’re close, I hop out and drag the boat onto dry sand.
It occurs to me, for a split second, that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, that Susan had told me to take it easy. But I can’t slack off on work without drawing attention to myself. I haven’t confided in anyone—not even Amy or Thom—and I’m not about to tell Glenn.
Steam rises from the sand as I help passengers from the Zodiac. Behind them is the dark, glimmering jewel of the bay; in front, yards of black sand stretch out before the zebra--striped hills. With no penguin colonies on this side of the island, we let passengers wander on their own, and I watch them make their way from the beach toward a shantytown of enormous oil containers and abandoned buildings—relics of the Antarctic whaling industry—so old and suffused with rust that they blend into the lava-blackened cliffs behind them. This reminder of whaling’s gruesome past makes me shudder: the whalers removing the blubber on the ships, then bringing the remainder of the bodies to shore, where they’d boil them down to get every last bit of oil. And the whaling industry isn’t even history—though the International Whaling Commission banned whaling in 1986, the Japanese have continued hunting in the Southern Ocean, killing minke and fin and even endangered sei whales under the guise of “research,” even though they haven’t published a paper in years and continue to sell the whale meat commercially.
Thom arrives in a second Zodiac with more tourists and our ship’s historian, an older British guy named Nigel Dawson. As if sensing my mood, Thom asks Nigel to begin a tour, then hands me a shovel and offers to ferry the tourists back and forth as I get to work. I walk down the beach, away from our landing spot, and start to dig. The water under the rocky sand is hot-tub temperature, and one of the highlights for our passengers is taking a dip in Antarctica, even though our reservoir will be large enough for only three or four bodies at a time.
The sand is wet and heavy; it’s like shoveling deep snow, and I pause to catch my breath. The water pooling in the shallow basin is somewhere around 110 degrees, and though we won’t dig more than two feet deep, my arms are already beginning to ache. When Thom returns to the beach and offers to trade places, I don’t hesitate to hand over the shovel.
As I walk along the shoreline, taking advantage of a few moments to myself, I notice that couple, Kate and Richard. They’re standing several yards away, near one of the abandoned oil containers, and it looks as though they’re arguing again. Then Kate stalks off toward the water, and Richard turns and heads the opposite way. I study them as I would a pair of birds—not because I’ve never seen an unhappy couple on a cruise but because I assume they’re continuing the same conversation as before, about starting a family. Penguins cannot successfully raise a chick alone; they need each other, or the chick will perish. With humans, child rearing is infinitely more complex and yet still so black and white. There’s no such thing as compromise, as having half a child—it’s all or nothing.