Читать книгу The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 9

BY THE TIME HE MOVES from his tent into his station house, winter has arrived. November 18, 1915, the sun sets at 2:42 P.M., and Bigelow, bundled upstairs in parka, boots, and discouragingly pungent caribou trousers, watches it disappear across the inlet’s sullen horizon and inscribes the hour and the minute into his log, writing as carefully as he can without removing his gloves. The sun’s descent illuminates the various layers of cloud, inspiring him to annotate their features and relative positions in the sky. A single remaining ray, like a celestial finger, reaches up and points to the blurred belly of nimbostratus, and he watches as it fades. Perhaps it will snow the next day. Bigelow stands, hugging himself against the cold, until he can see no more.

Downstairs, where he can move around without the encumbrance of furs, he has placed his drafting table next to the stove, and he works at its slanting surface during the long dark hours of the season. He has his responsibilities to the central bureau in Washington, D.C., and he has local duties as well.

For the town of Anchorage, in a frenzy of construction, Bigelow is to create a forecast map and tack it to the post office wall every day by two P.M., and he is to fly flags appropriate to that forecast: white for fair, blue for rain or snow, a red pennant for easterly winds, a yellow for westerly, and so on—eighteen combinations to cover all the possibilities, a language of signals familiar to citizens of the United States, but who knows if the local populace will understand it? Still, that isn’t Bigelow’s problem; his forecasts are for the Alaska Engineering Commission and its railroad, for which everyone is waiting.

There’s coal in Alaska—coal fields and diamond mines, veins of gold, silver, copper—and the fastest way to get it out of the territories and sold is by rail. If President Wilson relents, if the United States joins the Allies against Germany, the war effort will demand Alaska’s wealth. No one wants war, and yet everyone is excited by the possibility. Impatient to finish laying track and begin surveying for a deepwater port, the Engineering Commission has already made mistakes, mistakes for which weather was blamed, and Bigelow has been sent north to prevent more of them from happening. Last year, all the equipment shipped up from Panama’s completed canal—steam shovel, dredge, and crane—sank in the inlet. An unexpected storm blew in, the wind hit fifty knots, two barges crashed into floe ice and sank. So now the commission has decreed that no work proceed before the weather forecast is known. And forecasts depend on maps. To the initiated, air has features as clear as land, features that can be drawn, lines that divide one degree from another. Interpretations of those drawings may vary, opinions among meteorologists diverge, but good maps are absolute; they are irrefutable.

The bureau provides large-scale outlines of North America, printed on both opaque and tissue-thin folios. On the opaque maps, Bigelow enters temperature and pressure readings, delineating highs and lows with isotherms and isobars, fancy words for the lines he makes, sweeping over topography in waves and circles. On the translucent overlays, he indicates wind and precipitation, using directional arrows and a code of symbols for rain, snow, sleet, and fog. He plots his own data—readings he has taken and reported to the central office—as well as observations from all the other stations in North America, numbers he decodes from a long, daily cable message. But without a light table like the one at which he worked in Seattle, he sometimes makes mistakes, and even more of them when dogs are howling. Pen in hand, he startles at the sound, rakes its nib across ten or twenty degrees of longitude.

Half wolf, three quarters wolf, all wolf—the sound of sled dogs after dinner is like nothing Bigelow has ever heard before, one howls and then another answers and so it goes until dawn. Horses aren’t much use when snow is four feet deep, and the few automobiles shipped into Anchorage are good for nothing but sport—ice derbies and mud races—and the railroad isn’t finished, it’s barely begun. So anyone who plans on getting anywhere walks on snowshoes or travels behind a team.

When sled dogs aren’t working they’re staked, and Bigelow has grown accustomed to the sight of chains disappearing into the dens the dogs dig in the snow. But, invisible as the animals are when he walks through town, they fill the night with their wailing, like hideous hymns to the devil—once they begin, stars wink out and the bright moon sinks in the sky. Fingers in his ears, wool watch cap, earmuffs, parka hood: he can’t find a way to muffle the howling. Even Rigoletto, cranked up and blaring from the trumpet, is no good, the tenor’s lament threading eerily through the howling of the dogs. The death of civilization, the death of reason, it seems to Bigelow, tearing up one map and then another.

He binds the completed maps in volumes of 120 pages, each holding two months’ worth of recorded observations, paths of major storms extrapolated for comparison to those of years past and hence. Current theories of forecasting presuppose that atmospheric history tends, like human history, to repeat itself, an idea that some meteorological scientists consider facile. And, sometimes, sitting by the stove, feet numb and cheeks burning, Bigelow lifts his head from his task and is struck by its absurdity. He isn’t drawing mountains or rivers or canyons, all those features of the earth that have existed for aeons; and neither is he mapping countries or cities or even streets, the work of centuries. No, Bigelow records ephemera: clouds; a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh.

But there are other nights when this seems to him wonderful, poetic. He is recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people, events that, even if noted, are soon forgotten. A storm such as the one that destroyed his grandmother’s home might be represented in diaries and stories, but not accurately. Its character would be distorted, altered by tellings and retellings, made into a myth rather than a set of responsibly reported observations.

As with the shard of blue-and-white china he keeps, the pattern from which he can picture his grandmother’s unbroken plate, after winds blow then still, after clouds vanish, only Bigelow will have the record.