The End of the End of the Earth

by Jonathan Franzen

  * * *

  In Santiago, the night before our charter flight to the southern tip of Argentina, Tom and I attended Lindblad’s welcoming reception in a Ritz-Carlton function room. Because berths on our ship, the National Geographic Orion, started at $22,000 and went up to almost double that, I’d pre-stereotyped my fellow passengers as plutocratic nature lovers—leather-skinned retirees with trophy spouses and tax-haven home addresses, maybe a face or two I recognized from television. But I’d done the math wrong. There turn out to be special yachts for that clientele. The crowd in the function room was less glamorous than I’d expected, and less octogenarian. A plurality of the hundred of us were merely physicians or attorneys, and I could see only one man in pants hiked up around his stomach.

  My third-biggest fear about the expedition, after seasickness and disturbing my brother with my snoring, was that insufficient diligence would be devoted to finding the bird species unique to the Antarctic. After a Lindblad staffer, an Australian whose luggage for the trip had been lost by his airline, had greeted us and taken some questions from the crowd, I raised my hand and said I was a birder and asked who else was. I was hoping to establish the existence of a powerful constituency, but I saw only two hands go up. The Australian, who’d praised each of the earlier questions as “excellent,” did not praise mine. He said, rather vaguely, that there would be staff members on the ship who knew their birds.

  I soon learned that the two raised hands had belonged to the only two passengers who hadn’t paid full fare. They were a conservationist couple in their fifties, Chris and Ada, from Mount Shasta, California. Ada had a sister who worked for Lindblad, and they’d been offered a slashed-rate stateroom ten days before departure, owing to a cancellation. This added to my feeling of kinship with them. Although I could afford to pay full fare, I wouldn’t have chosen a cruise line like Lindblad for my own sake; I’d done it for the Californian, to soften the blow of Antarctica, and was feeling like an accidental luxury tourist myself.

  The next day, at the airport in Ushuaia, Argentina, Tom and I found ourselves near the rear of a slow line for passport control. At the urgent instruction of Lindblad, before leaving home, I’d paid the “reciprocity fee” that Argentina charged American tourists, but Tom had been in Argentina three years earlier. The government’s website hadn’t let him pay his fee again, so he’d printed a copy of its refusal and taken it with him, figuring that the printout, plus the Argentine stamps in his passport, would get him over the border. They didn’t get him over the border. While the other Lindblad passengers boarded the buses that were taking us to a lunchtime cruise on a catamaran, we stood and pleaded with an immigration officer. Half an hour passed. A further twenty minutes passed. The Lindblad handlers were tearing their hair. Finally, when it looked as if Tom would be allowed to pay his fee a second time, I ran outside and boarded a bus and charged into a sea of dirty looks. The trip hadn’t even started, and Tom and I were already the problem passengers.

  On board the Orion, our expedition leader, Doug, summoned everyone to the ship’s lounge and greeted us energetically. Doug was burly and white-bearded, a former theatrical designer. “I love this trip!” he said into his microphone. “This is the greatest trip, by the greatest company, to the greatest destination in the world. I’m at least as excited as any of you are.” The trip, he hastened to add, was not a cruise. It was an expedition, and he wanted us to know that he was the kind of expedition leader who, if he and the captain spied the right opportunity, would tear up the plan, throw it out the window, and go chase great adventure.

  Throughout the trip, Doug continued, two staffers would give photography lessons and work individually with passengers who wanted to improve their images. Two other staffers would go diving wherever possible, to supply us with additional images. The Australian who’d lost his luggage had not lost the late-model drone, with a high-definition video camera, that he’d worked for nine months to get the permits to use on our trip. The drone would be supplying images, too. And then there was the full-time videographer, who would create a DVD that we could all buy at trip’s end. I got the impression that other people in the lounge had a clearer grasp than I of the point of coming to Antarctica. Evidently, the point was to bring home images. The National Geographic brand had led me to expect science where I should have been thinking of pictures. My sense of being a problem passenger deepened.

  In the days that followed, I was taught what to ask when you meet a person on a Lindblad ship: “Is this your first Lindblad?” Or, alternately, “Have you done a Lindblad before?” I found these locutions unsettling, as if “a Lindblad” were something vaguely but expensively spiritual. Doug typically began his evening recap, in the lounge, by asking, “Was this a great day or was this a great day?” and then waiting for a cheer. He made sure we knew that we’d been specially blessed by a smooth crossing of the Drake Passage, which had saved us enough time to land in our Zodiac dinghies on Barrientos Island, near the Antarctic Peninsula. This was a very special landing, not something every Lindblad expedition got to do.

  It was late in the nesting season for the Gentoo and Chinstrap Penguins on Barrientos. Some of the chicks had fledged and followed their parents back into the sea, which is the preferred element of penguins and their only source of food. But thousands of birds remained. Fluffy gray chicks chased after any adult that was plausibly their parent, begging for a regurgitated meal, or banded together for safety from the gull-like skuas that preyed on the orphaned and the failing-to-thrive. Many of the adults had retreated uphill to molt, a process that involves standing still for several weeks, itchy and hungry, while new feathers push out old feathers. The patience of the molters, their silent endurance, was impossible not to admire in human terms. Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.

