My Last Continent(59)

It’s our last voyage at the end of a long season, with two stints on Petermann and four shiploads of different passengers. We’re both spent. And I worry, at times like this, that Keller isn’t cut out for this type of work after all. He’s become an incredible naturalist, yet he doesn’t like being around people, especially those who know so little. You were once just like them, I reminded him a couple of weeks ago, when he got cranky with a passenger who’d stepped on a penguin trail. I was never that stubbornly ignorant, he replied, defensive. And I said, Well, you are stubbornly impatient. Give these people a break.

Now I shift on the hard wooden bench and say, “I’ve never seen Glenn that pissed off.”

Keller shrugs. “He’ll get over it.” He looks at me, then presses his feet forward, bending my toes slightly back. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’ll apologize to Glenn, once he’s cooled off a bit. And he knows you had nothing to do with it.”

“That’s not it at all. You know by now what you’re risking, and still you keep doing it.”

“Glenn’s more bark than bite,” he says, closing his eyes. “Don’t worry.”

“I do worry. I don’t know what I’d do without you on these trips.”

I feel as though Keller and I help each other stay sane during these journeys; we remind each other that we’ll soon have a couple nights together in Ushuaia, or two weeks alone among the penguins at Petermann.

We’re alike in so many ways, even in the way Keller had taken the mic from me after the slide show, and how I’d taken it again from him—both of us trying to save each other from ourselves and the consequences with Glenn. And with a sudden, sinking feeling, I wonder if what Keller and I have been doing isn’t keeping each other sane but something more like the opposite—a folie à deux born of our love for the continent, and for each other, that is steering us not closer to but further away from reality. It’s the passengers who reflect the real world, its opinions and habits, its denials and truths—and we’re more removed from this world all the time, maybe to the point where we’re unable to exist within it at all.

With Keller’s eyes closed, I take the opportunity to study him unobserved, blinking out a bead of sweat that has trickled into my eye. He looks unconcerned, relaxed, despite what happened earlier, yet I can see that every moment he’s spent on the continent is already etched upon his face: skin ruddy from the cold and wind and sun, eyes receding into a growing nest of crow’s-feet. What draws me to Keller are things I think few people outside Antarctica—even Glenn, especially Glenn—will ever see. Watching Keller put out a fire in one of the tinder-dry dormitories at McMurdo. Seeing him break up a fistfight between two mechanics in the Southern Exposure. Watching him secure a loose egg back under a penguin’s brood pouch when the bird couldn’t leave its nest, sustaining a gory bite wound for his trouble. But most of all, what I know about Keller comes from the shared silences of our glacial hikes, from stealing away from the tourists for a few moments alone on the uppermost deck of the ship, from the reunion  s that feel as though we’ve never been apart.

I stand and pick up the sauna’s large wooden spoon, ladling water over the lava rocks. A great sizzle rises, and the room fills with steam, intensifying the heat. It’s getting harder to breathe, and as Keller opens his eyes, as I look at him through the steam, his eyes dark and wet as a seal’s, I realize that, though I may know him as well as anyone, he will always be a bit out of reach, even to me. Not listening to Glenn is one thing—not listening to me is something I hadn’t expected.

“You’ve got to get your act together,” I tell him. “I know you hate sucking up to Glenn, but if that’s what it takes—”

“We work for the APP, not Glenn,” he murmurs, his eyes falling shut again.

“As long as Glenn transports us down here, we do work for him. The whole program depends on getting a free ride.”

“It’s not a free ride,” Keller says. “There’s a huge price to pay.”

“Believe me, I know. But it’s worth it.”

Keller opens his eyes and looks at me. “So you agree with Glenn? You think seafood belongs on the menu?”

“No, of course I don’t, but at least I see the reality—that it’s impossible to fill a cruise if you don’t serve what the passengers want to eat.”

“These passengers need to know what a disaster this is.”

“I hear you,” I say. “I do. But since we’re bringing people down here, we have to teach them, show them how important it is, everything they’re seeing firsthand. If you had your way, you’d just fence it all off.”