Snowblind

Very easily they had become a ‘couple’, informally at first, just frequenting the same functions and monopolizing each other’s time. But Tony remembered the first event they’d attended as a unit—a summer tea hosted by the women’s alumni, and presented in Edwardian splendour on the shady lawn of the college. Anne was seductive in a simple cotton dress and he felt awkward and inelegant, like a lump of earth on a china plate. With wonder, he realized she actually meant it when she told him she was enjoying herself and his company.

From there, it seemed a natural progression to marriage, and he had assumed, in the patriarchal manner of his family, that Anne would sublimate her career to his own. She had, and without protest. But time and experience educated Tony in ways formal schooling could not, and now he couldn’t contemplate Anne’s salary-less, adjunct status without guilt overcoming him. As if he didn’t have enough of that to carry already.

Removing a fur-lined glove, Tony rubbed his eyes with a heavy hand. Where the hell was he? Why? The corer, as familiar as an old friend, felt strange in his hand when he bent to retrieve it. No site in the majestic terrain seemed worth sampling and no knowledge was worth wringing from the harsh landscape. He wasn’t the first to decide solitude was not good medicine for someone at war with himself.

With a supreme mental effort Tony hauled his thoughts from the abyss of despair and surveyed the vista before him. He needed a location with deep soil so he could obtain pollen buried in the peat as long as possible. Then he could accurately re-create the changes in the vegetation of the island over time. Last year’s data indicated that about seven thousand years into the past was as far as the pollen record went. It hinted that for the last one thousand years the climate had been colder and drier than it had been for the two thousand years previous to that. Tony realized his findings agreed with studies done on Axel Heiberg Island and Devon Island, but that didn’t really raise his self-esteem. Validating someone else’s data wasn’t the activity of an innovative scientist.

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