Boat Ride

On the third day Sid took Wally out to the space force base. They drove to the port in the morning. There was some roadwork into the interior but a two-hundred mile drive wasn’t possible from Qaanaaq to the space base, not in the mechanical means Sid and Wally had nor by the infrastructure that wasn’t all quite there yet. But Wally knew the cryptids could.

There were boats to the space force base, it was about a hundred mile trip. Wally got visibly excited when he saw the boat, like a dog. He wasn’t sure how long he’d have to wait for the boat, there weren’t posted timetables. The space force contracted local boats, sometimes as few as one, that would sit there until enough people got on or the call came that it was time to go, and then it would be one of those times when there wasn’t a boat and you had to wait. Wally didn’t have to wait.

He felt silly about having been so upset about not getting to take a boat all the way there. He made small talk with Sid, who turned out had taken advantage of the space force base’s open-door policy several times. He enjoyed talking American baseball with the service members, even though they were all pretty much Dodgers fans.

Sid was born in Greenland to a mother born in Greenland and by a father born and raised in Brooklyn. His father came to Greenland to work at the local university, studying the weaponization of weather, having moved there for the newly-created position less than a year after his thesis, a technically complicated engineering thing Sid tried to explain as using dust storms to disable the internet. Wally wasn’t following, but he liked small talk. Sid’s dad died, falling through a hole in the street during some construction work he hadn’t paid attention to while walking one morning in the middle of summer. It wasn’t even dark.

That was how Sid and his mom ended up moving to Brooklyn, to live with his grandparents, her in-laws, when Sid was three or four. They helped her get into the borough college, then one of the good name schools in Manhattan, where she got an M.B.A. and ended up a bank vice president by the time Sid was a teenager. Sid was proud of his mom, but, New York wasn’t him. He dropped out of high school and ended up moving back to Nuuk.

-It’s hard to explain, Sid said in his thick Brooklyn accent. It’s an ugly city.

-And how’d you end up in Qaanaaq?

-My cousin had the station wagon, Sid explained.

Sid tried to understand what it was Wally did, but cryptozoology made less sense to him than whatever it was he thought his father was doing.

-You don’t hunt them? You don’t catch them? Do you get to dissect them?

-There’ve been a few specimens, Wally noted. No one ever considered the Bigfoot Henry a cryptid, even though obviously he wasn’t the only one. Mostly we observe, Wally said.

Sid looked out at the icebergs. Sure, that made sense. Everyone observes, mostly.

Wally wondered how long the boat trip would take. They watched the abandoned settlements. Two houses here, five houses there. Wally had heard there was a lot of talk about the Canadian lipstick company taking an interest in resettling one of these places for an Arctic resort, but looking at the sorry remnants, Wally didn’t see how it was possible. Sid explained that it was usually a two hour trip but that this boat operator could probably get the thing to the space force base in ninety minutes.

-Speed demon, Sid said, tapping his nose.

As to the boat, it wasn’t big. There was an indoor part that set seven, and a deck that was naturally closed to passengers when the boat hit sixty knots, or seventy with an ambitious boat operator. If the operator had a crew, sometimes one or two would stand out there, faces facing the wind. Speed demons.

It turned out the other three passengers were all on the boat to watch the rocket launch. The very first time the space force base opened up an area for viewing rocket launches, they had to commission half a dozen boats. Now few people even bothered looking up from a distance when the things trailed up into the sky like drunken worms.