My Last Continent (9 page)

TWO YEARS BEFORE SHIPWRECK

Ushuaia, Argentina

I
arrive in Ushuaia late, and by the time I reach the docks I'm a full day behind everyone else and horribly jet-lagged. I'm still on the gangway, holding my duffel bag, as Glenn begins to introduce me to a new crew member. I don't recognize the tall, dark-haired man Glenn calls over until he turns around.

The red bandanna around his neck. The mossy brown eyes.

“Keller Sullivan,” Glenn says, “Deb Gardner.”

“We've already met,” Keller says, extending a hand.

I take it. Keller's hand, ungloved, is warm and rough. I let my eyes hover on his.

“Briefly,” I say, withdrawing my hand. “A while back.”

I haven't seen Keller since the day I left him at McMurdo, two years ago. He looks at once the same and different—still beautiful, his skin a little more weathered, his stubble a little scruffier. Most noticeable of all, he exudes a confidence he hadn't had before. He looks as though he belongs here.

Keller had e-mailed me faithfully from the station during
his austral winter, and over my own long, humid summer in Eugene, I tried to understand his decision, to put myself in his shoes. I even envisioned him on that bus instead of me, pictured myself staying behind for months of lightless cold while he left for home alone. Yet I wasn't sure I'd have been able to make that decision as effortlessly as he had.

We had only talked once; phone calls were expensive and hard to coordinate; with limited bandwidth, Skype wasn't allowed. After that first call, after I could no longer see Keller's face or hear his voice, as he wrote about overwintering—the biting chill, the inky dark, the supernatural green light of the aurora australis—he only seemed farther and farther away.

His choosing to stay made sense to me—he'd suffered losses that would never fully heal, and perhaps he thought the austral winter in Antarctica would help because, with the onset of darkness, the notion of time disappears along with the sun. That he could trade our plans so easily for an overwinter at McMurdo proved that he was ready to build a new life for himself, but it was one that didn't include me.

I had worked hard to let him go, and I'm wholly unprepared to see him again, here on the
Cormorant,
though I should've known it would happen. Antarctica is a small world.

After introducing us, Glenn leaves us standing there.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I have a job, same as you.”

“You could've told me, at least.”

“How?” Keller says. “You stopped writing me back. You didn't return my calls.”

I look down at my hands, red from the chill in the air, and try to settle the thoughts swarming through my head, to
articulate what I want to say. “It seemed pretty clear that was what you wanted, by staying at the base, then going back to Boston—”

“I only went back to Boston because I hadn't heard from you. Where was I supposed to go?”

“It's fine; I get it,” I say. “You did what you had to do. So did I.”

A crackle through Keller's radio startles us both, and he pulls it from his waist—it's Glenn, calling with a chore.

“Can we talk later?” Keller asks, and I shrug.

Despite my casual gesture, the knowledge that Keller is on board stays with me every second. The day is chaotic, with my attention pulled in myriad directions—helping the expedition team sketch out a rough itinerary, gathering data and photos for the presentations I'll give during the journey, pitching in wherever I'm needed—and I see Keller only in passing, within groups of crew members or other naturalists. Yet my heart rate quickens at the sight of him—and even when he's not around, I feel his proximity like an electric current, a frayed wire, loose and dangerous.

Finally, after the ship is prepped and everything quiets down, I go out to the uppermost deck, the one reserved for crew. In the evening dusk, I look at Tierra del Fuego as thick clouds hover over the mountains and creep down amid the sunset-hued buildings of Ushuaia. Opposite are the calm waters of the Beagle Channel, from where we'll begin our journey tomorrow evening.

I hear the creak of a hatch opening, then the sound of footsteps on the deck. It's Keller approaching, smiling just as I remember—a quick, easy smile with a hint of sadness un
derneath. He carries a worn paperback in his gloved hands. Seeing him, I feel a familiar cool hollowness, like an ice fog settling into a valley—the way I'd felt long after leaving him at McMurdo.

