My Last Continent (26 page)

FIVE YEARS AFTER SHIPWRECK

Portland, Oregon

I
hear my flight number called over the loudspeaker—­Santiago via Los Angeles, then onward from Santiago to Ushuaia. My daughter's hand clings to mine, but not as tightly as the year before—and next year, it will be looser still.

Neither of us likes to be apart, but she loves getting calls from “the bottom of the world”; she loves the South American toys I bring her when I return. While Nick is the only father she's known, she's got Keller's and my wanderlust in her blood; she's learned about the brush-tailed Antarctic penguins and is eagerly awaiting the day I take her with me.

After the
Cormorant
had limped back to Ushuaia, much heavier than when she left, I was transported to Buenos Aires, where I was hospitalized for a week. When I returned to the States, I remained on bed rest for most of my pregnancy. Kelly was born three weeks early, small but healthy, and when I brought her home a week later, Nick opened his door across the garden so he could hear her cry, and he didn't shut it again until we'd both moved in with him.

My mother flew out six months later to meet Kelly, and my father made promises to do the same. He died of a heart attack, on a flight during a business trip, before he could. Starting on Kelly's second birthday, my mother has made an annual visit, which has been good for all of us. She doesn't speak of my father often, but when she does it's with more fondness than tension, as if his absence, finally, makes sense to her. In the spring, Nick and I are planning to visit St. Louis as well as Chicago, where his family's from, so Kelly can meet her relatives. And then we'll fly to Boston, so she can meet her Aunt Colleen, Keller's sister. It amazes me how this small child, all of forty pounds, has connected—and, in my case, reconnected—our families.

Even though Nick and I share a bed, I believe it was Kelly he loved first. He was often the one who heard her in the middle of the night; he'd bring her to me, and she'd fall asleep between us. He'd never been a parent before, but he slipped seamlessly into the role, as if the part had been waiting for him all along. And, watching him with Kelly, the way he'd hold her and feed her and sing her to sleep, I knew I'd found the right mate—that I would never come home to an empty nest, and, for the first time, I didn't want to leave home.

But, three years ago, I finally returned to the continent; Nick urged me to go. I've been twice since. I hate leaving Nick and Kelly, so I don't go for more than one voyage a season, and I can't hike as far as I used to without feeling a twinge in my ankle, where the fractured bone never healed.

There is nothing in the landscape that doesn't remind me of Keller.

The first time I returned, his absence was everywhere: in my new research partner, in the bodies of the oil-covered penguins, in the shimmering meltwater dripping from icebergs. I returned home not sure I could ever go back again. But then I did, because it's where I feel closest to him. Where I can remember.

After the
Australis
disaster, my research had taken a new turn. It's no longer enough to study the effects of tourism and climate change on the penguin colonies in Antarctica. Now we have a whole new field of study—the effects of the shipwreck: the birds dead and injured by the fuel spill, the amount of plastic and other refuse they've ingested, how all of this affects their survival and reproduction.

A videographer on board the
Australis
produced a documentary about a year after the accident, capturing events I'd witnessed only in the aftermath. He had been filming on the bridge the moment the ship hit the iceberg that tore through its hull. He captured images of calm, blue glacial ice; the crew's easy chatter; the nervous jokes about uncharted waters. Then came the moment they knew they were going to hit ice, the captain yelling,
Hard to starboard,
in a desperate attempt to clear it.

And they nearly did. But this particular iceberg offered up a sharp underside that sliced a hundred-foot gash at the waterline.

The film's viewers will see the moment the ship hit—the flicker and shake of the camera, followed by utter silence on the bridge. Even after those first long, eerie moments, when the camera turned and fixed on the captain's face, he remained silent, his face so still it was nearly devoid of expression. He was not among the survivors.

We know that things got bad quickly—that the engine room flooded, that the malfunctions in the bulkhead doors caused four compartments to fill with icy water, that the electrical system and generators failed. The videographer filmed the passengers' terrified faces, many of them covered with blood and bruises after the impact had knocked them down or into furniture. He filmed the lifeboats being dropped, and he continued filming after a crew member stuck an angry hand into his lens. He captured the severe pitching of the boat as it tilted into the sea, the abandon-ship signal and the haunting silence that followed, punctuated by the cries of passengers and explosions from somewhere deep inside the ship. He captured the passengers rushing for lifeboats through air choked with smoke and fog, and the capsizing of those lifeboats in the wake of a calving glacier that roiled the sea around them. And, among the last to evacuate, he captured what were many passengers' last moments: sheets of fast ice shattered by the wave, flares drenching the sky and ice in a blaze of scarlet light, the creaks and groans inside the sinking ship.

I would not ever have watched the film unless Kate Archer had convinced me that it wasn't a
Titanic
-like disaster film but an environmental manifesto. As the one who financed the documentary, she made sure it captured all that is good about Antarctica, all that is precious and beautiful: the penguins, the whales, the eternal sunsets. When people ask me about the
Australis,
I tell them to watch the film.

