Field Notes from the Point of No Return
On the phone, my mother cries. She is losing the memory of my grandmother. I am forgetting her face, she says. Her eyes are disappearing. I am standing over the kitchen sink, the phone pressed between my shoulder and ear. I pull a dead leaf from a lemon-scented geranium. It is mid-June—the maple is shedding its wings—and she has been dead a few months. Is there a photograph or something you can use to bring her back? I ask. My mother sniffles, they are not her, she says. They cannot replace her. What is there to miss if you can’t remember? I want to say, but I don’t. Past the maple at the edge of a distant field, the morning sun unfolds along the ridge of an esker. Once a river flowing within the icy body of a mile tall glacier covering this place, it is now a sandy finger rising and sinking into the nearby sapric earth. The scale of this numbs me. All of it. The Ice. Death. What I wanted to say that day on the phone: Our days become like petty sums by minute accumulations. There is no further state to come. There is no antidote against time, which temporarily considers all things. Life is pure flame.
75° 06′ 00” S 123° 21′ 00” E
The drilling stops 120 meters from the subglacial lake but this distance is nothing. It is a small tick mark on a larger scale. The scientists have drilled nearly two and a quarter miles into the Antarctic ice sheet. They have travelled four hundred and twenty thousand years into the past, through ice formed when we were still finding our way in a cold and harsh world. Generational ice. They are after ice cores, the frozen world’s tree rings. But we can’t help ourselves. The story frozen in the ice was not enough. We need proof life can exist in the most hospitable of places. We need proof of hope beyond ruin. In 2013, 11,175 feet below the surface of Antarctica, we pierce the ancient subglacial lake Vostok. Water rushes up the borehole mixing with the drill’s lubricants, kerosene and freon becoming part of that ancient solution. Sealed from the world for millions of years no longer. We are now part of it.
*
I too have lost memories of her, so I turn to a photograph. In one, the background is washed and dark, save for a bottle of Aperol and one of Campari on a blurred shelf, and from this I know she is in Italy. In this void she turns her candid gaze to the table, her thin nose points down toward a spent lemon wedge next to her tea. I remember she drank tea. How simple a thing to forget. Her eyebrows perfectly arched. Her flat, closed mouth bookended with twin parentheses. She does not speak some soft-spoken incidental words, a fragmented line of her life. But this is not a memory.
49°1’38” S 123°26’4” W
In the Southern Pacific lies the oceanic point of inaccessibility. There is no more distant point from land than here. The nearest land is a one and half square mile sandy lagoon. The point of inaccessibility is the center of the pacific gyre, a place of little current and wind. Few sailors have crossed its path. But the albatross seeks this conditional space. It may spend six years or more over water, never once setting foot on land. In its perpetual flight it reads each wave, each ripple of wind and finds a home. It takes this prosaic sea to mean something. It traces something we cannot know of that empty void.
*
It is only a short time you know someone in the flesh in this world. Know the smell of their French perfume, the touch of their fingers. Bones like those of a bird, filled not with air but memories of movement. It is a short time we fix our eyes on their face before they become an afterimage. From this we build them anew through words, through film, through art. A burned new trail of neurons. Welts on a timeline. Humans, it seems, have been chasing the memory of themselves in others as long as they have been.
48°08’37” N 4°08”37” W
It is as simple as shooting an albatross at sea, which Jean-Marie LeBris does. Over the deck of the ship, he holds a severed wing to the wind and it lifts with ease. Alas, he says, I have comprehended the whole mystery of flight. Back in Brittany he toils in his shop. Through the gray and rain-soaked winter he makes notes by candle light. He measures with precision the arc of each bone, the weight of each feather. His notebook reads as an escape ledger. The physics escapes him, but the natural beauty does not. He maps onto Canton flannel nature’s blueprint for flight. On a Sunday in 1856 when his wooden bird is finished, he takes all fourteen meters of its wings and straps it to the top of a horse-drawn cart. What he says to those who have gathered to watch is lost in the wind sweeping the shore, but as he gallops down the hill and then rises as one grotesque unit of wing and equine and wheels, one observer says to another, what will be left to remember when feet are replaced by wings?