  The scopolamine patches that Tom and I were wearing on our necks had dispelled my two biggest fears. With the help of the patch and calm waters, I wasn’t getting seasick, and, with the help of the snore-muffling noise that we blasted on our clock radio, Tom was getting ten hours of deep scopolamine sleep every night. My third fear, however, had been on target. At no point did a Lindblad naturalist join Chris and Ada and me to watch seabirds from the observation deck. There wasn’t even a good field guide to Antarctic wildlife in the Orion’s library. Instead, there were dozens of books about South Polar explorers, notably Ernest Shackleton—a figure scarcely less fetishized on board than the Lindblad experience itself. Sewn onto the left sleeve of my company-issued orange parka was a badge with Shackleton’s portrait, commemorating the centennial of his epic open-boat voyage from Elephant Island. We were given a book about Shackleton, PowerPoint lectures about Shackleton, special tours to Shackleton-related sites, a screening of a long film about a re-creation of Shackleton’s voyage, and a chance to hike three miles of the arduous trail that Shackleton had survived at the end of it. (Late in the trip, under the gaze of our videographer, we would all be herded to the grave of Shackleton, handed shot glasses of Irish whiskey, and invited to join in a toast to him.) The message seemed to be that we, on our Lindblad, were not un-Shackletonian ourselves. Failing to feel heroic on the Orion was a recipe for loneliness. I was grateful that I at least had two compatriots with whom to study the wildlife guides we’d brought, and to puzzle out the field marks of the Antarctic Prion (a small seabird), and to try to discern the species-distinguishing hue of the bill of a fast-flying giant petrel.

  As we progressed down the peninsula, Doug began dangling the possibility of exciting news. Finally, he gathered us in the lounge and revealed that it was actually happening: because of favorable winds, he and the captain had thrown out the plan. We had a very special opportunity to cross below the Antarctic Circle, and would now be steaming hard to the south.

  The night before we reached the circle, Doug warned us that he might come on the intercom fairly early in the morning to wake those p
assengers who wanted to look outside and see the “magenta line” (he was joking) as we crossed it. And wake us he did, at six thirty, with another joke about the magenta line. As the ship bore down on it, Doug dramatically counted down from five. Then he congratulated “every person on board,” and Tom and I went back to sleep. Only later did we learn that the Orion had approached the Antarctic Circle much earlier than six thirty—at an hour when a person hesitates to wake up millionaires, an hour too dark for taking a picture. Chris, it turned out, had been awake before dawn and had followed the ship’s coordinates on his cabin’s TV screen. He’d watched as the ship slowed down, tacked west, and then executed a fishhook turn and steamed due north to buy time.

  Although Doug came off as the chief simulacrum manager for a brand with cultish aspects, I had sympathy for him. He was finishing his first season as a Lindblad expedition leader, was clearly exhausted, and was under intense pressure to deliver the trip of a lifetime to customers who, not being plutocrats after all, expected value for their money. Doug was also, as far as I could determine, the only person on the ship besides me who’d been a birder serious enough to keep a list of the species he’d seen. He’d given up listing, but in one of his nightly recaps he told the amusing story of his desperation and failure to find a pipit on his first trip to South Georgia. If he hadn’t been frantically catering to a shipful of image seekers, I would have liked to get to know him.

  It should also be said that Antarctica lived up to Doug’s enthusiasm. I’d never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real that I was really in the presence of. A trip that had seemed unreal to me beforehand had taken me to a place that likewise seemed unreal, albeit in a better way. Global warming may be endangering the continent’s western ice sheet, but Antarctica is still far from having melted. On either side of the Lemaire Channel were spiky black mountains, extremely tall but still not so tall as to be merely snow-covered; they were buried in wind-carved snowdrift, all the way to their peaks, with rock exposed only on the most vertical cliffs. Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space. Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice. No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature. Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief. Immanuel Kant had defined the Sublime as beauty plus terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

  The Orion sailed on through eerily glassy seas. Nothing man-made could be seen on land or ice or water, no building or other ship, and up on the forward observation deck the Orion’s engines were inaudible. Standing there in the silence with Chris and Ada, scanning for petrels, I felt as if we were alone in the world and being pulled forward toward the end of it, like the Dawn Treader in Narnia, by some irresistible invisible current. But when we entered an area of pack ice and became surrounded by it, images were needed. A Zodiac was noisily launched, the Australian’s drone unleashed.

  Late in the day, in Lallemand Fjord, near the southernmost latitude we reached, Doug announced another “operation.” The captain would ram the ship into the huge ice field at the head of the fjord, and we could then choose between paddling around in sea kayaks or taking a walk on the ice. I knew that the fjord was our last hope for seeing an Emperor Penguin; seven other penguin species were likely on the trip, but the Emperors rarely venture north of the Antarctic Circle. While the rest of the passengers hurried to their rooms to put on their life jackets and adventure boots, I set up a telescope on the observation deck. Scanning the ice field, which was dotted with crabeater seals and small Adélie Penguins, I immediately caught a glimpse of a bird that looked unfamiliar. It seemed to have a patch of color behind its ear and a blush of yellow on its breast. Emperor Penguin? The magnified image was dim and unsteady, and most of the bird’s body was hidden by a little iceberg, and either the ship or the iceberg was drifting. Before I could get a proper look, the iceberg had obscured the bird altogether.

