I hear only static, and I wait for a moment, then say, “Keller?”
Nothing.
My stomach turns over. While I’ve assumed that he’d be happy with the news, maybe I’m wrong.
I think of the Australis, heading south—surely she’d have turned around by now, but even so, the sat phone connection could be dicey. I hang up and make the call again. This time, I can’t get through at all, and I slam the phone down.
I look at my watch and sigh—I’m supposed to be at dinner by now. I try calling one more time. Reluctantly I give up and head for the dining room, where the only empty seat is next to Kate and Richard. Richard still wears a seasickness patch behind his ear.
“Until this trip, I had no idea there were so many different types of ice,” Kate says. “It’s like the Eskimos having a hundred different words for snow.”
“That’s just a myth, Kate,” Richard says.
“What?” she says.
“It’s an urban myth,” he says. His face looks flushed, and he keeps blinking his eyes, as if trying to focus. “Any credible linguist will tell you that the Inuit language may have a number of different ways of referring to snow, but it’s basically no different than in English, where we have wet snow, powder, sleet, slush, blizzard, and so on.”
Kate only looks at him, and Richard’s flush grows deeper, the set of his jaw a little more stubborn. He reaches for the wine bottle in the center of the table and fills Kate’s glass. I realize then that Richard doesn’t know about the baby, that Kate hasn’t decided what to do about her pregnancy.
I try to change the subject. “In May and June,” I say, “when the continent is preparing to shut ships like ours out for the winter, you can actually hear the ice crystals forming, if you listen closely enough. It almost sounds like the water is singing.”
“Really?” Kate says. “I’d love to be here to see that. Or rather, hear it.”
“It’s interesting, the way you personify nature,” Richard says, looking from me to his wife.
“It beats objectifying nature,” Kate retorts.
“And that’s what I do?”
Kate presses her lips together, her eyes shooting Richard a look that says, Not here, not now.
“We all objectify nature to some extent, don’t we?” says a man sitting across the table. “I mean, if we didn’t feel some sort of distance, we wouldn’t be able to build houses, or put gas in our cars, or turn on the lights. Not to mention food. You can’t think of pigs when you eat bacon or you just don’t eat.”
“Well, according to my wife, we should treat all these animals as humans,” Richard says. “Whales and penguins and even krill.”
“Kate has a point,” I say, in as friendly a way as I can manage. I’m not sure whether my arguing with Richard is better than Kate arguing with him, but it doesn’t feel quite as uncomfortable. “Animals are no less valuable to this planet than humans.”
“Of course they are. There’s a hierarchy involved.”
“A hierarchy developed by humans,” I say. “Take sharks, for example. Most people think of sharks as nothing more than props in a horror movie. But they may well be extinct in the next few decades, and they’re the ones that have been keeping the marine ecosystem in balance for four hundred million years. Once they’re gone, everything changes.”
“It sounds like your idea of a perfect world would be free of people altogether.” Richard’s face is crimson, and his left eye is twitching. He rubs his hands across his eyes.
“That’s not such a bad idea.” This comes from Kate, murmured so low I almost miss it.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Richard says, his voice tinged with bitterness.
“Stop it, Richard,” she says quietly. She pushes her chair back.
Richard grabs her arm. “Wait.”
Kate tries to free herself from his grip, but Richard rises to his feet, upending his chair and tipping a couple of full wineglasses as he pulls her up with him. I look again at the medicated patch behind Richard’s ear and know something’s very wrong. I scan the room, catching Thom’s eye. I can’t tell what he’s seen, but he reads my expression and pushes his chair away from the table, ready to come over if I need him to.
I’m standing up myself when the ship turns hard to port, catching us all by surprise. I grip my chair as plates slide off the table into people’s laps and as the servers, barely managing to stay on their feet, try to keep their trays from crashing to the floor. Spilled wine is spreading across the tablecloth like a bloodstain. Glenn runs past us out of the dining room.
I turn back to Kate and Richard—Richard is on the floor, using one of the chairs to stand. Kate isn’t helping him.
“What happened?” someone asks. “Have we hit something?”
“No,” I say. “We’ve turned around.”
Thom is next to me by now, and when I look at him, he nods, a sickening confirmation that he, too, knows why.
South of the Antarctic Circle
(66°33'S)
According to international maritime law, a passenger ship must be capable of launching all survival craft, fully loaded with passengers and crew, within thirty minutes of the captain’s sounding of the abandon-ship signal.
But there’s a difference between being theoretically capable of a task and accomplishing it. No matter how many times crew members go through the drills, even if they take into account the possibility of rogue waves and tipped icebergs, they can’t predict how long it might take to guide twelve hundred passengers and four hundred crew from a wounded ship in ice-choked waters below the Antarctic Circle, where lifeboats may have nowhere to float.
Nobody can know. It has never happened—until now.
