The SS Crow Headed South

I beached ashore on a clinker-built wooden row-boat, blushing at the touch of the supporting hand of the young oarsman with the far-away eyes. The green cairn stood sentinel atop a rock outcrop jutting into the frigid gray sea, witness to the tendrils of sea-smoke drifting across the frigid Arctic Ocean like a spent ghost army returning from a long campaign. On the horizon, the weary spirit-soldiers amassed upward into bruised cloud; raining upwards.

The Cairn loomed larger than a house when I crested the frozen tundra; its foundation stones were each the size of a man, polished green marble unlike the foliated gray gneiss and schist along the shore. Was it built as a warning, a way-finder, or a burial site?

I did not know what it was, only that I had been brought to it by my heart.

Two polar bears weaved back and forth, a hundred yards away, their noses in the air, sensing and seeing prey. My spine chilled. They crouched low and advanced toward me, one going left, the other right. I checked the beach where the row-boat came ashore, but it was gone along with the handsome sailor. I was untested here and by these beasts, but I knew how to set an animal against itself.

The earth trembled. The bears pressed flat against the snow, and I blundered around on rocks looking for flat, firm ground. The sea drew back, exposing naked gray sand and rivulets of brine rolled pebbles down the slope. Birds flew into the sky, spooked by the earth’s movement and the sea’s response.

Driftwood sticks snapped where I stumbled, revealing the bleached radius and ulna of a severed human arm. The ground around the Cairn was littered with freeze-dried corpses, men and dogs thrown about like broken dolls. I picked up a green and red tin of Lucky Strike “Roll Cut” tobacco and spilled its desiccated contents on the earthly remains of Gustafsson’s fateful 1906 expedition to the North Pole.

I was in a place where even the white bears dare not tread.

The earth tremors stopped. Water must find its level and a single uniform wave pushed toward shore, miles wide and waist high. The risen ocean surged up the rocky shore, fanned out across snow and tundra, pooled around the bodies and objects strewn around, and wavelet lapped against the base of the Cairn

The Cairn thrummed a bass chord that resonated in my chest, then again, and again.

The green stones pulsed like a beating heart, and I understood—not what the Cairn was, but where it was and why it was.

The white bears rose from their hiding place and galloped away, kicking up ice.

Thunder boomed.

A huge white cloud surged over the mountains and thundered south as a wall of white fury, a thousand feet high a hundred miles wide. I stood frozen in fear as the wintry nebula of ice, snow and dense fog came directly at the Cairn. I was prepared to die.

This cloud came from the land of my ancestors, which I glimpsed reflected in the sky.

The land beyond.

A shadow inside the cloud grew larger and darker, became a shape, became curved and latticed, and an Arctic whaling ship burst out of the cloud, flew soundlessly through the air, crashing to land, throwing up rocks and sparks as the metal-clad bow and keel plowed past me and into the frigid ocean. Squat, square-rigged, black as soot, the seven starred name-board flashed by.

I knew this ship!

It was the SS Crow.

Braced against the Crow’s foremast, the blue man Tooke stared at me, his eyes sparkling blue, as mine do in winter.

Behind him, second from the right, brown-eyed Ada turned and looked at me. Brown-eyed as I am in summer.

Ada Kittiwake looked at me as a mother might look at her child.

The SS Crow disappeared into the dense fog that had formed above the placid Arctic sea, warmer today than when it left this world in 1906.

The SS Crow headed south.

I woke to the tug of the green stone pendant that lay in the hollow of my neck.

The same green stone as that of the Cairn.

It tugged again, it pulsed.

I grabbed at the pendant, at the smooth serpentine neck.

Father says it was made by an ancient hand, by the Dorset, before the Eskimo. Father says the Dorset had blond hair. Ada Kittiwake had brown hair.

The form so delicate, the green marble so hard; how had they made it? From whence had the green stone come to the Arctic? From whence came the polished green boulders of the Gateway Cairn?

I was found in the snow, the pendant was found on me. A foundling in the snow.

For a brief moment I wasn’t sure when, where, or who I was, but the dream did not fade. It rearranged itself into a single impossible fact.

Ada Kittiwake was my mother.

