The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Part Two

  THE WHITE DAY

  Life: an intermittent fever between long lapses of quiet.

  —ROBERTO CALASSO

  1

  February. A whale, an owl, a grebe. There's a new moon, the tiniest sliver, its belly-weighted shadow pushing that one edge into light. Below is an estuary full of bellowing frogs and an ocean of unturned waves. A heron balances on a mat of kelp. A dolphin leaps straight up out of the water, a silvery, wiggling mass of joy. Sometimes it's hard to remember what a mess we're making of our planet. The sea exhales; mist wafts over cool sand.

  I walk the beach in California. At waterline, a Chumash spear point tumbles at my feet, spins like a compass, and points north. I pack my winter things—parkas, snowshoes, crosscountry skis, and moose-hide packs, plus Gaby, my dog, and begin driving.

  Now hot, now cold, rain curing to snow and back to rain, hail bulleting sand. It's not always so that winter comes on schedule, that flakes fall straight down and stay. I've been driving and driving: east to the Mojave Desert, north to Mount Whitney, northeast into Nevada's Jarbidge Wilderness, north through Idaho to Glacier National Park.

  Oh how funny it is: that I'm to write about winter and can't find it. As soon as I arrive somewhere the dusting of snow immediately melts and I have to move on. A flick, a flap, a flashing transparent wing: I look for it out my truck window, any sign that will tell me winter will soon come.

  Snow starts far up in the sky with one dust mote cartwheeling through cloud. As it free-falls, moisture encarnal-izes dust: faceted crystals are born. The one becomes many and they go where wind goes: everywhere and down and touching.

  I call about the cabin I was to rent near the Canadian border, but it's mired in a springlike thaw, the owner tells me. “There was snow,” he says, “but it melted. The river never froze and the valley floor is open.”

  As I drive rain comes instead: wild midwinter tempests with thunder and lightning. Sleet punctures holes in the season. In the mountains where glaciers have retreated to tiny patches of ice, sun and wind crusts over what's left of avalanching cornices.

  I stretch my legs by a lake; wind rattles the reeds where early-arriving ducks will nest. Dry, dry, the reeds sing. Six years of drought turn to seven. My own weathers are changeable: cold when I'm tired, enervated when I'm hot, ardent the farther north I drive, even without snow.

  My truck rides the rise and fall of the northern Rockies. Finally there's a winter blast, but wind dries it, and snow goes like a dress being torn from a corpse. When I reach Gary's cabin in northern Montana, meltwater ponds wet our legs to the shins. Snow fleas cluster in ditch water and drown. A cloud comes. It caresses the river like a feather boa, then slides across a running ridgetop. Fat flakes fall but sun shines through them like a flashlight, one transparency piercing another. No excuse for false innocence, someone says. A war is about to begin. Snow stops as if each flake had been caught by hand and thrown away with no regard for human life. The day ends. We feel bereaved before anyone dies. A curtain of sunlight falls that both hides and reveals.

  In Alberta I find more of the same: open water, bare ground and at best, snow corrupted by unseasonable rain. I call friends in Alaska; they're basking in warm weather like seals. The question keeps coming up: Is this global warming or just a quirk of weather, a natural fluctuation within a larger one? Meanwhile, the east coast of North America is being blasted with strong storms.

  Finally I give up my northbound journey and turn south again feeling slightly defeated. Surely, I'll find winter somewhere. The Blackfeet Indians called the Rockies “the backbone of the world.” Of the Blackfeet god who brought winter, Jim Welch wrote: “Cold Maker came down from Always Winter Land. He came with the wind. He was all dressed up in white furs and he was riding a white horse. He carried a lance made of ice and a shield of hoarfrost that one could see through. … His laughter sounded like ice breaking up on the river.”

