Читать книгу pH: A Novel - Nancy Lord - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

Helen was ravenous after working on the back deck all morning, sampling and hauling plastic totes of glass bottles to safe storage. By the time the cruise was over, she’d have roughly six hundred filled bottles to take back to the university lab. She was facing months of measuring alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon. As unreasonable as it seemed, even to her, this anticipation thrilled her.

In the galley, most of the others had already helped themselves and were sitting around the three tables. She served herself a bowl of chowder and a humungous roast beef sandwich oozing caramelized onions. There was pie for dessert.

She slid in where she could, next to their leader. She liked Ray Berringer—a man devoted to his “bugs”—although beyond the cruises she didn’t see much of him. Biology did its thing, chemistry did its. This division of departments had always seemed peculiar to her. What they were now calling “Western science” was just beginning to grasp that everything was connected, something Alaska Natives had known forever.

Ray, mouth full, nodded to her. His Sealife Center cap sat a little askew on his head, and graying neck hair merged with his untrimmed beard above a frayed T-shirt collar. She knew he loved the cruises, was clearly more comfortable as a salty sailor than a tweedy professor. Every year different faculty and students came on the cruises, but Ray was a fixture. He was the one who made sure the research happened, who wrote the grants and filed the reports.

She was still not entirely sure why Professor Oakley—Jackson, as she now knew him—had left. He had work he couldn’t do from the ship. He and Ray didn’t get along, for whatever reason—two alpha dogs, she suspected. But he’d also told her he was finding the whole thing “awkward.”

“The whole thing” she understood to include her. In recent weeks their relationship had passed from advisor and student to something she hesitated to call “love,” but included spending nonacademic time together and, yes, sex. “Chemistry,” they had joked. They had good chemistry, were drawn together by—what? It wasn’t just physical attraction; they interested one another. Perhaps it was their differences. In any case they were both adults—she had taken her time getting through school—and they had been discrete. She had felt confident that they could continue to be adult, discrete, and professional on the ship. Apparently he hadn’t shared her confidence. Or something.

She played the scene over in her head. Their few minutes in the ship’s lab, where he’d found her labeling jars. “I’m not staying.” Her confusion; they were already halfway down the bay. “You know this work better than I do.” Her protests. “I already told Berringer. It’s done.” Her questions. His answers, his excuses. “It’s not about you,” he said at one point. The whole thing, he said, was awkward.

At the end, he’d reached out and cupped the side of her face, and she had felt the heat. He said, “You’ll do a great job.”

Now, squeezing in among her colleagues, she tried being cheerful. “Unbelievable weather.”

Ray swallowed. “It will be interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such stratification so late in the year.”

Across from them, Tina and Robert were trading Sven and Ole jokes. In Tina’s joke Ole was doing a striptease in front of a tractor. Helen guessed it was OK to tell bigoted jokes about Minnesotan farmers. They were not a protected minority, not that she knew of. People were more careful about telling Eskimo jokes these days; at least they didn’t tell them so much in her presence. Her own sense of humor tended to be less hah-hah, quieter, culture-based. The small teasings and subtle ironies of the Iñupiat weren’t always obvious to others, but Arctic cultures wouldn’t have lasted long without them. They’d needed ways of amusing themselves in the cold and dark. More critically, humor diffused conflict and kept people alive.

Helen grimaced at the ridiculous punch line, Ole’s confusion between “attract her” and “a tractor.”

On Ray’s other side, his daughter picked at her food. Clearly she’d taken more than she could eat, eyes bigger than her stomach. How many times had Helen’s grandmother—her aana—told Helen and her cousins when they were small about the boy who ate too much? They’d loved that story, which went on and on, the greedy boy eating all the berries and greens and fish until he eventually ate a whole whale and drank an entire lake. It was a funny story, but it also taught a lesson.

Those cousins—most of them—still lived on the North Slope and were married with children of their own, or not married but with children. Helen was old now—twenty-six—to not have children, and she knew some of her girl cousins wondered about her and felt sorry for her. In their minds children were essential; a woman without them was incomplete, lacking, lonely. They would never say this, but they would tease her: Where is your baby? At Thanksgiving she would see them all in Igalik, at the holiday feast and the wedding of the cousin who was having her second baby. She was looking forward to that.

