“Sometimes.”
Without the war, he tells her, he probably would have spent his whole life in Montana, hunting. It never would have occurred to him to leave. But when he came back, he found he didn’t like walking in the mountains anymore. He didn’t like being cold or sleeping outside or shooting things. He’d had enough of all that. He got confused sometimes.
“One minute I’d be out for elk,” he says, “and the next I’d be hunkered down somewhere, hiding from the Germans, all mixed up about past and present.”
“Time to go makai.”
He laughs. “You’re practically a local already. Yeah, I guess it was time. Did I tell you why I came here?”
“No.”
“I was drinking a lot, that sort of thing, but I was also reading a lot because I had nothing else to do, and I happened to check a book out of the library that had these drawings of the islands, and all of a sudden I had to see Hawaii. I had to.” His fingers trail along her ankle. “I packed a bag and got on a train, then a ship. That was it.”
“I envy you,” Marian says. “Finding a place where you can stay put. Being content somewhere.”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d find that place, too. You don’t even let the possibility in.”
She doesn’t think he’s strictly talking about geography anymore. “Maybe someday,” she says.
The aurora occupies huge swathes of sky in a blink. One moment an arc of light hangs from horizon to horizon, bleeding up into the stars; the next it is gone. You feel you are receiving messages from an unknown sender, of indecipherable meaning but unquestionable authority.
—marian graves
Barrow, Alaska, to Longyearbyen, Svalbard
71°17? N, 156°46? W to 78°12? N, 15°34? E
January 31–February 1, 1950
9,102 nautical miles flown
They wait in Barrow for four days. When an auspicious forecast comes, they leave in the evening so as to arrive in Svalbard at midday, when the southern sky will glow with blue arctic twilight. The sun won’t actually rise for two more weeks, but at least they won’t have to land in pitch-darkness. This is an advantage to their delayed schedule, to the sixteen days they spent in Hawaii instead of the planned-for two: more light in the north. On the other hand, Marian worries about the consequences of reaching Antarctica so late in the southern summer, assuming they reach the continent at all.
The Norsel, the ship bringing the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition （and also the Peregrine’s fuel） to Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica, had suffered a delay, costing the expedition at least two weeks, probably more. A telegram had arrived for Marian at the Honolulu airport. The upshot: No hurry.
We might as well hunker down here for a bit, she and Eddie had said to each other, feigning more reluctance than they felt. Eddie had found his own lodgings in Honolulu rather than stay at Caleb’s. He’d been the one to mention the waning Arctic night as reason to dally. They’d thought they would probably have to fly all the way from Barrow to the Norwegian mainland, at the outside edge of the Peregrine’s range, as there was no real airfield on Svalbard and few navigation aids, but with good weather and a bit of twilight they’d have a better chance. She’d seized on the idea, had told herself, as she lingered in Caleb’s bed, that she had no choice but to stay.
* * *
—
As the Peregrine lifts off from Barrow, heavy with fuel, reluctant to climb, the edge of the frozen land is indistinguishable from the beginning of the frozen sea. To the north lies darkness, studded with stars. Green auroras ripple like shafts of light through moving water.
Extreme cold generally discourages overcast, but even so, they are lucky. For much of the flight the sky is not only free from cloud but so transparent there seems to be no air at all. At the pole, the stars hover against the black of the universe. Below, a frozen ocean is lit by starlight and the thinnest paring of moon, its platinum surface pushed up into broken dunes, shadow rippling in the trenches between. Where the tides have tugged rips in the ice, narrow channels of open water breathe fog as they freeze over. Never has Marian seen a landscape so suffused with hush, so monochromatic and devoid of life.
That woman marking up her map in Long Beach seems so distant, so silly, unrecognizable as herself, this other woman flying through an expanse of dark clarity. What did that map have to do with this place?
If they crash, survival will be impossible, but there are other perils, too. So far north, the compass wanders. Lines of longitude pinch together like bars at the top of a birdcage. To make sense of the place, the idea of true north must be banished, the ways in which they have previously oriented themselves against the planet forgotten. The birdcage must be lifted up and away, navigation done by specialized charts under a flattened grid where north is set artificially and lines of longitude wrenched parallel.