My Last Continent (16 page)

TWO DAYS BEFORE SHIPWRECK

Prospect Point
(66°01
'
S, 65°21
'
W)

I
'm halfway through my jog on the treadmill, at a lower intensity than usual, thinking only of when I can get back to the business center to call Keller. When I'd stopped by earlier, the phone was in use, and so here I am, waiting. I've already gone back once, and the same man was still talking—a business call, from the sound of it.

The walls of the ship's fitness center are all glass, and my eyes fix on an iceberg in the distance as the potential conversation plays over and over in my mind.

I'm pregnant. Or, I should say,
we're
pregnant. Isn't that what couples always say?

The joy in his voice.
I can't believe it
.

Do you really think we can make it work?

We can make anything work. Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?

I forgot to have Susan check during the last ultrasound
.

Laughter.
Sorry. I almost forgot where we are
.

As if we could ever forget where we are.

I tire more quickly than usual. I lay my hand against my abdomen and think of the baby's heartbeat, whether it's picked up as mine has. I set my pace to cooldown mode and check my watch—another fifteen minutes has passed, and I hope that passenger is off the phone by now.

It isn't until I step off the treadmill that I notice Kate Archer, stretched faceup on a yoga mat, her dark hair fanned out around her head. It looks as though she's asleep, and I'm startled when she opens her round, plum-brown eyes and looks right at me.

“I've been reading this book Richard bought,” she says, as if we're already in the middle of a conversation. “About Shackleton. Did you know he was in his early forties, just about Richard's age, during that expedition? The famous one?”

“Mmm.” I hold the treadmill for support as I stretch my legs. I glance over my shoulder, where I can see the passageway that leads to the business center.

“It makes you think about stuff,” she says. “Like how little I've done in life, when I really think about it.”

“We can't all be Shackleton,” I say. “Besides, he was pretty damn lucky. If things hadn't gone his way, he wouldn't be remembered the same way, trust me.”

“I hadn't thought of that.” She sits up, pulling her legs to her chest.

“How's Richard doing?” I ask, donning my sweatshirt. “Has he recovered from his fall?”

“It's only his pride that's wounded,” she says. “It's funny about Richard—he's always so hard on himself. He's never felt comfortable without a bit of pain in his life. Falling off a
cliff puts him back in familiar territory.” She looks up at me. “He feels terrible. He apologized to Nigel, and he even asked Glenn to get in touch with the other man who helped.”

“That won't be easy,” I say.

“I think you're right about the medication—that patch he's using. I've never seen him like this before. But he's so afraid of being seasick he won't take it off.”

“In these waters, he'll be fine. You should convince him to give it a try.”

She doesn't answer, and her eyes drift toward the horizon. “What about you?” I ask. “How're you doing?”

“I've been thinking,” she says. “About how I don't want to be another bystander. One of those people who looks at all this melting ice and says, Oh, well, there's nothing we can do about it anyway. I'm just not sure what it is I should be doing.”

“There's plenty,” I say. “The little things really add up.”

“Like what?”

“Well, don't tell Glenn I said this, but you can ask for more environmentally friendly meals on this ship.”

“I assumed they were already.”

“That's what they want you to think,” I say. “It's ridiculous that they serve seafood on this ship, with thousands of penguins killed by fishing nets every year.”

“That's awful.”

“But do we mention this in the lectures? No. Do we avoid serving fish? No. Because God forbid anyone should have to forgo five-star dining in the Antarctic.”

“I didn't think about that,” she says.

“No one does.” I remember Keller's rant on our last voyage and stop. “I'm sorry. I've got to get going. Besides, Glenn
would have my ass if he heard me right now. I shouldn't be saying any of this.”

“I don't know,” Kate says. “Maybe you should.”

“Well,” I say, “if it came from a guest, Glenn might actually listen.” I look at my watch, realizing I'm going to be late for the day's landing if I don't head belowdecks right now.

I force a smile. “Ready to walk on a new continent?”

OF THE THOUSANDS
of travelers who venture to the Antarctic peninsula every year, fewer than 5 percent actually set foot on the continent. Most of our landings take place on the surrounding islands, not the continent itself—but they don't report this back home; it's always
I went to Antarctica
. And everyone assumes going to Antarctica means the South Pole anyhow, when only a couple hundred ever make it that far.

