I knew, for example, that the Onyx River in Wright Valley had brought tons of cobalt and lead and copper into Lake Vanda over its long history. Yet there were virtually no metals in the lake. I knew this. But where had they gone? What was removing them? What thin veil of purity had caught them in its mesh? And whatever veil it was, did it fall elsewhere across the Earth and its seas, purifying as it went? Did the Earth, or this tiny piece of it, regenerate itself? At what speeds? By what agencies? Last year I had set particle “traps” in the lakes, had left them there for a whole year. They were nothing more than clear plastic tubes, capped at one end and suspended below the ice. But in time, if all went well, I would get them back and I would know the answers.
I had hardly slept, had tossed in and out of dream all night. In the dream, winds came down the long valleys, sweeping thin snow before them, turning everything white and opaque, until my hand became ghostly, disappeared before my face. Creaking metal, the movement of giant frames through the air, bending, moaning with the uplift; the boom of canvas, of tent walls filtering the perpetual light. I rose under mountains, in the salt-weathered hollows of boulders, in narrow passes—the continent rising away from me, as it does, a great plain of ice and solitude, of Edwardian figures with their sledges, dragging, barely moving against the hard blue sky. Then I awoke, looked up at the cherry wood of the bed, at the darkness of Ohio, and remembered I was still here. “It’s time to pack,” Wanda said. “Time to wake the girls so they can see you off.” In the basement the furnace rattled as I dressed.
In a few moments I was downstairs. The sun stood large and red on the horizon beyond the water tower, just about to begin its climb through the morning sky. We were all standing at the door—Dana in her yellow sleeper; Kate, who barely came to my waist, in pink. Wanda was dressed in the flowing muumuu she had bought that year in Hawaii. We were hugging and holding back tears and I was feeling that odd mixture of excitement and guilt, even dread that accompanies these journeys. So much seems to fold and entangle itself in this work. So much that is never said. Anticipation of things to come; regret for things missed. How many Christmases do you get with your children when they are still filled with wonder, knowing the winter snows are tossed in magic?
The van from the university drew up to the curb. Mike let the engine idle, jumped out, ran across the lawn, and lifted Katy over his head. Wanda hugged him and said, “You two look after each other. Don’t do anything foolish down there. I want to see everyone back here safe and sound.” Dana was wiping away tears. “Write me, Daddy. Call on my birthday,” she said, “like you did last year. We’ll keep the Christmas tree up for you. I promise.” “Write to your mother,” Wanda said to me. “She seems so concerned this time. And don’t forget the shell.”
We drove down High Street, jogged right, then left, and up the winding road to Boyd Hall. Walt, Tim, Varner, and Dr. Yu were waiting at the front door, and we all greeted each other with day-of-departure enthusiasm. Upstairs, the laboratory’s floor-to-ceiling windows let in a pale light that scattered across the benches and the instruments—the water baths and spectrophotometers, the burettes clamped and covered on the metal stand—and reflected onto the chalk board with its lists and equations and onto the sturdy wooden crates that were neatly lined against the wall. We locked the equipment boxes with their water samplers and filters and pumps and pipettes, and slid the dead weight of the sediment corer into its hinged container. We gathered the black carrying cases that held the pH meters, the oxygen meters, and probes. We stuffed books into knapsacks: Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater; Aquatic Chemistry; Wetzel’s Limnology. Large, ponderous tomes, but for us essentials, tools of the trade.
After we had checked everything against the list on the board, we carried it all downstairs. Mike, Walt, Tim, Dr. Yu, Varner, and I, like a line of porters and sherpas, wound our way down the narrow staircase of the old building, past the brass pendulum that swings in the stairwell, past the polished reading room, and out the door. We nearly filled the back of the van with our supplies. And this was only the beginning. The cold-weather clothing would come later, in New Zealand, and the camping gear and supplies would be carefully chosen in Antarctica, at McMurdo Station. “Expedition,” Mike said. “To the valleys of Mars and beyond,” Walt continued, raising his arm with a flourish. I turned to look at Boyd Hall. The gray limestone was adorned with a single word carved in large letters above the door: SCIENCE, it read, almost wistfully, as though somehow there were still only one. We moved slowly up the empty drive that runs by the small Gothic chapel and by Peabody Hall and then drops suddenly down toward the shallow pond, crosses the stone bridge, and climbs back again, past the art gallery and out to the highway. We were under way.
At the airport we unloaded the van, stacked the trunks and cases and knapsacks neatly by the counter, and then walked in aimless little circles while we waited. Brilliant surfaces, reflections, whispers, the serious self-confidence of airports—somehow, in our checkered shirts and hiking boots and faded jeans, our “geochemical attire,” as Mike called it, we did not fit.
“Would you please open these boxes, sir?” There was a stern voice speaking behind me. “I hear something. It’s ticking.” I listened for a second, crouching down, pressing my ear to one of the containers. There was no denying it: tick, tick, tick, tick, slightly muffled, but absolutely steady … and loud. I felt betrayed. By my own equipment.
A small crowd began to gather as I rooted beneath a mound of pipette tips and filter papers, things that sounded like dry leaves, that flew up and fluttered when I touched them. My hands clutched something cold, round, heavy. People were bending down. The circle of onlookers had grown. “It’s the clock drive,” I said, pulling it up with both hands. “For the water-level recorder. For the streams.” My voice was rising. I was in my own country, speaking English, making perfect sense, at least to myself, and yet I occupied the center of an expanding circle of incomprehension. How to explain this?
I stood up, pulled off the top of the instrument to expose the rounded drum. Varner reached into his knapsack and produced a roll of chart paper. Dr. Yu, who understood intuitively that this was about to become a public demonstration for the “authorities,” handed me the yellow float. I attached it to the instrument. You could now see the drum, with its lined chart paper, slowly turning. You could see the pen lean inward against the paper, touch it, leave a trace. You could see the way the yellow float, which dangled at my knees, controlled the pen, moved it up and down against the drum. “Imagine this is a stream,” I said, looking out over the crowd, and I pointed down, down at the carpeted airport floor. “When the stream rises, it lifts the float.” I lifted it slightly. “And the float lifts the pen.” A thin red line shot upward like a spike on the white graph paper. “Like this.” A woman in the back smiled. Then smiles all around.
There were more questions about the meters: pH, oxygen, conductivity. They had a look of menace about them, needles drifting mysteriously across the white calibrated landscapes of the faces. I lifted each of them in turn, held them up for the clerk to see, played with the knobs, watched the readings come into view. Readings of nothing. “You can put those things away now. Sorry for the bother. You understand.”
We were shortly airborne, the plane lifting slowly west, following for a moment the course of the broad Ohio River. I folded my hands on my lap, rolled my head back against the seat, and looked out onto the scattered fleece of morning cloud, onto the plane’s detached shadow sliding flat far below across the Earth.
This atmosphere through which we climbed, which lifted us like a great gentle hand, has such a thinness, an insubstantial quality to it. It is little more than a tenuous gathering of small molecules: nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, argon, carbon dioxide, jostling, colliding, glancing off one another like tiny billiard balls. No strong intermolecular linkages, no hydrogen bonds, no clear polarities as in the water of a lake. Just the weak force of gravity like some invisible shepherd drawing together his flock. A streak, a wisp, a swirl of matter strewn around. With a few bits of data, a few equations, you can count the molecules, the atoms. In the whole atmosphere, there aren’t