Because of the heavy chop that day, there is no time for a tour.
“You shouldn’t have a problem finding things,” the captain tells me. She’s wearing a neon orange vest over her life jacket and a neon orange beanie crushed atop her head, and the overall effect makes her look like a traffic cone. “You’ve looked at the schematics, right? Well, there’s a manual in there, and it’s not like you’ll get lost.”
She glances meaningfully at the structure looming into sight. From far off it looked like a spindle in a strange spindle-forest, but in the past forty-five minutes it’s grown from spindle to behemoth. I spent those forty-five minutes and the three hours before them above-deck, my ass getting progressively sorer as the boat knuckled through the chop. But it was better than being below, where the captain’s warnings about nausea had proven correct almost immediately.
“We can’t dock today, so we’ll bring her around for you to step to the platform. Got your bag?”
I sling my duffle over my shoulder. “Yep.”
A metallic buzzing fills the air as we approach. The turbine’s three massive blades, each the height of a five-story building, are spinning quickly today. The sky is cloudless and bright, but it doesn’t do much to change the air of desolation about the place. Even at the start of August, the Labrador Sea is cold and mean, subject to violent squalls that blow down from what’s left of the Arctic. Without the sea ice that used to lock up the water, it’s the perfect place for companies like ZephyrCorp to build their mammoth offshore wind farms. The outfit here contains some three thousand turbines that power most of Nunavut and Newfoundland. Some people might say that’s a decent exchange for the sea ice, but I think that’s bullshit.
“There’s a satellite phone if you need to get in touch. Rations should all be provided for, and it’s got a state-of-the-art system for purifying water. Even allows for showers once a day. You remember the safety briefing?”
“Bad weather, stay inside.”
“And the ladder. Always rig in on the ladder. We had a guy fall once, broke both arms and both legs.”
A series of platforms ring the base of the turbine, and as the ocean rises and falls away I can see mussels and rockweed clinging to the lower ones. Long ribbons of kelp swirl like a head of dark hair. The captain brings the boat around to where a metal ladder extends, platform-to-platform, until it reaches a final landing far above (I think) where the sea can reach. A hatch is built into the side of the tower.
“Ready?” the captain asks.
You’ve got to be kidding me, I think, realizing that she means for me to attach my ZephyrCorp-issued harness to the rig on the ladder and hop over. Well, at least if I fall into the ocean it’s not as cold as it used to be.
“We’ll be back in three weeks!” she shouts once I’ve made it. I can hardly hear her over the wind and the hum of the turbine and the spray of the sea.
And then the boat is peeling away back into the drift and I am utterly alone.
All the rooms in my new home are stacked one on top of the other, with a ladder running through the center all the way to the very top. Thankfully there’s an elevator too, since I’ll be climbing the five-hundred-or-so feet to the gearbox and generator every day to take readings. I’m here on a repair job, but the repair is already finished, so really all I’ve got to do is monitor the new part and make adjustments if necessary. Easy money.
The first landing is a storeroom with shelves of freeze-dried meals and canned food, an emergency life raft, and water tanks that get re-supplied daily by advanced seawater filtration. On top of that is a small kitchen: electric stove, pump sink, cabinets stuffed with an assortment of bowls and mugs, electric kettle sitting by a basket of various teas and coffees. Above, a small shower and toilet, and then the bedroom, with a single bunk covered in lumpy quilts. The turbine is self-powered, which even I have to admit is kind of cool. The walls are studded with soft halogen lights. The hum is dampened, but still omnipresent.
A modern lighthouse, I think, and for the next three weeks I’m the lighthouse-keeper.
I toss my duffle on the bunk. Three weeks: far shorter than my usual gigs, and the pay is better too. Before this it was a two month forest-tech job in central Oregon running controlled burns, and before that a season fruit-picking in the shrinking Salinas Valley. It’s a patchy way to make a living, but I’ve never really been a career person. I don’t see the point in spending years locked into one thing, building some useless piece of technology or studying a subject so niche it’s irrelevant. Most of that industry will probably dry up anyway. It’s hard enough just affording food these days.
