The Future of Ice Read online

  Acclaim for Gretel Ehrlich's

  THE FUTURE OF ICE

  “What is striking about this intimate lament is Gretel Ehrlich's eloquent use of language to communicate dire facts. … [She] conveys the horror with a beauty that makes it hard to turn away. … Never preachy, she is instead poetic.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A powerful book by one of the West's foremost writers on the natural world. … An accessible, poetic and urgent frontline report from frigid, yet vibrant territories and ice-laden ocean waters that few of us have visited. … Ehrlich painstakingly observes what most others scarcely notice.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “A lament born of facts. … Ehrlich paints the moods, land scapes, and lives of sentient beings in some of the most time less spaces on the planet.”

  —The Bloomsbury Review

  “Objective fact and subjective experience are woven together with lyrical descriptions of place, scientific information and spiritual reflection. … Ehrlich gives us a reason to celebrate the beauty of winter and to act to save it.”

  —E, the Environmental Magazine

  “An intimate book that's part celebration of, part lament for and part meditation on cold. … The result will inspire, an ger and frighten you.”

  —Santa Barbara News-Press

  GRETEL EHRLICH

  THE FUTURE OF ICE

  Gretel Ehrlich is the author of This Cold Heaven and The Solace of Open Spaces, among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She divides her time between California and Wyoming.

  ALSO BY GRETEL EHRLICH

  This Cold Heaven

  The Solace of Open Spaces

  Heart Mountain

  Islands, the Universe, Home

  A Match to the Heart

  Questions of Heaven

  A Blizzard Year

  John Muir, Nature's Visionary

  For Marty Asher

  For my friends who travel in circles

  and

  in memory of Sam

  1988-2003

  Womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all.

  —GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant,

  and cloven, lucent, and missle, and wild.

  —ANNIE DILLARD

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Prelude: A Winter Solstice Blizzard

  Part One Winter in Summer

  Part Two The White Day

  Part Three The Unfastened: On the Spanish River

  Part Four How Memory Ends and Begins

  Part Five A Thousand-Mile Sailing Trip to Spitsbergen

  Part Six On Cold Cliff

  Notes and Sources

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  This book began with a phone call and represents a six-month chronicle of living with cold: where I went looking for winter and the ways in which winter found me. I had been living in a tent on a glacial moraine facing Wyoming's Wind River Mountains for six months. Summer had just ended, and two feet of snow arrived with nighttime temperatures dropping to an unseasonable twelve below zero. When my cell phone rang, I was wrapped in two sleeping bags feeling miserable. It was Marty Asher calling from New York. He asked where I was. I told him. “Perfect,” he said, then asked if I would write a book about winter and climate change, about what would happen if we became “deseasoned,” if winter disappeared as a result of global warming.

  I said I'd think about it. The continental ice caps, glaciers, and frozen seas of the far north where I'd spent so many years loomed in my mind because they were now melting at unprecedented rates. By midcentury, it is predicted, there will be no more glaciers and a million species of living beings will become extinct. The end of winter might mean the end of life. What is the future of winter, of snow, of ice?

  Crawling out of my tent, I pulled on knee-high moose-hide boots and sealskin mittens, shoveled through snow to the not-yet-frozen ground, hollowed out a pit, and made a sagebrush fire. As I warmed myself, snow came down, and this chronicle began.

  My tent was perched on a rocky knob overlooking a glacier-smoothed meadow backed by crowded peaks that rise to almost fourteen thousand feet. Snow pushed against the nylon walls of the tent, and I pushed back. It was a barren camp, a dry camp, a cold camp, with no running water, no toilet facilities, no trees, no heat. My favorite dog had just died.

  I wrote and lived outside, cooked on a Coleman stove, and bathed under the lukewarm stream that came from a solar-heated water bag. On frigid days I used the front seat of my pickup truck for an office, charging my cell phone on the truck battery, thawing frozen food and drying wet clothes on the dashboard. Wolves padded by and antelope grazed the knobs and draws like aliens, their black horns pointing skyward as if listening to something I couldn't hear. A hummingbird visited each day at ten. It circled the tent, flashed its iridescent throat, and left. Mice invaded. I dumped vegetable scraps into badger holes.

