“For you,” he says. “You wanted this trip.”
“I wanted something for us. To get reacquainted, Richard. Not just to be on a boat with a hundred other people. To go for a walk, to see the penguins, to see their chicks, to—I don’t know, share a moment together.”
“Do you remember how we met?” he asks.
“What are you talking about?” She sounds exasperated. “Of course I do.”
“That day in the café, when your computer crashed. You had a memory leak.”
“Richard, can we talk about this later?”
“Let me finish,” he says, his voice louder.
“Okay, okay.” She speaks in a whisper, as if she might be able to quiet him by example.
“The software was eating up your laptop’s memory,” he continues. “That’s why it crashed. It was an easy fix, but you didn’t know that. I wanted you to think I was a hero.”
“What are you saying? You don’t think I value you enough?”
“No, I’m saying that this trip, this sudden obsession with the penguins and the melting ice, it’s like a memory leak,” he says. “It’s consuming your mind, our plans—”
“Richard—”
“To retire early. To start a family.”
“No,” she says. “You wanted to retire, not me. And you’ve earned it. About the baby—I never said never. I just wanted to talk about it some more, that’s all.”
There’s a pause, and then Richard says, “I thought we’d already made the decision.”
“We aren’t like your computers, Richard. Our life is not a software program. We’re allowed to change our minds, to change our plans.”
“Except that you’re the only one changing,” he says. “I’ve held up my end of the bargain. What about you?”
“What about me? You’re bargaining with yourself, Richard. You’ve left me completely out of it. And that’s not my fault.”
He doesn’t answer, and I hear the slamming of the hatch, which means that at least one of them has gone out to the deck. I wait a little longer, until I’m certain they both must be gone, and then I continue on to the dining room. Breakfast is in full swing, but I don’t see either one of them.
LANDINGS ARE METICULOUSLY organized in order to appear efficient and seamless. Glenn and Captain Wylander find a spot to anchor, a place to land the Zodiacs. Glenn gives us a timetable, since he has to coordinate everything with the galley as well; due to the ever-changing weather, the chance to go ashore takes precedence over scheduled mealtimes. A few naturalists set off to scout trails for hiking, to make sure there are no leopard seals napping nearby. We find the best place to bring passengers ashore—preferably a shallow beach where we can haul the Zodiacs as close to dry land as possible.
The passengers, meanwhile, line up in the B Deck passageway leading to the mudroom, where they’ll sterilize their boots and move magnetic tags with their names and cabin numbers from an ON SHIP to an OFF SHIP position. It’s low tech, unlike the Australis-style ships that have electronic swipe cards for everything, but it helps us make sure every passenger who leaves the ship eventually gets back on.
The Aitcho Islands are an ideal place to land—plenty of penguins, fairly even terrain. As I lead a group of tourists away from the landing site, the chinstraps roam all around, their webbed feet leaving watery prints in the thick mud near the shore. I issue a strict warning not to go near the birds—but I can see how tempting it might be to pet them, to feel their silky black heads and snowy white faces, to trace the thin black lines encircling the undersides of their chins. The adult penguins, with no predators on land, will often pass close by; sometimes they’ll even walk right up to you. We constantly need to remind passengers that this is not a marine park, that we’re actually in the wild. Sometimes Keller will show them his ragged penguin-bite scars, which works pretty well as a deterrent.
When it comes to the tourists, our patience can wear thin, Keller’s especially—but I’m always reminding him that while we’ve grown used to this environment, for everyone else it’s like a cold, faraway planet that probably doesn’t feel quite real. And, more important, what people learn here might actually make a difference if they go home thinking about how much their actions up north affect the creatures down here.
I point to the guano that covers the nests and rocks, and now covers our boots as well—its sharp, overwhelming stench is the reason many of the passengers have covered their noses with scarves or the tops of their sweaters. “You’ll see how the guano is a reddish pink over there, where the chinstraps are,” I say. “That means they’re eating krill. Over here, the color’s more whitish pink, which shows the gentoos are eating fish as well as krill. What we don’t like to see is guano that’s a greenish color, which indicates a bird is starving.”