My Last Continent

by Midge Raymond

  Sometimes when I watch the penguins, I become so mesmerized by the sounds of their purrs and squawks, by the precision of their clumsy waddle, that I forget I have another life, somewhere else—that I rent a cottage in Eugene, that I teach marine biology at the University of Oregon, that I’m thirty-­four years old and not yet on a tenure track, that I ­haven’t had a real date in three years. I forget that my life now is only as good as my next grant, and that when the money dries up, I’m afraid I will, too.

  I first came to Antarctica eight years ago, to study the emperor penguins at McMurdo Station. I’ve returned every season since then, most frequently to these islands on the peninsula. It’ll be years before our Antarctic Penguins Project study is complete, but because Thom’s kids are young, he’ll be taking the next few seasons off. I’m already looking forward to coming back next year.

  What I’d like is to return to the Ross Sea, thousands of miles farther south, to the emperors—the only Antarctic birds that breed in winter, right on the ice. Emperors don’t build nests; they live entirely on fast ice and in the water, never setting foot on solid land. I love that, during breeding season, the female lays her egg, scoots it over to the male, and then takes off, traveling a hundred miles across the frozen ocean to open water and swimming away to forage for food. She comes back when she’s fat and ready to feed her chick.

  My mother, who has given up on marriage and grandkids for her only daughter, says that this is my problem, that I think like an emperor. I expect a man to sit tight and wait patiently while I disappear across the ice. I don’t build nests.

  When the female emperor returns, she uses a signature call to find her partner. When they’re reunited, they move in close and bob their heads toward each other, shoulder to shoulder in an armless hug, raising their beaks in what we call the ecstatic cry. Penguins are romantics. Many mate for life.

  IN THE SUMMER, Antarctic sunsets last forever. The sky surrenders to an overnight dusk, a grayish light that dims around midnight. As I prepare to turn in, I hear the splatter of penguins bathing in their slush, the barely perceptible pats of their webbed feet on the rocks.

  Inside my tent, I extinguish my lamp and set a flashlight nearby, turning over until I find a comfortable angle. The rocks are ice-cold, the padding under my sleeping bag far too thin. When I finally put my head down, I hear a loud splash—clearly made by something much larger than a penguin.

  Feeling suddenly uneasy, I turn on my lamp again. I throw on a jacket, grab my flashlight, and hurry outside, climbing my way down to the rocky beach.

  I can see a figure in the water, but it’s bulky and oddly shaped, not smooth and sleek, like a seal. I shine my flashlight on it and see red.

  It’s a man, in his cruise-issued parka, submerged in the water up to his waist. He looks into the glare of my flashlight. I stand there, too stunned to move.

  The man turns away, and he takes another step into the water. He’s crazy, I think. Why would he go in deeper? Sometimes the seasick medication that tourists take causes odd and even troubling behavior, but I’ve never witnessed anything like this.

  As I watch him anxiously from the shore, I think of Ernest Shackleton. I think of his choices, the decisions he made to save the lives of his crew. His decision to abandon the Endurance in the Weddell Sea, to set out across the frozen water in search of land, to separate his crew from one another, to take a twenty-two-foot rescue boat across eight hundred miles of open sea—had any of these choices backfired, history would have an entirely different memory. In Antarctica, every decision is weighty, every outcome either a tragedy or a miracle.

  Now, it seems, my own moment has come. It would be unthinkable to stand here and watch this man drown, but attempting a rescue could be even more dangerous. I’m alone. I’m wearing socks and a light jacket. The water is a few degrees above freezing, and, though I’m strong, this man is big enough to pull me under if he wanted to, or if he panicked.

  Perhaps Shackleton only believed he had options. Here, genuine options are few.