  Tent life pressed me into what the Tibetans call a mixing of mind and space. By that they mean thought moving with no direction and no bias, yet with a precision capable of taking everything in. The Inuit of Greenland call it sila, a word meaning, simultaneously, both weather and consciousness. Living outside for half a year, I began to see how the two are one.

  Clouds tickled my ribs and heat waves rippled thought. I was enveloped by sabi—a quiet loneliness that made me laugh. A snowflake came to rest on my eyebrow; I licked a piece of ice snapped from a pond. Weather streamed into my nose, mouth, eyes, ears, and circulated inside my brain.

  Weather is all mixed up with movements of mind: a gust can shove one impulse into another; a blizzard erases a line of action; a sandstorm permeates inspiration; rain is a form of sleep. Lightning can make scratch marks on brains; hail gouges out a nesting place, melts, and waters the seed of an idea that can germinate into idiocy, a joke, or genius. How could it be otherwise?

  These days seasons no longer come in sequence but are chopped up with heat, storms, blizzards, and droughts. It snowed in June, August, and September and thawed in January and February; record-breaking heat has been followed by record-breaking snow, and the average annual temperature has climbed. This is the signature of a warming climate.

  There should be no question about whether global warming is occurring because we now have 450,000 years of climate history at our fingertips provided by the ice cores taken from Greenland and eastern Antarctica, covering the last four glacial and interglacial cycles. We can compare the climate fluctuations before the industrialization of our world and after. We can see clearly how climate has changed.

  Ice cores are time machines. Snow piles up, compresses, and becomes firn, then ice mounds up into glaciers; oxygen bubbles are trapped in the ice, providing samples of ancient atmosphere, of how much carbon dioxide and methane is held within. Records of past temperatures and levels of atmospheric gases from before industrialization are compared with those after—a mere 150 years. We can now see that the steady gains in greenhouse gases and air and water temperatures have occurred only since the rise of our nuclear-smokestack-and-tailgate society. The last ten years have seen the most abrupt spikes. Humans have pushed carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere at unprecedented levels. Human-caused global warming is overriding that caused by natural fluctuations. Our sky is another kind of tent—not one that shelters but one that kills: it's chock-full of toxins and gases that flow into our bodies and oceans and air and the food we eat. Trapped carbon dioxide is like grief—it has to go somewhere.

  We're spoiled because we've been living in an interglacial paradise for twenty thousand years. Now we're losing it. Climate stability, not to mention human superiority and economic viabil
ity, are illusions we must give up. Our can-do American optimism and our head-in-the-sand approach to economics when it takes into mind only profit but not the biological health of our planet—has left us one-sided. Too few of us remember how to be heartbroken. Or why we should be. We don't look, because heartbreak might imply failure. But the opposite is true. A broken heart is an open heart, like a flower unfolding from its calyx, the one nourishing the other.

  My six-month chronicle took me to both ends of the earth: to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, where I found winter in summer, and to the top of the Spitsbergen (Svalbard) archipelago, where winter was giving way to spring, then returning again.

  I followed the orthodromic routes of migrating arctic birds, their great, arcing circles as they flew between Arctic and the icy coasts and islets of the South Atlantic Ocean: arctic terns, long-tailed skuas, jaegers, and sanderlings, among others. But they were on an opposite mission. Instead of looking for winter, they were trying to stay in the warmth and light of summertime, where food was abundant and chicks could hatch, fledge, and fly.

  I took up residence in a one-room cabin in Wyoming, wandered snow-embowered valleys on snowshoes and skis, and when water showed itself from under its cover of ice I made a canoe trip down the Green River. In those months winter's hold on me was complete, its grip both a form of concentration and a wide room in which mind and body could roam. I saw the ways in which winter had shaped me, and how our human presence on Earth may well be bringing the season of ice to an end.

