My Last Continent: A Novel(4)
The last time I said good-bye to Keller Sullivan was only three months earlier, during an unexpected Stateside visit. We still live on opposite coasts, and during the eight or more months we spend away from the continent, we keep in touch via e-mail, phone, and Skype. We’re like penguins that way—each of us off on our own separate journeys until we meet again, our shared nests reserved for these expeditions, for the peninsula, for the camps we build together.
It’s complicated, what we share—a relationship born among the penguins, among creatures whose own breeding habits are as ever-evolving as the oceans to which they’re constantly struggling to adapt. While many species mate for life, others are monogamous for only one season; still others have surprisingly high divorce rates—for all of them, survival comes first. Sometimes I think this sums up Keller and me pretty well. We have fallen in love with each other as much as with Antarctica, and we have yet to separate ourselves, and what we are, from this place. Each time I arrive at the bottom of the world, I never quite know what our nest will look like, or if it’ll exist at all.
Last season, when I arrived in Ushuaia, bleary-eyed and dreading our first week on the Cormorant before Keller and I would be dropped off at Petermann, I didn’t see him until I was on board. Until I felt my duffel being lifted out of my hand, an arm around my waist. He spun me into a bear hug before I got a chance to look at him, then set me down so we could see each other.
“Here we are,” he said. “Fin del mundo—”
“—principio de todo,” I said, finishing the sentence for him as I usually did, repeating the town’s motto, lettered in blue on the white wall that borders the colorful buildings of the town and the sharp, snowcapped mountains beyond them.
The end of the world, the beginning of everything.
Starting a journey to Antarctica doesn’t feel right anymore without Keller. In a sudden flurry of emotions, I don’t know which to give in to: worry, anger, or simply disappointment.
AS THE WAVES continue to lose their sting, guests begin to emerge from their cabins, unsteadily navigating the passageways. They don their waterproof, insulated, bright red Cormorant jackets and make their way topside.
The first few guests on the deck soon grow into a crowd of dozens, and it’s not long before I’m surrounded, fielding their questions. How fast do icebergs melt? Where will that one end up? How big do they get?
“An iceberg the size of Singapore broke off a glacier not too long ago,” I tell them. “But the largest one was even bigger than that, about two hundred miles long.”
“Two hundred miles?” says the guy who’d asked. “That’s like the distance from New York to D.C.”
I nod but don’t answer, never having been to either place. But I do understand their need to put their surroundings in context—I imagine I’d need to do the same if I were in New York or Washington. I’d need to compare the Washington Monument to the tallest pinnacle iceberg I’d seen, or compare the width of Times Square to one of the crevasses I’d come across on the continent.
But the truth is, right now I’m grateful for their questions. At least when they’re talking I don’t have to think about anything else, like where Keller is and why I haven’t heard from him, or how I can possibly reach a man who rarely answers his cell phone and tends to stay offline for weeks at a time.
“Was that a penguin?” a man asks, blinking as if he’s just seen a meteor.
I’d missed it, whatever he’d seen. “Could be,” I tell him. “They feed in this area. Keep your eyes up ahead, off to the side of the boat, and you’ll see them. The noise of the ship scares them out of the water.”
I watch as the tourists lean over the railing; I listen to rapid--fire sounds from their cameras. How quickly they duck -behind their viewfinders—in their haste to capture images of the penguins, to gather their mementos, they miss the real beauty in everything there is to see. I have to remind myself of my own first journey south, when I took more photos than I could count, hardly daring to believe I’d have the chance to see any of it again. The penguins’ sleek bodies porpoising through the waves, so fast they look like miniature orcas. The way they leap and swim in formation, as if they’re in the sky instead of in the water. The way they change direction in the blink of an eye.
Gradually, the cold seeps in, and everyone shuffles inside. My shoulders begin to relax as I lean against the railing. It takes a moment before I realize I’m not alone.
A woman stands about twenty feet away, where the railing curves along the bow, and while she’d been facing the other direction, she’s now turning toward me.
“Hi,” she says and walks over. I see her glance at my name tag, and then she holds out her hand. “So you’re the penguin expert,” she says. “I’m Kate Archer.”
After a brief pause, I take her hand, lost inside a puffed-up Gore-Tex glove. Her smile curves a half-moon into an otherwise lonely expression, and she seems so happy to meet me that I’m guessing she’s traveling alone and hasn’t talked to anyone in a while.
“This is amazing,” she says. “I bet you never get sick of this view.”
“No, I never do.”
She points toward a berg in the distance. “How tall is that iceberg?”
“I’d say sixty, eighty feet.” Then I add, “About the size of an eight-story building.”