by Ilana Bean
There’s something that feels sort of pleasant and humbling about describing our experiences and labeling it speculation—saying, this is what I think is going on, but I could believe something entirely different tomorrow.
In my first dream, the 6th amendment of the US constitution was about the North Pole. In my next dream, I wore my largest winter coat and it still wouldn’t keep warm.
When I google “North Pole” one of the suggested questions asks: Is going to the North Pole illegal?
It isn’t— the 6th amendment pertains to a fair and speedy trial. The North Pole is governed by the same laws as all international oceans. Canada thinks the North Pole might actually be Canadian, but no one else agrees, not even the US. In 2007, Russia planted a flag. The nearest land depends on what you consider to be land: are semi-permanent gravel banks land? If not, the closest land is off the shore of Denmark. If land must be permanently inhabited to count, then it’s an area in Canada’s far north, called Alert, like the state that is ready to shift into fear at any moment. Although Alert has been permanently inhabited since 1950, the individual inhabitants who live there are temporary.
Recently, Russia’s new and enormous icebreaker, Arktika, sailed straight to the North Pole after passing the coast of Norway. The hope was to test the capabilities of the ship with some serious ice. Is there nowhere else to find serious ice? During the Cold War (of course) two Russian scientists are said to have parachuted down to the North Pole. Classic!
Like flight and like the moon, the North Pole is a matter of many hotly debated firsts. Much of what has happened at the North Pole is only said to have happened, and then said by someone else to have not happened after all. Like the paradoxically large interior of a house that will drive its occupants mad, the calculations never add up. It’s very hard to check up on the North Pole. Because of the limitations of mercator projection, it was left off even the omniscient eye of Google Earth for years.
The more I read about the North Pole, the less I feel like it even exists. To say it’s where Santa lives is to say Santa, too, is neither real nor plausible. It’s a space without a recognized time zone and with days that last months. It’s not even one thing, but three. The earth has a geographic North Pole, a magnetic North Pole, and a geo-magnetic North Pole. To make matters worse, the North Pole would actually more aptly be described as a north-attracting pole. It’s the part of the Earth’s magnetic field that wants north magnetic particles to draw near— which means, the North Pole, is in fact, actually a south pole. We have been looking in the wrong place! All this time! The North Pole is Antarctica and the South Pole is the ice where polar bears will run 60 kilometers per hour to rip you to shreds.
Another thing about both the North and South Pole is that they could, at any moment, reverse. The South Pole would become the North Pole and the North Pole would become the South Pole, which it technically already is. This has happened 183 times over the past 83 million years, and the most recent occurrence was 780,000 years ago.
A polar reversal would throw off migratory patterns and cell phone signals alike. I first learned about this in Geosystems, a class in my high school that was nicknamed “Rocks for Jocks.” I remembered none of the mechanics, but years later, held onto the enormous discomfort. I signed up for an easy A, not a paralyzing fear of magnets! Polar reversal was one more strike against this whole thing. This is not my first North Pole dream.
It went on the list with Yellowstone exploding, with the impending earthquake that could wipe out the Pacific Northwest, the disappearing honeybees. I was and am so tremendously afraid of them all that I can barely distinguish between them—a photo exposed so brightly that forms appear featureless. Although none of them individually are likely to get me, surely one of them will. Sometimes I find it hard to think about anything else. The list goes on: the weakness of recycling programs, the idea that water distribution will be solved if we all turn off the tap when brushing our teeth, Zoonotic diseases, global pandemics.
The geographic North Pole is the point where Earth’s axis of rotation meets its surface. It’s where all of the longitudinal lines converge. It’s the point that feels like it is the very top of Earth’s head, if Earth had a head. If circles had tops. If there was one obvious orientation of viewing a sphere, if that concept itself did not defeat what feels like the whole point of spheres. Within northernness, there is often this concept: topness, upness. When I think of up in the room I am sitting in it means away from the ground and towards the sky. Which would make the downmost place of the earth a molten core and the up-most place of the earth not even the earth at all, but everything beyond it.
One therapist suggested that, to mitigate apocalypse fears, I should consider the sources of media I’m consuming. Are they profiting from my anxiety? It’s a fair guess.
She encouraged me to start following a publication that shares exclusively good news. I did, and found that the good news around us was mostly stories about dogs diving into bodies of water and pulling drowning humans out. This made me even sadder, like, That’s the best we’ve got? The goodness of the story wasn’t even that good, just a near aversion of something terrible. Maybe the essence of heroic acts lies in taking on more than what should ever be your responsibility, or even your right. Still, I’m happy to say that both dog and man are now okay.
Another therapist sent me lists of cognitive distortions and asked me to circle which ones my apocalypse anxiety fell into. I didn’t like this because I felt like maybe it wasn’t a distortion and was just the truth of what was happening and a better approach might be from the perspective of oncoming grief— not to say the earth isn’t in danger, but to learn to live with that sadness, to live with the idea that the world is bigger than what you’re able to change.
