How High We Go in the Dark(3)
Day 3: It’s amazing how the interior of the crater has already given birth to patches of green. Mammoth tusks protrude from the mud, while new plant life takes root. With the frequent landslides and ice melt creating temporary streams, the whole area has become a washing machine, mixing up the new and the ancient. Everybody here understands what’s at stake. It’s hard to ignore the Earth when it slowly destabilizes beneath you as you sleep, when it unlocks secrets you never asked for or wanted. On my first night, I stood outside and listened. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard the soil churning, the dance of a million dead insects, early humans, and wolves.
Day 27: In the wild, most parents will fight to the death to protect their young. On some level, I know my parents understand this. I do not answer their messages because I’ve said all that’s left to be said. I believe Yumi hears the song of the Earth when she sleeps. I have to believe she knows why I can’t be there for her plays and soccer games and all the other things. She’ll be okay. My colleagues here have children, too. They say their kids don’t understand or that they aren’t as close as they would like to be. But we’re here to ensure that they and their children and their grandchildren can breathe and imagine—and so they don’t have to deliver the eulogies of so many species. Happy birthday, Yumi. If you ever read this, know that I never stopped thinking of you.
I set the notebook aside and returned the iPod to the duffel bag, noticed another item wedged in the corner, wrapped in a pair of fleece socks: a worn photo and a carved figurine. The picture was taken three years ago, when we’d met up with Clara in southern Alaska. Yumi had just turned seven, and I was excavating a four-hundred-year-old Yupik village that was slowly washing out to sea.
I recognized the squat brown dig site trailer in the background. I used to sit inside and watch over my grad students while I finished my morning paperwork and coffee. The day this photo was taken, Miki and I looked on as Clara fit Yumi into a pair of oversized waders. Whenever Yumi saw her mother, on average every three or four months, for a week or two at most, it was as if Clara could do no wrong. “We only have the week,” Miki told me that morning, when it seemed like I was about to go lecture our daughter. “Don’t cause trouble.”
I walked from the excavation office to the edge of what my assistants called the mosh pit and watched as my daughter and granddaughter sifted through the sludge. Clara was telling Yumi a story about seal hunts.
“I think I’m going to start a painting of Clara and Yumi together like this, knee-deep in the mud,” my wife said from behind me. “For my next gallery show. Maybe it’ll remind Clara that the two of them need each other.”
“It’s almost too perfect,” I said.
“Look, Grandpa. I’m a big poop!” Yumi yelled.
Afterward, Miki took Yumi back to the motel to get cleaned up and I urged Clara to stay behind so we could talk.
“Your mother says you’re coming home for a while once we finish here,” I said.
“A week at most. I told you about the opportunity in Siberia,” she said.
“You see how much Yumi misses you, though.”
Clara stood next to one of the folding tables that overlooked the lip of the mosh pit. It was strewn with artifacts. She was focused on a wooden doll we’d found at the site, no larger than a soda can.
“I’m doing this for her,” she said.
“Sure, I get that,” I said. I’ve always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.
“You’d rather I come home, wouldn’t you, and maybe teach in your department? Pick up Yumi every day after school and pretend like everything is going to be fine.” She waved the wooden doll in the air, studied its simplistic carved smile. “Whoever played with this had a hard life, you know. Probably a really short one.”
“I just want Yumi to have a childhood with her mother,” I said.
“You and Mom are in no position to talk about being there for your child.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” I said. Every time Clara made this accusation, I felt like a pill bug curling in on itself. Once she had her own money, she’d wasted no time escaping to the farthest corners of the planet with only postcards and photos to let us know she was alive. Clara turned and left me standing there, grabbed her messenger bag, walked toward the ocean, still holding the wooden doll. By the time I caught up to her, she’d pulled out another one of her journals.
“Have you seen the new sea rise projections?” she said, reading off a list of cities that might be submerged within Yumi’s lifetime—most of southern Florida, nearly all the major cities in Japan, New York City turned into Venice. “Are you watching the news of Appalachia burning? Brain-eating amoeba population explosions at summer camp lakes?”