My Last Continent

by Midge Raymond

  I nod, and we’re close enough that my head nudges against his. We fall silent again, snuggled together like puppies for warmth. As time drifts, I think back on the day’s work, and then I sit up with a start.

  “What is it?”

  “My notebook,” I say, patting my parka, trying to recall whether I’d stashed it in one of the oversize pockets. “I don’t remember where I put it.”

  “It’s in the hutch.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I saw you put it away.”

  I stare at the opening of the tent, though I know it would be foolish to venture outside. “I hope it hasn’t blown away.”

  “It won’t. You secured it tight.”

  I wonder then if he’s been watching me as closely as I’ve watched him.

  “Relax,” he says. I feel his hand on my back, and when I lie down, his arm remains around my shoulders. I feel the day’s exertion, finally, take over, draining my body and mind of what little energy is left. I turn toward Keller, and my icy nose meets the warmth of his neck.

  I let my breathing slow, but my eyes remain open wide, fixed on the stubble on Keller’s face, on the spot where his earlobe joins the skin of his jaw. I never imagined I’d find myself in a situation like this again—in a tent with another civilian, another amateur—and a part of me is afraid to sleep, afraid to risk waking up alone.

  I don’t remember closing my eyes, but I wake hours later to a bright gold glow. For a long moment, I don’t move, savoring the heat of Keller’s body next to mine. When I sit up, he stirs and opens his eyes. The look on his face is one I haven’t seen in a while—sleepy, not quite sure where he is, a hint of a smile as he remembers.

  But it’s not me he’s smiling about; he’s looking past me, at the shadow hovering over my shoulder against the backlit tent.

  “The snow,” he says. “Look how high those drifts are.”

  Outside the tent, the sun is a halo behind thin clouds, and a light wind lifts the snow, surrounding us with sparkling dust.

  We have to kick the snow away to step out of the tent, and I’m glad I’d remembered, at the last minute, to bury a flagged pole in the snow near the Ski-Doo, which is now hidden under several feet of snow. I radio the station to check in, let them know we’ll be on our way soon. By the time I turn back, Keller’s uncovered the snowmobile and is bent over the engine.

  “I think the spark plugs got iced over when the temps dropped yesterday,” he says, straightening up. “Clean and dry now. Give it a try.”

  The engine starts right up. I let it run while I pack our tent. As we head toward the base, with Keller sitting behind me, his arm around my waist, I wish we weren’t on our way back. The cold, exhaustion, and hunger don’t compare to my sudden desire to remain with Keller, away from the busyness of the station.

  As we return the snowmobile to the MEC and set off for our dorms, I try not to delude myself into thinking he’s more interested in me than in the birds. In fact, when I see him later and he suggests we meet at the Southern Exposure, one of McMurdo’s bars, he asks if I can bring my notes, if I’d mind sharing them.

  And so, over the next couple of weeks, we continue our routine—days counting birds together, nights in the bar after his cafeteria shift. We get to know each other slowly, drink by drink. Once we’re a few beers into the night, the conversation becomes personal. Keller doesn’t like to talk about himself, and I have to fit together his pre-Antarctic life in puzzle pieces. It’s an image that remains with me when I see him each morning—a faded cardboard picture with the seams still visible, the cracks still open.

  But I want to put the puzzle together; I want to understand who he is. He’s unlike most men I’ve known, men whose experience here is more academic. Keller seems to go about discovering Antarctica like one of the early-twentieth-century explorers, part fearlessness, part eagerness, and part ambition, as if he’s got something to prove. I’m intrigued, as if I’ve unearthed a new species, one I’m eager to study, bit by bit.

  One night I’m gazing at him, trying to picture it—the ­buttoned-down life he said he’d once lived—this man I’ve never seen in anything but denim, flannel, and Gore-Tex, whose hands are chapped from nights working in the galley and days counting penguins.

  “So you were a lawyer, married, house in the suburbs,” I say, wanting the rest of his story. “Kids?”

