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Attribution for polar bear icons used below.1
⬅️ Previous chapter
Mid-November 2009
Grace is exhausted from late nights at her tiny Formica table scrolling websites like ScienceCareers.com and PostDocJobs.com. Adjunct professor at Ohio State. Lab manager at a tech startup in Idaho. Field station supervisor in Antarctica. She scans missions and visions on About Us pages, studies faces and bios, skims publications, projects, policies. Each application requires a unique spin on her resume. My innovative process uses purpose-built instruments. Unprecedented access has yielded exceptional data. My ground-breaking analysis reveals hidden patterns. In an exhausted haze she pours bluster and charm into each cover letter. She’s lost count of the submissions. As the pre-dawn sky lightens, she applies to be the science advisor on a zombie apocalypse TV series shooting in Toronto.
Her mother’s advanced-degree scholarships and mathematics genius did nothing to spare her from the purgatory of teaching hormonal seventh graders at Curtis Bay Middle. She says she loves it, but Grace wants no part of that fate. She resolves to be more strategic going forward. She’ll apply only to positions within a three-hundred-mile radius of her research.
In the shower, her mind relaxes. She’s back in her eight-year-old body, wondering. How do crabs know when to molt? Why do herons nest in great rookeries? What gives a marsh its distinctive reek? What’s it like to be a dragonfly?
Barbara’s question barges in, demanding What’s your why? Grace’s childhood curiosity alone couldn’t possibly have pushed her through living in her car, through assault and sleepless nights to finish her dissertation. Wonder didn’t fuel her to set up two labs and equip her own. Didn’t carry her through hiring grad students, publishing papers, winning awards, landing fellowships. What’s behind all that, if not some mysterious, unknowable Why? Why continue to chase funding? Why chase tenure-track positions? Why teach bored undergraduates and write conference abstracts? Surely curiosity alone is too fragile a scaffold for all of that. Even with ambition. The questions feel essential, like she won’t be able to dress herself or go out into the world until she knows. Until she has answers. Today.
The day is bleak and cold. A nor’easter blew through in the night, leaving a residue of chill wind and a heavy gray sky. Grace stands shivering on her bike at the light at Charles and 24th. She feels the familiar haunting coming on. Her Italian astrophysicist namesake has something to say. Grace groans. Not this bitch again.
What? Grace makes her mind-voice as hostile and uninviting as possible.
Admit it, Dr. Hack says, You think you’re special. Superior. You thrive in settings where everyone else is mediocre. Beatable.
The light changes. Grace barely misses the rear bumper of a red Acura running the intersection from her right. In her distraction, she mind-voices, People who choose easy, straightforward whys they can control, that are clear and achievable, are mediocre. They go around spouting that knowing your why is the key to happiness.
She can tell from the even deeper chill that washes over her that Dr. Hack is disappointed.
I’m hopeless, Grace thinks, digging deep to propel herself up a hill.
Why do you make everything so complicated? Life is love. Do what you love. When you follow your heart and use your mind, nothing can stand in your way. Stop limiting yourself.
Is this where you say I’m stardust and remind me the universe is infinite?
Dr. Hack sighs. I don’t know why I bother.
Neither do I. You’re welcome to go back to wherever you came from.
I can’t stand seeing you waste your talents on self-pity. There is much work to do, stop wallowing and get your hands dirty.
Grace huffs in exasperation. As a child that she could exit a nightmare by closing her eyes tight and opening them very slowly. She’s tried it before with Dr. Hack, even nearly ran into the bumper of a delivery truck, but it never works.
“How do I shut you off?” she blurts aloud.
To her surprise, Dr. Hack laughs and laughs. She continues to laugh as Grace passes under the south campus gateway and turns onto the winding drive through the forest to her building. As she locks her bike to the rack, she can still hear faint laughter. But it might be from the three undergraduates crossing the street behind her.
At the lab, Grace greets Barbara and opens her email to the dean’s reminder of today’s special guest speaker. As if it was possible to forget. Early in the semester, Barbara had proposed hosting a seminar together. “We’ll invite a guest to come speak to our colleagues. It’ll be a community-building thing,” she’d said. That was an easy no for Grace, who is neither a joiner nor a community-builder. Of course, Barbara went ahead with the idea. She and the dean have been talking it up at every opportunity.
