Tipping Point

What was her name? I remembered her face. Clear blue eyes, blond hair cropped above her shoulders, that toothy smile. I couldn’t help but return that smile. Sitting at my computer, I tried all the keywords I could think of but could find only her supervisor who worked in the same museum, the man who had joined us on that expedition south. Her name was gone. Only the image of that broad smile remained in my mind.

When my supervisor asked me about Antarctica, I was holed up in a room the size of a cupboard. It was me, a microscope, and a box full of cellophane-thin slices of rock on glass plates. I’d been staring down the microscope all day, describing them for my final year thesis. I’d look up from the three-times magnified binocular view to return a glass plate to its box and retrieve another, again and again. Each time I looked up, I had more difficulty refocusing. The walls swelled and shrank in the dim light. When he came to the door, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in hours.

“Julie, Cathy’s pulled out of the trip. I need someone to replace her. It leaves in a month. Do you want to go? You can think about it.”

I blinked at him as his face swam in and out of focus, framed by darkness. “Yes,” I said.

A month later, thesis submitted and behind me a flight south to meet the ship sailing to Antarctica, I dropped my bag on the floor of the cheap Hobart hotel room I was sharing with expedition partner, Carl. His bag sat by the door, packed, ready for the morning departure. Long and rangy, he met me with a half-smile and a muttered word. I didn’t know him well, but now wasn’t the time to start. My limbs felt shaky, and I climbed into one of the two single beds. The lights were too bright. My head ached. I curled into a ball and wrapped the blankets around me, shivering. Carl was stretched out on the bed across the room with problems of his own. Holding the phone tight to his ear, face turned away, he spoke in heated whispers to a girl half a continent away. It was clear where the conversation was going and I wished I could leave him alone to struggle with the frayed end of his relationship, but I was shaking with heat and cold. The only place I was going was on desperate dashes to the bathroom. It was a night for sickness and heartbreak.

In the morning, I woke grey and ill, Carl sullen and silent. Somehow, he got me to the ship and into the cabin that would be my home for the next two weeks. I crawled back into bed, shaking myself into another uneasy sleep. When Carl returned to rouse me for the departure, friends and family waving from the wharf, I barked at him incomprehensibly, feverish, and he slunk away. I remembered nothing.

The next day, I awoke rocking gently. We were at sea. The blonde-haired girl in the bed opposite looked up and smiled, “You’re awake.” She talked fast and she talked a lot, as if there wasn’t time enough to fit in all the words she had to say, her toothy smile flashing between remarks. She was a conservator, I learned. I had never heard of a conservator. She and her supervisor were going to conserve an Antarctic hut that had long been filled with ice. The words flowed into a picture in my mind, ice halfway to the ceiling, secrets frozen inside. They would test a technique of sublimating the ice to avoid damaging the historical artifacts within. Everything about this fascinated me. Perhaps I couldn’t imagine being as interested in what I was heading south for¾mapping ancient rocks¾as this girl was in icy archaeology. Our third cabinmate, Lauren, was twenty-four, clumsy. She fussed over her makeup, which I thought foolish, having none myself. She was the youngest politician elected to her party, and part of a cross-parliamentary fact-finding expedition. This did not interest me. Politics seemed an endeavor ill-matched with an expedition to an empty land filled with ice. She knew nothing of science or Antarctica, which bothered me, imagining myself, a scientist, forwarding some greater cause.

The days at sea ticked by, counted by breakfasts and dinners, seminars, movies, card games in the mess with endless cups of coffee as the ship rolled, waves washing against the portholes. In the evenings, I retreated to the quiet bridge, comforted by the engine’s hum and the watchful skipper at the wheel. We crept through mist that hugged the dark water.

The first iceberg was cause for celebration. A barbeque was organized on the trawl deck, the dark sea pouring away behind us. My new friend and I poured ourselves hefty glasses of wine. She talked. I listened. We drank. Soon we were each talking to others, but through the crowd I could hear her French-Canadian accent and her laugh. I smiled, looking around. She was talking to her supervisor, leaning in close.

Between the barbeque and later the ship’s dark, crowded bar, I lost track of her. In the early hours, listing between close and claustrophobic walls in the heart of the ship, I returned to our cabin, head swimming. It was dark but the bathroom light shone yellow around the door frame. When I pushed it, I found her slumped in the small space, head on the floor, a pool of vomit. I hauled her up and she sobbed, talking slowly now. No smile cracked through.

“It’s hopeless,” she said. “He has a wife and kids. There’s just no way…”

Blonde hair lank against stained cheeks, I shuddered at the sadness that did not seem to fit. She was just drunk, I thought. I helped her undress and get into the warm water of the shower. After, I lay her in bed, pulling the thick duvet over her. She fell immediately asleep and I climbed into the bed across from her. She was okay now.

