Like my father, Walt knew about these things almost intuitively. He knew how a lake could change, what it could say, what it could tell us about the way we lived on this Earth. When he saw that, intuited it in his numbers, it was too much. He was hooked.
For Tim, things had been clear now for some time. He had discovered analytical chemistry, had taken to the lab and all of its delicate operations with a deftness and good cheer that I had never seen before. His work had a kind of meditative stillness about it. A saintly quality. As though every act were being offered up. You hardly knew he was there, and yet everything got done. Meticulously. Almost without effort. Nothing wasted. I would just scratch my head and say, “How did he do that? So quickly?” I knew every number was exactly right. And with Tim there was something else: years of camping and fishing with his father in Canada had given him the resourcefulness of the outdoorsman. He could probably make a canoe with tree bark and fish with carved stones.
Then there was Mike, black hair down to his shoulders, a slight roll to his walk, that dense thicket of beard like Raphael’s Aristotle. Mike, alone of all of us, you could imagine on the first polar expeditions with Scott or Shackleton, always indefatigable and good-humored, ready to put his life on the line. Varner called him a gentle giant, even though he stood only five feet ten.
Dr. Yu, the oldest in the group, was a visiting scientist from Qinghai Province in China. He knew geochemistry, wrote poetry about the high, barren, windy emptiness of the Tibet Plateau, and was an expert on the salt lakes of that region. He would understand the Dry Valleys instinctively.
Varner was different. From the time I met him, he seemed a man of reason. Not easily excited. A skeptic, cautious. Even now he looked uncertain about our project. Maybe the flume he was designing to measure stream flow would work, maybe it wouldn’t. He would give it his best. But he could not even imagine the valleys and the mountains of Antarctica, he said. He could not imagine the streams or his own science there. The glaciers seemed like absolute fictions. I think, secretly, he thought I was slightly mad in wanting to go back to the lakes year after year. “Once should be enough,” he said. “Maybe more than enough.” Sometimes I think he doubted there were lakes there at all.
It still seemed odd that he had decided to come. We had been friends for many years. In college we had taken chemistry together, had run through the infamous “qual scheme” in laboratories that were stifling and dark, that smelled of rotten eggs. “So this is chemistry,” Varner had said wryly, shaking his head, as though some life decision were being made right there on the spot. That year we heard the great chemist Linus Pauling speak of disarmament and peace and then glide, almost without pause, into the theory of the hydrogen bond. “It was recognized some decades ago,” Pauling began, “that under certain conditions an atom of hydrogen is attracted by rather strong forces to two atoms, instead of only one, so that it may be considered to be acting as a bond between them.” Then he stopped for a second, as he often did for dramatic effect, and then, with his arms spread wide, his face lifted to the crowd, he said, “This is the hydrogen bond.” During the hour, he spoke of the properties of liquids, the structure of proteins, the origin of life, all the while returning to the little bond with which he had begun, the bond that influenced everything. “A man of passion, brilliant,” Varner had said without emotion, as though he were offering a pure description.
A chemical engineer by training, Varner had once earned a big salary blending polymers, turning plastics into corporate gold. But a decade into his chosen career, he began to have doubts. He went back to school at nights, became a high school physics teacher in Akron, working for less than a third of his engineer’s pay. No regrets. He was living a good life in Akron, in the big restored house he had bought eighteen years ago, not far from the Firestone mansion. He had his backyard garden, with its early tomatoes, and the barn swallows nested nearby. Varner was a putterer, a repairman, a man of the neighborhood. But he was also a gifted engineer. If anyone could turn a piece of plywood into a flume and have that flume get numbers, it was Varner. It really didn’t matter that he was not a hydrologist and had probably never even taken a course in hydrology. He had the engineer’s “feel” for physical objects, for devices and gizmos, for things that made the world turn. So Varner would build us a flume, tell us how the streams ran in time.
How the streams ran was at the heart of our work. We wanted to know how the streams gave rise to the lakes, how the lakes were prefigured in the waters of the streams. And we wanted to know what the streams carried, what dissolved things swam like secrets in the current: how much manganese and iron and cobalt, how much phosphorus and nitrogen, how much calcium? If you could measure the streams you could track the journeys of the elements, imagine them in the small compass of the lake like migratory birds.
As the project leader, I had parceled out the work according to interest and skill, but mostly according to interest. The fire had to be there first; the other would follow. Walt would study phosphorus and nitrogen, would try to measure how much of these elements the clear glacial melt streams brought to the lakes each year. We were interested especially in phosphorus, because in lakes this is the element of life, and sometimes of death. Mike would look at how the lakes had evolved through time, at their chemistry and salt structures, at how quickly the streams brought calcium and magnesium and sodium and potassium to them. Chemically the lakes were all different. Even when they lay cheek by jowl in the same valley, they were different. Why, we wondered. To explain the lakes we had to understand the streams. We had to know how fast they flowed, how quickly they delivered their precious cargo of ions and salts and clays. Getting the flows right was Varner’s job, and so much depended on it.
And then we had to retrieve the particle traps from Lake Vanda—this was up to Tim and Dr. Yu—gather together what bits of matter had settled into them, and decipher that. I worried about the traps. We had left them suspended for a year, tubes dangling at the end of a thread. Yet if all went well there would be signs and messages in them. For while the streams spoke of arrivals, of the elements coming down to the lake, the particles spoke of departures, of things leaving. In the two there should be balance.
A deep voice from the cabin interrupted my last-minute audit. We were crossing the equator now, it said, and I glanced out the window as though there were actually something to see: A thin blue line, perhaps, like the one they pasted on the spyglasses of nineteenth-century sailors when they first came into these parts, or even a few soft zeros marking the mystical latitude of the Earth’s halving.
What had brought me here, then, hurtling over the dark Earth, heading south? As with every journey, this one began with a few conscious steps, and I could record those. They have dates and dollar amounts and postage. But they are only a small part of the whole. Time and chance happeneth to us all, saith the Preacher. So what is it that comes before the easily recollected numbers, the presence of certainty? What lies in a time before Benoit and Hatcher, before I had even heard of the continent? I might just as well have laughed at the thought of this southern extreme the day Hatcher first mentioned it. But I didn’t and I wonder why. What did the word Antarctica reach into and touch? What resonances did it stir in what had long been stored away? Things I didn’t know had been there to begin with.
I went back to sipping a Jim Beam and searching for some visible evidence of our half-world position—something physical besides the wing light’s pulsing with the odd glow that it cast before being swallowed up. You had to laugh at that. A whole universe filled with night and then the winglight, like a little prayer. But there was nothing there. Only the rising winds. And far below, the empty sea.
TWO