Across from the bunk is a locker (A locker? Seriously? Who’s going to steal my stuff, the fish?) and a sort of lab-space with a bench and set of metal cabinets. Laminated diagrams are pinned to the walls, many of them depicting safety directives in language-less icons of various accidents, overlaid with red xs and sad-faces. There’s a screen and keyboard, no doubt powered by the turbine too. I press a key and the screen winks to life.
ZephyrCorp SeeWind PL-X, Model D-495, “Selene”
So the turbine has a name. Before I can stop myself, I think, Darcy would love that.
I have told myself I wouldn’t think about Darcy. I left my phone on the mainland, so that even if there was a lick of service out here I wouldn’t be tempted to call. In fact, I thought the job would be a good thing, would force a clean break. There is nothing more to say in that relationship. Nothing more to be done. As my mother used to say, sometimes love is not enough.
I’m living in a turbine named Selene, in the middle of the Labrador Sea, Darce, I think anyway. How’s that for giving up?
For my first sojourn to the top of Selene, I decide to try the ladder. Five hundred feet, it turns out, is a very long way to climb, and knowing the harness will catch me should I fall isn’t enough to stop my stomach somersaulting every time I make the mistake of glancing down. I think of the guy who broke both arms and both legs and triple-check the rigging with a shaking hand.
By the time I reach the nacelle I’m soaked with sweat. The humming up here is more of a dull roar, and I can hear whooshing outside from the turbine’s enormous blades. The nacelle houses the gearbox, generator, and drivetrain, everything that actually converts each turn of the rotor into power. After a quick check on one of the switchboards—yep, everything in order—my work for the day is done.
It’s going to be a long three weeks.
There’s a small viewing platform on top of the nacelle, so I rig myself back into the ladder and climb the remaining fifteen feet or so. I push open the hatch and the wind nearly tears my hat off. The sheer, dizzying height—endless ocean spreading out in all directions, rows of turbines, the long wrinkle of each wave, one after another, like striped wallpaper—is not what makes my breath catch.
The platform is almost entirely covered in nesting birds.
They seem to be some kind of gull, smaller than an ordinary seagull and pure white, with beady black eyes and a dot of red on the tips of their beaks. Their nests are made of driftwood and kelp, held together with bits of down, and most have two or three chicks inside. Over the roar of the generator and the great whooshing of the blades, the air is filled with warbles and screeches.
“What are you guys doing here?” I mutter, mostly to myself. A few of them regard me suspiciously, but quickly decide I pose no threat and turn back to their hatchlings. The chicks can’t be more than a few weeks old, fuzzy balls of speckled down. I watch them with some consternation.
Wind power is supposed to be a climate solution, but people forget about all the climate disruption caused just by installing these mammoth farms. Noise pollution during construction messes with marine mammals’ echolocation and the migratory paths of birds. Drilling into the seabed dislodges huge clouds of sediment, effectively light-starving whole ecosystems that can take years to recover.
And two turns of a turbine blade can power a family’s house for a whole day, I hear Darcy’s voice say.
What if I’m supposed to clear out these nests, huh, Darce? I think back. What if ZephyrCorp makes me dump them all into the sea?
On my ride back to the base, I think briefly about using the sat phone to call the mainland. Back in my room, I switch on the screen and open Selene’s digital manual. I scroll through Gearbox, Generator, Tower Segments A through D, until I find Upper Platform. I scan the various components, and read, to my immense surprise,
platform decks are built to mimic the contours of sea ice and coastal beaches, to provide nesting habitat for sea birds
I flip through the design spec. The platform is made of a kind of neo-plastic, ridged like a piece of paper that’s been crumpled and then flattened again. The birds can stay; in fact, they’re expected. I should feel relieved, and some part of me does, but—seriously? How is a giant, humming wind turbine a good place for a nest?
