“Don’t worry,” he says, as if reading my mind, as we begin a walk along the edge of the gentoo colony near our camp. “It won’t be like before. We’ll figure things out.”
He stops, looking out over the colony, then raises his hands, as if framing the scene for a photograph. “All this—it reminds me of a word I learned from my grandmother, a long time ago,” he says. “Her parents were German immigrants, and this was back when there was a lot of anti-German feeling in the States, so they distanced themselves from their heritage. My grandmother had always wanted to visit Germany, but she never did—she taught me this German word, fernweh, which doesn’t have an equivalent word in English. It means something like being homesick for a place you’ve never been. She said that was how she felt about Germany, her whole life.” He motions toward the hills, peppered with nesting gentoos. “I finally understand what she meant.”
A looming intuition seeps from below my consciousness, like the weighty, hidden part of an iceberg—the unwelcome awareness that for Keller, this is still about Antarctica, not about me. The continent has given him the unexpected liberty of beginning again—and while I know I can never understand the depth of his loss, I’m not sure he can truly begin again, even if he doesn’t fully realize it. He’d let me go once already, by staying at McMurdo, and, though I’d managed to let him go, too, I won’t be able to do it twice.
“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?”