  What follows is both ode and lament, a wild-time song and elegy, and a cry for help—not for me, but for the tern, the ice cap, the polar bear, and the lenga forest; for the river of weather and the ways it chooses to be born.

  PRELUDE:

  A WINTER SOLSTICE BLIZZARD

  December 21. Solstice. Why do we talk about sun when there is none? Sol has been banished and snow dissolves night. A wolf howls. The O of her mouth is hidden from sight at the edge of the trees. Her voice is echolocation: I'm lost, yet she knows where I am. I traipse to a pine-covered moraine, gulp snow, and go hungry.

  In winter I'm both gaunt and voluptuous. I forget food and stumble on flame. At the moment of solstice I try to balance an egg on its end, but it falls, spilling yolk sideways on a pine plank like a broken sun.

  It's dark and I walk. I hear movement in the trees; the wolf runs. Willows ringing dry ponds writhe in sudden blasts of snow. On the moraine a pine needle pierces the palm of my hand. I lick sap from a spindly trunk. Wind stops dead. Vanilla brews in the bark of a yellow pine. Far above, in the high peaks, I can hear snow rinsing the wombs of vanished glaciers.

  Winter is refuge and deathbed, monastery and ivory tower, cave and ghost. It's where we learn to hiss. In this season we dive through the Big Dipper's cup to the other side of the constellations; we go behind the scenes of our own lives. As stars move in their slow adagios, there's a sudden sense of falling and a blackout union with whatever we stumble upon. Storms confer powers of concentration; cyclonic winds drive sharp-shinned snowflakes. The whole world is taken in at once; the whole world dissolves.

  Inside cold there are musical notes: once, while I walked in hunger and fatigue across the center of northern Greenland's Warming Land, where no human had ever ventured, rays of light sprayed out from the ends of my feet. Each time I stepped down, a burst of music erupted. The earth was a piano and my feet were searching for chords.

  Here it is dark and I step on light. I climb down to the river and wander across floating shoals of ice. A dead elk lies draped over a boulder, her skin gone hard, her black feet piercing ice. Winter means desiccation, going back to skeleton and bone. Last week, in the Red Desert, I saw thirsty antelope circling a frozen pond, pawing to get at water where there was none.

  Flesh is ornament, rawhide is real. I wade through powder. Snow is another kind of air. My footsteps screech. How can something that comes from cloud feel like plastic? The wolf drops back into the trees, her mouth clenched tight. Snow has its own howl—a sixty-decibel silence.

  Winter is a white vagrancy. There are no days or nights. Just breathing and snow pushing space between thought. I rub my neck. Where lightning drove through me, snow recongeals on neural substrates. By afternoon I feel as if I can touch all the way back to the cells of my brain.

  Two ravens stitch a black line between bits of snow. Their love dance, like mine, is a picture of vertigo. The air shakes, then drops and hardens. Snowflakes make dizzying, vaulting leaps. Pine winds bunch needles into whisks for tea, brooms for sweeping away confusion.

  Winter is tourniquet: no blood allowed here. From under trees, a white wall curves out like a pouting lip. I can see where a ruffed grouse dove into the snowbank for refuge. Snow is a kind of hard fat. It can nourish and it can kill.

  White sky-threads thicken. The moon is out and so is the sun. When they set, darkness rolls at me. I think of Jupiter's brightest moon, Europa, which astronomers say is doodled and freckled, with creamy plains and crypto-icebergs, with a briny sea beneath a mottled ice crust where life might have been or will begin. “I am moved by strange sympathies,” Emerson said. The alignment of heart goes only with otherness.

  At dawn sun beams light-waves in a thousand directions, but as soon as they bounce off some object—bent nail, anthill, snow tire, fly wing—the waves line up, all vibrating in the same direction. So too the creation of consciousness. A streaming wild pulse encounters beings, events, junk heaps, and weather and as a consequence realigns itself into ordered description and memory.