Though Grace likes and even admires Barbara, she can be too much to take, especially lately. Too driven, too confident, too sure of success. Certain she deserves it. What does it mean that she resents Barbara for being too much like herself? It’s disorienting that Barbara is better at being Grace than Grace is.
Barbara’s even brought board games and decks of cards to the lab. She plays Life and Connect 4 and Spades with the grad students and post-docs, “to rest our brains,” she says. She initiated a “Journal Club” to host gatherings of colleagues to talk about new data and brainstorm new experiments.
“You’re wasting time away from our research,” Grace complains.
“The work’s getting done,” Barbara assures her. It’s true. She’s been mentoring and delegating to Steve and Erin, their graduate assistants. Their work is impeccable.
A few days ago, Barbara said to her, “When I first came here, I admired your independence. But now . . . don’t get me wrong. But, like, maybe you’re too isolated, y’know?”
Grace felt like a child being scolded for crayoning the walls. “Resorting to personal attacks now? While we’re airing out, maybe it’s not appropriate to play games with people who should be working.”
The labs Grace came up in were all deadly serious. You came, you worked, you worked more and still more, then staggered home to sleep for a few hours before returning to do it all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The dean’s words, You’re not a team player, nag at her. Barbara is the picture of a team player. No wonder he fawns over her so much.
At least she has the lab running smoothly, despite her quirks. Their paper for the conference is on track for completion a week before the deadline. Or it would be if they weren’t missing four critical data sets from Warbird to complete their analysis.
When she returned from Warbird last week, she told Barbara the data was corrupted by faulty monitors. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her they denied access. Not yet. It was too shameful to admit that latest defeat on top of having to blow into a plastic toy every hour. In front of everyone at the lab.
So another week has passed without Warbird’s data. She opens the data logs, hovers her cursor over the empty cells for Warbird. Clicks the tab for Dazzler’s robust, complete logs. And Beast. And Daredevil. It would be so easy to . . . No. She’s not that desperate. There’s a special circle in hell for scientists who falsify data. She’ll never be one of those.
“Barbara,” she says, surprising herself. Guess we’re doing this.
“Hmmm?” She doesn’t look up.
“Steve and Erin are great, but they aren’t trained to service and calibrate the equipment.”
Now Barbara looks up, her eyebrows arcs of expectation. She waits, refusing to make it easy.
“It . . . It should be you,” Grace says.
Did a flicker of triumph slip across her face?
“We both know it. I’ve been resisting. . .”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Barbara says. “Why is that?”
Grace scans the budget spreadsheet, which has no line item for additional field hours, for grad students or for Barbara. All this time, Grace hasn’t been charging the project for her extra trips. She considers it R&D on her inventions. Sweat equity.
“James hasn’t come through with the extra funding he promised.” She doesn’t say their benefactor is leaving the company by the end of the month.
A wave of intense jealousy courses hot through her. The freedom he must feel. This is why she’s never talked about it. The whole enterprise feels more like a house of cards by the day—
“You never said he offered more funding.” There’s an edge in Barbara’s voice.
“It was . . . on that day . . . when . . .”
Barbara’s face reddens. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Grace. I’m being insensitive not to think how all that has affected you. We were so worried. I’m just glad—”
Grace waves a hand. “Don’t. I’m fine.”
She’s been telling people who ask that her experience has made her grateful for every sunrise, every breath. No more taking it all for granted. But she knows it can’t last. She’s already fallen into old patterns. She can’t help it. Late nights, early mornings, titrating caffeine hourly. Too much to do, too little time.
Grace closes her laptop and sighs. “So, this happened. I’m . . .They . . . banned me.” Her throat tightens around the words.
“What? Who?” Is she eager or confused?
“Scott. James. I can never go on any of their sites again. There, I said it.” Her voice quavers. So much for bravado. She closes her eyes and draws a slow, deep breath. “I couldn’t get the data last time. It wasn’t the equipment.”
“Oh, shit,” Barbara says. “That sucks.”
Grace nods. She can read Barbara’s recalibration, but not her thoughts. Her face is a mask.
“I can’t imagine how frustrating, how . . . humiliating. Oh, Grace. I’m so sorry.”
