disappears, and Swannell looks for a solid floe on which to set us down. If I were Ishmael—Melville’s Ishmael, not the Bible’s—I’d probably at this point in my narration say something allegorical, about how we are all precariously aloft, about how the door of the helicopter is always thrown open and we are all always leaning out, dressed in ridiculous costumes, imagining ourselves to be something or someone that we aren’t: Phaeton, or John Muir or Rachel Carson or Doc from Cannery Row, or Ishmael, who, come to think of it, imagines himself to be the biblical Ishmael’s second coming; how, buffeted by winds actual and imaginary, held in place by harnesses that we can only hope will hold, we’re dangling above a planet too big for one mind to encompass, a planet that in large part thanks to our imaginings and desires and restlessness and ingenuity is changing more quickly than we can comprehend; how we’re all flying over hummocks and bummocks and milky-blue pools of slush that make patterns both beautiful and perilous, at once orderly and chaotic; how our cameras, fancy as they are, will never be fancy enough; how we’re all searching for colorful objects and meanings that we’ll never find and looking for solid ice that maybe just maybe we might.
Swannell picks his floe and sets us down, bouncing three times to test the thickness, and we all unbuckle ourselves and step out, cryonauts, onto the frozen sea, boots crunching on the lunar snow. The hummock Swannell chose, like those he did not choose, is shaped like a sand trap, or an amoeba. Around us ten thousand other hummocks shine and ten thousand pools of melt sparkle. They look delicious, these pools. I’d like to kneel down beside them and drink my fill, but I’m scared I might slip in, and besides I have a role to play, the role of a human in an inhuman landscape. Chocolate-covered cliffs, streaked with snow, rise up to the east and west of us, but we’re in the middle of the ocean—the ocean! Most inhuman of all is the silence. There are no sounds besides the crunching of our boots and the rustling of our outerwear. Not even the melt pools lap.
Near the edge of the hummock the Phaeton cinematographer sets up his camera on a tripod and aims it north, the direction from which we expect the Louis to approach. “What do we do if a crack does open up?” he asks of our floe.
“I have no idea,” says Swannell. “Try to get out. What you really don’t want is for the ice to close back in on you. I’ve seen that happen to seals. They just go sppppt”—he pinches two fingers together—“like a pimple.”
The Louis appears. The red smudge of the ship grows into the red triangle of the looming bow and the faint murmur crescendos. As it breaks the ice, water and snow shoot up around the bow in feathery plumes, and with it comes the sound of ice buckling—the creak as it stretches, the crack as it gives way, a low grumble as big blue-white blocks of ice heave upward, spilling over each other, into ridges that paw along the hull. What the breaking of ice sounds most like out here is fireworks heard from afar.
The cameraman finally gives me my cue, and I stand before the camera, as close to the edge of our hummock as I dare to go, the big red ship passing behind me. When the shoot ends I search my pocket for the yellow duck Ebbesmeyer gave me three years ago. I’d meant to leave it here, Marpol Annex V and environmental impacts and my promise to return it to Ebbesmeyer be damned. I meant to leave it here as a kind of wish. But grapnelling my pocket, I come up empty. Evidently I left the thing back in my cabin.
While the film crew pack up their equipment, I scan the hummocks for bears, having learned from Barry Lopez that the specially adapted fur on a polar bear’s paws makes its tread almost silent. Their coats, of course, make them nearly invisible. For all I know there is a bear nearby, but here in Peel Sound, there’s no sign of them, nor of any other life. As Swannell and the two cinematographers climb back aboard helicopter 363, I linger a little, making the moment last, trying to imagine what it would feel like to find myself marooned out here