I was counting down the hours until I stood on ice. I ambled along a ridge the size of a whale’s back with my boss, Dr. Bowman, the lead researcher of our joint Arctic project. To our left sat the Spitsbergen town Ny-Ålesund, situated on a fjord’s edge and lined with large dirt streets; on our right, peaks of mountains and glaciers alike spiked the Spitsbergen horizon. Lilted calls of snow buntings, the only songbirds on the entire island, rode the breeze. From afar, the birds, nicknamed snowflakes, huddled together, their white bodies shrouded underneath dark wings.
“Are you cold, Heidi?” Bowman asked. Cheeks rosy from the cold, hair a white, floppy ice cap atop his head, Bowman looked disheveled in that way unique to professors, who stretch the use of the same clothes over decades.
“No.” I was delightfully chilled. An Arctic breeze licked me like a puppy, lapping my bare hands, ears, and nose. The sun arched in the sky, nowhere close to setting despite the late hour.
“Other people save this level of enthusiasm for the tropics.” Bowman bobbed his eyebrows. “Do you think this is one big party?”
“Don’t you?”
“Why don’t we ask him?” Bowman nodded toward a tall, blond, rough-looking man, approaching us in long, quick strides. A rifle dangled from his large, gloved hand. Framed by the Spitsbergen skyline, its peaks like upside down ice cream cones, the Russian scientist offered the downward-pointed weapon to me.
“Take,” he said as he held out the rifle. Maybe he lived in the area year-round, I thought. He was clearly accustomed to the cold—and the wildlife. “For the bears.”
I lifted the rifle from him. He perused me, up and down. We’d met before, at the door of the dormitory, when, by way of greeting, he’d pursed his lips, said, “Gloves,” and mimed the action of putting a glove onto his hand. I’d ignored his advice. Not because I didn’t have gloves, but because I wanted to be closer to the summer cold. I preferred to be slightly cold and minimize sweating. I wouldn’t have picked this field of study if I liked hot weather. On the ridge, I had jammed my hands into my pockets for warmth. After I accepted the rifle, the Russian eyed my bare hands, his expression displeased.
“Thanks,” I mumbled insincerely. As much as I would have liked to hand the responsibility off to Bowman, I suspected that I, as the younger member of our team, had faster reflexes. Since polar bears roamed the area, we were encouraged to travel armed. The only thing I wanted to do less than shoot a humongous white ball charging me was to be mauled by one.
Up close, the Russian had moss eyes: soft and green, good for bedding, eyes that hinted at a softer heart underneath his brawny exterior. Some of my colleagues had conference hookups, peers in their field who shared an intimate arrangement when traveling. While I had hoped to be recognized for my scientific perspicacity, that same skill launched an observational inquiry into his body language for any sign of mutual interest. Before he walked away, he tilted his head at me, as though to ask, “Are you old enough for this?” He didn’t look at Bowman with nearly as much concern. Disheartened at my romantic prospects, I flagged the stranger as competition that I wanted to beat.
“That was nice of him,” Bowman said after the Russian left. I bristled at my academic advisor’s interest in another young scientist. “He seems to like you.”
“No, he doesn’t.” I made a face. It was the other way around really. I felt drawn to the Russian like a magnet to a pole. I wanted both Bowman and the Russian to see me as an intelligent colleague, not a kid. I had come to research, and I assured myself that I was more interested in a potential publication than a short-lived affair. In a male-dominated field like science, I had learned to get along well with plenty of arrogant guys, some of whom were attractive, but having infiltrated the patriarchy, I cultivated an exacting self-restraint so that I would be taken seriously as a peer. At work, I discouraged any perception of me as female. Even if I couldn’t fool a European into thinking an American was smart and sophisticated, I could still prove myself as a scientist, objective and observant. “He’s probably just here for the heavy lifting.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to make a friend.”
