Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [37]
I’ve continued my interest in polar exploration and the great expeditions, although I think it’s safe to say this is not a subject of general interest. They were just so phenomenally brave. They lived on dog meat and willow tea. They boiled old boots and ate them. They ate the deerskin ties off their tents and then they cut up their tents to make footgear, so they could go out and look for the rescue ships. Lieutenant George DeLong of the U.S. Navy spent two winters frozen in place 750 miles from the North Pole, which is not that far—others had traveled farther—and then his ship sank on June 12, 1881. There were fourteen of them left, and still he wrote in his journal, “All hands weak and feeble, but cheerful.”
All my life, those men were my heroes. I think I would have been better off with the astronauts or even the Argonauts or with the saints, if we had been that kind of family, or with the people who marched on Selma for their rights. But my father loved these men and he didn’t seem to notice that they were all, really, pretty crazy and most of them failures (Roald Amundsen was often the villain of these stories and I think now it was because he knew what he was doing; he accomplished his goal and he went on to other successes, and all of that was despicable to my father). These people made terrible mistakes and the best and worst of them just shrugged and said that it was no one’s fault at all, just the nature of life, just the inevitable outcome of what they had undertaken, but it wasn’t true. They had something missing. They left things behind that other, more reasonable men would have known to bring. They brought the wrong food, and the wrong transportation. They held the fucking maps upside down half the time and one boat fell to pieces in the Arctic Ocean because, when the ship had sailed in sunnier climes, the crew had pulled nails out of it to trade for sex with the Polynesian women, since iron was so valuable. They could have been saved by vitamins, which were easy to buy and carry. They could have been saved by a wireless transmitter, which was not uncommon.
On one of Peary’s expeditions, their boat was struck by moving ice, pressed between two icebergs by the current, and as the ship was sinking, water coming in through the port side, the crew and the scientists gathered a few things and scrambled onto the icy bluff. Finn Hamilton went below three times, because he couldn’t decide what to take. He brought a compass and threw it to a crewmate already on land. He went down for his pipe, and halfway up the stairs, he went back down again for his Bible and he slipped and drowned, tangled up with a footstool.
Some of us are Finn Hamilton and some of us are Beth Shenker, I guess. I have somehow not had the right things for this journey and I have packed and repacked a hundred times as if somehow the right thing will be found in some small pocket, put in by someone with more sense or gift than me, but I’m always scrambling for the last-minute thing and I am always, always watching the boat pull away without me.
Your family was one of my early boats and you were the bright and amazing sail, and I am, as I said at