The End of the End of the Earth Read online

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  My uncle, the Air Force veteran, now buried in the ranks at Arlington, was a lifelong joiner. Walt never ceased to be passionately loyal to his hometown of Chisholm, in Minnesota’s Iron Range, where he’d grown up without much money. He’d been a college hockey player and then a bomber pilot in the Second World War, flying thirty-five missions in North Africa and South Asia. He was a self-taught pianist, able to play any standard by ear; the elements of his golf swing were eclectic. He wrote two memoirs devoted to the many great friends he’d made in life. He was also a liberal Democrat who’d married a stringent Republican. He could strike up a lively conversation with almost anyone, and I could imagine the unfettered fun that my mother could imagine having had if she’d been with a regular guy like Walt and not my father.

  One night, at the restaurant in the South Florida condominium complex, over several cocktails, Walt told me the story not only of him and my mother but of him and Fran and Gail. After retiring from combat, he said, and after leading an officer’s social life with Fran at various overseas bases, he’d realized that he’d made a mistake in marrying her. It wasn’t just that her parents had spoiled her; she was an implacable social striver who hated and denied her backwoods Minnesota background as much as he loved and celebrated his own; she was unbearable. “I was weak,” he said. “I should have left her, but I was weak.”

  They had their only child when Fran was in her mid-thirties, and Fran quickly became so obsessed with Gail, and so averse to sex with Walt, that he felt driven to seek comfort elsewhere. “There were other women,” he told me. “I had affairs. But I always made it clear that I was a family man and wasn’t leaving Fran. On Sundays, my buddies and I would get loaded up on liquor and drive over to Baltimore to watch Johnny Unitas and the Colts.” At home, Fran grew ever more micromanagerial in her attention to Gail’s personal appearance, to her schoolwork, to her art projects. Gail seemed to be all Fran could talk about or think about. Four years at college had brought some relief, but as soon as Gail returned to the East Coast, and went to work in Williamsburg, Fran redoubled her intrusions into her daughter’s life.

  Walt could see that something was terribly wrong; that Gail was being driven crazy by her mother but didn’t know how to escape. By early August 1976, he’d become so desperate that he did the only thing he could do. He announced to Fran that he was going back to Minnesota, back to his beloved Chisholm, and that he wasn’t going to live with her again—couldn’t be married to her—unless she curtailed her obsession with their daughter. Then he packed a bag and drove to Minnesota. He was there, in Chisholm, ten days later, when Gail set out to drive through the night in bad weather across West Virginia. Gail was aware, he said, that he’d made a break with her mother. He’d told her himself.

  Walt ended his story there, and we spoke of other things—his wish to find a girlfriend among the other residents of the complex, his clearness of conscience regarding this wish, now that my mother was dead and Fran was in a nursing home, and his worry that he was too much of a country boy, too unpolished, for the stylish widows at the complex. I wondered if he’d omitted the coda to his story because it went without saying: how, after an accident in West Virginia that could never be untangled from his flight to Minnesota, and after Fran had lost the one person in the world who mattered to her, becoming locked forever in brittle posthumous monomania, a world of pain, he’d had no choice but to return to her and devote himself henceforth to caring for her.

  I saw that Gail’s death hadn’t merely been “tragic” in the hackneyed sense. It had partaken of the irony and inevitability of dramatic tragedy, compounded by the twenty-plus years that Walt had then devoted to listening to Fran, leavened only by the tenderness of his solicitude toward her. He really was a nice guy. He had a heart full of love and had given it to his broken wife, and I was moved not only by the tragedy but by the ordinary humanity of the man at the center of it. I had a sense of astonishment as well. Concealed in plain sight, my whole life, amid the moral rigidity and Swedish standoffishness of my father’s family, had been a regular guy who had affairs and drove to Baltimore with his buddies and manfully accepted his fate. I wondered if my mother had seen in him what I’d now seen, and had loved him for it, as I now did.