  He says nothing, and something in his face makes me wish I could withdraw the question. I stand up and wobble my way over to the bar to get us another round of drinks. When I return to the table, he’s staring at the wall, at a photo of an emperor colony. Our beers slosh as I put them down on the table, and I tumble into my seat.

  Finally he turns to me. “Remember the other day—you told me how penguins that fail to breed will sometimes choose new partners.”

  For a long moment, I can’t comprehend what he’s telling me.

  “It was our first child,” he says. “Only child.”

  He takes a long drink, and I try to remember how many rounds we’ve had. “She died,” he says. “Car accident.”

  I don’t know what to say. He is very drunk, and he’s talking far more than he ever has, yet his body remains still, lean and almost statuesque in the chair. “I thought we might try to have another baby,” he says. “But she decided to try another husband.”

  “Just like that?” As I look at Keller through the bar’s haze of cigarette smoke, I’m finding it impossible to imagine anyone walking away from him so easily.

  “Just like the birds,” he says with a harsh laugh. “I can’t blame her.”

  I want to touch him then, but I don’t move.

  He shifts in his seat and pushes his hair off his forehead in a slow, tired motion. “It was my fault,” he says. “Ally was nineteen months old. Britt, my wife—she went back to work after Ally’s first birthday, and we took turns dropping her off at day care, picking her up. I was supposed to pick her up that afternoon, but a meeting got rescheduled. I called our babysitter, Emily—a grad student who took care of Ally from time to time. Ally loved her. I even bought an extra car seat so Emily could take her places. She used to joke we were killing her love life, with a baby seat in her car. It was this crappy old subcompact. If only I’d bought her a new car instead.”

  He reaches for his beer, but he doesn’t pick it up, doesn’t drink. “I had my phone off during the meeting. I went home and no one was there—no Ally, no babysitter, no Britt. Then I turned on my phone.”

  His hand tightens around the glass. “I went to Children’s,” he says, “but she was gone. A driver on a cell phone had run a red light and slammed into the back, on Ally’s side. Emily survived. Britt blamed me more than anyone. I was the one who should’ve been there.”

  I reach over and touch his hand, still wrapped around the glass, his skin rough and wind-chapped, and I think of how Antarctica toughens you up, how maybe this was what he wanted—maybe this is what we all want—to build calluses over old wounds.

  He turns slightly in his chair, leaning almost imperceptibly closer to me. “It didn’t fall apart all at once,” he says. “It’s strange, how people disappear. No one likes to talk about it—as if it might be catching. Our friends, Britt’s and mine, didn’t know what to do—I mean, all of a sudden, we didn’t have kids who played together anymore. My sister was the only one who would listen, really listen. She’s the only one who calls me on Ally’s birthday. The only one who invited us over for dinner on the first anniversary of her death, so we wouldn’t have to be alone. She’s good that way, like my mom was. Everyone else—they seemed to want to pretend it never happened.”

  He lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “Britt and I tried to make the marriage work. She couldn’t move on—or didn’t want to. We didn’t last much more than a year. After she left, I tried to immerse myself in work.” He looks down into his beer. “When we were together,
when Ally was alive, the days always seemed too short—there was never enough time to fit it all in. Then, all of a sudden, every day was endless. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I wanted to escape—like Britt had, I guess. But she only went as far as Vermont.”

  He takes in a breath. “I started reading about the explorers, you know, wondering whether there was any uncharted territory left. Even by the time I decided to leave the country, I didn’t really know where I would go. I didn’t have a plan.” He pauses, and a small, sad smile emerges on his face. “Looking back, I guess I did know. I remember the day I went into my boss’s office and handed over my resignation,” he says. “I told him, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ ”

  I know, of course, that these were the last words of Captain Lawrence Oates, who died along with Robert Scott and the rest of the expedition team on their return from the South Pole. Knowing he was near death anyhow and a liability to his party, Oates walked out of his tent and onto the ice. No one ever saw him again.

  Eventually I tell Keller about Dennis, and he’s not surprised; he’d known all along. “I remember reading about it,” he says, “and seeing your picture. I thought about how alike we were, even though I’d never met you before.”