  Crossing into Wyoming, I climb from four thousand feet to eight thousand in elevation. On the rim of Yellowstone Park a cloud appears on the road in front of the truck. As it lifts, snow falls from it. I stop the truck, get out, and Gaby and I do a little dance of gratitude on the road. Now we're inside the cloud, and snow twists out of the sky at the windshield. Am I driving through a world that is coming apart or one that is piecing itself back together? Either way, I'm home.

  At the end of the day I arrive at John and Lucy's log cabin not far from where mine is being built. They've agreed to let me live there for as long as I want. It's twelve feet by fourteen feet, with no kitchen, no bathroom, just a room big enough for a bed, a sheepherder's wood-burning cookstove, and a small desk at a south-facing window. As night comes on, the temperature hovers at zero. I split kindling, start a fire, make the bed: flannel sheets, three wool blankets, and a down sleeping bag. The window looks out on a white pasture, a buried fence, and a willow-choked stream where a moose is grazing. The north window swallows storms. I'm wildly happy. Gaby lies outside on the covered porch, surveying my friends’ three dogs, four horses, plus the moose and two coyotes. Then she comes in and joins me on the bed.

  Winter sets in. Cold Maker is here. He comes with wind that blows out the sun. Sun no longer erases what the season lays down. In the high country, accumulation goes on effortlessly. Right here three feet on the level pile up to four. Snowflakes are shorn of their wings and end up bald-headed, like ball bearings. Wind takes up what's left and, like dust, blows it around.

  With snow a curtain of words flutters down. One day does not lead to another. Storm after storm comes, and the wind slips out from between them until the snow goes flat, compressing a whole year into one white day.

  2

  Seclusion, intimacy, ceremony, cabin fever—that's what winter brings. The Blackfeet made winter camps in the wide valleys below the Rockies. They wore buffalo robes with the hair on the inside and put their tents in among groves of pines or cottonwoods to protect themselves from harsh weather. They were often there for five months or “however long Cold Maker wanted to keep us,” they said.

  In Arnhem Land in northern Australia, the Yolngu called winter dharratharrmirri, meaning “having shivering.” The Navajo god Hastseyalti covered travelers with tsayelbelkladi, a blanket of darkness that kept them warm. A Tibetan teacher promised to teach me tumo, how to raise my core body temperature at will. I never learned. Now I have Gaby to keep me warm.

  I once spent part of a winter in Kyoto and often visited two Noh mask carvers. Mornings I watched them carve, afternoons I attended Noh theater rehearsals. The plays and their performances had a seasonality: winter was associated with north, black, tortoise, water, and mountain. We sat on tatami. There were no chairs. The stage was a ritual space, semidark, with the grassy smell of fresh tatami—like summer—wafting into my nose.

  Being winter-bound means that snow's mirror reduces the simultaneity of perception to a simplicity. The wobbles and mind-jumps don't show. The sky goes black, and winter life is secret. The ground grows dizzyingly white, a wide nothingness. Darkness pulls over like a monk's cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it's never gone before, and stays.

  3

  Today the snow on the cabin roof slides, then freezes into a bowed curtain at the eaves with a fringe of icicles. Inside, rime crusts the windows. From an oval at the center, I peer out: new-fallen snow is a plain of sparks; a magpie picks lice from the moose's back, then scratches snow off the fence post and settles there. The day is short. I ride with John to the elk feed ground. He harnesses a team of black Percherons, loads the hay wagon, and feeds the elk. Fifty bulls and two hundred females come to eat. As we bump along, seven more bulls wind down a steep hill of aspens. I push flakes of hay off the back of the wagon. On the way home we put on snowshoes and hand-carry hay to a yearling that lost her way and became separated from the herd. This whole valley is under John's careful watch. He doesn't own it; he simply cares f
or whatever comes this way.

  “Once there was so much snow here in the winters, you never saw a fence line,” John says ruefully. “You could walk out the second story of your house. We fed cattle in tunnels bulldozed through snow, and lived in the dark. Now we're lucky if we get three feet on the level.” He cuts a hole in the ice on a small lake and brings home trout for dinner. In winter, fish regulate their own heat, he tells me. There's tissue in their brain that keeps the head at a constant 28 degrees Celsius.

