B. W. Teigland's "Ad Nauseam"

Out of the water, the walrus has bad eyesight. When it drags its thousand-pound body out of the ocean, out and up, it can no longer see where it is. But it has found a place to rest, away from its pod. It has climbed the sea cliff.

The spot where the walrus would have rested—the spot where nature deemed it should rest, the spot where the salty foam of the sea meets the shore, a thousand feet below—this spot has become so overcrowded with rival walruses that it has become safer to take this evolutionary drunken walk, away from its part and share in that animal kingdom.

In the entire history of walruses, the animal has not done this before. Not until now, at the North Pole, where the polar caps are melting earlier each year, leaving the walrus high and dry, broken by weariness, vertically pushed outside the pod.

Uneasy, the walrus falls asleep on the open cliff, spends the night alone, not with the herd of walruses. Then the walrus wakes up on the edge of the precipice. Sensing that the rest of its pod is below, it tries to go back the only way it can—the way it came. Down the cliff.

Using flippers and not wings, it slides on the loose rock, somersaults, falls the thousand feet, and is crushed, blubber and bone, by its impact with the rocky seashore. It jerks convulsively and dies.

Not just one walrus. Herds of walrus share the same fate, the same fatal destiny.

— —

The polar bear hunts seals. But the sea ice is melting in the Arctic. So it cannot hunt seals, cannot stand motionless for hours at the seals’ breathing holes. Unable, just like the walrus, to solve the problem of failing life, the maritime bear swims to the shore below the cliff from which the walruses have been jumping.

The polar bear usually eats enough to see it through eight long months of eating absolutely nothing. But having eaten only one seal, only eight days’ worth of energy, the polar bear is hungry again and so will swim the distance, to the northern cape, to the cove of suicidal walruses. And in doing so it will risk drowning or being killed by orcas, which eat the seals that the polar bear did not, which will happen more and more in the years to come, when the ice has melted completely: from solid to liquid, from glacial silence to nothing yet known.

Not just one polar bear. Many will make this trip.

The cubs quickly learn the new ritual from their parents. After striking the hollow carcasses in playful imitation of the hunt, they eat the walruses.

At one time, polar bears and walruses were equal predators—equal in strength, in body mass, in aggression and instinct. But not now. Not now that the walruses are hurling themselves against the steep, jagged rocks.

— —

In turn, seabirds dive. They glide into the watery mass, into the old ocean and swim, forcing back the aquatic layers with the bones of their wings. Whales roar, and their huge mouths filter krill through baleen systems— krill that feeds on the polar lichen growing below the edge of an iceberg. Ice floes crash incessantly against each other when the ice breaks up in the polar sea. And under all the power of the narwhale’s spiral tusks, which migrate through fissures in the sea ice, millions of diatoms are spontaneously born.

The obstacle of survival is everywhere, so much so that it is not untrue to say that life is an obstacle. And that obstacle, varying as it does in the trials it offers, is indifferent. All things on the planet are connected through this indifference. And all things become one thing.