The Quickening: Creation and Community At The Ends of The Earth is the true story of a woman who postpones having her first child to go to Antarctica instead and see for herself whether climate change and the sea ice it is melting mean she should not.
It is the best book I have read in many years.
Elizabeth Rush and her husband Felipe are contemplating having a child when Rush gets invited to join a research expedition to Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier. Thwaites has been called the “Doomsday Glacier” because “In terms of the fate of our coastal communities, this particular glacier is the biggest wild card, the largest known unknown. Will Miami even exist in one hundred years? Thwaites will decide.”
Rush, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an assistant professor at Brown University, weighs the pros and cons of the trip. If she goes, she’ll join a crew of 57 oceanographers, physicists, ecologists, and geologists on the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, a research vessel as long as a football field, for a two-month foray into an icy world so difficult to reach that she’s told it’s easier to send help to the space station than to get help at Thwaites. Having a baby will have to wait, as the trip’s medical requirements forbid pregnant women from participating, and anyway, “no one wants to have morning sickness and throw up on a glacier.”
A climate activist, she also grapples with the carbon footprint the trip itself will leave. She estimates that her round-trip flight to Punta Arenas, Chile, the point of departure, will pump 5.3 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, ultimately resulting in the loss of sixteen square meters of sea ice. The approximately 355,000 gallons of diesel the Palmer will burn getting to Thwaites and back will melt almost eleven square kilometers of the ice they are studying.
Nevertheless, she decides to go and “observe what no one else ever has, to gain insight into the physical processes that are causing the widest glacier in the world to lose six times as much ice annually as it did three decades ago.”
“Before attempting to bring a human into the world,” she concludes she will “travel to its farthest corner, where survival is not easy, to bear witness to the impact our species is having on the only continent with no indigenous inhabitants.”
“I do not know what the expedition will do to my desire to have a child, nor do I know what this desire will do to the ice, or to the story I will write about my experience,” she worries. “I might see a glacier calve, I might return and make of my body a home for another. It is disorienting to simultaneously hold these two possibilities aloft in my mind—one grounded in disintegration, the other in creation.”
Preparing for the trip, Rush learns that “The Southern Ocean is so cold that you will start to stiffen and freeze after five minutes if you go overboard and are not properly protected.”
Trying to figure out what to take for a rugged two months at sea, she finds the advice she gets from men useless, while the women urge her to “pack twice as many tampons as you think you’ll need,” counsel she appreciates when her period goes wild and she bleeds for ten days, using up more than half her tampon supply. She realizes that, though the expedition is often referred to as a “cruise,” this will be no Princess adventure, no hot toddies or luxurious bed linens awaiting her when she comes off the ice. Instead, she’ll be sharing a room with one of the other 16 women aboard, sleeping in bunk beds, and definitely not drinking hot rum, as no alcohol is allowed.
Though Rush joins the group as a writer, she decides early on to participate in the research as much as she can and that the group’s scientists –busy tagging seals, sending submersibles below the ice to map the ocean floor, and taking muddy sediment samples – will allow.
They find thick bands of warm water working their way under the ice and eating away the ice shelf, the growing cracks on the surface implying that the shelf will break apart much more quickly than previously imagined. Rush realizes that, just in her not quite 40 years on earth, “climate change has gone from something that we thought would happen in the future, to something that is happening now, to something that is accelerating at such a surprising pace that it makes most of our attempts to reckon with it outdated before they even get underway.”
Even so, she concludes, “I want to have a child. I want family suppers… I want to bathe, both of us in the same warm water. Yes, that. And also something even more fundamental. I want to share this body my mother made for me… to care wholly for another, to receive the gift of giving away everything imaginable.”
The word “quickening” describes the moment in pregnancy when you can first feel the baby’s movements. Rush, finally pregnant, feels it almost a year to the day after leaving Thwaites. “It is startling in its suddenness,” she reports. “I hold my hand over the place where my child moves. This…reminds me of Antarctica, how things we once experienced as inert are springing into action: ice sheets are splintering, glaciers shrinking.” Declaring, “Having children can be an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it.”
It can also be an act of hope. “Celebrate the idea that to have a child means having faith that the world will change,” Rush urges. And more importantly, commit to “being a part of the change yourself.”
TELL PRESIDENT BIDEN & EPA: MOVE QUICKLY TO FINALIZE STRONG POLLUTION PROTECTIONS