  What to do? Emperor Penguins may be the world’s greatest bird. Four feet tall, the stars of March of the Penguins, they incubate their eggs in the Antarctic winter as far as a hundred miles from the sea, the males huddling together for warmth, the females waddling or tobogganing to open water for food, every one of them as heroic as Shackleton. But the bird I’d glimpsed was easily half a mile away, and I was aware of being a problem passenger who’d already been involved in one lengthy delay of the group. I was also aware of my distressing history of incorrect bird identifications. What were the chances of randomly pointing a scope at the ice and instantly spotting the most sought-after species of the trip? I didn’t feel as if I’d made up the yellow blush and the patch of color. But sometimes the birder’s eye sees what it hopes to see.

  After an existentialist moment, conscious of deciding my fate, I ran down to the bridge deck and found my favorite staff naturalist hurrying in the direction of Doug’s operation. I grabbed his sleeve and said I thought I’d seen an Emperor Penguin.

  “An Emperor? You sure?”

  “Ninety percent sure.”

  “We’ll check it out,” he said, pulling away from me.

  He didn’t sound like he meant it, so I ran down to Chris and Ada’s cabin, banged on their door, and gave them my news. God bless them for believing it. They took off their life jackets and followed me back up to the observation deck. By now, unfortunately, I’d lost track of the penguin spot; there were so many little icebergs. I went down to the bridge itself, where a different staffer, a Dutch woman, gave me a more satisfactory response: “Emperor Penguin! That’s a key species for us, we have to tell the captain right away.”

  Captain Graser was a skinny, peppy German probably older than he looked. He wanted to know exactly where the bird was. I pointed at my best guess, and he got on the radio with Doug and told him that we had to move the ship. I could hear Doug’s exasperation on the radio. He was in the middle of an operation! The captain instructed him to suspend it.

  As the ship began to move, and I considered how annoyed Doug would be if I’d been wrong about the bird, I rediscovered the little iceberg. Chris and Ada and I stood at the rail and watched it through our binoculars. But there was nothing behind it now, at least nothing that we could see before the ship stopped and turned around. Radios were squawking impatiently. After the captain had rammed us into the ice, Chris spotted a promising bird that quickly dived into the water. But then Ada thought she saw it come flopping back onto the ice. Chris put the scope on it, had a long look, and turned to me with a deadpan expression. “I concur,” he said.

  We high-fived. I fetched Captain Graser, who took one look through the scope and let out a whoop. “Ja, ja,” he said, “Emperor Penguin! Emperor Penguin! Just like I was hoping!” He said he’d trusted my report because, on a previous trip, he’d seen a lone Emperor in the same area. Emitting further whoops, he danced a jig, an actual jig, and then hurried off to the Zodiacs to have a closer look.

  The Emperor he’d seen earlier had been exceptionally friendly or inquisitive, and it appeared that I’d refound the same bird, because as soon as the captain approached it we saw it flop down on its belly and toboggan toward him eagerly. Doug, on the intercom, announced that the captain had made an exciting discovery and the plan had changed. Hikers already on the ice bent their steps toward the bird, the rest of us piled into Zodiacs. By the time I arrived on the scene, thirty orange-jacketed photographers were standing or kneeling and training their lenses on a very tall and very handsome penguin, very close to them.

  I’d already made a quiet, alienated r
esolution not to take a single picture on the trip. And here was an image so indelible that no camera was needed to capture it: the Emperor Penguin appeared to be holding a press conference. While a cluster of Adélies came up from behind it, observing like support staff, the Emperor faced the press corps in a posture of calm dignity. After a while, it gave its neck a leisurely stretch. Demonstrating its masterly balance and flexibility, and yet without seeming to show off, it scratched behind its ear with one foot while standing fully erect on the other. And then, as if to underline how comfortable it felt with us, it fell asleep.

  At the following evening’s recap, Captain Graser warmly thanked the birders. He’d reserved a special table for us in the dining room, with free wine on offer. A card on the table read KING EMPEROR. Ordinarily, the ship’s waiters, who were mostly Filipino, addressed Tom as Sir Tom and me as Sir Jon, which made me feel like John Falstaff. But that evening I really was feeling like King Emperor. All day long, passengers I hadn’t even met had stopped me in hallways to thank me or cheer me for finding the penguin. I finally had an inkling of how it must feel to be a high-school athlete and come to school after scoring a season-saving touchdown. For forty years, in large social groups, I’d accustomed myself to feeling like the problem. To be a group’s game-winning hero, if only for a day, was a complete, disorienting novelty. I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I’d missed out on some essential human thing.