But the truth is, right now I’m grateful for their questions. At least when they’re talking I don’t have to think about anything else, like where Keller is and why I haven’t heard from him, or how I can possibly reach a man who rarely answers his cell phone and tends to stay offline for weeks at a time.
“Was that a penguin?” a man asks, blinking as if he’s just seen a meteor.
I’d missed it, whatever he’d seen. “Could be,” I tell him. “They feed in this area. Keep your eyes up ahead, off to the side of the boat, and you’ll see them. The noise of the ship scares them out of the water.”
I watch as the tourists lean over the railing; I listen to rapid-fire sounds from their cameras. How quickly they duck behind their viewfinders—in their haste to capture images of the penguins, to gather their mementos, they miss the real beauty in everything there is to see. I have to remind myself of my own first journey south, when I took more photos than I could count, hardly daring to believe I’d have the chance to see any of it again. The penguins’ sleek bodies porpoising through the waves, so fast they look like miniature orcas. The way they leap and swim in formation, as if they’re in the sky instead of in the water. The way they change direction in the blink of an eye.
Gradually, the cold seeps in, and everyone shuffles inside. My shoulders begin to relax as I lean against the railing. It takes a moment before I realize I’m not alone.
A woman stands about twenty feet away, where the railing curves along the bow, and while she’d been facing the other direction, she’s now turning toward me.
“Hi,” she says and walks over. I see her glance at my name tag, and then she holds out her hand. “So you’re the penguin expert,” she says. “I’m Kate Archer.”
After a brief pause, I take her hand, lost inside a puffed-up Gore-Tex glove. Her smile curves a half-moon into an otherwise lonely expression, and she seems so happy to meet me that I’m guessing she’s traveling alone and hasn’t talked to anyone in a while.
“This is amazing,” she says. “I bet you never get sick of this view.”
“No, I never do.”
She points toward a berg in the distance. “How tall is that iceberg?”
“I’d say sixty, eighty feet.” Then I add, “About the size of an eight-story building.”
“Ah,” she says, then falls back into silence.
I know I should be more friendly, engage her in conversation, educate her about the Antarctic, but I already feel as though I’ve used up my conversation quota for the day. And then I see something ahead—a flash of reflected light, indicating the presence of something I can’t possibly be seeing.
I reach into my cargo pants and retrieve my binoculars, and I see I was right: In the distance is a ship, taller than the eight-story iceberg that is nearly hiding it.
I mutter, “What the hell?” and try to adjust my binoculars, wondering if they’re fogged up, or broken—or if there’s something wrong with my own eyes.
Then I glance over at the woman next to me, trying to remember her name. Kate. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just that I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
“What are you seeing?” She leans over the rail, as if that’ll help her vision. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will,” I say, lowering the binoculars. “Give it a second.”
“I wish I had my husband’s binoculars right now. I could probably see straight through that iceberg.”
It takes me a second to make the connection. “Is your husband’s name Richard?”
“Yes,” she says, looking over at me. “Why?”
“I met him this morning. At breakfast.”
“Then you’ve seen more of him today than I have.”
There’s something strange in her voice, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ve never been comfortable with the unnatural intimacy created on these voyages—we’re witnesses to crumbling marriages, sibling rivalry, love affairs. Part of the problem, I think, is that, for so many, Antarctica is the trip of a lifetime, and their expectations are so high. They come down here expecting to be changed forever, and often they are, only not in the ways they expect. They get seasick, they aren’t used to the close quarters, they learn that it’s because of their own bad habits that the oceans are dying. And this all seeps into not only their dream vacation but their relationships, more deeply than they’re prepared for.
Just then the ship begins to emerge from behind the iceberg, her bow nosing forward, revealing as she floats onward her many oversize parts: a vast, open-air terrace; a railing encompassing a sundeck and swimming pool; some sort of playing field just beyond. The ship comes slowly into full view, along with hundreds of tiny portholes and dozens of balconies feathered across the port side.