Even the
Cormorant
's crew, who will bend over backwards to get tourists' feet on the continent, can't always make it happen. It's not for lack of trying but usually for lack of a place to land. Even Shackleton's party never actually made it to the continent. Antarctica does not lay out its welcome mat very often—for eleven months of the year, sometimes twelve, ice prevents boats from landing on the sliver of exposed continent we're heading for today. The winds are calm, the sun is shining, and clear, relatively ice-free water awaits our arrival.

There is no beach at Prospect Point, so ferrying passengers between the
Cormorant
and this steep outcropping of land is a challenge. The clouds are hanging low, obscuring the sheer white cliffs in front of us. Amy and I take turns piloting the Zo
diacs and holding them steady against the rocks, while Thom and Nigel help the tourists up an elevated, scraggy shoulder.

Up the rocky incline, the main attraction is what's left of the hut at Station J—the one Nigel helped take down. It was built in the 1950s by the British Antarctic Survey and was occupied for only two years. The inhabitants left almost ­everything behind—rusting, unopened cans of food, utensils scattered on rickety shelves, books on a moldy cot, a wall calendar open to 1959. It remained a museum of sorts until it was dismantled in 2004. Now there is nothing left but the foundation and the mummified carcasses of two Weddell seals, their gray skin weathered and dirty like old leather but still intact.

The passengers step gingerly over slick, dark rocks, over patches of moss and tiny frozen pools. Some are finished with the views after twenty minutes; others find rocks and settle down for a while. We have two hours scheduled for this landing, and because the first batch of tourists is ready to return to the
Cormorant
so soon, I take a roundabout way back to the ship. I steer the Zodiac through fields of icebergs, pointing out the Doyle Glacier, showing them a piece that has chipped away: a gigantic, flat-topped tabular iceberg in the distance. Closer to us is a newly flipped berg, its tall, wavy blue underside revealed, slick and deep indigo, as if lit from within. The passengers snap photos, and I wonder whether they feel the same change in temperature among the icebergs that I do, the sudden chill of being so close.

As the Zodiac chugs through the ice fields, I remember being here with Keller, after we found each other again, two years after McMurdo. Today I'm looking at an entirely new skyline—the icebergs have split and shifted, floated and col
lided and melted—not unlike Keller and me over the past two years. We're all still here, only different.

I give each Zodiac full of passengers its own iceberg tour, glancing occasionally at my watch to see when I might be able to steal a few minutes to call Keller. As anxious as I am to get back to the ship, I'm careful not to rush as the afternoon wanes. The weather holds steady, with light winds and a wispy cloud cover that lets in the occasional glow of sun.

Finally we're ready to get the last passengers on board, and as I'm helping them into Thom's Zodiac, I notice a life preserver on the rocks, unclaimed. I motion for Thom to wait a moment, then take a step toward the hut.

There, sitting on a rock, facing away from the landing site, is Kate.

I turn back toward Thom and wave him on ahead. He understands and motions that he'll come back for us.

I climb the rocks to where Kate is sitting. She seems to be expecting me; she stands, then spins slowly around, turning in a complete circle. “I thought it would feel different,” she says. “My seventh continent.”

She looks toward the left, where, on the rocks rimming the bay, a small group of Adélies keeps a watchful eye on us. “Richard didn't come,” she says. “Not even to step on the continent—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I guess that's why I stayed so long. I kept hoping he'd show up.”

“I'm sorry he didn't,” I say, “but we need to get down to the landing. Thom will be right back.”

Kate keeps her eyes on the birds. “I was sitting here thinking of something you said the other night during dinner. About how the Adélies are in trouble, how the warmer weather has
been interrupting their breeding cycles. It's just so sad, you know? They do everything they're supposed to do, and it's still all for nothing.”

Then she turns to look at me. “I don't know how I can justify bringing a child into a world that could allow these birds to go extinct.”

“I know the feeling,” I say without thinking.

“You do?” She's staring at me.

“Sure.” I backtrack. “I've studied these birds for years. And you're right, it's depressing as hell. But it's not all bad. The gentoos, for example—they're doing well, adapting a lot better. And satellite imagery recently discovered a huge colony of emperors we didn't even know about. That doubles the number we thought existed.”

“That doesn't save the Adélies.”

I laugh but stop when I see her expression. “I'm sorry—it's just that you sound so much like me right now.”

A tiny smile breaches her lips. “I don't mean to sound so gloomy. I know I should be enjoying every minute.”

“Not everyone who comes down here leaves happy,” I say.