  I call out to the man, but my words dissolve in the foggy air. I walk toward him, into the bay, and my feet numb within seconds in the icy water. The man is now in up to his chest. By the time I reach him, he’s nearly delirious, and he doesn’t resist when I grab his arms, pull them over my shoulders, and steer us toward the shore. The water has nearly turned him into deadweight. Our progress is slow. Once on land, he’s near collapse, and I can hardly walk myself. It takes all my strength to help him up the rocks and into Thom’s tent.

  He crumples on the tent floor, and I strip off his parka and his boots and socks. Water spills over Thom’s sleeping bag and onto his books. “Take off your clothes,” I say, turning away to rummage through Thom’s things. I toss the man a pair of sweats, the only thing of Thom’s that will stretch to fit his tall frame, and two pairs of thick socks. I also find a couple of T-shirts and an oversize sweater, and by the time I turn back to him, the man has put on the sweats and is feebly attempting the socks. His hands are shaking so badly he can hardly control them. Impatiently, I reach over to help, yanking the socks onto his feet.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” I demand. I hardly look at him as I take off his shirt and help him squeeze into Thom’s sweater. I turn on a battery-powered blanket and unzip Thom’s sleeping bag. “Get in,” I say. “You need to warm up.”

  His whole body shudders. He climbs in and pulls the blanket up to cover his shoulders.

  “What are you doing here?” I, too, am shaking from the cold. “What the hell happened?”

  He lifts his eyes, briefly. “The boat—it left me behind.”

  “That’s impossible.” I stare at him, but he won’t look at me. “The Cormorant always does head counts. No one’s ever been left behind.”

  He shrugs. “Until now.”

  I think about the chaos of earlier that day. It’s conceivable that this stranger could have slipped through the cracks. And it would be just my luck.

  “I’m calling Palmer. Someone will have to come out to take you back.” I rise to my knees, eager to go first to my tent for dry clothes, then to the supply tent, where we keep the radio.

  I feel his hand on my arm. “Do you have to do that just yet?” He smiles, awkwardly, his teeth knocking together. “It’s just that—I’ve been here so long already, and I’m not ready to face the ship. It’s embarrassing, to be honest with you.”

  “Don’t you have someone who knows you’re missing?” I regard him for the first time as a man rather than an alien in my world. His face is pale and clammy, its lines suggesting he is older than I am, perhaps in his mid-forties. I glance down to look for a wedding band, but his fingers are bare. Following my gaze, he tucks his hands under the blanket. Then he shakes his head. “I’m traveling alone.”

  “Have you taken any medication? For seasickness?”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t get seasick.”

  “Well,” I say, “we need to get someone out here to take you back to the Cormorant.”

  He looks at me directly for the first time. “Don’t,” he says.

  I’m still kneeling on the floor of the tent. “What do you expect to do, stay here?” I ask. “You think no one will figure out you’re missing?”

  He doesn’t answer. “Look,” I tell him, “it was an accident. No one’s going to blame you for getting left behind.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” he says. “I saw that other guy fall. I watched everything. I knew that if I stayed they wouldn’t notice me missing.”

  So he is crazy after all.

  I stand up. “I’ll be right back.”

  He reaches up and grasps my wrist so fast I don’t have time to pull away. I’m surprised by how quickly his strength has returned. I ease back down to my knees, and he loosens his grip. He looks at me through tired, heavy eyes—a silent plea. He’s not scary, I realize then, but scare
d.

  “In another month,” I tell him, as gently as I can manage, “the ocean will freeze solid, and so will everything else, including you.”

  “What about you?”

  “In a couple weeks, I’m leaving, too. Everyone leaves.”

  “Even the penguins?” The question, spoken through clattering teeth, lends him an innocence that almost makes me forgive his intrusions.

  “Yes,” I say. “Even they go north.”

  He doesn’t respond. I stand up and head straight to the radio in our supply tent, hardly thinking about my wet clothes. Just as I’m contacting Palmer, I realize that I don’t know the man’s name. I go back and poke my head inside. “Dennis Marshall,” he says.