Aren’t we friends? I wanted to ask, but he probably meant friends my own age. Bowman had two grown children. His wife, a bushy-haired novelist, was watching my dog back in Colorado. At parties at their house, I was the youngest attendee by a decade, and though these elders were the local scientific community, I was adrift among them. Most of my graduate school colleagues hadn’t befriended our professors. It was true that it was harder to make friends when I considered normal conversation to be jargon-laden biology or ecosystems in flux. Before I’d even consider friendship, I checked that the applicant passed my prerequisites: demonstrated intelligence and a willingness to teach me what they knew. As I mimicked the interests of scholars twice my age, I meant for Bowman to see me as an equal—as hungry for success as I was for knowledge and a job in the cutthroat battle of academia. One of the delights of moving to Boulder, Colorado was the active elderly, age-defying Sierra Club members who explained the differences between shady lodgepole pines and sun-hungry ponderosas while identifying a nearby nuthatch by its yank call. On Saturday and Sunday, when, like everyone else in Boulder, I trekked the foothills’ coniferous forest cathedral, I would stop professionals twice my age to ask about woodpeckers and trail conditions.
Bowman began to voice his thoughts: “The high today is fifteen degrees Celsius. We should test the instruments while it’s warm—” I stopped and waited while Bowman rummaged through his jacket pockets for something. The gun brushed my leg, and I shivered. Bowman glanced over his shoulder, back toward the town. “Are the Chinese filming?”
With handheld camcorders, in coats the length of their bodies, the Chinese researchers explored Ny-Ålesund. Loquacious and animated, their cliquish club swarmed through the town’s buildings, richly-painted to capture the aurora borealis in wall colors—yellow, indigo, crimson. The walls stoked the northern lights year-round, even when summer weather reached temperatures above freezing.
“You know the Chinese government is under-reporting their carbon emissions,” Bowman hissed. This was the scientific version of scandalized gossip. Our disapproval masked our fear.
“Careful.” Though joking, I tried to keep my voice serious. Two white stone lions guarded the Chinese research station. “That’s funded by American investment.”
Bowman grimaced. Gazing at the green-patched tundra, spotted with brown mush, I wished we’d come in the colder part of the year, when all was white. Instead, early-summer flowers dotted our walk. Back home, Bowman collaged tundra botany pictures onto our university lab board and bought beer for whoever identified the plants. The only week I lost I had a fever, and the fuzzy edges of my vision blurred purple saxifrage into the pink flowers of moss champion.
Bowman didn’t want to admit yet that his fingers had started to fumble and jerk and lose nimbleness. I was discreet when I’d slip a tray out from his hands and use an eyedropper to place a specimen before sealing the microscope slides together. Before we left Colorado, his wife had confided in me that this might be Bowman’s last trip to our beloved Arctic. He was aging, less fit, and in no shape to visit over winter. He had devoted his life to studying the North Pole, and while he was unlikely to listen to his wife and stay home, I wanted him to trust me, to feel he could pass his work along to me, to know I was the right person to inherit his studies. Weighted by a solitary workload, by the egoistic personalities of my peers, and by a negative income, graduate school had been the most depressing years of my half-century life-so-far, except, except, for this trip, time outdoors in tundra. I wanted nothing more than this.
As the unfortunately warm weather continued into the following day, we boarded ship with Russian scientists, Chinese researchers, and crew. I, Bowman, and others collected on deck to monitor our progress across the water.
The ship reached sparsely populated ice, skirted by floating slabs not dense enough for us to stand on. I sighed and shifted impatiently. When the ship anchored, I would descend to the ice. Watching waves bounce, I said to Bowman, “Dense ice shouldn’t be such a challenge to find in the early summer.”
“It hasn’t taken this long in prior years.” Bowman’s face darkened.
“No,” the same Russian man who had brought us the rifle inserted himself into our conversation. “It did not.”