Now, with another bite of her sandwich, she watched Ray’s hand sneak over and snatch a potato chip from his daughter’s plate. The girl had turned toward the kitchen and didn’t notice. Ray did it again, walking his fingers like a spider across the space between them. This time Aurora noticed and swatted at his hand with a little shriek. It must have been an old routine for them. The sweetness of the play caught Helen unawares, and she raised her napkin to cover her smile.

Ray turned to her with mayonnaise on his mustache. “We’ll be a fine team, you and me and this bunch of galoots.”

After lunch, back on deck, more of the essential monkey work. Helen tightened a last cap, stood to stretch her back. Tina and Cinda were debating something about the bottle numbering system, and she turned from them to watch the ship’s wake drawing its long, frothy line across the blue. She could never look at the ocean and see just the surface; her eye wanted to take her down, as though into the illustrations she’d loved in grade school: past the little fish and the magnified plankton near the top to the jellyfish drifting below and then the bigger fish, always sharks, on down to the huge halibut stirring the mud on the bottom and the crabs and anemones and corals, all the waving tentacles and open mouths, marine snow falling, the big whales coming up from a dive, all that hidden world. What was the number? Ninety-nine percent of the living space on the planet is in the oceans? And they knew so little about it, still?

“Oh, man, have I got the farts,” Tina said.

“Methane,” Cinda said. “Twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. You’re killing us.”

“Yeah, me and seven billion other people. Not to mention the cows.”

Alex came out and took away more bottles for filtering.

“Dude,” Tina shouted after him, “take a break. Save some of that for us.”

Cinda looked up at Helen. “That was cool about the press release, how much it made the news. People are starting to pay attention. What seems weird is that no one’s screaming about it being a hoax. You’d think the nutcases who oppose climate science would have a problem with the ocean absorbing CO₂ from the atmosphere. What’s up with that?”

The press release that Jackson had sent out had, in fact, been drafted by Helen. In Helen’s draft, it had explained for those who were still new to the idea what ocean acidification was and raised the alarm about the change in pH that they were tracking in Alaskan waters. In its final form, though, the statement focused more on the fact that ocean acidification was being studied at the university’s new Office of Ocean Acidification Science, and it didn’t mention that it was a danger, right now, to sea life. Helen had felt a little hurt by this—that she missed the assignment somehow. She was more hurt that Jackson hadn’t talked to her about the edits. When she’d asked why he decided to downplay the new data that suggested—showed—that Alaska’s cold waters were already significantly affected by acidification, his answer—not entirely convincing to her—was that the point of the release was to announce the new office. He reminded her of the “rule” that a letter to the editor or a press release should be limited to one point; otherwise people got confused. One subject. Next time, another subject.

Cinda’s question might have been rhetorical, but Helen answered it anyway. “Maybe because it’s straightforward chemistry?”

Cinda rinsed her last bottle. She was filling two at a time now, one in each hand. “I don’t know. All the data in the world don’t seem to convince people that we’ve got a problem with greenhouse gases. They still think Al Gore made up global warming to get rich.”

Helen had heard exactly that from their congressman, when he’d spoken on campus. He’d claimed that global warming was “the biggest scam since Teapot Dome,” and that Al Gore was just out to make money. He’d insisted that just as many scientists didn’t believe in global warming as did and that his opinion was just as good as anyone else’s. The students in the audience had been stunned by his belligerence, and when the moderator tried to pin him down on the sources of his information, the congressman cut him off, yelling, “Don’t give me that,” and continuing his rant about how it was all just natural cycles and what was permafrost anyway—just frozen dirt. He’d said, “There’s nothing pretty about ice. Ice grows nothing.” She remembered those exact words, because he’d said them with such contempt.

That day in the auditorium Helen had sat on her hands, horrified that a person in such an important position could be either so ignorant or so corrupt—and which was it? Even an Alaskan grade school student knew that sea ice was an essential part of the Arctic ecosystem—not just the habitat for species like polar bears and ringed seals but that the underside of it grew—yes, grew—algae that fed the zooplankton and supported the food web. So was what she heard ignorance, or was it obfuscation, meant to deny the truth and protect the interests of those who benefited from destroying ice?

