In the McMurdo Biolab there was a tiny room that passed for a library. From there I had once put through a phone patch to my parents. They received it in Pittsburgh at three in the morning. It had gone through a ham operator somewhere in Indiana. “Are you all right, Bill?” my father had yelled, his voice cracking and confused with sleep. There was an edge of panic in his words that I had never heard before. “Are you alive?” It took us more than a few minutes just to connect, just for my heart to slow down. And by then he had handed the phone across the bed to my mother. They had never carried on a one-way conversation, with its awful pauses and clicks and “overs.” Neither had I. Not through eleven thousand miles.
That year Hatcher, Benoit, and I visited all the lakes. Some in darkness, when you could still see stars in the deep chutes of stone and wind that were the valleys, and sunsets that turned the sky emerald and mauve. There were Russian scientists at Lake Bonney, when the hut was still there, before the lake level rose and they had to take it out. Pinned down by October winds and blowing snow, we talked of Tolstoy and Turgenev, the Petersburg of the czars. There were boxes of frozen steaks, a small oil stove, a Primus, a few plywood bunks, lots of vodka and tobacco. Beyond, in the valleys, there was absolutely no one. There never had been. The nearest things to life were the mummified seals, crawled up from the Ross Sea, bones and flesh still intact. They had been lying there a thousand years almost unchanged.
In those days there were no field radios. They just put you in by helicopter on the frozen lake and said good-bye. When the day for pickup came, you waited. Sometimes you waited for a week until the weather broke, until the winds died down so the choppers could move up valley without being blown right back out. We were living on K-rations, in tents that were dots of green and red in the landscape. Early in the season—September, October—we could work outside only an hour or less. Even under the hood of the parka, the tip of my nose turned to frozen flesh, white and blistered when I looked at it in the silver blade of my knife. It seemed I could watch my own spit freeze before it hit the ground.
And there was the wind, constant and depressing. It could make you want to hug yourself and rock in the little tent, burrow into warmth and memory. Anything not to have to face it. But sometimes it could be a conspirator in play. On Bonney, we all “surfed” the ice on plywood squares—even Benoit and the Russian geologist Boris Lopatin—using our outstretched arms and our parkas as sails, finally crashing into the opposite shore. “Craaazy capitalists,” Boris Lopatin had said, laughing uproariously, holding up a glass of vodka whose surface had frozen solid.
I kept a small journal that year. On September 15, there was an eighty-knot wind pouring over the snout of the Taylor Glacier, down the east-west axis of Lake Bonney, slamming into the wooden hut where we slept. The hut rocked back and forth, moaned, uprooted two of its steel wires, and seemed on the verge of being tumbled down the valley. But then the wind suddenly stopped. According to my journal, I got up, walked outside over the scree slope and down onto the lake ice. It was forty below zero. The sky was a cloudless blue and beneath my feet the prismatic ice, cut crystal, was ten feet thick. You could drive a locomotive across it if you wanted. I chopped some of it with an axe, carried it back to the cabin in my gloved hands, put it in a large pot. I melted it, boiled it, made coffee in a metal cup, and drank it with my gloves on. Then I went out again. There was a granite boulder the size of a person kneeling. It was shaped like the Virgin, hollowed that way, a hood of stone around her smooth oval face. Over coffee, I stared at it, wondering how long it takes wind to carve rock that way, to abrade it grain by grain into a figure in prayer. A thousand years? A million? Time lay all about me, visible in the naked stone.
Suddenly there are strings of light turning in the black water below. The plane rolls and they disappear, then rolls again and they return, bright now, the city of Honolulu glittering in the midnight sea.
In the terminal the dense sweetness of flower leis is all around. The women in their red and blue muumuus drift as in a dream, slow, soundless night motion, the torpor of islands. Far beyond the airport, lighted houses and street lamps climb the flanks of the Koolau Range, leaving in black cleavage the unbuilt ravines and the upper wooded slopes of the mountains.
Gazing up, I can imagine Keith’s place, a single light on the farthest ridge, overlooking the volcano. I spent a year working with Keith: the endless talk about the sea, about the vents, the pillows of lava that move out there in the dark, their chemistry. We talked about how the oceans formed, how the islands themselves came to be: the seafloor spreading beneath us, the fire of the mantle welling up and moving away, cooling, leaving its magnetic message in the frozen stone, the plates always shifting over the broken shell of the Earth.
The islands came from all this tectonic motion, this eternal building from within. The Hawaiian myths spoke of it, spoke of the goddess Pele, the goddess of fire spilling lava, raising land, vast mountains domed and hissing above the cold sea. “Born was Pele, in the night,” the creation chant said. “Born was the coral, the mother of pearl, the shellfish, the conch.” The chant spoke of fire and water and calcareous stone. The new theory of plate tectonics embellished upon this, saw it all unfold in time, gave it dates and causes, tied it to the larger frame of the Earth. The geophysicist Tuzo Wilson argued that the Pacific Plate was gliding above a hot spot in the mantle. As the plate passed, fresh lava welled up from the “spot.” It was streaked red and orange with heat along the seafloor, cooling, building its way higher. Several million years ago land finally emerged, struggling against fog and rain and cutting surf. You can see the track of the Pacific Plate, its northwest drift, in the line the islands make in the empty sea.
In the years that these islands of basalt have waited, all things have come. In the beginning there was just rock and steam, Pele’s struggle against the tide. Now these outcrops are full. The soft air, the smell of mango, papaya, and ginger, the rustle of palm leaves, the glow of the night sky over the Koolaus, up by Keith’s house, tell you this. For these islands have been port to any spore that drifts or floats on tropospheric winds, to any passenger come on the pinions of brilliant birds. It is deep green maidenhair up and down the creased mountains, the petals of flowers adrift, perfume far into the desert night of the sea, the islands in nacre garlanded, the bays and inlets, the broken mouths of volcanoes aswarm with the lightning of sudden fish. I want to stand here and take all of this in, let it bathe me like a fine island mist, this spectacle of matter, the golden elements, concentrated on these shores. Knowing what is soon to be, knowing that in a few days, a few weeks, all of this will hardly seem possible—islands of burgeoning and blooming, the scent of living things compressed, of moonlight falling silver over it all—I question my own footsteps. I question my movement to the plane out on the tarmac waiting.
It was after midnight when we took off. From the window, the lights of Waikiki rose as a thin necklace at the throat of Diamond Head. Soon only the wing was visible, as gray as an industrial rooftop, cutting the palpable blackness. I glanced around the plane. Behind Mike, Dr. Yu, and me, seated in the vast midsection, 1 could see Walt, Tim, and Varner. Walt was still awake. Peter Medawar’s Advice to a Young Scientist lay facedown on his lap. He seemed content with his decision to come here, to “do science,” as he put it.
It had not always been this way. I had expected Walt would go on to study literature or philosophy, aesthetics maybe, somewhere on the West Coast. I think it was the fieldwork that drew him in and made him change his mind: The sampling on Acton Lake, the stream measurements he had made on phosphorus. The lake and the land, they were connected in subtle ways, ways he hadn’t thought about. The lake reflected the land, summed it up, told its story through time.
In lakes you can see things happen. Somehow they are just the right scale: not so large that change is imperceptible, not so small that it can be dismissed as merely local. One summer the arcing leaps of the sturgeon are less common. Then the cisco and sauger pike, the white fish and blue pike begin to disappear. Someone notices that the dissolved oxygen is lower. Then the decline accelerates. The mayfly nymphs, once so abundant in the sediments, turn up dead, and in their place bloodworms and fingernail