He looked at me when he spoke, his pronunciation guttural. His English thrilled me. He had probably seen a celebration’s worth of polar bears, maybe even wrestled them barehanded in Siberia. I didn’t know much about Russia, just the stereotypes about bears, but I could see handsome—and he was. In Colorado, the available male, typically taken with outdoor activities and beer, had become humdrum, especially when compared to the intellectual engagement of my research. While traveling, my workload was light enough for infatuated reveries about outdoor recreation and borscht.
“It is your first time here?” he asked.
Having never traveled to Russia or been exposed to Russian culture, I was at a loss for how to respond to him. Our scholarly interests certainly seemed to overlap. Most of the researchers would rather speak English with me to practice, but I wanted more than just practice with him. My fantasies wandered toward co-authorship in international waters.
“Yes.” I felt self-conscious. “I’m here to research.”
I shaded my eyes from the endless sunlight and studied how his eyebrows drew together. I imagined him as gutted as I was by the water snaking through the ice around us. Memorizing, I willed my brain to etch this view, this man, and this seascape, into a hippocampus lockbox. If he had been from an E.U. member nation, maybe we would have had a future together—for the visas—but mix my social awkwardness with his light sexism and good chemistry could fade fast.
“Ah,” he sighed. “I said a pretty woman could still be a scientist. They did not believe me.”
Whatever I’d been about to say hovered on my lips. “Thank you,” my insincere voice said. How did they see me? “Why didn’t they think I was a scientist?”
The Russian seemed to have realized his mistake. He hesitated, then murmured something about American tourists before he retreated briskly to his own research group.
When our ship finally flanked the Arctic’s shrinking sheet, I shouldered into a bright orange suit. The research teams stood apart from each other, cliquish. We waited to cram into the red basket that would lower us to the polar floor. When our turn came, Bowman and I held tight to the railing as the basket swayed down from the crane. Golden sunlight refracted at blinding angles off the expansive white and blue. I squinted into the direction of the sun’s dome. My eyes hurt, but I didn’t want to stop looking. Drawn to the cold, I wanted every detail.
Six years of study culminated in this reward: stepping out of the basket, I walked on water. I trembled with excess energy and shuffled over the ice after Bowman, the cold tickling my nose. The chill hugged like another layer atop my clothes. Underneath the ship’s noises, ice floes creaked and cracked. Interspersed with crinkled blue, frozen slabs, an archipelago of ice islands stretched out through the open water. Banks of draped powder rose in a crimped white blanket. The frequency of thawed slush, the sheer amount of frost-tinted ocean water snaking through the islands, surprised me.
Bowman picked his spot and unzipped his bag to get at our equipment. I crouched next to him and held the bag open as he pulled out a mechanical auger drill.
“Do you want me to—” Even knowing Bowman had more experience, I badly wanted to drill.
“No, I’ve got this,” he said and began to drill down. The hand auger looked like an enlarged corkscrew. It wound downward through the softest crystalline powder that dusted the hardpack, down to that special kind of ice layered year after year. Flecks of ice flew up from the growing hole.
I fished a chisel out from Bowman’s pack. As soon as he was done, I’d be ready to sculpt the shaft into smoothness. I could feel the sharp air tickling against my outer layers, and I began to log what I could observe. While Bowman drilled, I admired the undulation of the snowpack. The distilled beauty so sharp it chilled my core. Further out, the Russian team had ventured to a blue lake cradled atop the ice. I sought the large form of a particular Russian.
In a diving suit, an air tank strapped across his back, the Russian paused at the brim of an Arctic Lake to pull on a full-face mask. With one test breath from his tank, he jumped. His head disappeared, and I stopped breathing as he went under. Did they bring him along just to do that? Was he a skilled scientist? Could he read the data from their submerged equipment too?
Bowman was speaking, and my full attention jerked back to the task at hand. This was not something I wanted to mess up.
He’d drilled a hole wide enough to fit a hand through, and I crouched next to it, chisel in hand. I was surprised to see only a meager layer of snow. There was so precious little ice that I didn’t want to damage it further, and I felt like using the chisel was chipping into a gravesite.