  “Alike how?”

  “Abandoned,” he says.

  Antarctica gets her icy claws into a certain type of person, I’ve realized over the years, and I can see now that Keller is one of them. Now that he’s caught, he’ll return again and again, and he’ll learn that no one back home can quite understand what brings him here—the impulse to return to the ice; to these waddling, tuxedo-feathered creatures; to the hours-long fiery sunsets; to the soothing wild peace of this place—and he’ll eventually build his life around Antarctica because he’ll feel unfit to live anywhere else.

  That night, we leave the bar as usual, and my heartbeat stutters as we’re about to part because I notice the way his eyes are latched to mine. But though his gaze lingers for a moment, he offers only his usual good-bye: a quick wave and a quicker smile.

  The next afternoon, we hike up to a ridge overlooking the Ross Ice Shelf—a massive, flat blanket of ice stretching out into the ocean. Though it’s the size of France and hundreds of feet thick, it looks as thin as a wafer from high up, and about as fragile. From here we have a good view of a large Adélie colony. I watch a smile spread across Keller’s face as he studies them through the binoculars. “I love their faces,” he says. “Those eyes.”

  Adélies have completely black heads, and the tiny white feathers surrounding their glossy black eyes give them a wide-eyed, startled look. Compared to the emperors, the Adélies are tiny; making little huffing noises, they walk with their wings sticking out, feet wide, heads high, looking almost comical, whereas the emperors always look so serious, their wings down at their sides, their heads lowered.

  “They might be my favorite species,” I admit, “if I had to choose.”

  He lowers his binoculars, then reaches out to touch my sunburned cheek, and that’s when he kisses me. It happens quickly—his hand at the back of my neck, the spontaneous meeting of lips—and then time slows and nearly stops, and suddenly my body feels as wet and limpid as melting ice.

  Sex at McMurdo happens in stolen moments; it’s furtive and quiet, thanks to too-close living quarters, roommates, thin walls. I don’t know how many days blur together between that first kiss and the first night we spend in my dorm, but finally, after an aeon of helpless and constantly rising desire, we sneak out of an all-staff party and crowd into the narrow bunk in my room, ravishing each other like sex-starved teenagers, which is also typical of McMurdo residents.

  Afterwards, as the bass traveling on the wind from a distant building echoes the thumping of our hearts, in the arid heat of the room, sweat evaporating from our skin, it seems we could be anywhere—but at the same time, I realize this is the only place where our sudden relationship could feel as familiar to me as the icy, moonlike terrain surrounding us outside the room’s tiny windows.

  In the weeks that follow, we steal time whenever we can—when my roommate is in the field, when Keller’s is at work; it becomes difficult, at other times, to think of anything else. When we come in from the field, we have to peel off so many layers I think we’ll never find skin, until there it is, burning under our hands, dry and hot, two deserts finding water.

  Under the days’ perpetual sunlight, we compile data, we eat and talk, we pack up and hurry back for his shift in the galley. Late one afternoon, when he has the day off, we stretch out in the blinding light, hands folded together, my head on his shoulder, and we listen to the whistling of the wind across the ice and the cries of the birds. I savor the utter silence under those sounds; there is nothing else to hear—none of the usual white noise of life on other continents, no human sounds at all—and Keller and I, too, are silent. It feels as if our own humanness has dissolved, as if we have no need to communicate other than by breath and touch. And I feel the chill that has always seemed a constant and necessary part of me finally begin to thaw.

  AS I DRESS in the dark, what seemed like a good idea earlier now seems silly, impractical. I fumble to find my sunglasses and hear my roommate turn over in her bunk, and I’m thinking about taking off my cold-weather gear and getting back into bed myself.

  I tiptoe to the door and, in the ray of light from the hall, I glance back at my roommate—still asleep, thick orange earplugs filling her ears, a slumber mask over her eyes—and slip out of the room.