Humiliating? Seeing her diminished self through Barbara’s eyes is what’s humiliating.
“Might as well tell you this, too.” Grace swallows bile. “The dean told me I’m not on the interview list.”
Barbara leans back and gathers her hair up into a ponytail, then lets it drop loose. She looks away, out the window. “I had a feeling,” she says in a near-whisper.
Grace pushes away and stands. She wants to regret telling her, but she’s too relieved.
“What . . .What’re we going to do?” Barbara asks the window.
Her “we” shocks Grace. It’s the first time she’s considered that this affects Barbara, too. It affects all of them. Of course it does. What an idiot she’s been.
“I’m . . . sorry. I know it’s been a while. I should’ve told you earlier.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that . . . Oh, Grace, we’re doing such great work here. I really thought . . .” Tears stream down her face.
Grace’s eyes go hot, too. She nods. Swallows. “I’m . . . I’ve been trying to think. He offered me a one-year contract but, honestly. . .”
Alarm blooms on Barbara’s face. “You’ll take it, right? Say you’ll take it.” Her urgency sizzles in the close air of the lab.
“I was so angry after our meeting that I tried to accept James’ offer to move us into his lab at United Energy Holdings.”
“In New York City? What the actual fuck, Grace?”
“Don’t worry. He’s out of the picture. He quit.”
Barbara lets out a strangled cry. “What is wrong with you, keeping all this from me? I thought you were solid. Reliable. But no. You’re. . . unstable.” She stumbles off her stool and storms out of the lab with the parting shot, “Get your shit together.”
Grace’s phone buzzes. A text from Ned, Hélène’s narrowed-down list of science fair projects. It’s so long, she has to scroll to read them all. One catches her eye: melting polar ice.
As long as Hélène is willing to go beyond a simplistic demonstration of how melting sea ice and glaciers act differently on sea level rise, it’s a possibility. Grace wants nothing to do with pressing Play-Doh into bowls, adding blue-dyed water, and waiting for ice cubes to melt. Boring.
She searches her laptop and finds a promising method to study the relationship between seasonal trends in sea ice extent with shortwave and longwave radiation flux described in Earth’s energy budget. She texts back, Our guest speaker today studies the Arctic, he’ll have great stories. Bring Hélène.
To demonstrate she does indeed have her shit together, Grace offers to help Barbara with her seminar logistics. She meets the guest in the office, one Dr. Charles James Youngblood, III (“Call me CJ”). Straight off a flight from London, he’s trim, dressed in charcoal flannel slacks, maroon cable-knit cardigan, paisley bow tie, and expensive rimless glasses. He wears his sixty-plus years surprisingly well for a man who’s been outside most of his life. In fairness, he was heavily bundled in sub-zero temperatures.
She guides him through the faculty lounge to pick up cake and coffee, then into a classroom adjacent to the small auditorium where Barbara is overseeing the final preparations. He’s content to check email and go over his notes, so Grace leaves him to it.
In the auditorium, dozens of students and faculty stand or sit in clumps, chatting and laughing in excited anticipation. Dr. CJ is a rock star—quite a coup for Barbara. She convinced him to stop over on the way to his second TED Talk.
A dozen PhD students orbit Barbara. When did she collect them? They must have to answer, What’s your why? for admission to her club. They’re all ambitious and full of fight. Given the scarcity of open faculty positions in earth and planetary sciences at other R-1 universities, they’ll be lucky to teach at community college.
The dean takes the stage and manages to quiet the room after several attempts. He introduces Barbara in glowing terms. He’s not the fawning type, but today he’s over that line. Barbara stands to one side, looking humble-pleased. Her smile is beatific, but she clasps her hands tightly, which Grace recognizes as nervousness.
Ned and Hélène arrive just as the dean is turning over the mic to Barbara. They have to climb over six people to sit beside Grace. She’d had a few run-ins with annoyed students trying to take the seats she saved. People are sitting in the aisles and standing at the back of the room.
Barbara’s mini-CV of the famous Dr. CJ is peppered with superlatives. She details where he studied, post-doctoral fellow here and there, mentorship of X number of PhD students, Institute for the Study of Polar Regions in Belgium, and finally lured away to North East England to head up his university’s Arctic Research Center. He edits the Journal of Arctic Studies, has garnered this prestigious prize and that, and spoken at every annual UN Climate Summit since 1995’s first COP. His TED Talk went as viral as fifteen minutes on disappearing polar ice can.