  The following afternoon, Walt’s friend Ed called and asked him to come to his house with jumper cables. Arriving at the house, we found Ed standing in the street beside an enormous American car. Ed looked nearly dead—his skin was a terrible yellow and he was swaying on his feet. He said he’d been sick for a month and was feeling much better. But when Walt connected the jumper cables to Ed’s car and asked him to try turning over the engine, Ed reminded him that he was too weak to turn the ignition key. (He had, however, been hoping to drive the car.) I got into Ed’s car myself. As soon as I tried the key, I could tell that the car’s problem was worse than a dead battery. Ed’s car was utterly nonresponsive, and I said so. But Walt wasn’t happy with how the jumper cables were connected. He backed his own car away, dragging a cable and snagging it on the pavement. Before I could stop him, he’d torn off the cable’s gripper, and the person he became upset with was me. I worked to reattach the gripper with a screwdriver, but he didn’t like how I was doing it. He tried to grab it away from me, and he barked at me, shouted at me. “God damn it, Jonathan! God damn it! That’s not right! Give it here! God damn it!” Ed, now sitting in the passenger seat, had slumped sideways and was listing downward. Walt and I tussled over the screwdriver, which I wouldn’t let go of; I was angry at him, too. When we’d calmed down, and I’d repaired the cable to his satisfaction, I turned the key of Ed’s car again. The car was nonresponsive.

  After that first visit, I tried to get to Florida every year to see Walt, and to call him every few months. He did eventually find a girlfriend, a sterling one. Even when his hearing worsened and his mind began to cloud, I could sustain a conversation with him. We continued to have moments of intensity, like the time he told me how important it was to him that I someday tell his story, and I promised that I would. But it seems to me that we were never closer than the day he’d shouted at me about the jumper cable. There was something uncanny about that shouting. It was as if he’d forgotten—had been made to forget, perhaps by the overt mortality of Ed and his car, perhaps by the refraction of his love for my mother through the person of me—that he and I didn’t have a real history together; had spent, in our lives, no more than a cumulative week with each other. He’d shouted at me the way a father might have shouted at a son.

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  The Californian had been right to fear the weather, which was colder than I’d led her to believe. But I’d been right about the penguins. From the Antarctic Peninsula, where their numbers were impressive, the Orion’s route took us north again and then far east, to South Georgia island, where their numbers were staggering. South Georgia is a principal breeding site for the King Penguin, a species nearly as tall as the Emperor and even more dramatically plumaged. To see a King Penguin in the wild seemed to me, in itself, sufficient reason not only to have made the journey; it seemed reason enough to have been born on this planet. Admittedly, I love birds. But I believe that a visitor from any other planet, observing a King Penguin alongside even the most perfect human specimen, with vision unclouded by the possibility of sexual attraction, would declare the penguin the obviously more beautiful species. And it’s not just the hypothetical extraterrestrial. Everybody loves penguins. In the erectness of their bearing, and in their readiness to drop down on their bellies, the flinging way they gesture with their armlike flippers, the shortness of the strides with which they walk or boldly scamper on their fleshy feet, they resemble human children more closely than does any other animal, not excepting the great apes.

  Having evolved on remote coastlines, Antarctic penguins are also the rare animal with absolutely no fear of us. When I sat on the ground, the King Penguins came so close to me that I could have stroked their gleaming, furlike feathers. Their pluma
ge had the hypercrispness of pattern, the hypervividness of color, that you can normally experience only by taking drugs. The colonies of Gentoos and Chinstraps had not been great for sitting down, because of the excrement. But the King Penguins were, as one Lindblad naturalist put it, more tidy. At Saint Andrews Bay, on South Georgia, where half a million adult kings and downy king chicks were gathered tightly together, all I smelled was sea and alpine air.