  The dispatcher at Palmer tells me that they’ll pick Dennis up in the morning, when they bring Thom back. “Unless it’s an emergency,” he says. “Everything okay?”

  I want to tell him it’s not okay, that this man could be crazy, dangerous, sick. Instead I pause, then say, “We’re fine. Tell Thom we’ll see him in the morning.”

  I return to the tent. Dennis has not moved.

  “What were you doing in the water?” I ask.

  “Thought I’d try to catch up to the boat,” he says.

  “Very funny. I’m serious.”

  He doesn’t reply. A moment later, he asks, “What are you doing here?”

  “Research, obviously.”

  “I know,” he says. “But why come here, to the end of the earth?”

  It’s always been hard to explain why a place like Antarctica is perfect for me. Before you can sign on to overwinter at McMurdo, they give you psych tests to make sure you can live for months in darkness and near isolation without going crazy—and the idea of this has always amused me. It’s not the isolation that threatens to drive me insane; it’s civilization.

  “What kind of question is that?” I ask Dennis.

  “You know what I mean,” he says. “You have to be a real loner to enjoy being down here.” He rubs the fingers of his left hand.

  I catch his hand to examine his fingers. “Where do they hurt?”

  “It’s not that,” he says.

  “Then what?”

  He hesitates. “I dropped my ring,” he says. “My wedding band.”

  “Where? In the water?”

  He nods.

  “For God’s sake.” I duck out of the tent before he can stop me. I hear his voice behind me, asking me where I’m going, and I shout back, “Stay there.”

  I rush toward the water’s edge, shivering in my still-damp clothes. The penguins purr as I go past, and a few of them scatter. I shine my flashlight down through the calm, clear water to the rocks at the bottom. I don’t know where he might have dropped the ring, so I wade in, and within minutes my feet feel like blocks of ice. I follow what I think was his path into the water, sweeping the flashlight back and forth in front of me.

  I’m in up to my knees when I see it, a few feet down—a flash of gold against the slate-colored rocks. I reach in, the water up to my shoulder, so cold it feels as if my arm will snap off and sink.

  I manage to grasp the ring with fingers that now barely move, then shuffle back to shore on leaden feet. I hobble back to my own tent, where I strip off my clothes and don as many dry things as I can. My skin is moist and wrinkled from being wet for so long. I hear a noise and look up to see Dennis, blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, crouched at the opening to my tent.

  “What are you staring at?” I snap. Then I look down to what he sees—a thin, faded T-shirt, no bra, my nipples pressing against the fabric, my arm flushed red from the cold. I pull his ring off my thumb, where I’d put it so it wouldn’t fall again, and throw it at him.

  He picks it up off the floor. He holds it but doesn’t put it on. “I wish you’d just left it,” he says, almost to himself.

  “A penguin could have choked on it,” I say. “But no one ever thinks about that. We’re all tourists here, you know. This is their home, not ours.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “What can I do?”

  I shake my head.

  He comes in and sits down, then pulls the blanket off his shoulders and places it around mine. He finds a fleece pullover in a pile of clothing and wraps it around my reddened arm.

  “How cold is that water, anyway?” he asks.

  “About thirty degrees, give or take.” I watch him carefully.

  “How long can someone survive in there?”

  “A matter of minutes, usually,” I say, remembering an expedition guide who’d drowned. He’d been trapped under his flipped Zodiac for only a few moments but had lost consciousness, with rescuers only a hundred yards away. “Most people go into shock. It’s too cold to swim, even to breathe.”

  He unwraps my arm. “Does it feel better?”

  “A little.” Pain prickles my skin from the inside, somewhere deep down, and I feel an ache stemming from my bones. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing out there.”

  He reaches over and begins massaging my arm. I’m not sure I want him to, but I know the warmth, the circulation, is good. “Like I said, I lost my ring.”

  “You were out much farther than where I found your ring.”

