My Last Continent (10 page)

Later, when the rain stops, we hang our clothes to dry outside. I'm quiet, thinking about what comes next. After our return voyage, when the
Cormorant
docks in Ushuaia, we'll
watch the passengers crowd onto a coach bus bound for the airport, and we'll have one more night together before Keller himself heads to the airport. Because this is Keller's first trip with the
Cormorant,
he'd only been offered one voyage, one assignment at Petermann. He'll travel from Ushuaia to Santiago to Miami to Boston while I prepare for the next group of passengers to embark. I'll spend another week on board and two more weeks on Petermann with another naturalist from the
APP
before heading back to the States myself.

“Don't worry,” he says, as if reading my mind, as we begin a walk along the edge of the gentoo colony near our camp. “It won't be like before. We'll figure things out.”

He stops, looking out over the colony, then raises his hands, as if framing the scene for a photograph. “All this—it reminds me of a word I learned from my grandmother, a long time ago,” he says. “Her parents were German immigrants, and this was back when there was a lot of anti-German feeling in the States, so they distanced themselves from their heritage. My grandmother had always wanted to visit Germany, but she never did—she taught me this German word,
fernweh,
which doesn't have an equivalent word in English. It means something like being homesick for a place you've never been. She said that was how she felt about Germany, her whole life.” He motions toward the hills, peppered with nesting gentoos. “I finally understand what she meant.”

A looming intuition seeps from below my consciousness, like the weighty, hidden part of an iceberg—the unwelcome awareness that for Keller, this is still about Antarctica, not about me. The continent has given him the unexpected liberty of beginning again—and while I know I can never un
derstand the depth of his loss, I'm not sure he can truly begin again, even if he doesn't fully realize it. He'd let me go once already, by staying at McMurdo, and, though I'd managed to let him go, too, I won't be able to do it twice.

“So is there a word in English—in any language—for what we're doing?” I ask. “For thinking we can make it work this time?”

“Insanity?” he says.

I laugh. “The ecstatic display,” I say, thinking of penguin mating rituals. “The flipper dance.”

“Normal people,” he says, “just call it love.”

WE MEET UP
late in the day, at the edge of one of the island's largest gentoo colonies, each of us clutching a hand counter. We settle on a large, flat rock about twenty feet from the colony to rest for a few minutes before heading back to camp.

We watch a crèche of juveniles waddle eagerly forward as adult penguins return from the sea, ready to feed their still-­dependent offspring. A few penguins sit on eggs, and others are feeding very young chicks, taking turns to forage for food. One gentoo tries to steal rocks from another's nest, evoking a shrieking match among several of the birds. A skua lands dangerously close to a nest, stepping toward one of the tiny chicks, and five nearby gentoos turn on the skua, who lets out a rubbery caw and flaps away. Moments later, the gentoos are squawking at one another again.

“I'm still getting used to not intervening,” Keller says.

One of the challenges of being a naturalist is letting nature
take its course, no matter what. “I'm not sure that feeling ever leaves you.”

He lifts his eyes from the penguins to the ocean beyond. “One day at McMurdo,” he says, “a Weddell seal wandered onto the base—I have no idea how he got there, so far away from the water. He was all alone, just sort of limping along. He was small—a juvenile.”

I listen, remembering when we met, when Keller couldn't tell a crabeater seal from a Weddell. How he'd called the leopard seal a sea leopard.

“I followed him, wanting to help. There was no way I could get him back to the water, but I could tell he was dying, and I wished I could put him out of his misery, at least. I stayed back, waiting, as he slinked along. I don't know if he was aware of me or not. Finally he stopped moving. I watched him die.” Keller turns his head toward me. “Is that crazy?”

“I'd have done the same.” I stretch out my legs until one of my thick-soled boots touches his. Those who winter over at McMurdo occasionally see animals heading away from the sea when they should be going toward it—some are confused, lost; others are steady and determined, as if they are on some strange suicidal mission. Of all the challenges of overwintering, this is the most disconcerting.