She frowns. “Why do you say that?”

“It seems like there are two kinds of people who come to Antarctica. Those who have run out of places to go, and those who have run out of places to hide.”

“This is my seventh continent, so I guess I've run out of places to go. Which one are you?”

“This is only my third continent. So you figure it out.”

“Are you ever going to leave here? I mean, stop coming back?”

“No. It may only be my third, but it's probably my last.”

“It never gets old?”

“Never. Everything's changing so quickly down here, I can't know what awaits us from one season to the next.”

“How do you keep from getting depressed?”

“I'm actually more depressed when I'm
not
here. I may see the consequences of climate change here, but at least I don't have to watch everyone going about their lives as if it's not actually happening.”

“See, I get that,” she says. “I really do. Richard can't wait to have a baby, but he doesn't think about changing the world for the better instead of adding to its problems.”

Until a few days ago I would've agreed without a second thought. Yet I find myself saying, “But babies themselves ­aren't inherently problematic, are they?”

“You know what I mean. At the rate we're reproducing, the planet will hit ten billion people by the middle of this century. That's not sustainable.”

“No, but unless you're talking about having eleven children, a baby can be a positive thing. Maybe you'll have a kid who grows up to do good in the world.”

“That's what Richard keeps saying. Maybe you two are right.” She sighs. “I just wish he could see it the way I do—but it's so black and white for him. If else.”

“If what?”

“That's one of Richard's sayings,” she says. “Computer speak—you know, how in programming, every event is predetermined by the outcome of another? If we do one thing, it leads to the next. He thinks like this—in absolutes.
If
we have a child, we could strengthen our marriage;
else
we could not.”

This makes me think of Keller—of him and his ex-wife,
Britt; of him and me. Would having another baby have saved them, or done the opposite? What would it do to us? “It's a big issue for couples, I guess,” I say to Kate, trying to keep my voice neutral.

She offers up that same tiny, sad smile. “You're lucky,” she says. “To be so free. So unattached.”

I shake my head but can't think of anything to say. Then I hear the rumble of an approaching Zodiac, the sound of Thom returning for us. “Ready?” I ask her.

She nods but doesn't move for a long moment. I watch her eyes linger on the Weddell seals and follow her gaze. Looking at their well-preserved bodies, I don't know whether to envy them or pity them, lying there untouched, stuck forever in a landscape that won't allow them to disappear.

TEN MONTHS BEFORE SHIPWRECK

The Cormorant

T
he lounge is crowded and dim, the shades drawn. I'm holding a microphone in one hand, and in the other I use a remote to flip through my penguin photographs, behind me on a large screen: close-ups of Adélies courting, their elongated necks stretching skyward; of chicks putting their whole heads into a parent's mouth for a meal of regurgitated krill; pano­ramas of rookeries blanketing the sides of islands, barren landscapes transformed into checkerboards of black and white.

“Unfortunately,” I say, “we have less than half the number of Adélie colonies that we had thirty years ago, and the birds within those colonies are at only a third of their original numbers.”

I continue to the next photos: cracked and abandoned eggs, adult penguins sitting on empty nests. Keller is standing next to me.

After I go through all the slides, I ask the passengers near the portholes to release the shades, let the light in. “We have time for questions,” I say.

“Is there any way to keep the penguins from extinction?” someone asks.

“Our research translates to things we should
all
be doing,” I answer. “Deal with the climate, which is complicating the weather patterns that affect the penguins' breeding. Stop eating fish, which is like taking food from their mouths.”

“I only eat sustainable seafood,” a woman says. “Like the Chilean sea bass.”

“It's good to be aware of where your food is coming from,” I say. “And how it affects everything else in the environment.”

What I don't tell her is that there's nothing sustainable about “Chilean sea bass,”
which is the name some clever public relations team came up with for the Patagonian toothfish. Thanks to its hip new name and subsequent popularity, it's been overfished to the point of being endangered. And I don't tell her that while menus may claim that it's sustainable, most toothfish still comes from illegal fisheries—and, as if that's not enough, they use longlines, which wreak havoc on the birds.

Keller takes the mic from me. “Any other questions?”

“Getting back to the penguins.” A self-assured voice in the back. “I'm not sure all the evidence is in regarding global warming.”

I swivel my head to see a smirking man dressed head to toe in extreme-weather clothes that look so new I expect to see price tags dangling from them.

