Once I joined him on that ship for the Antarctic, there was no turning back.
“Wind twenty knots,” he wrote. “Thinking of you.”
“Sent via High Seas satellite phone,” read the email footer. “Please keep replies short.”
He was somewhere off Antarctica, a place he had been dozens of times, aboard a no-frills tourist ship where he was the expedition leader. There was a separate captain and crew, but he directed the itinerary, oversaw the staff and guides, and was responsible for 50 well-heeled passengers who had shelled out five figures to chug across 2,000 nautical miles of hostile Southern Ocean to a distant land of ice and snow.
“Thinking aloud,” he wrote in January, “I have no idea what your diary looks like for April, but I could come to California for a couple weeks. I would be interested in some hiking in national parks.”
I agreed, but soon he wrote with a new proposition: He would buy me a plane ticket to the Solomon Islands, and we would sail around in a 20-foot open boat, exploring atolls and bays and camping on the beach.
“Maggie,” he wrote, “I know this is a big ask for a first date. I nervously await your reply. Have I pushed the boat out too far?”
He asked if I had any concerns, and I did. They included (but were not limited to) sunburn, saltwater crocodiles, unexploded ordnance from World War II, and the simple but daunting possibility that, once alone on a small boat, he and I might discover we didn’t actually like each other. We’d never even kissed. We were basically strangers, and he was 30 years older than I was. I was 32.
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One of my friends called him Old Salt; another, the Ancient Mariner. His life was so adventurous that, in my mind, the concept of age didn’t really apply. He lived mostly on ships and spent his free time snowmobiling across Siberia.
I had met him on a trip he’d led to the remote subantarctic islands scattered south of New Zealand. Though scoured by wind, the islands are relatively temperate and abound with life: giant prehistoric-looking flowers, thousands of king penguins, blindingly white southern royal albatrosses with nearly 12-foot wingspans.
I felt full of life there, too, invigorated by the wildness. Seemingly immune to the seasickness that felled many passengers, I spent hours in the bridge watching the bow crash over the swells.
Midway through the two-week trip, I began to wonder if he had a crush on me. No, I must be imagining things. And even if I wasn’t, could I seriously consider someone so much older, so salty? But my infatuation with the subantarctic had cracked me open, and he was very much of these islands. On one, he had rediscovered a species of bird previously thought extinct. On another, he had acquired a scar on his knee from a sea lion bite. Sometimes when he talked about subantarctic wildlife, he teared up.
As I sat in the ship’s bar with some Irish filmmakers — the only other passengers well under retirement age — he brought me small gifts, as courting penguins will offer pebbles to potential mates: extra bowls of potato chips, a book he had co-written.
The filmmakers smirked at me.
“Is it crazy that I think I’m interested?” I asked them.
On our last night, I sought him out, curious if he would make a move. Our conversation was awkward at best, but in the course of it he told me about arriving by night at an encampment of Chukchi reindeer herders in Siberia. Above a vast herd of thousands of animals and the thin frozen cloud of their breath, twisting sheets of green aurora had filled the sky.
Never before had I so envied another person’s memory. My internal compass swung toward him and stuck.
When I left the ship, I decided that if I was still thinking about him in a week, I would take action. On day eight, I sent an email casually inquiring about coming along on one of his Siberian trips to write about it. The logistics didn’t work, but soon we were trying to figure out where and when we could meet instead.
I said yes to the Solomon Islands, but the plan was derailed by a scheduling conflict. He wrote back the next day. He would return from Antarctica in two weeks, restock and refuel, pick up new passengers and depart again. Did I want to come along?
“You won’t like his body,” my mother said when I told her I was going on a five-week-long first date to an ice-covered continent with someone nearly her age. “It won’t be what you’re used to.” Ominously, she added, “You won’t like his toenails.”
When I left, it was winter in Los Angeles, and when I arrived, it was summer in Invercargill, a port city at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island. He was in the tiny terminal, looking nervous, wearing a polo shirt with his company’s logo embroidered on the breast and clutching three red roses in cellophane.
As he kissed me briefly on the mouth, I wondered if we would have sex that night. I couldn’t fathom it. He seemed utterly unknown. The reality hit me that, once the ship sailed, I would have no way of turning back.
As we drove to the docks, he held my hand and explained that he’d put me in a passenger cabin with a nice Kiwi lady, and, also, he’d decided it would be best if I functioned as a staff member. That way, he wouldn’t seem to be involved with a passenger, and I could eat with the staff and generally have a more interesting time.
I was presented with an embroidered polo shirt of my own. We agreed I would tend bar, herd people along on the hikes, and do whatever else my modest skill set would allow.
This seemed like a great idea, as I had no interest in being a freeloader or concubine, and I craved the legitimacy of being part of the team. But when I boarded, awkwardness overwhelmed me. While the other staff members were kind, I could see the truth in how they looked at me: I was the girlfriend. I tucked the roses into my bag.
I can’t tell the whole story of a first date that could have been a disaster but instead turned out to be the risk that has inspired my subsequent risks, a leap into something wildly uncertain, something that didn’t last but expanded my world in ways beyond latitude. I came to covet his competence and intrepidness, and I realized my task was not to glom onto him but to foster those qualities in myself, to go out into the world in pursuit of what moves me.
I can’t tell the whole story because it’s too long. But if I could, I would tell you how he took me into a forest of gnarled ironwood trees, where red flowers fallen from their branches carpeted the ground and penguins and sea lions peeked from behind moss-covered logs. I would tell you about ice-covered seas and penguins porpoising out of black water. I would tell you about the love notes he left on my pillow. I would assure you that, actually, he hadn’t been sure we would sleep together on the trip at all, but I would admit too that in the first week, my skittishness had alchemized into powerful desire.
On the surface, we struggled to connect, but something buried and wordless pulled us together. To explain it would have been as impossible as explaining why we both loved the sea, the wild animals, the raw landscapes. After each day’s work was done, as we sailed ever farther from my known world, I would go to his cabin and climb into his bunk while 20-foot swells rolled the ship and the perpetual twilight of the Antarctic summer lingered over the sea.
Since I can’t tell you about all that, I don’t have to explain how things fell apart, either. I don’t have to get into how antsy he was in the domesticated, urban spaces where I spend most of my life, or how he had trouble incorporating me into his world, too. I won’t tell you that the last night we spent together was in an RV in Alaska, parked beside the dog yard of a man who would later win the Iditarod, or that I woke in the night to a hundred sled dogs howling together, an unearthly, inscrutable vortex of sound.
As he slept on beside me, undisturbed, I thought of how this memory would be only mine: the lavender night, the sleeping man, the sky swirling with dog music.
Maggie Shipstead lives in Los Angeles. Her third novel, “Great Circle,” will be published by Knopf in May.
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Modern Love: My Five-Week-Long First Date - The New York Times
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