Unsettled

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What’s a moment that made you question reality?

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Fifteen months ago we went to Antarctica.

It was my wife’s birthday present. More than that, it was something she had wanted to do since she was a little girl. I had known this about her for years. Some people want to see Paris or the pyramids or the Northern Lights. She wanted to see Antarctica. So we went.

I don’t know what I expected. Ice, I suppose. Penguins. Cold weather. A ship. People in expensive jackets taking photographs of one another.

There was all of that.

But there was also something else.

The place was too big to take in. We would stand there looking at ice and mountains and water, and I would know I was seeing it, but I could not quite believe it. The scale of it was wrong. Or maybe the scale of everything else was wrong. It was so quiet in places that you became aware of your own breathing. The snow and ice made ordinary colours seem loud.

Each day we went out from the ship. We walked on ice. We watched penguins go about their business as if we were the strange ones, which of course we were. We saw seals lying around like they owned the place. We watched whales surface and disappear. We took part in small research projects as citizen scientists. We went to lectures on history and climate and exploration and marine life.

I liked the lectures. I like learning things. That is no surprise to anyone who knows me. But after a while the facts did something strange. They did not make the place smaller. They made it larger. Each thing we learned opened up another thing we did not know.

At the end of the trip they showed us a video. The ship’s videographer had been filming us all along. Landings. Icebergs. Penguins. Whales. People helping one another in and out of zodiacs. My wife in Antarctica, finally there.

I cried.

I didn’t expect to. I was sitting there with all these other passengers, watching a screen, and suddenly I was crying. Not dramatically. Just enough to surprise myself.

Part of it was seeing my wife’s dream gathered up like that. A childhood wish, carried for decades, and there it was on a screen. Part of it was the beauty. Part of it was that we were leaving.

People say that at the end of a trip. Back to reality.

Back to email. Back to work. Back to news bulletins. Back to wars and arguments and people wanting more than they need. Back to the usual human business of taking and defending and explaining ourselves.

But sitting there, watching Antarctica on the screen, I wasn’t sure which thing was reality.

Was that place the interruption? Or was it the thing that had shown us the world more truly?

We had learned about whales recovering since the end of industrial whaling. That was one of the hopeful parts. Nature can heal when people stop doing the thing that is killing it. I found that moving. Then we learned about krill harvesting. Huge nets. Supertrawlers. Another pressure on the same system. Whales coming back, but underweight because the food web is being stripped.

That stayed with me.

You see the whales and feel glad. Then you hear what we are still doing and feel ashamed. Both things are true. The healing and the damage. The beauty and the appetite. The silence and the machinery somewhere beyond the horizon.

That was the part that unsettled me.

Antarctica did not make me question reality because it felt unreal. It made me question reality because it felt too real. Too beautiful. Too fragile. Too honest.

And then we came home.