I spot something I hadn’t noticed before in one of the cabinets. It’s a book, titled A Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Arctic, and next to it, a small journal. They must have been left by the last technician. I pull out the book. A page has been dog-eared, and it opens to a picture that matches the birds on the platform.
Ivory Gull (critically endangered). A scavenger species of gull that is typically found among ice floes in the High Arctic. During breeding season, the ivory gull will congregate in breeding colonies around Greenland and Nunavut Province, building nests on sea cliffs or directly on the sea ice, one of the only known species to do so.
So that explains why the gulls are nesting here, instead of on the sea ice they expected to find. They aren’t here because they want to be; they’re here because they have nowhere else to go. A familiar, gray feeling settles into my chest as I think about the little gulls and their fluffy chicks.
I put the bird book back and pull out the journal. It’s full of observations, sporadic and in a variety of hands, dating back almost a year. Some detail whale sightings, or white sharks who now range this far north, but the most recent entries are all about the gulls: their nest-building and egg-laying, the trading of incubation responsibilities by the parents, the eventual hatching of the chicks.
I close the journal, the gray feeling spreading like a storm front moving in. A cheery catalog of observations doesn’t override the reality: the turbine platform is a refugee camp, the birds displaced, and their real habitat now a thing of the past.
I grew up in a suburb north of Boston, with a rocky beach only a few minutes walk from our house. The water was always frigid, even in the summer, but I used to walk that beach in all seasons combing for whatever the ocean delivered and often accompanied by at least one family member.
My father’s parents came here from Lebanon, fleeing their own sort of crisis, and my parents settled down just a few houses over from them. In fact, most of my extended family could be found within a one-mile radius of that bit of coast, and most family gatherings ended at the beach for a walk or the distribution of dessert or to stargaze. At the time, the world was hurtling towards climate disaster, but my family kept their heads down, certain it would never affect us. “Going green” was a matter of opinion, like personal style, and never mind the things I learned in school or that my friends’ parents worried about.
But eventually the sea turned against us, creeping higher year by year, and when there were storms, the flooding got so bad that the first floor of our house became permanently moldy and water-damaged. Eventually my parents had enough and moved us to a “temporary” apartment fifty miles inland while they “figured out renovations.” It was the beginning of the end for their marriage, but I didn’t know that.
Back then, I thought we were going to get our shit together and fix things, that we’d put the world right and my family would move back to our house by the sea. I was an activist, was even thinking about going into policy myself. I voted green, went to all the marches, called my senators, but still, still by the time anything changed, it was too late.
“We are getting our shit together,” Darcy told me when I voiced this. “Look at that new solar-powered housing complex upstate! Or the bill that just passed for the electric bus system!”
At that point we’d been dating almost a year, but I still hadn’t taken her to meet my family. I told her it was because I didn’t visit often, which was true, but really it was that her rainbow-dyed hair and propensity for physical touch (she described herself as “a hugger”) would be as jarring to my parents as their dour TV dinners would be to her. I didn’t want to think of what would happen if the conversation turned to politics.
And even to me, her optimism rang hollow. Sure, now we were changing, now that everything was fucked. The damage was done. The planet was never going to go back to how it was, how it should have been. My parents finalized their divorce, and my childhood home fell into ruin, becoming more a part of the coast I used to walk with each passing year.
I never visited that beach again.
Just as I promised myself I wouldn’t think of Darcy, I promise I won’t worry about the gulls. But somehow I find myself visiting them every day when I make my trip to the nacelle (now by elevator) to take readings.
I start recording observations in the old technician’s journal. Just for completeness of the record, I tell myself. And if I spend long hours up there, it’s only because watching the adults flying is something to do. They dive and soar with impressive agility through the high winds, which are always blowing in the kind of rip-roar you’d expect for, well, a wind farm, and I soon stop worrying about the turbine blades chewing them up.