Keller looks at him for a long moment. “You're saying you don't believe in human-induced climate change?”

“I'm not yet convinced, no.”

“The temperatures here on the peninsula have gone up nearly five degrees in the past fifty years. That makes this region
one of the fastest-warming areas on the planet, about ten times faster than the global average. Does that qualify as evidence?”

“It's not
enough
evidence.”

“The Antarctic ice sheets are melting at an unprecedented rate,” Keller goes on. “I'm talking billions of tons per year. This could mean global sea-level rises of ten, twenty feet.”

I step closer, hoping he'll notice me and stop talking. Keller has already been warned by Glenn not to lecture the passengers, after Glenn overheard a dinner conversation in which Keller took a passenger to task for taking supplements made from krill. Yet Keller doesn't see me, or isn't ready to be silenced.

“As Deb was saying, in the years we've been coming down here, we've seen the Adélie counts drop—in some colonies by as much as seventy percent—and it's not just the fact that they can't nest on snow-covered rocks. The depletion of the ozone layer affects the phytoplankton, which in turn affects the krill, which means the penguins are left with less to eat. They need to go farther in search of food, which means they may not make it back in time to relieve their partners, and their chicks will starve or end up abandoned. Is
that
enough evidence? Or do they have to go completely extinct first?”

The man rises to his feet. “I don't appreciate your tone.”

“I'm sorry,” Keller says. “I guess I find it frustrating when people refuse to see what's right in front of them.”

The man looks aghast. “You can't speak to us like that.” He gives Keller a hard stare before he turns and walks out the door.

An uncomfortable silence fills the room, and through it Keller continues.

“The truth hurts, I know,” he says, “but it hurts the continent a lot more than it hurts any of us. I know you all came down here for the experience of a lifetime—but there's just too many of you.”

Subtly, I reach for the mic.

“You don't need a passport to visit Antarctica,” he goes on, “and now there's a whole new breed of so-called adventurers who don't care one bit about the continent. They just want to skydive or paraglide or water-ski in the coldest place on earth so they have something to brag about at the next cocktail party.”

This time, I wrest the mic from Keller's hand.

“Who are you to tell them they can't?” a voice calls out from the back. “You can't pick and choose who comes here. It's not a country club.”

“No,” Keller says, his voice naked and raw without the mic, “it's more like a cemetery.”

Glenn seems to come out of nowhere—I don't see him until he's right next to me, holding his hand out for the microphone. A high-pitched whine is emitted by the speaker, and Glenn lets the noise die down before he says, in his usual smooth, calm voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our program. Thank you.”

Silently Keller and I begin unplugging the A/V equipment, and I zip my laptop away in its case. I'm hoping Glenn's busy enough to go back to the bridge, but he hovers, and as soon as the last of the passengers has cleared out, he turns to us. He opens his mouth to speak, then simply shakes his head.

“Sorry, Glenn,” Keller says. “I got a little carried away.”

“This is getting old, Keller. I'm not warning you again.”
Glenn looks as if he's about to say something more, but instead he turns on his heel and leaves the room.

I look at Keller. As if he knows what I'm about to say, he holds up a hand before I can speak. “I don't want to talk about it. I'm going to the gym.”

“What about dinner?”

“Fuck dinner.”

I sigh and gather the rest of our equipment. By the time I stow it away, dinner has begun, but I'm not in the mood either. I know this won't sit well with Glenn, that Keller is in enough trouble already, and that, although I have no appetite now, I'll probably be hungry later. But the head chef, Eugenio, likes Keller and me and always lets us sneak in after dining hours, while the galley staff is hanging out, cleaning up. Keller rinses dishes and scrubs pots, I grab a mop, and Eugenio fixes us a vegan version of whatever the galley staff had for dinner—always a Filipino dish, noodles or fried tofu or vegetable empanadas.

I change into running clothes and head to the gym, but Keller's not there. I notice the light on in the ship's tiny ­sauna—a cedar-scented wooden room with a single long bench just wide enough to hold a human body. I take off my clothes and don a towel, and when I open the door, a gust of hot air blows out. Keller's sitting on the bench, back against the wall, legs stretched out. I sit on the opposite end, and I just barely fit. My toes rest against the arches of his feet.