  I enter a canyon above two string lakes. On either side pines give gifts other trees do not; their needle whir stirs weather into thought. Snow slides down granite, squalls pulse, each one leading me deeper into the mountains. To put my finger on the end of thought, to stir the heart's beginnings … isn't that what life is all about?

  After the long storm there is a melting quiet and the hushed roar of wind around high peaks. Long-stemmed aspens click above fallen leaves. There's a descent into a wide valley. The whirl of self vanishes. I sit on a rock and doctor a blister. In that bubble, a whole trapped ecosystem jiggles.

  Winter is purgation. It empties us out. Darkness fills the void and snow drains it with light. I look up. White flakes fall past my eyes like tiny pages, each one flashing its redundant narrative. Or is it only ash from the spilled flame and blizzard of solstice?

  I stand and walk. Emerson said the first circle is the human eye, but so is the planet. They are linked: the one is always beholding the other.

  All who come here

  feel the lids fall

  from their eyes.

  This view

  of the world without end

  there is nowhere to hide.

  —Muso Soseki

  Part One

  WINTER IN SUMMER

  TIERRA DEL FUEGO

  The straight course is hacked out in rounds

  against the will of the world.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  January. Perpetual freshness, raw cliffs, a leggy forest, an unpolished sun: that's what I've come to love about the end of the world, the uttermost part of the earth, latitude 55 degrees south, last stop before Antarctica. Up under the eaves at the torn end of the Andean cordillera, snow blasts rock walls white and a hanging glacier crumbles. Ocean ends. Ice recedes. Time sweeps upward in the form of southern beech trees; wind rams it back down.

  I've come here to hike a seventy-mile circuit in the southern Andes. It's summer but it feels like winter. The trees are bent as if picking up something that had fallen. There is no sunrise, no moonrise, no sighting of the Southern Cross, only storms braiding and unbraiding themselves.

  Lately my travels have mimicked the high-altitude circumpolar routes taken by arctic and antarctic birds—south polar skuas, great skuas, long-tailed jaegers, sanderlings, and arctic terns. While we travel the same routes, we are seeking different kinds of weather: they are driven by a tight summer-and-light-seeking schedule ordered by magnetic f
ield lines and sun-compass routes; I'm looking for cold, meandering through wintry landscapes when and where I find them, trying to see if the season of winter is shrinking, and why.

  Morning. A single blade of light rays down. I walk the length of the natural harbor below Ushuaia. The town hangs on a hill backed by green peaks. A glut of birds sweeps overhead. Gray-headed albatrosses cross paths with ones that are black-browed, and these pass giant petrels and southern fulmars, as three olivaceaous cormorants flap hard on the water below. Straight south, somewhere between Drake Passage and the South Sandwich Trench, a couple of arctic terns I saw nesting at the very top of Greenland, near Warming Land, have just completed their 107-day trip to these southern waters in search of a twenty-four-hour sun. But here they're getting winter minus the darkness: rain turns to sleet, and in the direction of Cape Horn there is a whiteout of summer snow.

  Before me is the historic Beagle Channel, named for the ship that brought young Charles Darwin here, to el fin del mundo. It was just before Christmas in 1832 that the HMS Beagle turned into the Strait of Le Maire, then the channel. It is a fragment of South Atlantic water into which Drake, Ross, Cook, Fitzroy, Darwin, Joshua Slocum, and Rockwell Kent, among many others, sailed. They were searching for passage to Asia, looking for gold, or just looking.

  This coast was once home to the Yamana Indians, who traveled these rough waters by bark canoe. In the mountains behind Ushuaia lived the Selk'nam (also known as Ona) Indians, guanaco-robed hunters of the harsh Fuegean mountains and plains, whom the Yamana feared.

  Today the channel is stippled with whitecaps, the bitterness of vanquished Indians still washing up on its shores. “Is right here everything end,” Derek Walcott's Odyssean figure said. What ended was a time when there seemed to be room enough for everyone.