The chicks, for their part, are growing fast. Every day they seem a bit bigger, a bit louder, more ready to explore the world beyond their driftwood-and-kelp nests. They beat their little wings in rebellion and scream at their parents for food. Their feathers are coming in with a bit of gray speckling, and I read in A Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Arctic that they won’t be pure white until they reach maturity.
One parent always stays in the nest while the other goes off hunting, and one day I get curious and go out to watch them in action from the base platforms. The sea is in full force, but so are the gulls, diving into the waves and coming back with crustaceans or small fish in their beaks.
The longer I watch, the more I notice that the base platforms have been designed precisely for this habitat: they extend further than they need and spiral around the turbine to create pockets like coves. Somewhere beneath them must be a structure that roots the thick, leathery arms of kelp. This artificial reef attracts schools of small fish, and sometimes something larger that causes them to roil and leap out of the water. It’s . . . not what I expected to find surrounding such an industrial structure.
I remind myself not to be fooled. It’s just a toy model of the ecosystem that would have been here with the sea ice. Where are the seals, the sea leopards, the killer whales?
As if on cue, a jet of water trumpets into the air and I nearly fall over in shock. Jesus Christ, it’s a whale, not thirty yards away. A lone humpback, gliding through the water as if turning on an invisible wheel, its knobbed back transitioning to a flat flap of tail in one smooth motion. I turn instinctively to say something snarky—are we finally getting our “guaranteed sighting” from that whale-watching cruise you dumped all that money on, Darce?—before remembering that I’m alone.
I run back inside Selene and take the lift to the upper platform, where I watch the humpback’s steady progress through the turbines and then the empty sea long after it’s out of sight. Around midnight the sun dips below the horizon. The gulls are bedding down with their mates; the air is filled with cooing. Hundreds of turbines spin noiselessly in the twilight.
Are there people in any of them? Is someone else looking out, not knowing that I’m looking back? The thought makes me strangely sad.
I’ve never minded being alone, so why do I ache with loneliness?
I wake suddenly to a sound like a freight train.
There’s a moment where I wonder if I’m dreaming, and then it comes again, engulfing the circular room with a roar that makes the walls tremble. It’s a wave. Outside, there are waves high enough to crash over my quarters, forty feet above where they were this morning. Terror overtakes me. The sea is coming for me again.
I force myself to breathe, and I recall distantly that the forecast had mentioned a storm. Selene was made to withstand even a Category 5 hurricane. Whatever is happening outside, it can’t touch me here.
I reluctantly slip out of bed and check the weather data. The winds are blowing at sixty miles an hour, with gusts up to ninety. The gulls, I think, a cold fist of dread closing over my heart. They’re going to be blown right off the turbine, nests, chicks, and all. Before I can register what I’m doing, I’m pulling on my boots and running for the elevator.
Going up feels like being inside a cargo jet taking off. There’s a low-pitched moaning that must be the wind, and a higher note, like an overtone, that gets louder as I ascend. The walls vibrate, my very bones vibrate, as if I’m inside a bell as it’s ringing. The safety briefing flashes across my mind momentarily—bad weather, stay inside—but all I can think of are the gulls. Maybe I can save some of them, move their nests into the nacelle just for the night, just until the winds die down . . . .
I stumble out of the elevator. The floor is rocking; the entire turbine is swaying. Nausea rises in me. I race up the remaining fifteen feet of ladder to the upper deck. I can still save some of them. It’s all I’m thinking. I reach for the hatch, and that’s when I discover I’m not rigged in, oh fuck I’m not rigged in, and I’m falling, falling into empty space . . . .
Slam.
My body hits something solid. The landing. Through the grate I can see the tower spiraling into darkness. By some miracle I missed the edge. I lie there, dazed, tasting blood in my mouth.
How could I be so stupid? To forget my harness? To even think to go out there? The gulls are probably long dead. They were never going to make it. Never. My mind fills with horrible images: their flimsy white bodies hurtling through the storm like flotsam, my family’s old house splintering in the waves, my last fight with Darcy before we separated.