Bowman and I worked together in a symbiotic rhythm. I evened the cylindrical hole while he put away the auger drill. Together, we configured a tripod over the hole to lower down a neutron probe that would measure density and estimate shrink and mass. The ice was thinner, weaker, and warmer than I’d expected. I was precise and attentive as
I used a tape measure to gauge depth and penciled notes in my notebook. The glorious cap at the top of the world was shrinking. Frozen water dwindled in density; its precious thickness had halved. Standing on ice, I felt like my own body heat was the enemy, warm enough to melt.
After we packed our gear and returned to the ship’s computer-equipped research cabin, Bowman read figures from our statistical models, too eager to strip out of his orange suit. He plugged new data into algorithms to update graphs. A satellite fed us fresh data, rounding our picture of the North Pole.
At first, I thought there was a miscalculation. My hands hovered above the keyboard. I was waiting for Bowman to comment. Our simulations were cool colors, ruptured by a yellow funnel, like a tornado forming.
But processing the results, Bowman’s face cooled, then froze. He rounded on unsteady legs. “I need some air,” he spoke gruffly.
Bowman—who could spend hours in the lab adjusting a sample in microscopic light without a hint of frustration—slammed the door behind him.
Underneath my feet, the ship shifted. We had started back.
I’d known Bowman long enough to know how he looked when he didn’t want to talk, but Bowman was the only person I knew for hundreds of miles. And the number one person I was concerned with pleasing. Were the figures off? Did we need a second sample because of some mistake with something we’d taken—I’d taken?
Jutted against the frozen floor, our boat ground against the ice as I surveyed the findings that led to Bowman’s dark mood. I traced the forecast’s arc downward as the ice pack dwindled to zero. This summer would see ice pack numbers at their record lowest. Based on this new data, we would lose the summer ice sooner than we had previously predicted. A stranded, unprotected frozen island that wouldn’t even stay frozen for long. We had tipped into warm enough waters to cause the summer ice to disappear year after year. As much I wanted publication, I didn’t want this news verified by peer review and printed.
Seasick, I hunched over. As an adult, I turned off lights, reduced water use, lived without air conditioning and without a car, but my efforts alone were inutile against ballooning atmospheric carbon. I didn’t want to study environmental history instead of fieldwork. I craved peer-reviewed publications and nature, but I might need a new area of expertise, because my intended field was melting.
Dropped back at our Spitsbergen dormitory, I felt too sick to eat, too adrift to sit, and, stumbling out, I left, swaying under despair. Like the glaciers, we would lose the North Pole ice in the summer. With one glance at the rifle by the door, I strode north without it, without Bowman, my bare hands thrust into my jacket pockets.
Not far from the town, I heard movement behind me and turned to find I had a Russian tail. He carried a rifle, wore his olive coat, and navigated the tundra with sure footing and freakishly long strides. My knees weakened at the sight of him, well-prepared as ever, armed with a flare and a radio at his belt, the sun knighting his brow. As he neared, I melted for him a little more.
“You go to the beach?” He meant the shore. He passed each English word like a kidney stone. I nodded. He nodded. He fell in step with me, and we strode out of town. Flat ridges and rocks littered our path across permafrost-punctuated brown hills.
“I’m Heidi. You are?”
“Alexander.” Rocks jutted up to one side of us, and I steadied myself against them as I guided myself over a slippery slope. Inside, I seesawed between my delight at his proximity and the insincerity of pretending everything was fine when I wanted to talk about ice melt.
When we closed the distance to the water, I saw why he accompanied me. We rounded a corner and our party of two ballooned into a party of hundreds. A herd of languid walruses stretched their huge masses out until no bank remained. One long extended clan huddled together with youngsters between them. The adults’ backs formed a protective barricade around the clan’s edges.