Ada Kittiwake died over one hundred and twenty years ago.

I opened my eyes. Blue, brown, who is to say?

Puffy white clouds drifted above the Manhattan rooftops, visible through the vaulted window of my bedroom overlooking 37th Street and Madison Avenue.

It was 7.28 am, Saturday, June 20th, 2026. High School Graduation was scheduled for 10.30 am in the Park.

I pulled the bed cover over my head, hoping to catch a loose thread of the dream, or the hand of the young oarsman with the far away eyes, but all I could see was the after-image of the sky out the window of my bedroom.

Graduation.

I offered a prayer for rain, snow, a deluge of frogs, but when I removed the cover from my face, the June sky was still blue, and the clouds were still puffy and white.

Blue sky meant the life I was supposed to want was wanting me: the final act in my High School drama, in a leading role that made my stomach churn. I was doomed like a lamb to the slaughter.

I swung my legs from the bed and rushed to my homework desk where I scribbled down the words: “Cairn, Ice Storm, the Crow.”

The Crow! A picture of the SS Crow was pinned to the cork-board above my homework desk.

“Halo Yuki, I make clean now?” said Wanda, the housekeeper, entering my bedroom without knocking. “Doctor say I must ironing your shirt before you go too”.

The alarm clock beeped. Seven-thirty on the dot. I scribbled down two more words before they got away: “Blue Man.”

“You not need alarm,” said Wanda thumping the button on top of the clock with a meaty finger. “Always I find you like this. Awake!”

It was true. I had the perfect High School attendance record. Little goody two shoes.

Wanda barged past me to make the bed, pausing when she felt the cold damp of my sweat on the rumpled sheet and pillow. She tutted loudly and shook her head.

The dream was going, gone into the ether, but the message it forced on me was hard as stone.

I sighed, buckling to the inevitability of the day. “Father is fussing, Wanda. I’ve already ironed the blouse and skirt.” I pointed at the sensible monochrome Ann Taylor outfit that was hanging from the hook on the wall beside the closet door.

Wanda evaluated me sternly.

“You not wear pretty clothes, make you beautiful? Summer, Yuki, and you show your legs and arms, so strong, so pretty.”

“Wanda, please! It’s graduation, not a beauty contest. Father says we need to set the tone.”

“I not know what you mean, but I do know that you only young the one time.” Wanda ran her hands down the sides of her ample waist and over her hips, territory that may once have curved.

Wanda was probably right, but we were past the point of no return, and I felt a great sense of loss, whether for a missed opportunity, the end of my uneventful school life, or the simple act of awakening from a dream, I wasn’t sure.

“You very good girl, Yuki,” said Wanda

It sounded like a rebuke. I went to the bathroom before Wanda had a chance to dish out well-meaning advice.

The practice of self-loathing was at the core of my daily ritual in front of the unsparing bathroom-mirror. My cheekbones were too high, my face too wide, my mouth too small, and how hated my mop-cut blond hair! I stared for the millionth time at the blond-haired Eskimo freak, and she stared back at me with those heavy-lidded eyes, brown in summer, blue ion winter. It wasn’t any one feature that I hated; it was the combination.

I often tried to imagine a biological mother and father that might account for the way I’d been assembled, but the picture never held. I had never known what I was—too many inheritances, none complete.

In the dream, there had been no confusion. I belonged to the North; Ada Kittiwake was my mother.

Ada Kittiwake disappeared one hundred and twenty years ago.

So, I was born one hundred and twenty years ago.

A founding.

Where was I found? In what state was I found? Was I frozen in ice? Was I passed from one century to the next by hand, borne upon the SS Crow, reflected in the sky?

The bedroom was neat as a pin. Wanda opened the window to let the Manhattan morning waft thought the room and down the hall.

It was graduation day for the Packard School Class of 2026, and the pinnacle of my brilliant student career, capped off with a perfect attendance record, a 4.0 GPA, a narrow miss on the 1600 SAT.

“Only Allah is perfect,” said Principal Joseph Reilly when he called me to his office and informed me that I would be Valedictorian, an honor I did not want.