And Teapot Dome? Wasn’t that a scandal, not a scam? She’d gone home and looked it up. How odd to compare global warming to a bribery scandal, specifically one in which a government official took bribes from oil companies!

What was especially incongruous was that the reason the congressman had been speaking on campus was to take credit for federal funding for the new acidification office. She had to think he hadn’t known what he was doing.

The ship slowed, and the captain’s voice boomed through the speaker. “Whales at one o’clock!”

Helen dashed for the binoculars she’d left in the boot room and headed for the stairs, close behind Colin and the girls from the lab. From the main deck they climbed the ladder to the flying bridge. The ship had slowed completely now, the engines a gentle throb through the steel deck. Colin was pointing, and she saw the vapor of a blow trailing off, still well out in front of them. Then another blow beside it, tall and straight up.

“Two of them,” someone said. “At least two.”

And, “They might be fin whales.”

They all strained to look, cameras and camera phones and tablets pointed.

The whales blew again, closer, and their long dark backs cut through the surface. They were paralleling the ship on the starboard side. They were big whales, that was for sure.

“Fins,” Colin said under his breath.

Ray was there now, and his daughter, who wasn’t dressed for the outside and had her bare arms crossed over her chest. Ray was explaining that fin whales mostly fed on plankton, lots of euphasiids in these waters, and on forage fish. “Two tons of food a day,” he said. “They’re sometimes called ‘greyhounds of the sea’ because of their speed, which they use to circle schools of fish to bunch them up before gulping them.”

Then the whales were right beside the ship, so close Helen didn’t even need her binoculars. The water was so clear; she was looking through the surface and down into it, at the entire bodies of fin whales. The larger one was just feet from the ship now, seeming to look them over. Its spade-shaped head was knobby around the twin blowholes, and whitish chevron-shaped marks stretched down its long back to the elegant slice of dorsal fin. It turned its head, showing the white side of its jaw. It rolled around to face the other way, and she saw the other jaw—the dark one—and remembered this asymmetry of the fin whale, white on one jaw and dark on the other.

“Did you see that?” she said quietly, to anyone who was listening. “Did you see the way it flashed us with the white side of its jaw?” She could imagine now what she’d only read, that biologists speculated that the jaw coloring had to do with that fish herding Ray had just mentioned. Fin whales were known to circle clockwise, which meant the white jaw would be visible to the fish, could be like a flashing light. But why would they want to circle only clockwise? Why not have two white jaws and be an ambidextrous circler?

The scientist in her wanted a theory, wanted to understand, needed more than awe.

A voice came from beside her. “Can you imagine anyone wanting to kill such a magnificent creature?”

It was the artist, the woman she’d met briefly at the safety orientation when they first boarded and then later had the short conversation with about seasickness meds. Now here she was, googly-eyed about the whales.

“Actually, yes,” Helen said. “Native people hunt and eat whales. Not fin whales, not in Alaska, but bowheads and belugas, and in Russia, gray whales.”

The woman—petite in an oversized and overstuffed parka, with bleached-blond hair matted into dreadlocks and dangling beads—turned to her. Helen watched her register dark hair, dark eyes, skin a little yellowish, Mongolian eye fold, whoops. Now the woman looked embarrassed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that. I meant the Japanese commercial whalers that do it for the meat. The Inuit have a different relationship, I know.”

“The whales give themselves to the people.” Helen said this instinctively, rhetorically, defensively. It was what she’d been raised to know, and if she didn’t actually believe this—she was a scientist, after all—many of her relatives did. While it might not be literal truth, the belief centered on respect; if you behaved well and were grateful for your food the animals would see that you didn’t go hungry. She wasn’t sure why she’d made such a bald statement to a strange woman, except that she was annoyed by her attitude and her use of the word “Inuit.” It was not a name that Alaska Natives used for themselves.