“You see,” he said and nodded toward the walruses. Long, pointed tusks and thick, blubbery hide, a single walrus could bulldoze me if I blocked its path to the water. These tooth-walking sea horses were too much of a threat for me, with or without a rifle, to handle. Strange to think, this bulky animal, oblivious to me, yet able to obliterate me with ease, was threatened by human-stoked thaw stealing their habitat right out from underneath them. I imagined living like them, on ice year-round, engulfed in pristine snow-ridden expanses with all the seafood I could eat. Some people liked heading south, snowbirding, for winter, but not me, never me.
“Thanks for coming with me.” I supposed he knew the Arctic well enough to know there might be walruses nearby, and he had joined me because he knew the terrain.
“Yes,” he said. He looked pleased. His moss eyes were extra soft as he gazed at me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d inspired a man to follow me anywhere. I felt my cheeks redden and not from the cold, but the data had left me so depressed that not even this handsome man could cheer my spirits. “You are welcome.”
“What’s your area of focus?” I asked. I was hoping he would take me seriously as a scholar. All this time I’d thought I was learning from Bowman by sticking close to his side. I’d strived to do everything he did to prove I was the rightful heir to his research. Bowman’s tutelage prepared me to devote my life—as he had done his—to the Arctic, but I might need more allies and, potentially, a backup plan.
“Hydroacoustics…. You are wealthy?”
Apparently, the assumption that academic scientists have an independent income was global.
“No.” Frustrated, I waved toward the water. I could handle the Arctic. I could get a job in academia without him and our hypothetical joint paper. “Are you?”
We were unlikely allies anyway. I started to march.
“No, no, Miss Heidi, I am sorry.” He called after me as I crossed a small knoll. “Come back. I was thinking of research funding.”
The wind pricked my eyes. He wanted to research with me? I walked away purposefully but slowly—to give him time to follow me. Pretending not to see his pleading, apologetic expression, I contemplated if we could ever have a future. While sour American Russian relationships explicitly forbade government collaboration, scientists, individual friendships built on objectivity, could strive to enhance scientific knowledge, to preserve some small corner of the natural environment, and maybe to meet up once a year. If he would listen to me, I would be able to undo some preexisting sexism and remedy my own ignorance about Russia and Russians. Would I be okay in a long-distance scholarly partnership?
My feet navigated over black and gray pebbles. Ocean waves rushed toward the shore, slammed into each other, trickled up to us, and looped back out. I wanted to join the water, to have the lashing comfort of the waves, to stand with my boots in the beauty of the Arctic Ocean and pretend nothing changed. As though my presence alone would freeze the ice and keep it frozen.
“This is not safe,” Alexander said. He’d come after me. “We should return.”
I almost wanted to test him by going out farther just to see if he would keep coming, but his presence anchored me ashore. I couldn’t keep pushing him to follow me this way and that, endangering both of us as if the land were ice and melting underneath us.
It was over a thousand kilometers to the North Pole from where I stood, and too soon, in the summer, it would be iceless. In place of a warmth-repellant, frozen sheet, the ocean would absorb the sun’s invading heat. Every time I’d see a new tremor in Bowman’s hands, I’d trace it to the polar cap cracking and breaking. As his bones turned brittle, my role model would fade in tandem with the ecosystem model we knew so well. The currents would change. The pole would thaw, and it wouldn’t matter that Bowman was too infirm to visit because dark water would replace our beloved heat-refracting ice. He had devoted years of his professional life to studying and preserving this ecosystem. I would have to brace against the decline of both, struggle to cope, to counteract, when I couldn’t congeal saltwater or halt aging. I had imagined I would inherit his studies, but I was beginning to suspect that I could not live through research alone.
To my right, the walruses raised their heads. On the outskirts of the herd, one I would’ve called a sentry barked and shuffled the others toward the water. The walrus moved its rear forward, flapping flippers, and heaved its front after, pumping over the ground, not as adept at negotiating land as it was at home in the water. The ground underneath me shook as the herd climbed over each other to reach the water.
