Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

To the question of what our collective hopes are for the rest of this expedition, I’d say our answer is plain enough: we just want to get off the sand with what, after two years, we feel we’ve earned. We came here to do something very specific, and simple; something many have done before; and the fact that we still sit on an empty hold feels to us like the retraction of a promise, the very definition of unfairness. It’s a loaded deck, a cosmic rout of lousy timing. No one wants to be among the last ones on the sand, the suckers who stayed to turn out the lights.

“It’s a feeling,” Bushard has said, “I find impossible to describe.” He was sitting at a table in the galley, with his head in his hands.

Renaldo asked him: You mean that it’s happening, or that it’s happening to us ?

He closed his eyes. “I’m going to stop talking to everyone aboard this ship,” he said.

august 2

Tuva, over the course of this expedition, I have come to understand what it is like to spend your life waiting for a rig that was never going to show. Time passes, the ship never comes in; at a certain point the ruined narrative solidifies, the hidden smallness and stupidity of your ambition presents itself in toto, and there you are: a walking avatar of foreclosed possibility. It’s a dark understanding that one day is there like a weight on your neck. But nothing is written, and there’s room for surprise. Opportunity can hulk itself from the dunes at the very moment you least expect it.

And today: the call on-deck sounded; our engines cut. We lined the port rail. The sun hit my visor like the idea of a headache spreading itself across the sand. I saw nothing. I asked what the commotion was about. Renaldo pointed.

In the far distance, a black speck. Then the sound of an engine. And then it hove more fully into view: a new model shipper-tank, outfitted with heat-reflective panels, a fly-bridge, and a full hull set atop a sleek, continuous track that made our own treads look like sand-churning windmills. As it came closer, however, it became apparent that all wasn’t well: one of their stacks was shredded, there were char marks up and down the iron sheeting on her wide bow. Someone had painted over the name of their ship, and scrawled a dripping Homeward Bound just below. The crew stood on deck, facing us. As they passed less than a hundred yards of sand separated us and we formed a brief mirror-image, a silent communion that was broken only when they finally signaled for a conversation between captains, and Tonker retired to his cabin to initiate the transmission.

They were not Firsties, that much was plain. A smell of biological mustiness carried on the wind registered immediately. “They’re riding low,” Tom said. In fact, they were struggling to push through the sand. “You think?” Renaldo said back. Bushard tried to yell across to the other ship, but was met with silence. Their sun-suits were white, and reflected the afternoon light. They looked like ghosts, hovering at the rail. “Happy ghosts,” someone said.

We stayed at the port rail, unmoving, for half an hour. Our new friends did the same. There was talk of disembarking on the buggies, but one of the mates hushed that idea before it took hold. Finally, with a lurch, our engines fired to life. The wheel was turned, and we made a slow arcing seventy-degree shift to the west. The stern of our sister ship gradually moved out of sight, her tremendous bridge winking a final time as it passed behind a low ridge of dunes. Captain Tonker explained later: the Homeward Bound had found an entire pod of dirwhals, and was returning home with a full hold. There had been trouble with the Firsties, the ship was on her last legs, but they would make it off the sand.

He continued: and they have given us a parting gift—the coordinates for their proven but unsanctioned ground.

Tuva: this is a gesture rarely made between the captains of shipper-tanks. Our hope is restored. We’ve been instructed to spruce up the buggies and ready our equipment. Along with Bushard and Renaldo, I’ve pulled an eight-hour shift in the high-hoops. All told we’ll be hoisted two hundred feet off-deck. As the stand was erected and we were strapped in, someone made a joke about the view. “Repeat that, please?” Bushard said.

“He said you look like three flags hoping to surrender,” Tom said.

“Tell him where to stand so it catches him in the face,” Renaldo said, as the motorized winch clenched and drew us heavenward.

The view from the hoops was staggering. I could see the sloping vanishing point of the sand in all directions, as if someone had gently pressured the horizon into a rounded dome that didn’t so much meet the sky as push into it. The sound from engines below didn’t reach our ears; their churning presence was apparent only in the vibration carried on the stilts between our legs. Everywhere I turned, the granulated vista appeared both limitless and small. In my happiness to find myself where I was, I reached for my notes and accidentally dropped my binoculars. They fell to the deck like a shot-down plane.

“Good Lord,” Renaldo said. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

august 18

Sighted over the last two weeks: fourteen spent lance casings; two sliding holes in the sand, which were speckled and strewn with sun-hardened biological matter; one burned-out buggy that after brief inspection was determined to belong to the Firsties; three discarded sun-suits; various instruments used to measure deep-sand activity; and a collapsible reflective tent.

We are now treading in a straight line to the west, following the coordinates we’ve been given, and moving well away from what could be called even substandard hunting conditions. The sand sits atop a stratum of irregular rock formations, glacier-cut a millennium ago, which in segments have been exposed and balded by the wind, the presence of which is in itself a novelty, considering the overall stillness of the Gulf. Two days ago we woke to a silent engine and a sound like waves crashing on the hull only to be told we were in the middle of a windstorm; when it was over, and the engines were fired once more, the sand-drift had climbed to the portholes on the starboard side. The extra care we are taking with our navigation has made our progress feel incremental.

If not for the evidence so plain in front of us, we would surely be demoralized. But it seems that every time one of us is ready to admit that we perhaps have been led astray by some cruel practical joke played on one captain by another, a call comes in from the hoops or the buggies that points undeniably to the aftermath of a successful hunt as well as a confrontation between shipper-tanks. All crew on deck have been ordered to remain within spitting distance of a loaded bomb-lance at all times.

Bushard’s mood has soured dramatically since our encounter with Homeward Bound . This morning he asked me if he was alone in thinking that what we were doing was, perhaps when all was said and done, a bad idea. When I asked him what he meant, he said: the whole picture—the pursuit of finite resources, the Firsties, the families hoarding their wealth in the southern biospheres, the burning wheel of industry, our participation in it. I told him that as long as I could remember I’d been too busy regretting what hadn’t happened to think much about what might. From where I was standing, at least we were going somewhere . He looked at me as if I’d missed the point. I asked him: try again.

“Never mind,” he said, and walked away.

august 20

This morning, we sighted two desiccated and partially blown-open dirwhal carcasses. In their state of decomposition, we were unable to tell their genus. Everyone, as we’ve pushed farther on, has grown antsy, agitated. The sand is waffled with deep and veering tread-tracks. It’s increasingly clear that whatever went on here was less a deliberate lancing and more of an indiscriminate unleashing of explosives. We’ve been sent out in buggies for exploratory pronging, but none of those trips have turned anything to the surface.