  At Keller’s dorm, I knock quietly, hoping his roommate doesn’t answer. I wait, then knock again, wondering if I’ve overestimated us, to be so certain he’ll welcome a middle-of-the-night surprise wake-up call, that he’ll be willing to sacrifice one of the more precious resources of McMurdo summers: sleep.

  Finally the door cracks open, and he stands there blinking as the hall’s fluorescent lights hit his eyes.

  “Get your coat,” I whisper.

  He shuts the door and a few moments later opens it again, fully dressed. We slink through the dorm. Outside, we shade our eyes from the nighttime sun, still high in the sky and obscured by a veil of wispy clouds. It’s about twenty degrees out, maybe colder.

  I love that Keller hasn’t asked a single question about where we’re going, why he’s out in the broad daylight of three in the morning. He’s just letting me lead the way.

  We walk toward Hut Point, a little more than three hundred yards away. The land under our boots is black and white, volcanic earth and frost. The ice-snagged waters of McMurdo Sound stretch out in front of us—and before that: a plain, weathered square building.

  The hut that Keller has been so eager to see was built in 1902 for Scott’s Discovery expedition. For months it’s been closed and locked to all but the conservation team that’s finishing its restoration—except for tonight.

  I dig into my jacket and pull out a key. I let it dangle between us.

  His still-sleepy face breaks into a smile. “How’d you get that?”

  “I’m well connected.”

  He grins, and I hand him the key.

  Under the awning Keller pulls off his hat, pushing his sunglasses up over his head. He unlocks the door, and we step inside, standing still as we wait for our eyes to adjust to the dim light coming in through the building’s small, high windows.

  I watch as Keller walks carefully through the hut. I follow his eyes around the soot-blackened room: boxes and tins of oatmeal and cocoa, biscuits and herring; rusted frying pans on the brick stove; shelves scattered with cups and plates, bottles and bowls; oil-smudged trousers hanging on a line, a dog harness from a beam. A pile of dark, oozing seal blubber drips with oil; seal carcasses hang, well preserved, on one of the walls. A large box labeled LAMP OIL reads, SCOTT’S ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION 1910—one of several other parties that once inhabited this place.

  It’s eerily noiseless—the hum of the statio
n gone, no penguins outside, no petrels above. Instead of the diesel fumes of the station, we breathe in the thick, musty flavors of hundred-year-old burnt blubber and the dusty artifacts of men whose time here was both celebratory and desperate.

  Keller knows not to touch anything, and he moves as little as possible, taking in everything he can. I hadn’t thought to bring a camera with me—but then I realize, in all our time together, I’ve never once seen him take a photograph.

  “Remember the lost men?” Keller asks.

  “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “The Ross Sea Party,” he says. “They were right here—in this room—never knowing they’d devoted their lives to a lost cause.”

  “They knew the risks.” In 1915, ten men from the Ross Sea Party, the group Shackleton had tasked with laying supply depots for his Endurance expedition, had gotten stranded when their ship lost its moorings and drifted. Not knowing that Shackleton’s crew had been forced to abandon their own ship, the men kept going, completing their mission, but three of them didn’t survive.

  “That’s exactly what I appreciate about being down here,” Keller says. “You know the risks—the hazards are tangible.” He takes another look around, as if what he’s trying to say is written on the time-scarred walls. “Back in Boston, I was living this so-called normal life, blissfully ignorant of the dangers all around us. That’s so much worse. Because when something does happen, you’re not prepared for it.”

  I move closer, and he pulls me into a long hug, so long I feel as if maybe he’s afraid to let go—as if by clinging to me, in this hut, in this faraway place, he can preserve his memories and leave them behind at the same time. I want to assure him that he’ll find a balance, that it’s the same fine line as going from here to home and back again, but I know he’ll learn this soon enough, in his own time.

  At last he pulls away, kisses my forehead. “Thank you for this,” he says.

  We go back out into the summer night and walk around the other side of the hut, facing the sound. Clean, cold air freezes through my nostrils, carrying the faint scent of ocean and iced rock.