I stand next to Amy among the hastily assembled expedition staff and crew on the bridge, where Glenn is giving us another briefing. As he’d told us earlier, the Australis has struck a submerged object, likely ice, in the Gullet and is taking on water. Glenn and Captain Wylander have been coordinating rescue efforts with the Argentinian Coast Guard, the Chilean Navy, and two other cruise ships.
The Australis has not yet given the abandon-ship signal, and this gives me hope. The Cormorant is the closest ship, and we’re ten hours away—ten very critical hours—but the Australis still has electrical power, and her captain estimates she’ll stay afloat for another twelve hours, depending on weather conditions.
All of us, of course, have received emergency training, in everything from CPR to evacuating the Cormorant. But putting together a rescue plan for a sinking ship of sixteen hundred, without knowing what the conditions will be like until we get there, is next to impossible. The Cormorant, nearly at capacity, can safely take on no more than two hundred people.
Of course, not every ship that strikes ice is destined to sink; a seaworthy cruise liner is equipped with life preservers of her own: airtight bulkheads, bilge alarms, compartment seals, escape tubes. When all safety measures perform as intended, a debilitated ship may list at an odd angle for days or even weeks without sinking.
Yet the Australis, we’re learning now, has suffered extensive damage. “Apparently there was a serious malfunction in two of the bulkhead doors,” Glenn says. “The failures occurred when they were stuck in fast ice and tried to force their way out. The next closest ship is another eight hours behind us.”
Which means that for the next eighteen hours, the Cormorant is the Australis’s only real hope.
“Any casualties?” Nigel asks.
Glenn says simply, “Yes.”
I try to stand still, to breathe evenly. I know that when it comes to the rescue efforts, I don’t have the luxury of choosing which life is more important than the next, not when so many are in danger. But I also know that the minute we have the Australis in our sights, only one person will matter.
We’ve already cordoned off a section of the lounge,
now a mini–triage center supplied with blankets and first-aid equipment, and it’s time to let the passengers in on the news. As we head down the steps to the lounge, Amy leans close and speaks into my ear. “He’ll be fine,” she says. “If anyone can handle something like this, it’s Keller.”
The rest of the packed, overheated lounge looks as if it’s ready for any regular presentation, with one exception: the silence. The passengers wait, their nervous eyes focused on Glenn as he explains the situation. They remain calm, passive, probably because they’re in a bit of shock themselves.
“As a precaution,” Glenn concludes, “all guests will be required to wear life jackets from this point forward, around the clock. Guests will no longer be permitted on the bridge, in the fitness room, or on the rear deck, where we will be staging search-and-rescue efforts.”
Search and recovery is far more likely; as much as I want to remain optimistic, I’ve been in these waters and in this weather long enough to know what it can do—to boats as well as to passengers. I picture the listing Australis and wonder where Keller had been when it hit. Had he been on the phone with me at the time; was that why we’d lost our connection?
“I know this is not what any of you signed up for,” Glenn says, “but I urge you to remain in your cabins as much as possible. I know many of you have medical expertise and other skills we’ll need, and we may call on you. But for now, you need to keep yourselves safe and out of the way.” He draws in a breath. “Finally, and I know this is another of many inconveniences you’ll experience over the next few days, I’m going to request that everyone agree to take on an additional passenger or two, if possible, in your cabin. You can double up with one another or take on someone from the Australis.”
Glenn signals to the staff, and I get into place as we begin the emergency lifeboat drill, the same one we’d gone through the first night on board, in the Beagle Channel. It seems much longer than a week ago—back then, everyone was laughing and taking photos as they put on their frumpy orange life jackets, excited as they anticipated the Drake and what awaited them beyond. I remember thinking that this would be a long journey, but for entirely different reasons.
Now the passengers are somber as they put on their jackets and assemble at their muster stations. I stand at my station, unable to make eye contact with anyone. Nature and I have always gotten along, or so I’d believed; we’ve had a good relationship of mutual respect and understanding. But perhaps I’ve had little to fear from nature because for so long it’s always been only me. As the Cormorant hurtles south, I feel anxiety knitting closed my throat. As every Antarctic traveler knows, once you begin to fear the ice, the relationship changes forever.
TWENTY YEARS BEFORE SHIPWRECK
The Missouri Ozarks
Deep in the forest, the humidity is oppressive, especially for September. It’s too hot to cover up completely, and I’ve been slapping at mosquitoes all morning. I wear long pants to avoid poison ivy, but I’m in a short-sleeved shirt, drenched in sweat and sticky, acrid bug repellent.
Everything in these woods has a way of enveloping you. As I bend down to pick up my field notebook, I brush my bare arm against a bush that’s sprouting poison ivy. I look at the batch of triple leaves, then dump half the contents of my water bottle on the spot where the plant touched my skin.
Pam hears me and looks over. It’s only midmorning, but her dark-brown hair is escaping its loose ponytail, and her face is bright red, as I imagine mine must be.
“How’re you holding up?” she asks.
“Great.”
Pam’s twice my age, and this is my second year as her research assistant, but still she’s always asking.
“Beastly out here today,” she says.