I stared at the herd open-mouthed, shocked at their retreat. At less than a tenth of their weight, Alexander and I couldn’t have scared them off. I cast my gaze around, looking for what had caused such panic. Sea foam rose to the air as more walruses immersed themselves. Alexander grabbed my arm, and I stumbled as he hauled me back from the water’s edge.
“Look,” he said and pointed with the rifle.
Toward the walruses, down a steep hillside, barreled a huge white polar bear. I had no idea such a large animal could move so quickly, so slowly. Alexander shoved me toward boulders for cover, as if he were the sentry walrus and I part of the herd. It was a good thing he thought fast because seeing my first polar bear glued me in place. The bear’s cannonball-sized feet pummeled the ground, pounding to reach the walruses before they escaped. As fast as the bear jogged, my heart outpaced his paws.
“I told you. This is a bad idea,” Alexander said.
I knew only a desperate polar bear, one starved out of a shrinking habitat, could think to kill and eat a walrus. And in the event the walruses dodged the bear, two relatively easy-to-kill humans lingered nearby.
Placing himself between the bear and me, Alexander cocked the rifle. He cradled it with both arms, the butt against his shoulder, and aimed. His broad back barred me from danger.
“No,” I whispered, in case the bear heard, and reached out to lower the gun barrel toward the rocks with my fingers. “Don’t shoot.”
Now Alexander gave me a look of solid disbelief. Saving a charging polar bear so it could eat me later, that suggested insanity.
On the other side of Alexander, one walrus trampled another’s pup in their chaotic escape. Clumsy on land, the hit pup lay dazed and disoriented, not twenty yards from us. As the trampled pup inched toward the water, waddling on all four of its flippers, within a foot of the water, the bear landed. I flinched as its mouth opened and the young walrus’s head disappeared. The walrus’s head crumpled beneath the bear’s teeth. That could have been my head.
The bear picked up its prey by the nape and carted it toward higher land. If the bear had killed us, I would have had the guilt of getting Alexander killed to add to my remorse over the melting north. Unless the bear attacked, killing the polar bear too, was illegal, though I’d heard people poached polar bears in Russia.
At a safe distance from the extended walrus family, the bear began dismembering his prey. I was still staring at the bear when Alexander commenced his own retreat. Keeping the bear in his sights, he marched away. He would leave me behind if I wanted to risk my life surveying polar bear dining habits, but he’d survive.
The ravenous bear tore at skin to uncover meat. He’d peeled back most of the walrus’s speckled brown hide by the time I scurried after Alexander. Passing behind the hill, the rocks blocked the animals from my view. Up ahead, I saw Alexander, gun slung over his shoulder, a trail of muddy footprints in his wake.
I was indebted to him for the effort he’d made to keep me safe, and I needed to tell him that something other than endless sunlight justified my antics. With backward glances to check that the polar bear was still eating, I chased him down across bumpy tundra.
His shoulders relaxed with relief when he saw me. He must have sensed my desperation because he paused and turned toward me, and we stood in open space on stony rubble and stalwart flora. If I’d thought his eyes soft before, they warmed into the color of a plant bed you’d find on the bottom of the sea floor. I trusted him with everything.
“We’re reaching the tipping point,” I said. I blinked faster in the chilly wind. “We’ll be bereft of the entire summer ice sheet within the next decade.”
Tiny lines crossed Alexander’s forehead like ice forming across Arctic waters. The same dismay that unsettled me tightened his jaw. How could you prepare for this? I watched his face anxiously. I wondered if he planned on staying through summer into winter. I hoped he did. Even if you’re at the end of the world, you might want company. Someone to join for sunny nights in tiny dormitory cots. Someone to whom you could express your deepest worries about ice melts and your darkest concerns about sea habitat risks. Someone who would fight rising temperatures with you.
“But more research will be needed to confirm it,” he said. “The tipping point.” He pronounced it without an accent, as if he had practiced the words often enough to perfect them. The way you say words you need to survive in another language, such as hello, thank you, please. I love you. Help.