Blue sky, puff clouds. Graduation was scheduled for 10.30 am, an open-air ceremony in Sheep Meadow, Central Park. I felt a hollow pit in my stomach. My speech was scheduled for 10.45 am. This was really happening: there was nothing I could do to stop it or to escape it.

The dream though.

The Ann Taylor blouse and skirt, light and dark blue, made me look like twice my age. The blouse was one size too large, just as father and I had decided when we selected the outfit on-line a week ago.

“Nothing showy, nor too revealing,” said father.

The small green pendant, a carving of a serpentine polar bear.

It was found on me as an infant, abandoned in the Arctic snow. On the belly underside, there was an inscription: “YUKIAK KITTIWAKE.” The pendant was my constant companion, my lodestone, pointing to true north. That morning, under the blouse, it felt warm against my skin. It pulsed.

The dream was real.

What father really meant is that the high-collared blouse would cover the pendant, and the long cuffed sleeves would conceal the seven-star tattoo on the inside of my right wrist. “Not too revealing”, meant, “not too embarrassing.”

I wasn’t embarrassed, but I was eager to please. It was what I did best!

“You being OK?” said Wanda, when she saw me staring out of the window at the sky.

“I had a strange dream, Wanda.”

“What for kind of dream it being?”

“It being kind of dream…” Wanda’s mangled English was infectious.

I glanced down at the scribbled note lying on the homework desk: green cairn, white ice storm, crow, blue man. Directions, not colors, not fragments.

“I dreamed I saw Ada Kittiwake on the Crow,” I said.

I was relieved that Wanda didn’t roll her eyes, but then her chin wobbled a bit, her gray eyes glazed.

“Maybe, Ada is with you today?” said Wanda, turning to the print image of the SS Crow pinned on the cork board above my desk; I think to avoid getting weepy. I joined her at the desk.

“National Geographic, December 1906, Vol. XVII, page 642,” written in my best hand across the bottom of the print.

“She told me she was my mother.”

There, I said it.

“Your mother?” said Wanda, squinting at the photo, frowning.

The SS Crow was a two-masted square-rigged sailing vessel with an ugly wheelhouse stuck behind the mid-ship smokestack. Draped in webbed shrouds, a tangle of stays, blocks and tackles, bristling with Whaling hooks and gaffs, it was a dark menacing hulk, half buried in Arctic Ice. The crew, thirteen men and one woman, lined the main-deck of the Arctic whaler, staring mirthless at the plate-camera operator, who was probably the ship’s surgeon. The ship bore the fated Gustafsson Expedition to the Arctic in 1906 never to be seen again.

Thirteen men, dressed in seal-skin pants and caribou-fur parkas, or dark woolen pea-jackets. I knew them all by name and by their stories. Second from the right, shorter than the men, a bare-faced Inuit woman stared directly at the camera. Her name was Ada Kittiwake. Behind her, a tattooed south sea man.

Wanda looked at me, looked at the photo gain. “Your mother,” she said.

“My mother.”

My name is Yukiak Kittiwake.

I had always called the woman in the picture my ancestor because it was safer than naming her as my mother, but I’d known all along, and now the dream.

“You ready to go down?” said Wanda, wiping tears from her eyes. “Doctor is downstairs waiting, I know.”

“You are coming to the graduation, right?” I said. I desperately needed moral support.

“Of course I must.”

Wanda reached up and pulled the leather necklace and green pendant out from under my collar so that it lay visible at the base of my throat.

“You be you,” said Wanda, pleased with the adjustment to my outfit. She stood back and examined me with a critical eye, and I could tell she hated the blue blouse. “You too good girl, Yuki,” she said.

Too good for graduation. Too good for the life my father had chosen. I reached past Wanda and took down the photograph of the Crow.

You be you. But who?

The person in the mirror.

The person in the mirror was in the wrong place. The person in the mirror belonged in the dream.

“You ready to go down?” Wanda asked.

I touched the pendant at my throat.

“No,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

“For where?”

“For the land beyond,” I said, grasping the pendant so hard that it hurt.

“How?”

Wanda’s gray eyes sparkled in their own way, with excitement of fear, it was hard to say.

“Aboard the SS Crow,” I said. “It is headed south”