Richard had left Kate wealthy. After her own daughter was born, she moved to Seattle, where a donation in excess of $4 million earned her a seat on the board of the Antarctic Penguins Project and allowed the organization to expand its small full-time staff, which now includes me. Kate visits ­Eugene frequently, often staying for weeks in my former cottage, and our daughters are growing up together. When I go to Seattle, Kelly and I stay with her, for as long as we can. When I'm asked to speak or teach, I try to bring Nick and Kelly with me. I want Kelly to be a good traveler, since I plan to take her south one day—and I want to do it before everything changes, before the ice melts, before we begin seeing the last of the Adélies.

In the airport, I hug her tight, until Nick touches my shoulder. “Final boarding call,” he says. I'm always the last one on the plane.

I let Kelly go and straighten up, watching Nick palm the top of her head with his hand, which is swallowed up by brown curls. I kiss them both one last time, then turn and hand over my boarding pass. I walk backward toward the gate, waving at them until I have to turn the corner.

While we've made a family, Kelly and Nick and Gatsby and me, I don't think I'll ever stop looking for Keller. When I'm on the peninsula, I tell myself I'm here to rescue the penguins, yet I know that, each time, it's the penguins who rescue me. When the cruises visit Booth Island, I steal away in a Zodiac. I go to a desolate beach and climb up to a remote gentoo colony. There, I sit and I wait. Every time, I feel a moment of dread, wondering if this will be the season he does not appear. And then, I see him.

Admiral Byrd waddles over, turning his head sideways, showing me a round dark eye. I arrange my legs just so. When he is settled, I remove my gloves and stroke his smooth, dirty feathers.

Sometimes, when I feel the weight of Admiral Byrd in my lap, I feel that Keller is here with us. I think about the day I'll sit here with Kelly, instructing her to sit, still and quiet, as her father had once instructed me—and I picture the look on her face, in those green-flecked eyes that are all Keller, when Admiral Byrd makes his appearance, then lets himself tumble into her lap.

Because Keller's body now belongs to the Southern Ocean, I like to believe we'll see him one day—that we'll experience a fata morgana and glimpse him standing up amid a cluster of penguins, his red bandanna around his throat, squinting as the sun's reflection off the ice bounces into his eyes. That he'll see us and smile. That he'll say, as he used to,
Fin del mundo,
and we'll respond,
principio del todo
.

The end of the world, the beginning of everything.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
hile the places in this novel—the islands of the Antarctic peninsula, the research stations—are real, I've taken a few fictional liberties, among them creating the Garrard penguin colony near McMurdo Station, which is loosely based on a real colony and actual circumstances but is otherwise fictional. The gentoo penguin Admiral Byrd is also fictional and was inspired by an overly friendly Magellanic penguin in the Punta Tombo colony in Argentina, named Turbo, who is beloved by the researchers and volunteers who have had the extraordinary experience of meeting him. (Visit
www.penguinstudies.org
to learn about the Center for Penguins as Ocean Sentinels and to follow Turbo on Twitter.) The Antarctic Penguin Project is a fictional organization inspired by the nonprofit Oceanites (
www.oceanites.org
), a nongovernmental, publicly supported organization whose scientific research in Antarctica helps foster education and conservation. Any inaccuracies throughout the novel, made inadvertently or for the sake of fiction, are my own.

I am grateful to all who made the existence of this book possible. Among them: Dr. Dee Boersma, who taught me about penguins from Antarctica to Argentina and whose research with the Center for Penguins as Ocean Sentinels is doing wonders for the conservation of these incredible animals.

Molly Friedrich, whose overall brilliance, keen insights, and tough editorial love helped get this novel ready for the world. A million thanks as well to Nichole LeFebvre, Lucy Carson, and Alix Kaye for being incredible readers and offering enthusiasm and support.

Liese Mayer, who is not only an amazing editor but an absolute joy to know and to work with. Great thanks, too, to the fantastic team at Scribner for such terrific work in every aspect of bookmaking.

Thanks to the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, which gave me the gift of time and space to write, and without which this book would still be a work in progress.

Thanks to the
Ontario Review
, which first published my short story “The Ecstatic Cry,” from which
My Last Continent
eventually emerged.

Thanks to my family, for love and support. Most of all: John Yunker, for being there for every step of the journey, both on and off the page.

John Yunker

Midge Raymond is the author of the short story collection
Forgetting English
, which received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in
Poets & Writers,
the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
,
TriQuarterly
, and
Bellevue Literary Review
, among other places. Learn more at
MidgeRaymond.com
.

ALSO BY MIDGE RAYMOND

Forgetting English: Stories

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First Scribner hardcover edition June 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raymond, Midge.
My last continent : a novel / by Midge Raymond.—First Scribner
hardcover edition.
pages ; cm
I. Title.
PS3618.A9855M9 2016
813'.6—dc23
2015033592

ISBN 978-1-5011-2470-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-2472-3 (ebook)