Bear Necessities

 

Coming back to an old work place can be startling, especially if it's been abandoned.

Abandoned not just by you, but by those who might have followed. Forsaken for good, even if circumstances had made it impossible to continue.

It might not help much to remind oneself that part of the reason for all this was that the work was inefficient, clumsy and had become outmoded.

Maybe worst of all would be to find amongst the ruins and abandonment an entirely inappropriate new clueless set of incumbents who could never have understood how hard we'd tried?

But perhaps after all, that might be consoling.

A comforting realisation that all has not been wasted, that new uses have been found for what we've left behind – in short, that life goes on.

We hope.

The Forecaster

 

This was where we lived and worked –

a weather station way up north –

Wrangel Island, to be precise

Kolyuchin – north of Chukotka.

 

We made observations, carefully measured

the various meteorological changes

all of which would help us to know

just what the future held.

 

With melting ice, and better ways

to do all this, we found ourselves

out of a job. And so we left.

The village stayed behind

 

and has remained, with swinging doors

and all our old detritus –

here's a pile of rotten pallets,

rusty oil drums roll around.

 

I have returned.  It’s thirty years

that once were future, since we last

recorded numbers which helped to make

the forecast, all that time ago

 

and here it is – our abandoned home

visited by my present being.

No human life.  It has become

a house of beasts.  A heavy paw

 

lies draped across the window-sill.

Neatly framed a gentle head

leans and peers through broken glass.

On the path that used to be

 

there rests another, shifting her weight

then settles down once more.

These new arrivals seem at home

since we left.  So I leave them

 

unconcerned about the future.

They are content.  I go to leave

this place to those who now live here

where once we worked on forecasts.

 

 

Past experience, present discovery... and an unknown, though essentially foreseeable future.

My speaker's task of living and working in a hostile environment to take measurements in order to forecast the weather was in the past. The very climate change that his work helped predict finished it off.

For now, he observes.

After all those observations, past and present, he leaves once again to face what lies ahead, for himself.

And for all of us.