The days crept by and grew longer, the air colder. The icebergs, larger and more frequent, were like sentinels, unmoved as the dark water washed around them. Finally, rising beyond the white pack ice we saw the immense ice plateau, flecked by the dark peaks of the Frammes Mountains. Sea ice crunched against the ship’s hull as we waited for our chance to move toward land. Packs of tiny black figures, Adelie penguins, waddled across the ice together before our monstrous orange ship, teetered by the ice edge and then, one after the other, ran awkwardly toward the edge, hurled themselves forward, and plunged into the dark sea.

Finally, the time came to leave the ship. I stood by the aft hangar, my cabin mates with me. Inside the hangar, Carl was checking our field gear one last time. A heavy whomp-whomp sound filled the air as the Sikorsky-76 landed before us on the broad deck. I hugged my cabin mates and waddled over in my orange freezer suit, climbed awkwardly into the back seat, Carl into the front. The jet engine started with a blast. All I could hear were the rotors winding up to a scream. The machine lifted gently. I looked at the two girls standing in the hangar and waved. She was smiling.

Eva! That was her name. Heat poured through the window of my new office. It had been years since I’d really thought of her until recently, with my move to Perth on the horizon. She had worked for the Western Australian Museum when we were in Antarctica. Perhaps she still did. We could meet for lunch, I thought. But an online search of her name revealed nothing. I scrolled and scrolled. Why couldn’t I find her? Then, far down the page there was something. It was an old edition of a conservators’ magazine.

“…  the recent sudden death of Western Australia-based conservator, Eva...”

I opened the link and flicked through until I reached a page near the end. “Obituary.” My heart clenched. There was no picture. That wasn’t right, I thought. There should have been a picture of her.

“Eva is fondly remembered by all who have had the pleasure to know her… Her sense of humor and lively personality have brightened so many lives. She will be greatly missed…”

I focused on the black words and tears carved down my cheeks, tears for a girl I had briefly known fifteen years ago, who had been dead already for seven. As I read on, I realized she had lived in Darwin, from where I had just moved, in the years prior to when I lived there. Then she had returned to Perth. Now I was in Perth, and she was gone. It was as if she had been a shadow in my life, or I in hers. The obituary was signed by her supervisor.

The helicopter left us in a blast of sound and wind, as we clung to our mountain of field gear and food boxes. I took a breath of cold air and watched the helicopter shrink into the sky, the whomp-whomp of the rotors fading, until finally it disappeared over the horizon. A blanket of silence fell. There was only a buzzing in my ears and the faint whoosh of the blood pumping through my veins.

I looked around, taking in our new home, a scatter of steep-walled rocky islands held fast in the sea ice. To the west, across an expanse of frozen sea, a dark wall of one of the islands revealed the twisted shapes of folded rock layers, cut by black basalt dykes. To the south, the grey-blue icy continent rose in the distance, a world away.

“C’mon,’ Carl said, breaking the silence. “Let’s set up camp.”

Camp life quickly became routine. The hiss of the burner heralded water for morning coffee. I sat silently through breakfasts as we skirted around each other in the hour in which conversation was neither needed nor wanted. We each followed our sequence of preparations for the day, packing lunch, sample bags, hammer, hauling on rucksacks, clipping on skis, and then swoosh, away across the sea ice that stretched in all directions, toward the dark rock walls of distant islands. The skis slid smoothly over new-blown snow, and then clattered and scraped over patches of clean, blue-grey sea ice where the wind had scoured the snow clear. We each skied with our own reflections, the sound of our own breath, the train of our own thoughts, the vista of ice and sky. I spent my time alone on the pristinely preserved rocks, trying to draw from them their ancient secrets. Days were long and silent.

One afternoon, returning from the farthest island, skis skating easily beneath me, I noticed Carl slowing ahead.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Look,” he said, pointing ahead, and I strained my eyes toward the dark figures far in the distance.

“Penguins,” he said, removing his skis and rucksack. He pulled out his camera.

“What are you doing?” I said. “They’re miles away. You can’t get a decent picture from here.”

“Oh, they’ll come to us,” he said.

I saw he was right. They were approaching. Soon I could make them out, a band of five Emperor penguins, and I could hear a distant shhhh sound, as they skated along, outstretched flippers propelling themselves forward. In minutes they pulled up metres away, planted their slender beaks in the ice and closing their flippers beneath them in a practiced maneuver, pushed themselves to standing. On black, claw-like feet, one shuffled closer, his compatriots standing solemnly behind. Pulling his dark head down against his body, he stood fat and silent. Then, stretching his long neck to reveal its streak of subtle yellow, he released a deep, double-voiced trill that trembled in the air. Tucking his head back into his body, he turned it to one side to take a better look with one black eye. We observed each other silently. After a long pause, he slumped back onto the ice and pushed himself away.