*
When I wake, I am still a child. I hear my grandmother’s hum. Low, distant. The heavy velvet shades keep the morning from the room. I wander down the long hall and find my grandmother’s room, green and laced. Her bed posts knurled and beasted. Carved lions yawn from the head board. It is rich walnut. A straight grain. The morning news whines in the background. In her nightgown she leans her head into the curling iron and rolls the hot steel toward her scalp. She watches herself in the mirror. I watch her through another mirror behind her. Between these mirrors her image reflects again and again. She becomes mise en abyme. She cannot disappear. She goes on forever.
21°34’29” N 158°16’31” W
The wind spits sand into our faces. We lean against the gusts, and walk along the edge of the rat fence toward the signal tower. Above us the great birds float in the wind, adjusting slightly their axis against each gale. They funnel gently toward the land, but their grace halts with the touch of terra. They stumble and bobble and clapper out. They mate for life. They seek their other. From the roped path we watch two birds dance, their tube-filled beaks rubbing against one another, the shape of their necks taking the shape of a paper heart. When we speak, our words sail from our mouths, carried away into the black lava cliffs behind us, so we remain silent and let the albatrosses speak for us. A short distance more and we spot a poult hidden in the dense green plants of the point. The poult is all black and gray mottled down the size of two fists held together. My wife begins to cry, but her tears are swept off her face before they can fall to the sand. They dissolve in the air and join the saline spray washing the lava rock shore. An albatross spreads its wings and sweeps like a kite out over the sea of tears.
*
My grandmother wanders into the kitchen and stands frozen. She seeks an answer for a question she has forgot. She seeks in us her reason for being in this place. We pause, watch her face become a compass less the needle. My grandmother is named Margueritte, but we call her Dawn. Dawn, someone says, what do you need? In this moment we all together see her name break over the horizon. She is the first light of day, which is to say, she is the maker of light. She is the sun returned again and again as it always has and as we assume, it always will. What a cold morning it has become for her, overcast, a light snow falling at daybreak, accumulating, flake by flake, layer upon layer, as it has done before.
9°4’30” S 2°45’12” W
It is October 1968, and they sail on, past Tristan da Cunha, past the grave of Napoleon. They have traveled two thousand miles from the port of Cape Town. The Clan Ramsey, in her fifty thousand cubic feet of frozen storage, holds fish and fruit and ice. She is the arctic wrapped in steel. Along the ship, two albatrosses rise then skim the ocean surface then dive to eat squid. They seem to need nothing, not even wind. They are static in time and the sailors write upon them their stories. Then one morning they are gone. The crew eats their Madras curry and fried calf liver, and over bowls of Fish Portuguese wonders why their companions have left them. The cook, Joseph Mpaya, doles seconds to the long-faced sailors. They are bad fortune, he says. They are the heartbreak of the sky. After their meal, during the long afternoon watch, the crew glasses the sea but there is nothing. No wings. No land. Only horizon. The two albatrosses are a memory. Black bilge spills into the wind from the twice orange-ringed exhaust. The ship burns more and more coal; she is hungry for fuel. The days pass and the crew searches the sea for the umbra of the birds but finds none. They close their eyes and look toward the sun, chasing the fleeting afterimage. Below deck someone plays a cabaletta on the electric organ. Someone speaks: “morro! … la mia memoria.”
*
In her last years, my grandmother wears smooth the tips of her neurons. The fracturing, icy remains of my grandmother’s brain unwrinkle into a blue abyss. She becomes a sea. She moves into some synthetic wave of experience. False memories of her father are all that remains. He builds the world she dreams. My grandmother’s father finds a spot of land and builds a town. He clears land, and moves creeks. He finds patterns in the ground and sections off, one by one, a land he does not own. He names it for his wife but his wife was not named Ann. He steams long thin strips of ash and bends them into bows. He makes a ribcage of wood and skins it with thin plywood. They live together in a homemade caravan in the town he has made. Then the winter comes and the whole of the town is covered in ice. My grandmother’s father invents the Zamboni. He takes an old tractor and runs around and through its metal sheeting hoses of all sizes, industrious veins. Pulleys and cranks raise and lower the long arm from which water sprays the icy surface. He bolts behind the arm a rubber coated rail to pull flat the water sprayed on the ice, leaving no pit or valley or rise or bump, only a glassy finish. I bring my grandmother a cup of tea and a small, crusty slice of bread. She dips a spoon into the bowl of jam and spreads a thin layer over the toast. The tea ripples in small circles as she brings the stained porcelain to her lips. She is perfectly cut with color. I see her father’s reflection in her eyes—his trilby hat turned down, his long jacket buttoned tight to his neck—from the last photograph taken of him hanging in the hall, oval framed, its protective glass rounded like that of the cornea.
