My Last Continent: A Novel(5)

“Ah,” she says, then falls back into silence.

I know I should be more friendly, engage her in conversation, educate her about the Antarctic, but I already feel as though I’ve used up my conversation quota for the day. And then I see something ahead—a flash of reflected light, indicating the presence of something I can’t possibly be seeing.

I reach into my cargo pants and retrieve my binoculars, and I see I was right: In the distance is a ship, taller than the eight-story iceberg that is nearly hiding it.

I mutter, “What the hell?” and try to adjust my binoculars, wondering if they’re fogged up, or broken—or if there’s something wrong with my own eyes.

Then I glance over at the woman next to me, trying to remember her name. Kate. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just that I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

“What are you seeing?” She leans over the rail, as if that’ll help her vision. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You will,” I say, lowering the binoculars. “Give it a second.”

“I wish I had my husband’s binoculars right now. I could probably see straight through that iceberg.”

It takes me a second to make the connection. “Is your husband’s name Richard?”

“Yes,” she says, looking over at me. “Why?”

“I met him this morning. At breakfast.”

“Then you’ve seen more of him today than I have.”

There’s something strange in her voice, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ve never been comfortable with the unnatural intimacy created on these voyages—we’re witnesses to crumbling marriages, sibling rivalry, love affairs. Part of the problem, I think, is that, for so many, Antarctica is the trip of a lifetime, and their expectations are so high. They come down here expecting to be changed forever, and often they are, only not in the ways they expect. They get seasick, they aren’t used to the close quarters, they learn that it’s because of their own bad habits that the oceans are dying. And this all seeps into not only their dream vacation but their relationships, more deeply than they’re prepared for.

Just then the ship begins to emerge from behind the iceberg, her bow nosing forward, revealing as she floats onward her many oversize parts: a vast, open-air terrace; a railing encompassing a sundeck and swimming pool; some sort of playing field just beyond. The ship comes slowly into full view, along with hundreds of tiny portholes and dozens of balconies feathered across the port side.

Even Kate looks surprised. “How far away is that boat?” she asks.

“Not far enough.”

“It must be gigantic.”

I nod. “Ten stories high, twelve hundred passengers, four hundred crew. And it has no business being down here.”

“It looks like it made a wrong turn somewhere in the Caribbean. How do you know so much about it?”

“I’ve been studying the effects of tourism on the penguin colonies,” I say. “I keep up on these things. The Australis is a new ship, registered in the Bahamas but probably filled with Americans—a floating theme park, like most of them.”

“You’re obviously not a fan.”

“I have no problem with ships like this in the Caribbean or in Europe. But down here—the last thing any of us needs, least of all the penguins, is for that behemoth to dump a small town’s worth of people on these islands.”

“Then why is it allowed down here?”

I sigh, staring at the ship, which is moving along the horizon like a pockmarked iceberg. “No one owns these waters. They can do whatever they want.”

“Is it headed south?”

“Looks like it,” I say, then shrug. “The good news is that, most of the time, ships that big just dash across the Drake to give passengers a glimpse of the icebergs and then head back up north. So we probably won’t see it again. It’s way too big to get into most of the places we visit.”

Kate’s still looking at the cruise liner, and I’m heartened to see that she appears as disgusted by it as I am. “It makes even that iceberg look small.”

I let out a wry laugh. “That iceberg is nothing compared to what we’re getting into,” I say. “And the Australis doesn’t have a reinforced hull like we do. That’s why I’m betting it will turn around.”

“What if it does come across icebergs?” she asks. “How will it navigate around them?”

“Carefully,” I tell her. “Very carefully.”





FIVE YEARS BEFORE SHIPWRECK


Petermann Island





When I notice one of our gentoo chicks is missing, I flip through our field notebook, find the colony chart, and match nest to nest. According to our records, the chick was two weeks old, but now the rocky nest is empty. I search but find no body, which means its disappearance must have been the work of a predatory skua. When skuas swoop down to snatch chicks or eggs, they leave little behind.

I move away from the colony and sit on a rock to make some notes. That’s when I hear it—a distinctly human yelp, and a thick noise that I have only heard once in my life and never forgotten: the sound of bone hitting something solid.

I stand up and see a man lying on the ground, a red--jacketed tourist from the Cormorant, which dropped its anchor in our bay this morning. The ship, making her rounds in the Antarctic peninsula, had left Thom and me here a week earlier, and she’ll pick us up in another week, during the last cruise of the season.