The nameless days were counted in radio schedules, the routine preparations for skiing across the ice that became darker and patchier, the swishing sound of skis on snow, the passage of silent thoughts, solo wanderings, unfolding the quiet secrets of rocks. The sun circled on.

One afternoon, as I closed my notebook and turned toward camp, my gaze caught the unusual shape of a boulder, no longer rounded and upright but somehow deflated, as if the rock had taken a deep breath and exhaled, shedding its weight and its memories. I stepped closer, discovering to my astonishment that it was no longer a boulder at all. It was shattered by a thousand cracks. Over thousands of years the freeze and thaw had crept into nascent fractures, the trickle of water in the summer, fragile ferny feathers of autumn ice, delicate at first and then devastating, until what remained was a thousand rocky shards, resting against one another in the shape of the boulder they had once been, clinging to a past they could no longer sustain.

Returning to camp, I found it empty. I moved through the day’s end routine of unpacking, labelling, storing samples. When the tea was ready, I switched off the burner and silence closed. I sat by the ice edge, breathing into the warmth of the mug, watching the sea ice press against the shore. Though I could not see any movement, the tiniest drip, the faintest crack was startlingly vivid as the swell moved beneath. Then I heard boots crunching on snow and looked up to welcome Carl, but he was not there. The sea ice stretched away into the distance, its grey hollows shadowed in the evening light, highlighted by bright patches of late summer snow. Looking further, I saw movement, a dark figure on a ridge of rock half a kilometre away. His shadow was cast thin and stretched across the ground. Closing my eyes, I took a sip of tea, listening to the crunch of distant footsteps that seemed almost upon me.

The wind picked up as Carl approached across the darkening ice late in the evening. Writhing, wraith-like snakes of blowing snow twisted about his feet, swirling in and out of existence. By the time he reached camp, clouds were closing in and snow was falling. Later, in my tent and preparing for sleep, the hiss of snow against the tent, the canvas flapping wildly, I thought I heard people yelling in the wind. Reluctantly, I climbed out of my sleeping bag, unzipped the tent door and peered into the maelstrom. I could see no one, just the tents flapping in a haze of blowing snow. I retreated inside.

The days stretched on. We awaited a resupply but could not know when it would come, the helicopter journey requiring good weather over a vast stretch of Antarctic coastline, so we continued our work. Then one morning, leaning over an outcrop, I heard it, barely perceptible, a faint hum. I stood sharply to attention, scanning the sky but seeing nothing. I looked to where Carl was working, a hundred metres away. He too was standing rigid, staring into the same far distance. For what seemed a long time we stood watching, seeing nothing. The hum grew louder. When it already filled the air, I saw a black dot appear on the horizon, a helicopter. When Carl drew the two-way radio to his lips, I grabbed my rucksack and started running towards him. As I drew up beside him, it descended in a blast of frigid air and noise, scattering small stones and we crouched, shielding our faces. Slowly the rotors wound down to a stop and two men stepped out, boots crunching on gravel. They were the first people we had seen in weeks. We rushed over, but then stopped short, glancing at each other nervously. We cautiously shook their hands, answered their questions with a word or two, looking sidelong, hands thrust back into our pockets.

The helicopter would stay for the day, so we set out to distant outcrops, which we could not otherwise reach. I watched our tiny camp and its neighborhood of rocky islands disappear behind us as we rose over the icy gulf. Far below, dark open water beckoned on the horizon. Isolated, rocky outcrops remained wrapped in an immensity of ice, immovable glaciers pouring around them. Approaching the distant shore, I saw hundreds of tiny black dots on the ice, an Adelie penguin rookery. We landed on a flat pavement of rock on the hill above them and, as the rotors wound down and the silence descended, I could hear them out of sight on the ice below. Leaving the others, I set off down the slope, following their cries.

At the ice edge, the snow was deep, the ice broken into ridges by a tide crack at the shore. Fluffy grey-brown chicks on the sea ice called shrilly. Determined to reach them, I leapt across, landed heavily in the soft snow and fell backwards into the crack. Struggling to wrench myself free, I hauled myself awkwardly onto the snow-covered sea ice. Then I noticed the stench. Everywhere, the snow was covered in excrement and vomit. As I struggled to my feet, the penguins shuffled cautiously away, clambering over the dead, decaying bodies of smaller chicks, covered in tufts of grey feathers. I took the photographs for which I had come, trying to avoid capturing the evidence of death, and retreated quickly across the tide crack, back to the helicopter.