“I'm sorry I didn't stay in touch,” I say. “I was trying to protect myself, I guess.”

“I shouldn't have given you a reason to.”

I nudge his boot. “Only one more week until we're back in Ushuaia.”

“I wish I could stay down here,” he says.

“I can give you the key to my cottage,” I suggest. “You can
make yourself at home. The place does need a good cleaning, though, and you'll have to feed my landlord's cat.”

He smiles. “Can I take a rain check?”

“Why?”

“I'll be teaching at Boston University, believe it or not—just summer term, a freshman bio course. When they offered it to me a month ago, I didn't know whether I'd see you. After we lost touch, I thought—” He stops. “It's a different sort of complicated, this life, isn't it?”

I think of two volcanologists I know from McMurdo, an “ice couple,” meaning they are together whenever they're at the station but then happily return home to their families, thousands of miles apart, after their research time ends—an arrangement not at all uncommon among Antarctic researchers and staff.

“Couldn't you get out of it?” I ask. “I mean, if you really want to come to Oregon instead.”

“I don't know. I guess a part of me needs to see this through.”

“Teaching? You could do that in Eugene.”

“It's not that. It's about”—he pauses—“not disappearing.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's been almost five years,” he says, “but still I go home and think of how things used to be. Wiping up Ally's dinner from the kitchen floor while Britt gave her a bath, or vice versa. We traded off these things, but usually we both read her a story. Sometimes it was the only time we all were together in a day, but we always had that.” A smile lights his face, and I feel as though he's talking more to himself than to me. Then it fades. “Britt donated all of Ally's books to Children's Hospital before I had a chance to go through them. I'd have liked
to keep just one. Her favorite was
Make Way for Ducklings
. Since we lived in Boston and we'd taken her to see the bronze ducks in the Public Garden, she thought it was a true story.”

He leans back slightly on the rock, propping himself up with his hands. “After she was gone, after Britt left, I'd be at the office until nine, ten, eleven. Until I was tired enough to know I could get to sleep in an empty apartment. Before I could register how quiet the place was, and how neat—no food on the floor, no toys in the bathtub, no picture books.” He angles his head toward mine, though his focus is on a pair of gentoos walking past a few feet away. “Just before I went to McMurdo, I called Britt. A week before Ally would've turned four. Britt had met her new husband by then, but they weren't married yet. I told her I was thinking about her because of ­Ally's birthday—but the truth was, a part of me was worried that she'd forget. She'd been trying so hard to move on, to erase both of us from her life—it was as if we'd both disappeared.” He raises his eyes to mine. “And then I did disappear. I came down here.”

There's nothing I can say, and I suddenly feel selfish for wanting all that I want for us, for even attempting to weigh my own desire against the depth of his pain.

I move one of my gloved hands over to touch his and lean against him. We watch a penguin raise her head, calling to her chicks, and they emerge from the crèche, wobbling toward her, ready to eat.

The weather has turned, the wind blasting tiny frozen chips of rain into our faces, our hats and jackets. We sit and watch the penguins for a few more minutes before packing up our supplies and heading back to camp.

THE NEXT MORNING,
we're packed and ready by the time Glenn radios with the
Cormorant
's ETA. Keller and I are windblown and grubby; I feel the sweet, worn-out exhilaration that comes from the end of a research trip, as well as the nagging anxiety about what our data will ultimately reveal.

Keller has already taken a load of supplies to the landing site, and as I follow, approaching the bay where a Zodiac will appear for us at any moment, I feel the same irresistible pull toward Keller I always have, taut as ever. I slow as I get nearer, and the few feet left between us feels vast, wide open; in this space I see our entire relationship, or whatever this actually is—both clear and opaque, entirely comfortable, and completely whole.

