My Last Continent by Midge Raymond

Author:Midge Raymond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

JUST AFTER THE announcement that dinner is being served, I wander into the ship’s library to waste a few minutes; we naturalists always go into the dining room last so we can sit where the empty seats are. I scan the bookshelves, looking for something to distract me.

I glimpse a book on a table and pick it up. Alone, Byrd’s book. I wonder for a moment who had plucked it off the shelves this afternoon, who might’ve sat here reading it, perhaps leaving it to return to later.

I think of Keller, who embraced aloneness after his marriage fell apart. At least he’d been married once and wants to try it again. My whole life has been stats and inventories and censuses and hypotheses. People like Kate think I’m worldly because they’ve met me at the end of the earth, but in reality my world is very small.

Most of the time, I keep myself preoccupied with the birds; I’ve rarely let myself succumb to the charms of the males of my own species. There was Dennis. There was Chad, in college, who never knew the extent to which he’d altered my life. There was a professor in graduate school, an ornithologist twice my age. And, in the years after that, my love life consisted of little more than the occasional blind date set up by Jill and other university colleagues who worried I didn’t get out enough. I’d eventually give in, unravel my hair, wear something other than cargo pants and fleece—but nothing ever lasted more than a few weeks, a couple of months; I’d eventually break it off, or the guy would save me from having to do it by bowing out first.

Traveling, of course, makes relationships a challenge, though perhaps it’s only an excuse. I often thought my eagerness to see the world stemmed from my father’s long absences; his work kept him in cities across the country more often than at home, and it was rare to see him even on holidays. I came to believe that whatever was out there had to be far better than what was at home in Missouri.

He was also the one who’d fostered my curiosity. When he was home, he’d take me “fossil hunting,” which in St. Louis meant amateur geological digs at the sides of highways. My father would pull off the road, and, along an I-170 road cut, we’d find the shells of crinoids and corals, unearthed by construction crews that had dug into the limestone hills. “All this was underwater once,” my father would say, waving his arm around the flat, suburban landscape. “Right where we’re standing—this used to be the bottom of the ocean.”

I was vaguely aware of my mother’s dislike of these outings, the fact that my father would arrive home after a week or two away and set right out again, with me, on what she called “silly scavenger hunts.” Yet we didn’t talk about any of this—denial was, for us, as natural as breathing—and her unhappiness remained veiled in offhand comments rather than actual conversations.

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