He graciously thanks Barbara for the introduction and opens with, “All that travel has been hell on my cat,” to pockets of polite laughter.
“Contrary to current evidence, I didn’t start my career with an intense focus on climate.” He gives a compressed history of his research and tells stories of coring two-mile-thick Antarctic ice in the 1980s. “Sea ice is a perfect lab to study turbulent boundary layers.”
He makes the work and adventure sound fun in the way that doing impossible things with like-minded, passionate people is life-changing and addictive. That sudden blizzard is a rite of passage, that frostbitten thumb a trophy.
“About ten millennia ago, climate settled down and we entered the Holocene epoch. You know it as the time when the ‘climate dragon’ dozed off. Temperature stabilized and agriculture flourished worldwide.”
His slides fill the big screen behind him. Cold blue skies and white ice. Any one of them would make a stunning art print. Grace applied for a research trip with a glaciologist in undergrad, but he expected her to pay her own travel. She heard later that he preyed on the women who went and bullied the ones who refused his advances.
Dr. CJ continues, “Our ice cores showed that climate could still be chaotic, with changes occurring on time scales of decades. But overall, climate was relatively stable for over 11,000 years.”
A knot forms in Grace’s stomach. She wasn’t expecting this turn. From his TED Talk, she remembers stories of Shackleton-like perseverance and cheating death. How could she have missed that his brand is being a canary in a coal mine? Ned and Hélène are rapt. They’re also between her and the aisle, blocking her exit.
“In 1988, NASA scientist Jim Hansen gave his infamous testimony before the Senate Energy Committee. He pointed out that alternative energies like wind and solar would slow the planet’s warming and boost economies. Which was all quite promising, until it became politicized and polarized—pun intended.” He pauses for polite laughter and head nods.
Dr. CJ twists open the plastic water bottle on the podium to take a long draw. The crinkle sound reminds Grace of when James Cowan said he never drinks from plastic bottles. She saw only irony then, but he meant it. And now he’s leaving that world. Lucky bastard.
“Svalbard is heaven on earth,” Dr. CJ says beneath a huge image of reindeer on a plain of white with windswept candy-ice mountains beyond a silver glass ribbon of sea. All that white blinds Grace with longing. In the next image, the showy green rays of Northern Lights snake the sky, as gooey-bright as the ectoplasm in Ghostbusters. “It would take a poet to do it justice.” He moves on to a handsome polar bear standing on an ice shelf fringed with icicles jutting out over a rocky shoreline.
“In my time there, the temperature has warmed more than twice the global average.” A postcard shot of the red-brown barracks of the research station looms behind him. Thick snow frosts peaked roofs. “We’ve measured a stark reduction in sea ice extent and thickness.”
He launches into a more detailed discussion of his research findings, illustrated with data and graphs, summarizes what other scientists do there, and extends a warm invitation to anyone in the audience to join them, anytime. Grace’s eyelids grow heavy, a prelude to her body shutting down.
Before the next slide he says, “From the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time category.” There he is on the set of Good Morning America, sporting the same paisley tie, sitting with Robin Roberts and Diane Sawyer on a curved beige sofa behind a hideous coffee table. Everyone laughs, Grace included. The absurdity is a relief.
“I prepared for days and flew to New York to deliver my dire message to millions. Turns out, they had time for exactly two questions. One, Have you ever fallen into the Arctic Ocean?” He pauses for groans and laughter. “Yes. Yes, I have. And the hardball follow-up: Was it cold?” More laughter. Ned looks confused. Hélène is doubled over. “Also yes.” Grace wants to laugh, but she’s as chilled as that water. Does no one else see the tragedy of their triviality? She can’t decide if she’s despairing or enraged.
“What I wanted to say was this: two centuries of burning fossil fuels is not just tickling the climate dragon’s nose. We’re stomping it with combat boots.”
The room has gone quiet but for the sound of someone weeping. For a tense moment, Grace worries it’s her.
“The entire earth,” he says, “not only the Arctic, is in rapid transition. Two decades ago, I thought I wouldn’t live to see the changes visited on my grandchildren.”
