“So is there a word in English—in any language—for what we’re doing?” I ask. “For thinking we can make it work this time?”
“Insanity?” he says.
I laugh. “The ecstatic display,” I say, thinking of penguin mating rituals. “The flipper dance.”
“Normal people,” he says, “just call it love.”
WE MEET UP late in the day, at the edge of one of the island’s largest gentoo colonies, each of us clutching a hand counter. We settle on a large, flat rock about twenty feet from the colony to rest for a few minutes before heading back to camp.
We watch a crèche of juveniles waddle eagerly forward as adult penguins return from the sea, ready to feed their still-dependent offspring. A few penguins sit on eggs, and others are feeding very young chicks, taking turns to forage for food. One gentoo tries to steal rocks from another’s nest, evoking a shrieking match among several of the birds. A skua lands dangerously close to a nest, stepping toward one of the tiny chicks, and five nearby gentoos turn on the skua, who lets out a rubbery caw and flaps away. Moments later, the gentoos are squawking at one another again.
“I’m still getting used to not intervening,” Keller says.
One of the challenges of being a naturalist is letting nature take its course, no matter what. “I’m not sure that feeling ever leaves you.”
He lifts his eyes from the penguins to the ocean beyond. “One day at McMurdo,” he says, “a Weddell seal wandered onto the base—I have no idea how he got there, so far away from the water. He was all alone, just sort of limping along. He was small—a juvenile.”
I listen, remembering when we met, when Keller couldn’t tell a crabeater seal from a Weddell. How he’d called the leopard seal a sea leopard.
“I followed him, wanting to help. There was no way I could get him back to the water, but I could tell he was dying, and I wished I could put him out of his misery, at least. I stayed back, waiting, as he slinked along. I don’t know if he was aware of me or not. Finally he stopped moving. I watched him die.” Keller turns his head toward me. “Is that crazy?”
“I’d have done the same.” I stretch out my legs until one of my thick-soled boots touches his. Those who winter over at McMurdo occasionally see animals heading away from the sea when they should be going toward it—some are confused, lost; others are steady and determined, as if they are on some strange suicidal mission. Of all the challenges of overwintering, this is the most disconcerting.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch,” I say. “I was trying to protect myself, I guess.”
“I shouldn’t have given you a reason to.”
I nudge his boot. “Only one more week until we’re back in Ushuaia.”
“I wish I could stay down here,” he says.
“I can give you the key to my cottage,” I suggest. “You can make yourself at home. The place does need a good cleaning, though, and you’ll have to feed my landlord’s cat.”
He smiles. “Can I take a rain check?”
“Why?”
“I’ll be teaching at Boston University, believe it or not—just summer term, a freshman bio course. When they offered it to me a month ago, I didn’t know whether I’d see you. After we lost touch, I thought—” He stops. “It’s a different sort of complicated, this life, isn’t it?”
I think of two volcanologists I know from McMurdo, an “ice couple,” meaning they are together whenever they’re at the station but then happily return home to their families, thousands of miles apart, after their research time ends—an arrangement not at all uncommon among Antarctic researchers and staff.
“Couldn’t you get out of it?” I ask. “I mean, if you really want to come to Oregon instead.”
“I don’t know. I guess a part of me needs to see this through.”
“Teaching? You could do that in Eugene.”
“It’s not that. It’s about”—he pauses—“not disappearing.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been almost five years,” he says, “but still I go home and think of how things used to be. Wiping up Ally’s dinner from the kitchen floor while Britt gave her a bath, or vice versa. We traded off these things, but usually we both read her a story. Sometimes it was the only time we all were together in a day, but we always had that.” A smile lights his face, and I feel as though he’s talking more to himself than to me. Then it fades. “Britt donated all of Ally’s books to Children’s Hospital before I had a chance to go through them. I’d have liked to keep just one. Her favorite was Make Way for Ducklings. Since we lived in Boston and we’d taken her to see the bronze ducks in the Public Garden, she thought it was a true story.”