Transquility
Britnie Walston
surprised to notice that I no longer saw any blue at all that wasn’t the sky: the water was all white, all solid. Neither, I realized, had I seen the seals, not for days. I felt oddly bereft. With the freezing of the shores came an equally marked slowing of my communications with the outside world. I paused over my keyboard now. Instead, I went on longer walks. Sometimes I stood on the glacier and shivered not because of the cold, but because of the desolation in the beauty, and the feeling of life trapped under my feet. Two valleys over, microbiologists had recently discovered that it was possible for cells buried deep in the ice sheet to continue evolving and growing, even during the darkness. Griff announced that I would be spending two nights in town: Charlie and Ted would helicopter me to McMurdo on Saturday morning and bring me back on Monday. The pretense for this trip was booze-andgrocery procurement and our laundry, but I knew better—Griff just wanted me to see some people my own age, namely other women. “Okay,” was all that I said when he told me. But I looked forward to getting away from Marble Point for a few days. This trip was a chance for me to see Catherine. She was my one female friend still on the continent, a woman who had also worked at the South Pole Station and who was posted at McMurdo for Blue Mesa Review | 28