My Last Continent

by Midge Raymond

  “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. “Th
ere’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.

  ONE DAY BEFORE SHIPWRECK

  South of the Antarctic Circle

  (66°33'S)

  It’s not uncommon in Antarctica to see what does not exist—to see the mountains levitate in the distance, to see the rising towers of a city on the horizon. When the sea is colder than the air, a layer forms that creates a polar mirage. The more layers, the more refracted the light: Mountains are born from the sea; cliffs turn into castles. Such mirages usually last only moments, until the air layers mix, and then they disappear.

  These illusions can be dangerous—they often caused explorers to miscalculate distances—or simply embarrassing, leading the explorers to identify land that was not actually there. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Captain Sir James Clark Ross discovered a mountain range he named the Parry Mountains, about twenty-five miles from his position east of Ross Island—but there were, in fact, no mountains there at all; what he’d seen was a reflection of another mountain range, more than three hundred miles away.

  Such visions have a name—fata morgana—and I feel as though I’m seeing a mirage right now: a large, multilayered building rising from the sea, moving along the horizon. I’m on the foredeck, braced against a biting headwind, and I’m hoping that this is only a trick of the eyes. It’s normal to see a fata morgana just before a storm or change in the weather.

  But this mirage doesn’t waver or blur; it doesn’t disappear. Heart thudding, I raise my binoculars to confirm what is even more bizarre than a fata morgana, and all too real—the Australis, about half a nautical mile away, headed in our direction. Headed south.

  I run up to the bridge. Glenn is standing next to Captain Wylander, who’s speaking into the radio.

  “What the hell is that ship doing down here?” I ask.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

  The captain hands the radio to Glenn, who barks a warning to the ship. “Lack of advance notification is in violation of IAATO protocol.”

  “They’re making a run for the Gullet, aren’t they?”

  “They won’t make it that far.”

  I leave the bridge and return to the deck, raising my binoculars, as if I might see Keller on board. I look for an orange crew jacket, but it’s freezing cold, and hardly anyone’s outside—only a scattering of passengers among the Australis’s five decks, with no idea what their captain is risking. They are already fading in the mist and the sleet that is beginning to slicken the deck under my boots.

  I peer through the fog at the stiffening ice. Just yesterday Glenn had been planning our own run for the Gullet, the scenic but narrow strip of water that cuts between Adelaide Island and the continent. Few tourist vessels ever make it that far, and given the changing weather and the amount of ice forming, Glenn had decided to turn around. Unlike whoever’s at the helm of the Australis, Glenn is far too careful to attempt anything tricky unless conditions are just right. And so we are headed north again as the Australis is heading south.

  The sea is incredibly icy even here, with bergy bits clanging against the hull. Passengers always freak out when they hear the metallic thud of ice—I’ll spend most of my day reassuring skittish passengers that the Cormorant has a reinforced hull, that it’ll take a lot more than a few growlers to sink it. If only I could say the same about the Australis, which is not built to navigate the icy conditions she’s headed into.

  In the hundred years since the Titanic sank, ship design and construction have improved drastically; it’s not a stretch to assure passengers that today’s cruises are safe. Yet the one thing that hasn’t changed is human nature—ego and folly and hubris and whatever outcomes these may bring—and every ship is only as safe as her captain and crew and the choices they make.

  I listen to the smaller pieces of slushy ice rub against the steel like a wire brush; the familiar, uneven rhythm normally relaxes me. I lean on the railing, eyes still on the Australis. I’d like to think I’d have known the ship was this far south, that I’d have felt Keller’s proximity somehow. More than ever, I need to talk to him. But as I’m heading up to the communications room, Glenn radios.

  “We’re doing an ice landing,” he tells me. “Be ready to scout in five.”

  I LOWER THE gangway onto a wide plain of fast ice. The captain has nudged the Cormorant into a frozen expanse of ocean, and, despite the cloudy afternoon, the ice burns with white light. Another unforgettable experience for the tourists: a chance to walk on water.

  Several inches of fresh powder cover the ice, and Thom, Nigel, and I walk out onto the frozen sea, testing its stability with ski poles, posting flags to mark boundaries the tourists won’t be allowed to walk beyond. Within half an hour, we are escorting passengers directly from the boat onto the ice.

  Ice landings are my favorite types of excursions—no Zodiacs, no penguins, just three feet of solid ice that, because they’re walking on the ocean, the passengers celebrate. A man flops down to make a snow angel. Snowball fights erupt.

  I scan the area, and when I glimpse a figure about a hundred yards away, past one of the boundary flags, I think I’m seeing things again. Who would venture past what we’ve determined to be safe?

  I know the answer even before I raise my binoculars to my eyes.

  She’s several yards past the flag by now, and no one else seems to have noticed. I walk briskly toward her, trying to seem as casual as possible. I’m hoping she’s just overlooked the flag and will realize her mistake and turn back. But Kate keeps going.

  Once I’m past the flag, I shout her name. If she hears me over the wind, she doesn’t respond.

  I pick up my pace, and my boots slide on the ice that’s just below the thin layer of snow. In front of me, the pearly surface of the ice and the blanched sky meet and blur into one. Don’t fall, I tell myself. Don’t fall.

  I’m sweating under my parka and all the layers beneath, and I’m breathless from the cold and from calling out to Kate. Finally, about twenty feet away from her, I start to run. I catch up and grab her by the wrist.

  She turns, the expression on her face unreadable. I hold fast to her wrist as I try to catch my breath.

  “What’s with the disappearing act?” I sputter out.

  “I just wanted a few minutes away from everyone. I don’t like being around people all the time.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have taken a cruise. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not ready yet.”

  “This is not up to you, Kate. We haven’t checked this ice for saf
ety. Come on.”

  Before I know what’s happening, she yanks her arm away and starts running—away from me and the Cormorant—and I glance back toward the ship. The naturalists are busy with other passengers, and so I turn and follow Kate. I don’t know what sort of suicidal mission she’s on, but I do know I can’t let her go any farther. She is slipping and stumbling, and when I get close enough to catch her again, I reach out—and this time both of us lose our balance and tumble to the ice.

  I break my fall, landing hard on all fours, feeling the searing bend of my wrists, the sharp pain in my knees. My sunglasses fall off, and I turn over and lower myself to the ice, lying there faceup, closing my eyes for a moment against the blinding white of the sky.

  When I open them again, Kate is sitting next to me, wincing and brushing snow off her parka.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” I ask her.

  I’m surprised to see tears in her eyes when she faces me. “I’m pregnant,” she whispers.

  I nod but say nothing.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about it,” she says. “How to be happy, how to be ready. I just can’t.”

  “You will,” I assure her.

  “How can you say that?”

  An enormous pop fills the air around us, and she looks at me in dismay. “What’s that?”

  “The ice,” I say.

  “It’s breaking?”

  “More like breathing,” I say. “It makes a lot of noise. Doesn’t mean we’re falling in just yet. Still, we need to go.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, though she’s making no move to get up. “I wasn’t trying to—” She sighs. “I just needed a little space to think, that’s all.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  For a moment it almost seems natural to tell her, to have someone to talk to about this. But all I can say is: “Yes. I do.”