The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Rush

Months earlier I asked a male glaciologist what to bring on the trip. He told me to “pack as if you were going to the moon,” which struck me as both useless and boastful.

she is quick to remind me that many of the world’s seafloor maps are produced by the oil and gas industry—another reason we know so very little about Antarctica, where fossil fuel extraction has been forbidden for decades.

Right now, it is frightfully easy to accept, without interrogation, that the world is ending. But there isn’t just one world, and this isn’t the first time much has been lost. Having children can be an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it. In her essay “m/other ourselves,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “To answer death with utopian futurity … [is] a strange thing to do. To name oneself ‘mother’ in a moment where representatives of the state conscripted ‘Black’ and ‘mother’ into vile epithets is a queer thing … we were never meant to survive and here we are creating a world full of love.” For Gumbs, mothering is action: it both resists historic violence while also creating the context for other futures. “The radical potential of the word ‘mother’ comes after the ‘m.’ It is the space that ‘other’ takes in our mouths when we say it … all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves and the way we relate to each other.”

JOEE: There’s this great book called Folklore and the Sea that’s all about how sayings like Mackerel skies and mares’ tails make tall ships carry short sails have a truth to them, because they really are references to centuries of lived experience. People from one place could predict the weather three or four days out, because they were like, Oh, this particular flower is wilting today. Or, There’s a certain ring around the moon, or, The wind shifted, and I could smell apple blossoms. There are all of these really subtle, delicate signals that are embedded in human memory, and they connect us to the environment. But Antarctica is the only place on earth where there is none of that—like, none of that at all. There are no Indigenous people who can say, When the wind shifts and comes around from the north, you know it’s going to blow like hell for three days. And without that knowledge, that deep institutional knowledge, when the barometer drops, you really don’t know what’s going to happen next.

In that same conversation, she complained about all the paperwork she was made to sign in order to sail, including an agreement not to get pregnant in Antarctica. “I mean, why doesn’t it say you’re not allowed to make someone pregnant?” she asked.

Instead of saying, “Look at the bay, look at the trees,” I tried and continue to try changing who acts in my sentences. “The tupelo trees are greeting you; the Narragansett Bay swims by.” Maybe if the language I use understands the landscape where our lives unfold as animate, he will too. I’ll admit that, at first, this felt like a thought experiment, and not one that came easily to me. But just a couple of days ago, I was walking on the beach and realized I didn’t have to try anymore to think about this ocean as a person: it just was and is.