78°29’07” N 14°17’59” E
The pontoon is lowered in the water first, followed by the grand piano. The crew helps Ludovico Einaudi off the icebreaker and onto a dinghy. They take him to the pontoon, a manmade relic among the floe. The polyhedral deck has been made to mimic the jagged shape of the polar ice. He sits at the piano and blows on his hands to warm them. In the near distance a glacier calves. Ice rains in to the sea adding to the floe. The performance is postponed and the crew and Ludovico are evacuated back to the ship. They are worried about a glacial wave. When it arrives, it rolls the pontoon but the piano remains safe. A short time later, Ludovico returns to the pontoon and performs his composition “Elegy for the Arctic.” During the performance, the microphone picks up the faint growl of more glaciers calving. The composition ends on what musicians call an unresolved chord. It hangs in the air waiting to be called back.
*
The last time I see my grandmother in the hospital she is calling for my grandfather. He is gone. Not gone, but left, seeking something somewhere. We cannot calm her. We do not know the place she occupies. She is a young girl waiting on the corner of Fourth and Liberty, waiting for my grandfather to finish sweeping the worn-thin wood floor. Waiting for him to close the shop and meet her on the street. Waiting for him to lean over and with his wide mouth kiss her cheek the way a stale wind over the ocean touches a feather, lightly enough to cause vibration but not so much as to make it heard.
78°14′ 9″ N 15°29′ 29″ E
A triangular prism rises from the tundra. The reflective stainless steel roof scatters the little light that falls in the days before winter. Its design: to keep in existence. To stave off starvation. Over a million seeds are stored inside. It is the world’s memory of food. It is to save crops from natural disasters. It is built to harness the cold of the arctic, four hundred and thirty feet above sea level. If all the world’s ice were to melt it would still be a safe 200 feet above the new sea. With the aid of locally mined coal, its refrigeration system will keep the cooler—buried three hundred ninety feet into a sandstone mountain—at a constant -18°C. It has been designed, we are told, for a virtually infinite lifetime. An arctic heatwave flooded the entrance to the vault in 2017, nine years after its opening, and though no seeds were destroyed it was a shot across the bow. It was designed to operate autonomously, says Hege Njaa Aschim, a Norwegian government official, but now we are watching the seed vault twenty-four hours a day.
*
By the time she dies her mind has long since left, long since unfurled into an outspread sea. I do not lose the memory of my grandmother dying because I was not there. I do not lose the memory of seraphic light filtering through the windows onto her death bed because I was not there. It is all true I am told—the room, the light, her having already decided to let go. So what was left then in the end? A body? A heart? Some common arm bones left unbroken for ninety-two years?
60°44’12” N 17°18’36” E
Our breath turns to smoke as we exhale in the bitter cold. We stand on a dock at the bottom of a coastal hill and watch the sunset behind us reflect off the glassy bay. The sun hits the atmosphere at such a shallow angle, sunsets bend along the curve of the earth and the sky bursts into oranges and yellows. The sky becomes a cold flame. It is a little after two in the afternoon but already the light is failing. Out in the Bothnian Bay, we watch gray ice dance with the current and stack like plates along the rocky coast. Around us stugas puff white smoke from their chimneys and advent candelabras glow through thin windows. It is a short time we are allowed to take in the light of the world so it must be done while there is still something to hold on to. We are five degrees, forty-six minutes, and forty-eight seconds from the Arctic circle. This is the closest I will come to the polar night. This is the closest I will come to time untethered from memory.
*
The remaining memories I hold of my grandmother filter like melt water through ice, distilled in some way and made pure by finding new paths to carve through bedrock. So it goes with recollection that truths are bent into green ribbons and settle in their own time among the stars of the polar night. I miss them. Every day I miss the rich dream of what once was. I tread the terrain of forgetfulness. There is some part of me now locked in place, forever seeking a fusion of the fragments that glides without interference among a quiet sea. But I do not find this. In those last few years of my life, I am told, I will be lost to my own mind. I am no more a ship than something else. No more a wing. I am not something which finds its own way time and time again. Something glacial. Something geologic. Something burning a hole in thin fabric chasing, what on the other side, once cast a shadow.
Benjamin Fidler currently lives, teaches, and wanders the shore of Lake Superior in Marquette, Michigan.
Published March 7 2022