“Yes,” the woman said, and Helen noticed she was quite a bit older than she’d first thought. Her face was like a shriveled apple, like the faces of apple-headed dolls some of the grannies sold at Native arts fairs. Helen didn’t understand why a woman that age, even an artist, would be wearing at sea spackled tights, pink ballet slippers, and a giant puffy parka.

The woman asked, “Do you think the smaller one is the baby of the other one?”

“I’m not a whale expert,” Helen said, “but that’s probably a good bet.”

The smaller one—the likely calf—was at the surface now, exhausting spray that nearly reached the ship. Helen breathed deeply, hoping for a whiff of fishy breath. The ship was one hundred twenty feet long, and the whales beside it—approaching half that length—made it feel small and insubstantial, as though it were a toy boat and they were little Lego people snapped onto it.

“They’re telling us something,” the woman said. She held her digital camera at arm’s length, shooting in directions and at angles that seemed odd to Helen.

Helen was trying very hard not to be rude. “What are they telling you?”

“They’re sizing us up. They’re saying, ‘OK, you’re innocuous.’ Or they might be saying, ‘Screw you, stop messing up our home and stealing our food.’ The water’s reflective, so it’s hard for me to read the energy field.”

Helen resisted expressing an opinion about energy fields. The larger whale was sinking lower, not diving but sinking like a submarine, its blue back blurring into the depths. Then it was under the ship, and everyone inhaled and turned to the other rail. Both whales were leaving them, off to that side and moving away, just the pencil lines of their backs showing as they surfaced, and then just the vapor of their twin breaths.

The ship began to move again. The captain, out on the bridge wing, waved his cap and called to them, “I have never seen whales that fucking good, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years!”

After that night’s dinner, Tina organized two teams for charades. Book and movie titles were popular, as were marine themes. Silent Spring was easy. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was hard. Cinda was surprisingly good at acting, and Colin made up new rules. The artist, Annabel—Helen had finally learned her name—contributed titles and song lyrics that no one else knew and was very loud and random in shouting out her guesses. She had a laugh like a goose cackle and kept, for some reason, repeating “caudal peduncle.” Ray joined them, but when the clue from Alex was “jumping jacks,” he went from “jacks” to “jack to “Jackson Oakley” and made a snide comment about “our missing colleague who was too important to be here.”

Helen covered her discomfort by getting a glass of water. She understood why Ray would be unhappy with Jackson, but she didn’t think it was very professional for one professor to criticize another in front of students. She’d never heard Jackson say anything bad about Ray. He didn’t talk about him at all.

The correct answer was Jacques Cousteau, which someone guessed after Alex pretended to be a pigeon, cooing.

After that they played Cinda’s game, which wasn’t really a game. Helen knew it from cultural training sessions, where it was called “values clarification.” If you were a color, what color would you be? The group was mostly shades of green, and Aurora was purple. If you were a bird, what bird would you be? Arctic tern, chickadee, harlequin duck, sandhill crane, peregrine falcon. Helen said she’d be the blue of glacier ice and a golden plover. She was glad she wasn’t a psychologist, because even to a non-psychologist the immediate and rather flippant associations the group tossed out seemed to tell more about each of them than they knew. Including herself—was she really like ice? Ray, of course, had to be especially flippant. If he was a bird, he’d be an Eskimo curlew because, “then the Eskimo curlew wouldn’t be extinct, which it seems to be, or else, I guess, I’d be extinct.”

Ray offered up the next category: “If you were a pteropod, which would you be, Limacina or Clione, shelled or naked?” Most of them wanted to identify with Limacina, the “sea butterfly,” because the shell was so jewel-like, as well as protective, and to “fly” through the sea with its winged foot was pretty cool. Only Ray and Colin chose the carnivorous Clione—for its own exotic beauty, they said.

“It eats the other ones,” Aurora complained.

“We all have to eat,” Marybeth said.

“Circle of life,” Tina intoned. “Circle of life.”

When everyone had gone off to prepare for the night shift or to watch a movie or sleep, Helen settled into a corner of the galley with licorice from the candy drawer and began reading her advanced organic chemistry text, the section on aliphatic nucleophilic substitution. She was still on the first page when Annabel returned—wrapped now in a pink woven shawl pinned at her chest with a green papier-mâché brooch the size of a fist. “I don’t want to bother you,” she said. “I can see you’re studying. But I’m told you’re the one I should talk to about ocean acidification. I need to understand the chemistry. Can we talk sometime?”

