Witching Hour

2:30 a.m. in McMurdo Station

“2:30 a.m. in McMurdo Station is when your body can’t dance anymore. A friend calls to you from across the writhing crowd, his voice echolocating through pumping limbs. You want to stay but your back is stiff and your joints ache. This is your third deployment to Antarctica, and for months you’ve been working sixty hours a week hunched over a computer manifesting flights. You’re exhausted, not solely from the job. You’re the third generation in your family to work in Antarctica, and sometimes you wonder if you chose this or if it chose you. You’re tempted to keep returning no matter how it wears on your body, on your soul.”

2:30 a.m. in McMurdo Station

5 a.m. in Sapperton

"5 a.m. in Sapperton belongs to hospital workers and insomniacs, all of us alone. I am the latter on a curb, one of many on the corner, sticking like burrs to the corduroy shell of this sleepy nowhere. I lean against my trembling apartment building that threatens to sink into the earth whenever a train screams by. This rain-soaked slice of town is wedged between the hospital where I drew my first shuddering breath and the freight tracks where someone surrendered theirs just two weeks ago."

5 a.m. in Sapperton

10:30 a.m. in Choteau, Montana

"10:30 a.m. in Choteau, Montana is the best time to look for snow geese in the barley fields. That’s what Dave says. He picks us up in his old Chevy truck, the one with 375k miles and a “check engine” light that’s been glowing on the dash for over a decade. Dave is eighty-four now—a nasal tube looped beneath his trucker hat, a portable oxygen concentrator humming in the front seat—but the way my grandma looks at him, you’d think they were both nineteen."

10:30 a.m. in Choteau, Montana