I don’t really know

I’m not anti oil. I depend on it too much to be against it. Even when I was a twenty- something eco-dreamer and saboteur, out there trying to rescue the oceans’ bounty from massacre-sized nets and harpoons, I couldn’t really be against oil. How could I have? It took our good, oil-guzzling ship to ram into their bad, oil-guzzling ships. As unyielding and uninviting as it is up here in the Arctic Circle, however, I wonder if nature isn’t trying to tell us oil guys and non-oil guys alike something.

Just the other day, for example, a hunt party went horribly south when one of the hunters (from my home state of Washington) was mauled by a polar bear. It happened on land, not that water’s anything impeding on them, anyway. Polar bears are prodigious swimmers. Polar bears are brash. One circled our boat a few weeks back. Hauling him or herself onto our tug would have been easy work. Then what? I made sure all our hatches were closed, that’s what.

We’re anchored now somewhere on the shallow Arctic Ocean. The vast expanse of Alaskan tundra to our south, an ice pack to the north closing in like a heavy, creaking door. Winds are forecasted up to 60 knots. It’s not the first time this summer we’ve had to hunker down behind any kind of break-water we could find. A jetty. A spit. A man-made island compliments of Big Oil.

These islands:

I never did watch the show about the Arctic ice-road guys who carve out holes in the ice in the winter, then fill them with dirt. The ice retreats sometime in mid to late summer up here, opening a very small window of opportunity for tugs and their barges to get as much exploratory equipment and lodging containers and food and other associated supplies as they can out to these dirt piles slash mini-islands. All with the stated, singular purpose of hitting another jackpot. The ones who have already? Those have oil rigs on them, Olympics-style torches burning 24-7. Drill, baby, drill.

It’s my last dance that I began two years ago. Today. Two years ago today I was thrust forcibly into a spiritual and material repurposing, a reinvention, which this so-called last dance is a part. Other parts include such things as depression, demotion, professional growth, stress, weight loss, gain, getting closer than I ever have before to my Maker, discovering who and what really matters–all the cliches.

There’s worse places in the world to do it. My reinvention could have taken me inside other, less scenic bowels, and with a bunch of arseholes too. But I like and trust this captain. I cannot say that about many I’ve worked for in the past. This one’s calm. He gets out and he does it. He teaches me stuff. There’s a ton to learn, no pun intended. The nuances of tugboats are many. Not like anything I was doing before this. Before this, well, it was junior varsity. Tugboats? Varsity.

Here, too, at least I run the chance of seeing a polar bear in its natural environment, again. I saw them a lot years ago when I was in the Coast Guard. “Prodigious” and “brash” are understating it. I was married then, childless. Today, young blood is in college. Pardon my otherwise cuss-free rambling to this point, but where in the fuck did all that time go?

Throughout most of this, I was pretty sure that my last dance had to culminate in some kind of violent report. What that looks like in my line of work is gruesome, a polar bear mauling notwithstanding. A line (or rope for you less nautically inclined) coming under so much pressure pulls and pulls, creaks and creaks, until it just can’t anymore. It will part. And anyone in its path gets cut clean in half.

Or a shipmate I sail with who got pinched between a front loader and a container. An inch or two more in reverse and he wouldn’t have merely passed out from getting the wind knocked out of him. He’d have been crushed to death.

Amid all of these potentialities are the polar bears and the seals and a captain and crew I’ve great respect for. I don’t get sea sick anymore, either–fuckin A!So maybe this last dance that I thought had to end with me losing a limb or life doesn’t have to be so . . . final. Maybe my last dance, then, can come to a boring end. With having all my digits and wits about me. With, say, my guys going up for seconds. Destroying any leftovers the following day, leaving those poor bastard cold cuts to sulk in the fridge and go bad. For as it turns out, I dance pretty all right in the kitchen. There’s a food truck for sale up here, too.

I don’t know. I just know that I mustn’t press my luck. Despite the fact I get to play the age card now, and I sure as hell have whenever possible, it doesn’t get me out of all of the hazardous evolutions. As low man on the totem pole, I have to. I don’t have a choice. Besides, what kind of last dance is it if I’m not dancing.

But yeah, I will get hurt out here. It’s not hyperbole. It’s cold. It’s slippery. It’s getting dark. And I’m –screw “old.” I’m . . . tentative.

I’m tentative when I didn’t used to be. And out here, tentative will land you in the cold, hypothermic drink real quick.

So I’ll soak the unexpected aurora whenever it appears. I came under its wispy spell just the other night. It shimmered and it glowed and it moved like a silk shirt in the wind. When it pulsed, I thought of the sky having a heart that beats.

The rest of the time, it was just dancing.

-tmc