I'd kept busy the spring after I left, working on my data and writing a paper on my findings at the Garrard colony; when the days in Oregon grew long and bright, I taught a summer school class and then got a last-minute gig in the Galápagos on another ship from the
Cormorant
's tour company. I'd returned to Antarctica as usual last season, and being on the peninsula felt far enough from Ross Island that I managed not to think too much about Keller. By then, I didn't know where he was; I'd let our correspondence go months earlier.

Now, as I look at him on the deck, with the breeze in his hair and his eyes fixed on mine, it seems as if time has frozen, as if I'm back in the same moment at the Movement Control Center at McMurdo, when he told me he was staying behind.

He holds up his book, its pages fluttering in the night's breeze.
Alone
by Richard Byrd. I'd read the book years ago, a memoir by the first person who'd wintered by himself on the continent.

“The first time I read this,” Keller says, “it was about two years after Ally died, after Britt and I split up. I came across Byrd's home address—it's right there in the book—and I knew exactly where it was. He lived on Brimmer Street, in Beacon Hill, not even a mile away from me.”

He palms the book between his hands. “I was still at my old job, so the next morning, I worked a half day from home, then headed over to Beacon Hill on my way to the office. It
wasn't hard to find the address, but I began to doubt it was Byrd's real house because there wasn't a plaque or anything setting it apart—and this was the home of a man who had three ticker-tape parades in his honor during his lifetime, and a state funeral after he died, a man who's buried in Arlington National Cemetery. So I was about to keep walking when a woman emerged from the house with a bag of garbage. I said hello and blurted out that I was admiring her house. Without missing a beat, she said, ‘So you've read the book.' I said yes, and then she invited me in for a tour.”

Keller's lips turn up in a half smile. “She showed me the paneled library on the first floor with a carved oak fireplace mantel, where Byrd planned his journeys. She showed me the little backyard where Byrd tried to keep penguins after one of his trips. It was unbelievable that she did that—she didn't know me; I could've been any kind of lunatic. But I knew why when I told her she should put a plaque up on the building. She shrugged and said, ‘Nobody remembers Byrd anyway.' ” Keller looks up, his eyes meeting mine. “That was the day I quit my job. I wanted to do something worth remembering.”

“And so you became a dishwasher at McMurdo.”

He smiles. “I thought of it as a temporary distraction—the part where I got away from it all and discovered what I wanted to do. I had no idea this would be what I really wanted. Which meant I had to start over, catch up to you.”

“You thought leaving me was the best way?”

“For the record, I never planned to stay on,” he says. “I never wanted to separate, but that was my chance—to learn as much as I could, to become something new. I tried to explain it. If only you'd picked up the phone.”

He steps closer, leaning his body next to mine against the railing. “I wasn't ready to go home. Not then.”

“But you weren't planning to go home,” I say. The cry of a petrel in the distance adds a background whining note to my voice. “You were planning to come to Oregon with me.”

“And wash dishes in Eugene?”

“There were other options. Other ways to come back down here.”

“Like what? By staying, I could put the hours in, learn how things worked. Whenever I wasn't working, I was out helping anyone who needed it.”

“So why'd you leave McMurdo at all?”

“Because that was only the beginning of the journey.” He takes my cold hands, and I don't resist. “You were the destination.”

I shake my head, my mind trying to return to the way it was between us, wanting to get it all back.

“What is it?” Keller asks.

“Just trying to remember the last time you kissed me.”

Keller puts a hand on one side of my face, and as he slips his hand to the back of my neck, he pulls me forward and kisses me, a long slow deep kiss that in an instant melts away the icy edges that had frozen since I left McMurdo.

Finally he steps back and looks at me. “So,” he says, with that grin of his. “Does that jog your memory?”

I try to look nonchalant, though my hands are shaking. “Vaguely.”

He kisses me again, and we stay out on the deck for a long time, huddled together, trying to fit the past two years into the next two hours as night settles over Ushuaia.

It doesn't take us long to pick up where we'd left off—and, as at McMurdo, our time together is so unpredictable, so divided among shipboard duties, that every moment feels tenuous, as if we might easily lose each other again.

