Where'd You Go, Bernadette(88)

There was something unspeakably noble about their age, their scale, their lack of consciousness, their right to exist. Every single iceberg filled me with feelings of sadness and wonder. Not thoughts of sadness and wonder, mind you, because thoughts require a thinker, and my head was a balloon, incapable of thoughts. I didn’t think about Dad, I didn’t think about you, and, the big one, I didn’t think about myself. The effect was like heroin (I think), and I wanted to stretch it out as long as possible.

Even the simplest human interaction would send me crashing back to earthly thoughts. So I was the first one out in the morning, and the last one back. I only went kayaking, never stepped foot on the White Continent proper. I kept my head down, stayed in my room, and slept, but, mainly, I was. No racing heart, no flying thoughts.

At some point, I was paddling in the water, and a voice popped out of nowhere.

“Hello!” it said. “Are you here to help?” It might have been saying, Are you a good witch or a bad witch? It was that perky, the blues that Technicolor, the iceberg that spirally.

The greeting belonged to Becky, a marine biologist, who was out in a Zodiac, taking water samples. She was bunking on the Allegra en route to Palmer Station, a scientific research center, where, she explained, she was going to live for the next several months.

I thought, No way, you can actually live down here?

I climbed into her Zodiac and called out phytoplankton levels. She was a big talker. Her husband was a contractor who was back home in Ohio using a computer program called Quickie Architect (!) because he wanted to be put up for a project at the South Pole to dismantle a geodesic dome and replace it with a research station.

Whaaaaa…?

By now you’ve learned that I’m a certified genius. Don’t say I never told you about my MacArthur grant, because I did. I just never stressed what a big deal it was. Really, who wants to admit to her daughter that she was once considered the most promising architect in the country, but now devotes her celebrated genius to maligning the driver in front of her for having Idaho plates?

I know how bad it must have been for you, Bee, all those years, strapped in the car, hostage to my careening moods. I tried. I’d resolve never to say anything bad about any of the drivers. Then I’d be waiting, waiting, for some minivan to pull out of a parking space. “I’m not going to say it,” I’d remind myself. From the backseat, in your squeak: “I know what you were going to say. You were going to call her a fucking idiot.”

Why I’m even mentioning this, I guess it’s to say that I let you down in a hundred different ways. Did I say a hundred? A thousand is more like it.

What did Becky mean, dismantle the dome? What were they going to do with it? What was the new station being built from? What materials are even found at the South Pole? Isn’t it just ice? I had a million questions. I asked Becky to have dinner with me. She was a drab type, with a ten-gallon ass, unctuous toward the waiters in some “see how well I treat the help” show of superiority. (I think it’s a midwestern thing.) After dinner, Becky strongly suggested she’d like to hit the bar, where, between her questions to the bartender about the ages of his “kinders” back in Kashmir, I pumped her for more facts.

At the risk of being like Dad and overexplaining stuff you already know: Antarctica is the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest place on the planet. The South Pole averages sixty below zero, has hurricane-strength winds, and sits at an altitude of ten thousand feet. In other words, those original explorers didn’t have to just get there, but had to climb serious mountains to do so. (Side note: Down here, you’re either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you’ll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he’s a legend, all-star personality, but there’s the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e., won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don’t know. Finally, there’s Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand.) The South Pole is on a shifting ice sheet. Every year they have to relocate the official Pole marker because it can move one hundred feet! Would this mean my building would have to be a wind-powered crab-walking igloo? Maybe. I’m not worried about it. That’s what ingenuity and insomnia are for.

Any structure built would have to be coordinated out of the United States. Every material, down to the nail, would have to be flown in. Getting the supplies there would be so costly that absolutely nothing could be wasted. Twenty years ago, I built a house with zero waste, using only materials from no farther than twenty miles. This would require using materials from no closer than nine thousand.

My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like, I’m going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I’m about to kick the shit out of life.

The whole time I was thinking, What a fabulous idea of mine to take this family trip to Antarctica!

You know me, or maybe you don’t, but from then on, every hour of my day became devoted to plotting my takeover of the new South Pole station. When I say every hour of my day, that would be twenty-four, because the sun never set.