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

by Elizabeth Rush

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.