  Though every penguin species has its charms—the glam-rock head streamers of the Macaroni Penguin, the little parallel-footed jumps with which a Rockhopper patiently climbs or descends a steep slope—I loved the Kings above all others. They combined untoppable aesthetic splendor with the intently social energies of children at play. After porpoising toward shore, a group of Kings would come running headlong up from the breakers, their flippers outstretched and fluttering, as if the water had gotten too cold for them. Or a lone bird would stand in shallow surf and gaze out to sea for so long that you wondered what thought was in its head. Or a pair of young males, excitedly tottering after an undecided female, would pause to see which of them was the more impressive craner of its neck, or to whap at each other ineffectually with their flippers. They had viciously sharp bills but sparred instead with punchless wings.

  At Saint Andrews, the activity was mostly on the outskirts of the colony. Because so many of the birds were incubating eggs or molting, the main colony itself seemed strikingly peaceful. The view of it from above reminded me of Los Angeles as seen from Griffith Park very early on a weekend morning. A drowsy megalopolis of upright penguins. Patroling the thoroughfares were the sheathbills, strange snow-white birds with the body of a pigeon and the habits of a vulture. Even the amazing sound the Kings made—a spiraling festive bray that was sort of like bagpipes, sort of like a holiday noisemaker, and sort of like the “woofing dog” sound on certain airplanes, but really like nothing on earth I’d ever heard—had a soothing effect when thousands of distant penguins were making it together.

  In the twentieth century, human beings did penguins a favor by all but extirpating many of the whales and seals that they competed with for food. Penguin populations rose, and South Georgia has lately become even more hospitable to them, because the rapid retreat of its glaciers is exposing land suitable for nesting. But humanity’s benefit to penguins may be short-lived. If climate change continues to acidify the oceans, the water will reach a pH at which ocean invertebrates can’t grow their shells; one of these invertebrates, krill, is a dietary staple of many penguin species. Climate change is also rapidly diminishing the Antarctic Peninsula’s encircling ice, which provides a platform for the algae on which krill feed in winter, and which has hitherto protected krill from large-scale commercial exploitation. Supertanker-size factory ships may soon be coming from China, from Norway, from South Korea, to vacuum up the food on which not only the penguins but many whales and seals depend.

  Krill are pinkie-size, pinkie-colored crustaceans. Estimating the total amount of them in the Antarctic is difficult, but a frequently cited figure, five hundred million metric tons, could make the species the world’s largest repository of animal biomass. Unfortunately for penguins, many countries consider krill good eating, both for humans (the taste is said to be acquirable) and especially for farm fish and livestock. Currently, the total reported annual take of krill is less than half a million tons, with Norway leading the list of harvesters. China, however, has announced its intention to increase its harvest to as much as two million tons a year, and has begun building the ships needed to do it. As the chairman of China’s National Agricultural Development Group has explained, “Krill provides very good quality protein that can be processed into food and medicine. The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share.”

  The Antarctic marine ecosystem is indeed the richest in the world; it’s also the last remaining substantially intact one. Commercial use of it is monitored and regulated, at least nominally, by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. But decisions by the commission may be vetoed by any of its twenty-five members, and one of them, China, has a history of resisting the designation of some large marine protected areas. Another, Russia, has lately become openly intransigent, not only vetoing the establishment of new protected areas but questioning the very authority of the convention to establish them. Thus the future of krill, and with it the future of many penguin species, depends on uncertainties multiplied by uncertainties: how much krill there really is, how resiliently it can respond to climate change, whether any of it can now be harvested without starving other wildlife, whether such a harvest can even be regulated, and whether international cooperation on Antarctica can withstand new geopolitical conflicts. What isn’t uncertain is that global temperatures, global population, and global demand for animal protein are all rising fast.

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  Mealtimes on the Orion inevitably put me in mind of the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain: the thrice-daily rush for the dining room, the hermetic isolation from the world, the unchanging faces at the tables. Instead of Frau Stöhr, dropping the name of Beethoven’s “Erotica,” there was the Donald Trump supporter and his wife. There was the merry alcoholic couple. There was the Dutch rheumatologist, her rheumatologist second husband, her rheumatologist daughter, and the daughter’s rheumatologist boyfriend. There was the pair of couples who, whenever the Zodiacs were being loaded, jostled their way to the front of the line. There was the man who, by special permission, had brought along ham-radio equipment and was spending his vacation in the ship’s library, trying to contact fellow hobbyists. There were the Australians who mostly didn’t mix.