A third asked me why I was more worried about drowning in a catastrophic flood than other forms of death, since all death is death. There are answers, like, for example, a fear of total obliteration, experiencing death not only as an erasure of self but an erasure of context, but I found this question somehow comforting.
The geomagnetic North Pole is an antipodal point where the axis of a best-fitting dipole intersects the surface of Earth. I almost know what that means. It’s close to the magnetic North Pole, but not the same thing. The whole point feels more theoretical, like where the math says the North Pole should be if the North Pole was a place that made any sense. Perhaps the idea that North is up is taking the perspective of the sun, imagining its roundness as another head which, like our own, is more comfortable when oriented in one position than another, feeding on hydrogen, which, like so many things, is not unlimited.
For all the fear of apocalypse I had been practicing most of my life, I would have thought that when the pandemic arrived I’d handle it either particularly well or particularly poorly. I knew we would eventually have a global pandemic because in 2016 an Uber driver once told me one was coming while I was on the way to the airport, and this fit well into my framework of the world. Still, I didn’t come away with a lot of actionable ideas. It didn’t really change anything when it hit.
My roommate showed me a video on her phone of her toddler niece learning that she would soon be a big sister and I immediately started crying, thinking about how I was a big sister too and thinking about family and how scared I was for my own. I thought about my dad’s asthma and my brother in New York. I thought about a dream I used to have over and over where my sister falls off a cliff in New Mexico and grabs onto its rocky ledge. When I reach my hand out, she can’t quite grasp it. Her hair is curled; she is seven again and dressed up for my brother’s bar mitzvah. Some dreams are nonsensical; others are just heavy handed. I said to my mom on the phone, “I’m really struggling this weekend,” and she said, “Yes, so is every person in the world.”
One summer when I was eight or nine, my family went to North Carolina and found a group of snakes on the rocks. They gathered around them for what felt like ages, and I stayed on the other side of the creek, positive they would be bitten by something irreversibly venomous. Because I couldn’t think of any other way to stop this, I stood on my rock screaming and screaming and screaming until my family came back to me.
When I was a kid, my dad told me about the story of Baucis and Philemon. It’s one of the myths where commoners— a husband and wife— act kindly to a disguised god and are, in turn, rewarded. Their greatest wish was to die at the same moment, to never face the pain of existing without each other. And so, while an enormous comet would bring total obliteration, on the other hand, there is also this.
The magnetic North Pole is also horrible because it’s always moving. The magnetic North Pole is the point where the planet's magnetic field points vertically downwards. When you get here, the compass needles drop. The reason I think that it is so horrible that the magnetic North Pole moves is because what that means is that Earth is moving on its axis— that the Earth, in fact, wobbles. I hate this. There are so many real things to worry about but I also worry that the Earth will wobble so much that one day it will break off the track and start hurdling outwards, that there is no bar of iron holding anything to anything, that there is only electricity and magnets and thousands of feet of water, melting ice and Cold Wars and no land on which to build. I worry everything I depend on is halfway made up; a research station perched on a surface that will disappear into the ocean in the spring, that was never built to last in the first place, mapping a point that won’t hold still, that ships sink searching for and no one will believe you really found. If I could, I would make the North Pole illegal. I would amend against this whole thing. Get a time zone, North Pole! Join Canada!
When I write about the unsteady orbit of the earth, I feel a non-metaphorical tingle along my scalp. I feel the presence of my heart, which is here too, which is moved by electric impulses in muscle. Even the concept of the North Pole can shift the physiological parameters within my very real body, which, like all matter, has a magnetic field of its own. My feet are the bottom of my body for their proximity to earth, and my head is the top for its distance. I pull up Google maps and find that because of the way sitting on my bed, cross-legged and leaning, the northernmost place of my body is my right knee. This is the last warm week of October; the Northern hemisphere that holds me is turning away from the sun. Small black bugs bite my arms and legs in the days before the first frost.
I’m interested in figuring out how to live in a world that’s fundamentally unstable and unpredictable—because I have to and we all have to and that’s the task we were given, and my human brain is hardwired to search for narrative, even though one narrative that I find generally convincing is that the whole hunt for narrative is pretty futile in a world that’s so complex and unruly. I think our need to orient ourselves in the world we live in and our actual ability to do so is wildly mismatched. There’s something that feels sort of pleasant and humbling about describing our experiences and labeling it speculation—saying, this is what I think is going on, but I could believe something entirely different tomorrow.
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Ilana Bean is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Iowa, as well as a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship and Stanley Fellowship Award. Her work has appeared in Nashville Review. She is a nonfiction reader for The Iowa Review.