I’m not sure he will—typically only the males feed in this region, and they prefer the deepest of waters—but I try to be encouraging, to let people believe they’re going to see everything possible, that they’ll get their money’s worth. They don’t need to know that they could visit Antarctica every year for the rest of their lives and still not see all there is.
“So,” Richard says, putting the binoculars back on the table, “how long have you worked on the Cormorant?”
“We’re actually with the APP,” Thom tells him.
“Oh?”
Thom’s mouth is now full of toast, so I continue. “The Antarctic Penguins Project is a nonprofit organization,” I explain. “We study the three species of penguins here, tracking their progress, numbers, feeding and breeding habits. The boat transports us down here as part of the project’s mission to educate people about the region.”
“Nice,” Richard says. “If you have to be down here, this is the way to travel, that’s for sure. What’s our first stop?”
Thom explains that we won’t know until just before we get there—that each excursion to these tiny, remote islands depends upon ice, weather, and access, all of which change day to day, sometimes hour to hour.
My mind wanders back a few days to when I arrived in Ushuaia, at the guesthouse where Keller and I had planned to meet. He wasn’t there, and I took the opportunity to shower off the long flight and to close my eyes for a little while. When I woke up, it was morning, and I was due at the dock where the Cormorant was moored—with still no sign of Keller.
I sent a quick e-mail from the computer in the hotel lobby, thinking his flight had been delayed and that he’d show up that evening, just before we cast off. But when the Cormorant’s long blast sounded and the ship drifted into the Beagle Channel, I looked past the passengers’ faces, past their champagne glasses at the waters ahead, and I wanted, irrationally, to run up to the bridge, tell the captain we had to wait.
I stare out the view windows of the dining room and try to think optimistically: Keller must’ve missed his flight, shifted his schedule at the last minute, made a plan to join the Cormorant in Ushuaia on its next voyage south, two weeks from now. I tell myself this even as I doubt all of it. I sneak a glance at Richard, who is adjusting the settings on his binoculars, and in that moment we’re not so different—both of us searching for something we aren’t going to find.
The last time I said good-bye to Keller Sullivan was only three months earlier, during an unexpected Stateside visit. We still live on opposite coasts, and during the eight or more months we spend away from the continent, we keep in touch via e-mail, phone, and Skype. We’re like penguins that way—each of us off on our own separate journeys until we meet again, our shared nests reserved for these expeditions, for the peninsula, for the camps we build together.
It’s complicated, what we share—a relationship born among the penguins, among creatures whose own breeding habits are as ever-evolving as the oceans to which they’re constantly struggling to adapt. While many species mate for life, others are monogamous for only one season; still others have surprisingly high divorce rates—for all of them, survival comes first. Sometimes I think this sums up Keller and me pretty well. We have fallen in love with each other as much as with Antarctica, and we have yet to separate ourselves, and what we are, from this place. Each time I arrive at the bottom of the world, I never quite know what our nest will look like, or if it’ll exist at all.
Last season, when I arrived in Ushuaia, bleary-eyed and dreading our first week on the Cormorant before Keller and I would be dropped off at Petermann, I didn’t see him until I was on board. Until I felt my duffel being lifted out of my hand, an arm around my waist. He spun me into a bear hug before I got a chance to look at him, then set me down so we could see each other.
“Here we are,” he said. “Fin del mundo—”
“—principio de todo,” I said, finishing the sentence for him as I usually did, repeating the town’s motto, lettered in blue on the white wall that borders the colorful buildings of the town and the sharp, snowcapped mountains beyond them.
The end of the world, the beginning of everything.
Starting a journey to Antarctica doesn’t feel right anymore without Keller. In a sudden flurry of emotions, I don’t know which to give in to: worry, anger, or simply disappointment.
AS THE WAVES continue to lose their sting, guests begin to emerge from their cabins, unsteadily navigating the passageways. They don their waterproof, insulated, bright red Cormorant jackets and make their way topside.
The first few guests on the deck soon grow into a crowd of dozens, and it’s not long before I’m surrounded, fielding their questions. How fast do icebergs melt? Where will that one end up? How big do they get?
“An iceberg the size of Singapore broke off a glacier not too long ago,” I tell them. “But the largest one was even bigger than that, about two hundred miles long.”