Helen closed her book on a scrap of napkin. “We could do it right now if you want.” She’d heard this at a conference: never pass up an opportunity to educate.

Annabel nodded vigorously, hair beads jangling. “Formidable!” she shouted in a French accent. “Tout de suite I’ll be back.”

And she was, as though she had flown to her cabin. She thumped onto the bench across from Helen and opened her drawing pad to a clean sheet. “Pretend I’m a third-grader,” she said. “I’m that stupid.”

“I doubt you’re stupid,” Helen had to say. “But stop me if I start getting too detailed for your purposes. The basic chemistry isn’t too complicated. And, by the way, you’ll be hearing us shorthand ‘ocean acidification’; we call it OA.”

She talked, and Annabel, several rings sparkling on each hand, made chicken-scratch notes in green ink.

She wanted to make sure Annabel understood that the ocean wasn’t turning to acid, only becoming more acidic, while still being on the alkaline side of the pH scale. “Sea life evolved in a very stable pH situation. We’re asking creatures to live in a different environment now, very suddenly. This is the hard part—we don’t know exactly how individual species will respond—are responding. We know that corals are having a very hard time. And you heard Ray talking about pteropods, the marine snails. They’re very vulnerable. Anything with a carbonate shell is affected.”

She drew a carbon dioxide molecule on Annabel’s paper, then a water molecule and one for carbonic acid. “This is the thing,” she said. “In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide stays carbon dioxide. The carbon and oxygen atoms stay bonded. In the ocean, CO₂ reacts with seawater. It forms carbonic acid, which releases these hydrogen ions and reduces the pH. The hydrogen ions combine with carbonate ions to form bicarbonates. Then there are fewer carbonate ions left to make calcium carbonate, the major building blocks needed by shell builders.”

Annabel was studying her crude drawing. Helen hesitated to get into the aragonite versus calcite distinction or to be specific about saturation horizons. She knew how easy it was to pile on too much, to let her passion for the subject overtake another person’s tolerance for it. Keep it simple, Jackson was always saying.

Annabel looked up. “So you could say that reduced carbonate ions lower the saturation state.”

Helen tried not to be surprised by the non-third-grade reference. “That’s exactly what we say. We say the water is undersaturated with aragonite, one of the main forms of calcium carbonate.”

Annabel said, “Ray showed me some pictures. His little animals have to work harder to form the calcium carbonate for their shells, and if it gets too bad, their shells actually start to dissolve.”

“That’s exactly right. In the Arctic we’re already seeing corrosive water.”

“We really are fucked.”

Colin, who’d been noisily poking through the candy drawer, came and stood by them while he unwrapped a Sugar Daddy. “Such language,” he said. He glanced at Annabel’s pad. “What kind of art do you do?”

Annabel extracted a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on. “Just about everything. Drawings, paintings, sculpture, collage, fiber, constructions of various kinds, some printmaking, installations. Sometimes it’s ephemeral. Usually there’s an element of healing.”

Colin did a funny thing with his eyebrows.

Helen said, “I imagine you have a particular project with us?”

“I brought materials,” Annabel said. “Colored pencils, paper, some clay, wire. I have to see what presents itself. I don’t impose anything. Very possibly there’ll be an element of light. I’ll leave you to your studies.” She started to get up. “Sugar Daddy!”

Colin jumped aside, as though in fear of having his candy ripped from his hands.

“I would love to have that wrapper. Just the paper.”

Colin peeled off the paper and handed it over. Then Annabel, in her movie-star glasses, was to and through the doorway, waving the candy wrapper in one hand, flapping her art pad with the other, and calling back to them, “Grazie, grazie, beautiful people!”

Colin turned to Helen. “Ephemeral art?”

Ephemeral art was the least of it. Helen wanted to know how a person who seemed to understand saturation horizons could also embrace woo-woo energy fields, and why that person would need to add Italian to her enthusiastic French. People thought she lived in two worlds.