“Can’t you just entertain the idea?”
“There’s nothing to entertain, Darce. We’d never be able to afford it, not even if I took a salary job and you went back to that shitty tech company.”
“Maybe not that house exactly, but other places like it are starting to go on the market, and the idea is that it’s a collective, you’re not just paying for a house, but you’re paying into the whole system, the clean energy grid and the farm and—”
“And there’s a million other people who want to live in a place like that, so it’s going to go to the highest bidder. Obviously.”
“Jesus, I knew you were going to be like this. I knew the first thing you’d do was shoot it down, like you always do—”
“Don’t make me the bad guy just for being realistic.”
“You’re not being realistic, you’re being pessimistic.”
“Right, I forgot I was speaking to the only resident of Darcy’s Dreamland.”
“You’re the one who lives in a dreamland. You’re so convinced that the world is a horrible place, that it doesn’t matter what anyone says or does—you’re just going to find what you expect to find! Well I want more than that!”
I lie splayed on my back, aching, and I’m aware of tears dripping down my face.
“Darcy’s Dreamland” is what I used to teasingly call her side of our debates, back when we used to go for hours, her the optimist and me the pessimist, and then we both saw it as a point of pride that we could be so different, like it made our relationship stronger. Until it became the very thing we resented about each other. Or perhaps I made it so, because she was right: I couldn’t let go of my cynicism, and it would poison everything she wanted for us.
A wave of grief washes over me. I think of the gulls, of my family’s home, the beach, once loved then hated. How do I justify it, Darce? How do I believe in it like you do, a future, a home, a child?
Selene sways and sways, feeding off the storm, embracing its power, and somewhere far off, the homes of Nunavut are flaring with light.
Somehow, I manage to drag myself back down to my bunk, where I fall into a fitful sleep. I don’t know how long I’m out for; it feels like days. When I finally wake, cocooned in blankets, the roar of the waves is gone.
My entire body aches. I pull off my shirt and twist to find mottled purple bruising extending down my back. Probably further, but I don’t really want to look. It hurts to inhale, making me suspect I’ve cracked a few ribs. At least I can still walk. Lucky I didn’t break both arms and both legs, or worse, everything else.
I limp down to the kitchen and brew a strong pot of coffee, putting off as long as I can the journey back up to the gearbox. I don’t want to see the empty platform, streaks of guano and scatterings of driftwood all that remains of the nests. But after eating and washing up and re-organizing the stores and entertaining myself with a crossword puzzle, I’ve run out of excuses not to do my job.
I don’t care, I tell myself, as I punch in the upper level on the lift. I always knew it was going to happen. And if I was smarter, I wouldn’t have gotten attached.
But when I lift my head through the hatch, I’m as shocked as I was the first time.
The gulls are still there. Their nests look a little worse for wear, sure, and some birds have feathers sticking up oddly, but they’re all still there. Without missing a beat, the adults are back to their foraging, delivering new bits of refuse for nest repair. And the chicks—if they can even be called chicks anymore—are spreading their speckled wings and levitating a few feet in the air, where they wobble like tiny kites. The polar sun is fierce in the cloudless sky.
I read once that if you look hard enough, you can always find a reason to hope. But I think the truth is closer to Darcy’s appraisal: you can always find a reason not to, and those reasons often feel more convincing. Hope isn’t found, it’s created. And sometimes, the reasons follow.
The fledglings lift higher and higher on the updrafts. The parents are watching; some launch themselves off the platform and begin circling above. They’re demonstrating, I realize. And then the first brave chick takes the leap of faith, following the adults off the platform and into open air. My heart lurches, but it’s got wings, hasn’t it? The others take the cue, and suddenly they’re all careening into the sky.
All across the horizon, small white specks are streaming from the tops of the other turbines like magnolia blossoms scattering in the wind. There must be thousands. The entire wind farm is a vast nesting colony.
Against all odds, the gulls have found their niche in this new world.