An hour later, after a hot shower on board, I glimpse my face in the tiny mirror above the sink. I hardly recognize myself, and it's not the sun- and wind-reddened skin or the dark circles under my eyes or the deepening of a few wrinkles. With a jolt I recall learning, in a long-ago biology class, about a section of the cerebral cortex that, when damaged, causes a condition known as face blindness. If you damage this part of the brain, you can no longer recognize friends, family members, or even your own face in the mirror—and this is how I feel, as though I'm looking at a stranger—someone with features just like mine, only relaxed, softened: someone in love, someone loved back, someone happy.

IN THE MUDROOM
after the morning's landing at Cuverville Island, I hang up the extra life preservers and get ready
to signal the crew to bring up the remaining Zodiac. Then I notice there's still one tag in the
OFF SHIP
position. I don't recognize the name, but who it is doesn't matter as much as the fact that we've left someone on shore.

“Shit,” I mutter and radio Glenn to tell him to wait up.

I turn the Zodiac back toward the landing, my shoulders tensing. It's extremely rare for tourists to get left behind, and my mind flashes to Dennis. When I round the coast to the landing spot, the sight of a lone passenger standing there nearly stops me short.

“Hello?” I call out, but he doesn't seem to hear me.

I bring the Zodiac closer and call out again. “Sir, I'm here to take you back to—”

Then the red-jacketed figure turns around, taking off his hat.

It's Keller.

Often during the last week of this voyage, I've felt my chest constrict at odd times—when I see Keller across the dining room during meals, when we pass each other en route to some task, when I watch him take off across the water in a Zodiac full of passengers—tense with the knowledge that, while he's here now, he'll be gone soon enough. And now, as he heads toward me, I take a long, full breath.

He wades into the water. “Permission to come aboard?” he asks.

“What exactly are you doing?” I ask, glancing backward. We're just out of sight of the ship.

“I knew you were on mudroom duty,” he says, “so I made up a fake tag to lure you out here.”

I shake my head, trying to look disapproving, yet I have to laugh at the sight of him bundled up in a red tourist's jacket.
“Are you
trying
to get fired during your first season? Stealing passenger clothing and going
AWOL
? Glenn's going to have a fit.”

Keller steps into the boat. “Borrowed, not stolen. And as far as Glenn knows, you're just picking up a wayward tourist.”

He puts an arm around my waist and holds me to him as he takes the helm and steers the boat out of the bay—heading not toward the ship but in the opposite direction, toward a maze of icebergs. Moments later, we're surrounded by towers and turrets of ice.

Keller loosens his hold but keeps his arm around me. “I just wanted a few minutes,” he says.

He cuts the engine, and we drift.

After days of tourist chatter, of Glenn's voice on the
PA
, of the steady rumbling of the ship, the silence fills my mind like water in a jar—the world goes smooth and clear, with nothing but the whisk of wind around the ice, the splash of a penguin entering the water, the gurgle of waves against the ice.

We float along the edge of an iced city, the bergs rising out of the water like skyscrapers. The sea has arched doorways into the sides; the wind has chipped out windows. In the distance, several conical formations tower over the bay, with deep crevasses in their sides, as if enormous claws have slashed through them, drawing blue light instead of blood.

Keller turns his body in to mine, looking over my head at the drifting icelands beyond. Within days, even hours, these icebergs will be unrecognizable—the water will turn them around, flip them over, wash away a little more from below. The icescape we're viewing now no one's ever seen before, and no one will ever see again.

“What do you love most?” he asks.

“About you?”

He grins. “About the icebergs.”

I rest my head against his shoulder for a moment before answering. “I love the way some of them look like houses. How they seem to have doors and windows and awnings and porches. It makes me want to climb inside and live in them.”

“I wish we could.”

He runs his hands up my arms, over my elbows to my shoulders. I want to shed my naturalist's jacket, and strip him of his tourist's coat, as he pulls me forward and kisses me, finding a slip of bare skin at the back of my neck. In the near silence, the lick of the water against the Zodiac fills my ears, and I feel as though I, too, am floating, buoyed by his hands.