Grace glances at Hélène and Ned. Their hands are clasped together. Hélène’s knuckles are white and her mouth hangs open.
The next slide shows a smiling boy and girl on side-by-side swings. They look about six or seven; Grace can never tell kids’ ages. “I have two grandchildren,” Dr. CJ says. “So far. Ladies and gents, the Holocene is well behind us. I call this new epoch the Stultuscene, after the Latin word for stupid.”
He elaborates how grief-stricken he is, can’t stop thinking about the world his beloved grandchildren will inherit. His voice cracks as he says their names. The air in the room has a crisp, medicinal smell like a funeral home.
Having forced his audience to face the unprecedented slow-motion disaster of planetary warming, he ends. Everyone is quiet but now the weeping is distributed. A Greek chorus of grief.
Barbara’s eyes are red-rimmed, but she heroically hosts a brief Q & A. Ever-ambitious undergrads show off for their professors with long rambling questions. Dr. CJ is patient and encouraging with each one, but Grace can’t listen. She’s paralyzed by a swirl of emotion as big and bright as the aurora borealis he showed. Scientists don’t talk about family or confess worry like this. How bad must it be for him to break the protocol of objectivity?
When Barbara tries to have girl-talk about her own sadness and anxiety, Grace shuts her down. There’s no time to wallow, it’s a distraction, not relevant to their work. The truth is, it’s too big and horrifying and dire.
Grace wants to shake it all off and leave, but she’s trapped. Why did he have to dump it all on them, make them look head-on at such immensity? Why didn’t she sit on the aisle? Behind closed eyes, she peers into a dark abyss. She could let go and fall—
Ned rests a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Grace? You okay?”
She shakes her head no, then remembers Hélène. She wants to bury her face in his chest and wail, but instead she scrubs her face with her hands and groans.
“He’s a real charmer,” Ned says. He looks as bereft as Grace feels.
“Not our usual fare, that’s for sure.” She hazards a glance at Hélène, relieved she doesn’t have a kid.
“Sorry that was so grim,” she says.
But Hélène is hooked. “He’s amazing. Sign me up.”
Grace and Ned exchange looks. He throws his arm around Hélène’s shoulders and pulls her close. Maybe she is ready for The Left Hand of Darkness after all.
“Coffee?” Ned asks.
Their row is clearing. Grace nudges him. Every cell in her body cries out for solitude.
“Can’t. I have class.”
“I thought you only taught in the morning.”
“I’m . . . picking up for a colleague. Just this once.” The easy lie surprises her. Ned deserves better.
In the lobby, he kisses her cheek. “I’ll call later. Good luck.”
Hélène is wide-eyed, searching the crowd. Grace could offer to introduce her to Dr. CJ, but all she wants now is for them to leave. She bids them good-bye and heads upstairs to fetch her coat.
As she climbs down the bank behind the building, the fog is a force of thick resistance. She settles on her log beside the muffled stream. The bare trees on the far bank hide behind the milky scrim of earthbound cloud.
The fog’s chill presses into Grace. The damp brush of a ghost’s sleeve teases her nose, eyelids, forehead, wrists.
The mist tumbles her into the stark, breathing Arctic. Reindeer and polar bear, glacier and granite and ocean. The place gathers weather. Stores cold. Sips furtive glances sunward, chooses the solitude of velvet, star crusted night.
The ice breathes night.
Parka-clad shadows witness the melting and calving and crashing. They measure and record the sliding damage of decisions made a world away, the fatal submission of the sublime white mind of Earth.
Grace recoils, pulls into herself. It’s too much. Too much.
Your grief is sacred, the mist whispers. Sourced in love.
She longs to be a sky-being like the fog. “Will you lift me away with you, when you go?” Her voice is hoarse.
We are here now together. Offer your grief, do not hoard it.
The line she imagines dividing her limbs, fingers, head, and torso into “me” and “not me” blurs and merges with draped droplets. She floats free, porous, unburdened and light. Wrapped in love.
The mist wants Grace to know there are no boundaries. Only love.
Next chapter ➡️
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polar bear by Manh Do from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
"Offer your grief, do not hoard it." A directive for all of us. This was beautiful, Julie. 💜
The close of this chapter is really beautiful. Your prose shimmers and sparkles when you describe nature.