  “I must have missed it.” He doesn’t look at me as he speaks. I watch his fingers on my arm, and I am reminded of the night before, when only Thom and I were here, and Thom had helped me wash my hair. The feel of his hands on my scalp, on my neck, had run through my entire body, tightening into a coil of desire that never fully vanished. But nothing has ever happened between Thom and me, other than unconsummated rituals: As we approach the end of our stays, we begin doing things for each other—he’ll braid my long hair; I’ll rub his feet—because after a while touch becomes necessary.

  I pull away. I regard the stranger in my tent: his dark hair, streaked with silver; his sad, heavy eyes; his ringless hands, still outstretched.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “I was just trying to help.” The tent’s small lamp casts deep shadows under his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you don’t want me here.”

  Something in his voice softens the knot in my chest. I sigh. “I’m just not a people person, that’s all.”

  For the first time, he smiles, barely. “I can see why you come here. Talk about getting away from it all.”

  “At least I leave when I’m supposed to,” I say, offering a tiny smile of my own.

  He glances down at Thom’s clothing, pulled tight across his body. “So when do I have to leave?” he asks.

  “They’ll be here in the morning.”

  Then he says, “How’s he doing? The guy who fell?”

  It takes me a moment to realize what he’s talking about. “I don’t know,” I confess. “I forgot to ask.”

  He leans forward, then whispers, “I know something about him.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He was messing around with that blond woman,” he says. “The one who was right there when it happened. I saw you talking to her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw them. They had a rendezvous every night, on the deck, after his wife went to bed. The blonde was traveling with her sister. They even ate lunch together once, the four of them. The wife had no idea.”

  “Do you think they planned it?” I ask. “Or did they just meet on the boat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I look away, disappointed. “She seemed too young. For him.”

  “You didn’t see her hands,” he says. “My wife taught me that. You always know a woman’s age by her hands. She may have had the face of a thirty-five-year-old, but she had the hands of a sixty-year-old.”

  “If you’re married, why are you traveling alone?”

  He pa
uses. “Long story.”

  “Well, we’ve got all night,” I say.

  “She decided not to come,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “She left, a month ago. She’s living with someone else.”

  “Oh.” I don’t know what more to say. Dennis is quiet, and I make another trip to the supply tent, returning with a six-pack of beer. His tired eyes brighten a bit.

  He drinks before speaking again. “She was seeing him for a long time,” he says, “but I think it was this trip that set her off. She didn’t want to spend three weeks on a boat with me. Or without him.”

  “I’m sorry.” A moment later, I ask, “Do you have kids?”

  He nods. “Twin girls, in college. They don’t call home much. I don’t know if she’s told them or not.”

  “Why did you decide to come anyway?”

  “This trip was for our anniversary.” He turns his head and gives me a cheerless half smile. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  I roll my beer can between my hands. “How did you lose the ring?”

  “The ring?” He looks startled. “It fell off during the landing, I guess.”

  “It was thirty degrees today. Weren’t you wearing gloves?”

  “I guess I wasn’t.”

  I look at him, knowing there is more to the story and that neither of us wants to acknowledge it. And then he lowers his gaze to my arm. “How does it feel?” he asks.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Let me work on it some more.” He begins to rub my arm again. This time he slips his fingers inside the long sleeve of my shirt, and the sudden heat on my skin seems to heighten my other senses: I hear the murmur of the penguins, feel the wind rippling the tent. At the same time, it’s all drowned out by the feel of his hands.

  I lean back and pull him with me until his head hovers just above mine. The lines sculpting his face look deeper in the tent’s shadowy light, and his lazy eyelids lift as if to see me more clearly. He blinks, slowly, languidly, as I imagine he might touch me, and in the next moment he does.

  I hear a pair of gentoos reunite outside, their rattling voices rising above the night’s ambient sound. Inside, Dennis and I move under and around our clothing, our own voices muted, whispered, breathless, and in the sudden humid heat of the tent we’ve recognized each other in the same way, by instinct, and, as with the birds, it’s all we know.