Over late nights on the crew deck, Keller fills me in on what he's been up to the past two years: He'd done legal consulting as he went back to school full-time, earning a master's in ecology, behavior, and evolution in only two semesters. He wrote his thesis on the impact of rising global temperatures on Adélies, and he impressed the
APP
enough for them to recommend him to Glenn as a naturalist this season so that he could gather data on Petermann Island.

I'd known that, with Thom taking time off, I'd have a new research partner on Petermann, but I'd assumed it would be one of the long-timers from the
APP
. And then, after six whirlwind days on board the
Cormorant,
one of the other naturalists escorts Keller and me to the island by Zodiac, with two weeks' worth of supplies.

As soon as the
Cormorant
recedes into the Penola Strait, Keller and I work quickly to establish our small camp, pitching all three tents though we know one will remain empty. After a week of pent-up sexual energy on board, we're both eager to take advantage of being alone, at last. As I lie naked in the tent, my body awakening in the cool air, under Keller's hands, I realize the extent to which I'd let myself grow numb, forgetting the pleasures to be found in my own skin. The tent is tight and cramped, not unlike our individual sleeping quarters on the
Cormorant
—but now, rather than the hum of the ship, we hear the sounds of the penguins and waves lapping the bay; rather than dry heated air, the night is alive with a
gelid summer mist. It's effortless, being together again, as if it were days later rather than years, and the emotional scrim that had begun to envelop me falls away again. Keller, too, seems more at peace, as though he has shed the very last of his former self, traces of which I'd seen when we first met. Now he's only muscle and bone, as if distilled down to his very essence—the part of him I still feel may be just out of my reach.

In the morning, we rise early; it's a balmy forty degrees, and we work in light jackets, forgoing hats and gloves. Our tasks for the next two weeks include counting birds, eggs, and chicks, as well as weighing a sampling of chicks to contribute to one of our ongoing studies on the connections among penguin populations and factors like climate change, food sources, the fishing industry, local weather, oil spills.

We've continued to examine the effects of tourism on the birds. Two hundred years ago, the penguins had the continent all to themselves; now they come into contact with bacteria they have no defenses for. Four years ago, Thom and I tested tourists' boots as they boarded after a landing and found almost two dozen contaminants. Glenn wasn't at all happy about our stopping guests from the Zodiacs on their way to lunch, so that was our first and last experiment. And in truth, we can't blame only tourism; migrating birds bring new toxins, too—we've found salmonella
and
E. coli,
West Nile and avian pox. Still, whether it's climate change or tourism, the only thing not changing is the penguins' vulnerability. So we keep studying, and I keep wondering what impact our data might have.

Seeing Keller working nearby throughout the long days, sharing our meals, retreating to our tent as dusk settles over
the island—all this has given me a sense of optimism I haven't felt since my early years here. For so long I've identified with the continent in its icy despair, the ephemeral nature of its wildness—but I feel newly energized, as if what we accomplish here may make a difference after all.

The weather holds up for nearly our entire stay—it isn't until the last day that an icy rain begins to fall midafternoon, while we're still in the midst of the day's work. The adult penguins are unfazed, going about their business as the raindrops roll off their feathered backs—but the chicks, still covered with dark-gray fluff, can't shake out the water that sinks into their down, and many of them will freeze to death this year.

Keller and I are both as waterlogged as the chicks when he convinces me it's time to give in; the temperature is dropping, the rain turning to sleet. We scurry into our tight two-person tent, where Keller takes off his boots and helps me with mine. We toss our dripping jackets into the corner, on top of the boots, as we shiver in the frigid air.

“Lie back,” Keller says. He pushes my shirt up over my shoulders, and I close my eyes, trying to stop my body's shaking as I feel his mouth on my belly, my breasts, my neck, then holding my breath as he travels downward. With his tongue he limns the angles and curves of my body, filling the hollow places he'd left behind, until new tremors flood through me, washing away all but the two of us, our bodies damp and drying in the wind-rattled tent.