“I saw dozens of tags when I was down there, but I’ve kept this one as a reminder. That the birds aren’t just numbers.”
I take a deep breath. I hope he’s listening between the lines, hearing what I’m saying as an apology, of sorts—for what happened on our last voyage, for my wanting more than he can give. “Anyway,” I continue, “you’re the only person I know who can understand.”
He lifts my face toward his and kisses me. “Thank you.” He looks back at the tag between his fingers. “I’d love to hear about the bird who wore this.”
I rest my head on his shoulder. “I’ll tell you about her over a beer on the Cormorant.”
He holds the tag up toward the light, and we look at all its scars—its numbers and letters, its scuffs and scratches—and I sense he’s thinking, as I am, of these tags and their long and mysterious journeys, from the hands of researchers to the left flipper of a penguin, to the hundreds of miles of seas where they forage for food, and, finally, to the sloppy wet deck of a fishing boat, before they make their way back to where they came from, completing a full and tragic circle.
THREE DAYS BEFORE SHIPWRECK
Whalers Bay, Deception Island
(62°59'S, 60°34'W)
The first time I saw Deception Island, I thought I’d been struck color-blind. Under a steel-hued sky, the landscape is all gray, black, and white, with streaks of snow melted into the sharp, serrated black hills that form a horseshoe around Whalers Bay. As the Cormorant passes though Neptune’s Bellows—a passage so narrow that most early seafarers missed it, giving Deception Island its name—her white-and-blue reflection bounces off the dark mirror of greenish black water. The island is awash in varying shades of light and dark, the only color coming from human sources: the ship, the bright red parkas crowding the main deck.
As we prepare for our landing, thoughts of what to do with the news I received from Susan run through my head. Of how to tell Keller. It now feels stranger than ever that he’s not here with me, and I’m counting the days in my head, my thoughts skipping ahead to when there’s a possibility, however remote, that I’ll see him again.
I certainly can’t e-mail news like this, but I dread another awkward ship-to-ship phone call, afraid of what I’ll hear in his voice when I tell him—that this news may be not welcome but instead a painful memory of all that he’s lost.
I think of the emperors, the devoted males who guard the eggs—this is Keller. The depth of his devotion would equal that of the birds, while I’ve avoided motherhood. But nature has a way of surprising us, of overpowering us, of reminding us that, no matter what we believe and no matter how hard we try, we’re not in control after all.
Thom and I direct passengers into a Zodiac, which I then maneuver across the expansive, colorless bay toward the island, easing through the sunken, watery caldera of the peninsula’s most active volcano. The penguins don’t build nests here, on the unstable black volcanic sand, and their absence gives me a lonely feeling as I pilot the Zodiac toward the beach. When we’re close, I hop out and drag the boat onto dry sand.
It occurs to me, for a split second, that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, that Susan had told me to take it easy. But I can’t slack off on work without drawing attention to myself. I haven’t confided in anyone—not even Amy or Thom—and I’m not about to tell Glenn.
Steam rises from the sand as I help passengers from the Zodiac. Behind them is the dark, glimmering jewel of the bay; in front, yards of black sand stretch out before the zebra--striped hills. With no penguin colonies on this side of the island, we let passengers wander on their own, and I watch them make their way from the beach toward a shantytown of enormous oil containers and abandoned buildings—relics of the Antarctic whaling industry—so old and suffused with rust that they blend into the lava-blackened cliffs behind them. This reminder of whaling’s gruesome past makes me shudder: the whalers removing the blubber on the ships, then bringing the remainder of the bodies to shore, where they’d boil them down to get every last bit of oil. And the whaling industry isn’t even history—though the International Whaling Commission banned whaling in 1986, the Japanese have continued hunting in the Southern Ocean, killing minke and fin and even endangered sei whales under the guise of “research,” even though they haven’t published a paper in years and continue to sell the whale meat commercially.