I just remembered. I'm almost out of Brennivin.
Long silent volcanos are erupting in Alaska. The earth is making noise. Maybe the big one is coming. Who knows? Maybe it's not.
What do you think the big one is, anyway?
They rejected you for health insurance. Even though I'm the one with the high blood pressure, it's not a cost item. If it gets bad I'll drop dead, off the health care radar. They won't pay a cent. Your issues cost money. You will live longer and cost them more trying to keep you happy during your long life. Money is what it's about. Not life.
My life will be shorter than normal people, says Domenick Curatola, MD. I'm trying to live it now. No offense intended. When the big one comes I probably won't be here. Nothing I can do about it. They say it's in my DNA. I'm predisposed to self-destruction at a time and place of God's choosing, or at least random chance.
When I was on the ice what I learned is that no matter how bad it gets it can always get worse. You should always be prepared for being peppered by lava bombs as hot as the sun in a two-hundred mile per hour hurricane while you discover you have temporal lobe epilepsy and go into convulsions having had to burn for warmth the user's manual for the only short-wave radio for one hundred miles.
You need to be prepared for that. "Prepared" does not mean you should have plans in place to stop it from happening, just that you remain calm when it does. Dying calmly is what we learn on the ice.
The other thing you learn in Antarctica is that no matter how bad things are, they're going to get better sooner or later. There's a physical law about this. You learned it in high school physics, you just forgot it along with the solution to quadratic equations and the name of Alexander the Great's father (Philip). This law is called the law of conservation of personal tragedy. There's only a finite amount of personal bullshit any of us has to deal with in the world. It's going to get used up. Then things will be good until that's used up. Then it will be just plain boring forever. And then we'll all pray for the bullshit to come back, just to spice things up.
No matter how bad the weather is, it can get worse. And it will always get better. Because in comparison to other planets Earth weather is relatively tame. It's not hot enough to melt lead anywhere on the surface. It doesn't rain ammonia. Water is generally in a liquid state. When things go slightly off kilter and we have an ice age or a warming trend, things are still pretty okay compared to, say, the surface of Venus.
No matter how bad it gets, someone always thinks it's good. In Antarctica they love condition one. Condition one is when the wind blows so hard you can lay down on it. Condition one is when the blizzard is so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face. They love condition one because it feels like adventure. Otherwise it just feels like being far away and lonely.
But if you're out in the field in a tent you only like condition one for as long as your tent stays up. Then it sucks. Then you wish for the sultry calm days of no-ozone sunburns and snowblindness everyone back at McMurdo finds boring.
Right now there are people having the time of their lives. We did too, once. Not now, though.
What do you think love actually is? What's the genetic imperative for love? Was it selected for during evolutionary processes, or does strong positive emotion come from somewhere different than strong negative emotion? If aliens came to earth could we explain it to them?
A woman gave me the Brennivin. She bought it but she was afraid of what it would do to her. Maybe when she drank it, it would act like battery acid and eat right through her tongue and drain out the bottom of her chin. No matter that Icelandic people make a hobby getting drunk on the stuff and riding snowmobiles to the lava flows. No matter their jaws are still intact despite frequent imbibement. She was afraid.
So I'm drinking it. My chin is still intact, but I have the strange urge to drive a snowmachine to a river of flowing lava and trying to coax the flow back into the ground. But not for long. It's almost gone.
It would be great if it was simple to explain everything that happened to me, and so to us. But the Northern Hemisphere is full of stories that are difficult to tell. They say to start a story in the middle, but I can't figure out where this starts. I feel like backtracking to the last ice age and starting with the death of the last wooly mammoth moving forward to the vikings and mead and then getting somewhere close to eighty degrees south where Scott of the Antarctic died. And I could start there but nobody would get it.
Everyone would say: but what were you doing in Antarctica wearing shorts, a tie-dyed shirt, and a purple pageboy wig? And I'd have to shrug because the laws of story say I had to start on chapter two-hundred, way after all that stuff was explained back in North America where it's complicated.
And sun dogs.
And nacreous clouds (which do not cause ozone depletion).
And poetry contests, which I won.
And sixty below.
And snow that sounds like plate glass breaking under your boots.
And blue eyes -- why are blue eyes so prevalent among the polar explorers?
And left hands. We're predominantly left-handed on the ice.
And the volcano which is always erupting.
It took years. Nothing happened for years of my going to the ice, and then it all happened. And then it stopped. But it was years and I got older and settled into the pattern and I figured it was as it was meant to be.
In contrast to the complexity of the North, Antarctica is butt-simple. It's naked. It's white and blue. It's ruled by the laws of physics. Right and wrong are absolute there, like heat and cold. Up and down.
Everything in Antarctica is as it was meant to be, because no matter how much we try, we can hardly change it. Just like Titan is as it's meant to be, and Calypso and Io and Mercury and Alpha Centauri.
When I went there, the earth was rumbling and the sky was falling and all the dinosaurs were lying frozen, waiting for their DNA to be resurrected.
Everything was exactly as God left it on the sixth day before he took off for his Bermuda cruise.
I could still see his fingerprints on the mountains.
And on the inhabitants. And on my own blue eyes.
That's all the explaining I can do.