It's our last voyage at the end of a long season, with two stints on Petermann and four shiploads of different passengers. We're both spent. And I worry, at times like this, that Keller isn't cut out for this type of work after all. He's become
an incredible naturalist, yet he doesn't like being around people, especially those who know so little.
You were once just like them,
I reminded him a couple of weeks ago, when he got cranky with a passenger who'd stepped on a penguin trail.
I was never that stubbornly ignorant,
he replied, defensive. And I said,
Well, you are stubbornly impatient
. Give these people a break
.

Now I shift on the hard wooden bench and say, “I've never seen Glenn that pissed off.”

Keller shrugs. “He'll get over it.” He looks at me, then presses his feet forward, bending my toes slightly back. “I know what you're thinking,” he says. “I'll apologize to Glenn, once he's cooled off a bit. And he knows you had nothing to do with it.”

“That's not it at all. You know by now what you're risking, and still you keep doing it.”

“Glenn's more bark than bite,” he says, closing his eyes. “Don't worry.”

“I do worry. I don't know what I'd do without you on these trips.”

I feel as though Keller and I help each other stay sane during these journeys; we remind each other that we'll soon have a couple nights together in Ushuaia, or two weeks alone among the penguins at Petermann.

We're alike in so many ways, even in the way Keller had taken the mic from me after the slide show, and how I'd taken it again from him—both of us trying to save each other from ourselves and the consequences with Glenn. And with a sudden, sinking feeling, I wonder if what Keller and I have been doing isn't keeping each other sane but something more like
the opposite—a folie à deux born of our love for the continent, and for each other, that is steering us not closer to but further away from reality. It's the passengers who reflect the real world, its opinions and habits, its denials and truths—and we're more removed from this world all the time, maybe to the point where we're unable to exist within it at all.

With Keller's eyes closed, I take the opportunity to study him unobserved, blinking out a bead of sweat that has trickled into my eye. He looks unconcerned, relaxed, despite what happened earlier, yet I can see that every moment he's spent on the continent is already etched upon his face: skin ruddy from the cold and wind and sun, eyes receding into a growing nest of crow's-feet. What draws me to Keller are things I think few people outside Antarctica—even Glenn, especially Glenn—will ever see. Watching Keller put out a fire in one of the tinder-dry dormitories at McMurdo. Seeing him break up a fistfight between two mechanics in the Southern Exposure. Watching him secure a loose egg back under a penguin's brood pouch when the bird couldn't leave its nest, sustaining a gory bite wound for his trouble. But most of all, what I know about Keller comes from the shared silences of our glacial hikes, from stealing away from the tourists for a few moments alone on the uppermost deck of the ship, from the reunions that feel as though we've never been apart.

I stand and pick up the sauna's large wooden spoon, ladling water over the lava rocks. A great sizzle rises, and the room fills with steam, intensifying the heat. It's getting harder to breathe, and as Keller opens his eyes, as I look at him through the steam, his eyes dark and wet as a seal's, I realize that,
though I may know him as well as anyone, he will always be a bit out of reach, even to me. Not listening to Glenn is one thing—not listening to me is something I hadn't expected.

“You've got to get your act together,” I tell him. “I know you hate sucking up to Glenn, but if that's what it takes—”

“We work for the
APP
, not Glenn,” he murmurs, his eyes falling shut again.

“As long as Glenn transports us down here, we
do
work for him. The whole program depends on getting a free ride.”

“It's not a free ride,” Keller says. “There's a huge price to pay.”

“Believe me, I know. But it's worth it.”

Keller opens his eyes and looks at me. “So you agree with Glenn? You think seafood belongs on the menu?”

“No, of course I don't, but at least I see the reality—that it's impossible to fill a cruise if you don't serve what the passengers want to eat.”

“These passengers need to know what a disaster this is.”

“I hear you,” I say. “I do. But since we're bringing people down here, we have to teach them, show them how important it is, everything they're seeing firsthand. If you had your way, you'd just fence it all off.”

“Damn right, I would.”

“Well, if that were the case, none of us would be here. Including you.”

The heat of the sauna blurs my vision, and I can no longer see him clearly.

“The explorers,” Keller says, “were obsessed with firsts. Scott, Amundsen, all of them—it was about doing it first. Now everyone's obsessed with lasts. Checking off their last
­continent. Seeing it before it's all gone. Soon they'll be bragging about who photographed the last living Adélie.”

“God, I hope not.”

“Brace yourself,” he says.

Abruptly Keller gets up, opens the door, and walks out, letting in a blast of cool air. More quickly than I believed possible, I feel the heat leave my body.