The jet engine started with a sudden blast and the rotors wound slowly, then quickly, to a blinding blur of sound. The pilot tentatively lifted the machine and then, more deliberately, a few metres higher. Once comfortably in the air, he dropped it over the edge. We plummeted, catching the cold air that drove us forward just above the sea ice. Before I could pull my camera to my eye, we were tearing along metres above the ice at an impossible speed. We swerved around icebergs, steady and solemn. Realizing the magnitude of the moment, I dropped my camera in my lap and looked at the scene through my own eyes. Like a newsreel, images poured into me, flowing like electricity through my body. The icebergs gave way to open water. Fragments of ice, scattered over the dark sea, flew past beneath us, pieces of a monumental puzzle that would never be solved. Then, abruptly, the pilot pulled upwards, the whole world slowed, and the power of the moment slipped away. Sometimes I wish I had held onto the camera, that I still had some record, but then I remember that I do. The images flicker through my mind, the engine roars in my ears and a secret smile curls at the corner of my mouth.

I dialed the number. My mouth was dry, cheeks flushed, heart beating hard.

“Yes?”

“I’m calling about Eva.”

The line returned silence.

“I know this is a bit strange. It’s a long time ago but I only just found out that she died. I was her cabin mate on an expedition to Antarctica fifteen years ago and I lost touch with her. I just want to know what happened.”

After a pause, he spoke. He told me that she had struggled with depression for years.

As he talked, I thought of her crying on the floor of the bathroom, drunk. I thought about putting her to bed, thinking she was okay. As he kept talking, I cried silently. If I had said something more, would it have changed anything? If I had found her again in the years between, would it have made a difference?

She had rented a hotel room, he told me. In the morning, the staff had found her. He didn’t tell me how she did it and I didn’t ask, though I wanted to know. I imagined her blonde hair resting on the surface where she lay. What was she thinking of when she closed her eyes for the last time? Was it clear skies and icy horizons?

I thanked him, said goodbye, and we never spoke again.

Weeks later, I spoke to Carl. “Do you remember that French-Canadian girl on our Antarctic trip?” I asked. He said no. We had played cards into the night as the icy water washed against the portholes. He had laughed when she teased him.

“I remember Lauren,” he said. “She’s a good politician, knows her stuff.”

I said nothing. The room seemed to darken. He did not remember the girl who had won our hearts. Or had it just been mine?

I lay in the sun, my head resting on the rocky pavement, hair lying loose on the ground. These were the last days of our Antarctic summer. My fingers traced the outlines of unseen crystals on the rough surface beneath me, feeling their texture as I stared up into the flawless sky. When I pressed my palms against the cool rock surface, I imagined I could feel a sense of its forgotten past, crystalline secrets calling from long ago, when the dark sky was filled with strange constellations, when the world was silent but for the wind whistling across endless oceans.

When it was time to return to camp, I hauled on my rucksack one last time and walked towards the steep rocky slope and the descent into the cold shadow where Carl waited down on the ice. As the path became steeper, blockier, I found myself climbing over sheer, rectangular boulders. Finally, I reached a point where I was sitting on the edge of a tall block, feet dangling below. To descend further, I would have to push myself off and jump to the next ledge, far out of reach below my feet. Beyond the ledge, I could see the route down and at the end I could see Carl. His rucksack lay on the ground. He was waiting for me, I thought. I sat on the ledge wondering if I should push off, but I was afraid. I called out to him,

“Carl!”

But he was looking the other way, his hood pulled tight over his ears against the cold, dark shadow of the cliff on which I was balanced. I looked up. It was a long way back to retrace my steps. I would have to find a new route. I looked down again. The ledge was right there.

I pushed myself off.

Just as it seemed okay, my rucksack caught on the edge and swung me over the drop. I sucked in a breath of freezing air. For a moment I hung there in space. The rock slipped out from under my fingers and I saw the silent figure of Carl in the distance, looking away.

 For Eva, my friend for a brief moment. I wish it had been longer.

-Julie Hollis

Julie is an Australian writer, science communicator, and geologist living in Brussels with her nomadic husband and bilingual sons (who put her language skills to shame). When she is not herding children or working towards a grand vision for the geological survey organisations of Europe (or even when she she is), she likes to write. She has had several narrative non-fiction articles published in Massive Science, one of which appeared in Best Australian Science Writing 2021. She has also released two podcast series featuring narrative interviews with geologists. After all, she likes rocks too.