“Better than serving mystery meat at Dobbs.” Until I’d begun working for Pam, my work-study job had been food service in the cafeteria near my dorm.
I’d registered for Dr. Pam Harrison’s biology class two years earlier, during my first year at the University of Missouri. Even then I knew I wanted to focus on birds; my childhood obsession with them had never waned.
I’d hoped to go to Seattle for college, to the University of Washington, where I could get involved with the Magellanic penguin program I’d heard so much about. But I was too daunted by the size of the loans the UW program would require to consider it. Stupid, Pam would later tell me, when she heard how I ended up at Mizzou. How’re you going to get anywhere if you don’t take risks?
The housing lottery assigned me to Jones Hall my freshman year, and I soon learned that the all-women’s dorm is a coveted place to live for sorority girls thanks to its proximity to Greek Town. My roommate, Taylor, was a petite, lively blonde from Springfield whose main goal in college was getting into the Tri-Delts. Taylor invited me to all the parties, insisted on doing my makeup—since I usually wore none—and opened up her wardrobe to me. “It’s too short,” I’d say after squeezing into one of her tiny skirts. “That’s the point,” she’d reply and hand me a tube of lip gloss.
Thanks to Taylor and her makeovers, I felt as though I’d just met a new version of myself, along with scores of other new students, and, for those first months, I relished this glimpse of who I could be, having shed the tomboy of my childhood. Yet as the months passed, I found it hard to bond with this new me, as well as with the other students. I’d be in a crowded fraternity basement, beer flowing, music blasting, and feel a sudden need to push my way out, happier the moment I began walking home alone in the cold night air. I’d find myself wanting to sneak out of a guy’s bed so we wouldn’t have to try to make conversation as soon as we sobered up. The fun was fleeting, even though, week after week, I’d show up hoping it would be different.
In my second semester, I took my first class with Pam, and my focus shifted—sharply, as if snapped back into its natural place—from parties to science. A tiny, dark-haired woman in her mid-forties, Pam was energetic, blunt, no-nonsense, and her passion for ornithology was palpable and contagious. She could answer any question without hesitation, many answers based on her own research, and I wondered what it would be like to have that sort of knowledge, to know as much about a species or an environment as you did about yourself.
Pam taught several courses in biological sciences and ran the avian ecology lab. That semester, I read everything I could about birds and registered for her avian ecology course in the fall. One day, she took me aside after class. She said she needed a field research assistant, and while she usually hired graduate students, she sensed that I might be interested. The job entailed searching for and monitoring nests, resighting banded birds, and recording field notes.
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” I said.
“Are you in decent shape? There’s a lot of hiking involved.”
An active runner back then, I logged about fifty miles a week. I nodded.
“How’s your hearing?”
“Fine.”
“Are you color-blind?”
“No.”
“Any problem being out in bad weather?”
I shook my head.
“Poison ivy, bats, snakes—problem?”
“No.”
“Then you’re hired,” she said. “We leave from the Tucker Hall parking lot tomorrow morning, seven sharp,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
I didn’t have any idea what I was doing that first morning, but gradually I learned. I learned how to catch a bird in a net, how to weigh and measure and band it. I learned how to listen and how to wait, how to spend hours under a canopy of trees in volatile midwestern weather, how to spot well-hidden nests.
And now, a year later, I’m working with Pam on a long-term study evaluating the response of various species to deforestation and restoration in the Ozarks. We look at breeding patterns, predation, and the birds’ rate of return in clear-cut forests.
As we walk among the oaks and juni
pers, I can see the delineation between old and new growth from the last clear-cut. Ahead of me, Pam stops short, and I crouch down next to her. She’s peeking under a low bush, at an empty nest. As usual, she says nothing, waiting for me to see what she sees. And a moment later, I do—shell fragments, so small they’re barely perceptible to the naked eye. Unless you’re Pam, or have been trained by Pam.
“What do you think?” she says.
I sit back on my heels and look around. I don’t see tracks among the fallen leaves, but snakes are the main predators of songbirds around here.
As Pam pages through her field notebook, I know we’ll be adding another component to her half decade of research—and this is what I’ve grown to love: the way each day brings a new discovery, the way species’ lives are layered so intricately, the way we begin to ask the questions that will eventually puzzle out all these mysteries. Working with Pam had become, for me, far more intoxicating than the beer bongs and Jell-O shots of Greek Town.
“I’ll do some research on snake predation in this region,” I say to Pam.
She shuts her notebook and looks at me. “You’re always talking about working with penguins,” she says. “Where are you thinking about graduate school?”
I have stacks of brochures and applications in my apartment, but, on the other hand, I don’t want to leave. I feel as though I need to finish what I’ve started here with Pam—the problem is that it could take years, even decades.
“I’ve still got time,” I say.
“You need to plan ahead.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll stay here. Keep working on this.”
She takes a drink from her water bottle and shakes her head. “Bad idea. You want seabirds, you need to go east or west, north or south. To the sea. In two years you’ll be done here.”
“You don’t want me to stay?”
My Last Continent Page 18