  By way of mealtime small talk, I asked people why they’d come to Antarctica. I learned that many were simply devotees of Lindblad. Some had heard, while on a different Lindblad, that a Lindblad to Antarctica was the best Lindblad, possibly excepting a Sea of Cortez Lindblad. One couple whom I liked very much, a doctor and a nurse, Bob and Gigi, had come to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary one year late. Another man, a retired chemist, told me that he’d chosen Antarctica only because he’d run out of other places he hadn’t been. I was glad that nobody mentioned seeing Antarctica before it melts. The surprise was that, for nearly the entire trip, not one staff person or passenger even uttered the words climate change in my hearing.

  Granted, I was skipping many of the onboard lectures. To prove myself a hardest-core birder, I needed to be up on the observation deck. The hardest-core birder stands all day in biting wind and salt spray, staring into fog or glare in the hope of glimpsing something unusual. Even when your intuition is telling you that nothing’s out there, the only way to know for sure is to put in the hours and examine every speck of birdlife out to the horizon, every Antarctic Prion (might be a rare and exciting Fairy Prion) darting among waves whose color it matches exactly, every Wandering Albatross (might be a Royal Albatross) deciding whether the ship’s wake is worth following. Seawatching is sometimes nauseating, often freezing, and almost always punishingly dull. After I’d racked up thirty hours of it and tallied exactly one seabird of note, a Kerguelen Petrel, I dialed back and devoted myself to the more sociable compulsion of playing bridge.

  The other players, Diana and Nancy and Jacq, came from Seattle and belonged to a book club that had several other members on the ship. Along with Chris and Ada, they became my friends. In one of the early hands we played, I made a stupid discard, and Diana, a formidable bankruptcy attorney, laughed at me and said, “That was a terrible play.” I liked her for this. I liked the foulness of the language at the table. When my partner, Nancy, who owns a forklift dealership, was playing her first slam contract of the trip, and I’d pointed out that the rest of the tricks were hers, she snapped at me, “Let me play the cards, you shit.” She told me she’d meant it affectionately. The third player, Jacq, also an attorney, told me that she’d written a stage play about a Thanksgiving dinner she’d attended at Diana’s, in the course o
f which Diana’s ailing husband had died in bed in the family room. Jacq had the only tattoo I noticed on any passenger.

  As in The Magic Mountain, the early days of the expedition were long and memorable, the later ones more of an accelerating blur. As soon as I’d had a rewarding encounter with South Georgia Pipits (they were gorgeous and confiding), I lost interest in visiting abandoned whaling stations. Even in Doug’s voice, on our fifth day at South Georgia, a weariness was audible when he said, “So I think we’ll do another sea kayak.” He sounded like Vladimir and Estragon when they decide, late in Godot, after exhausting every other conceivable distraction, to “do the tree.”

  Toward the end of the trip’s final day, which I’d mostly spent at the bridge table while hundreds of potentially interesting seabirds wheeled around outside, I went down to the lounge for a lecture on climate change. The lecture was delivered by the drone-flying Australian, whose name is Adam, and was attended by fewer than half the passengers. I wondered why Lindblad had postponed such an important lecture until the last day. The charitable explanation was that Lindblad, which prides itself on its environmental consciousness, wanted to send us home fired up to do more to protect the natural grandeur we’d enjoyed.

  Adam’s opening plea to us suggested other explanations. “Passenger-comment cards,” he said, “are not the place to voice your beliefs about climate change.” He laughed uneasily. “Don’t shoot the messenger.” He proceeded to ask how many of us believed the Earth’s climate was changing. Everyone in the lounge raised a hand. And how many of us believed that human activity was causing it? Again, most hands were raised, but not the Donald Trump supporter’s, not the ham hobbyist’s. From the very back of the lounge came the curmudgeonly voice of Chris: “What about the people who think it isn’t a matter of belief?”