  The rest of the day snow is all that happens. The moose wanders. Earlier in the week John's truck broke down. When he tried to hitchhike home, not a single car passed, so he walked the ten miles. While others leave the valley to avoid winter, John, Lucy, Rita, Jaime, Jim, Dorothy, Mark, Pat, and a handful of others stay. “It's the best time to be here,” they agree.

  Past midnight silence squeaks. It's been dark since four-thirty. Snow has stalled. Once in a while an errant flake tumbles down and my woodstove answers by belching smoke into the unmoving night. My face is pale; my hands are covered with soot. I'm tired of trampling circles with my own thoughts. Water in a pan on the cookstove boils down to a sputter. I write nothing. In every season the Earth is dynamic, but winter's pandemonium can be oddly quiet. I stick my head out the door: the wood pile floats, adrift in glitter. Icicles ripple and fall from the roof. They lie on new snow like glistening sticks. The branch from which they fell … where is it? If I kept walking through the pines above this cabin, would I find a translucent tree?

  Morning. Sun presses down and the ground-dazzle shivers. Right now the circumpolar migrants are getting close to the equator. The long-tailed jaeger has stopped his pirating and predation on other birds to fly The one-and-a-half-ounce sanderling flies alongside the white-rumped sandpiper and the ruddy turnstone. Higher up, as high as twenty thousand feet, the arctic terns lead the way from winter to fish-glutted southern seas and all-night summer light.

  Around here, glitter crackles, snowflakes knot and dissolve. Then a weather system's low pressure drags its feet over the valley, and wind throws snow spiraling in three-dimensional curves down the sky's cylindrical surface. Just before snow hits the roof, it falls straight and on the valley floor a new white carpet unrolls on top of the old. I get into bed with Gaby and read the legend of a man in Japan who fell through a crevasse into a bear den and was saved by the bear. Pyramids of snow sift in under the door. The geometry of winter sums up its angles at my feet.

  Yet spring keeps trying to come. Wind rips clouds apart and sun makes icicles shed tears. Worldwide, spring events are now occurring two days earlier per decade, and temperature jumps accelerate the disruption of the connectedness among species. From plant to bug, to bird, to tree, to water, to fish, to bear—it doesn't take many steps until the whole world of living things collapses. We've already lost chestnut trees, the Grand Banks fishery, elms, Monterey sardines, as well as thousands of feet of topsoil. Plants close their stomata in reaction to hotter than usual days; if closed to long, the plants will overheat and die. Since greenhouse gases remain in the air for one hundred years, whatever we do now to stop the planet from getting warmer will not be felt right away. Meanwhile, the land is getting hotter and drier, the seas are growing, the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica that hold three quarters of the earth's fresh water are melting, and plants, animals, and humans are becoming more disease-ridden. Increased rainfall is expected to wash more soil and crops away; prolonged drought will scorch already arid lands. Besides water shortages, there will be shortages of food. In the newspaper I read of Band-Aid stopgaps to the rising oceans: enormous gates that will be closed across the entrances to seaports in the Netherlands and in Venice.

  Here, I look out the cabin window: a north wind splinters the broken bones of fallen snowflakes to ice. I strap on snow-shoes, climb the hill behind the cabin, and push my head into flocked pine trees. The verb to pine comes from a different root than the noun, pinus, for the tree (though, with root, we're still using botanical language here). Pinus comes from the Latin verbpoena, meaning “superseded by pain.”

  Winter is about evanescence: absences stack up, and the starkness of living alone with almost no family as background noise is, itself, falling snow that has escaped being pressed into the glacier's time machine. Looking out the door, I see nothing and no one except the black-and-white magpie that flaps from one end of the sky to the other as if bringing winter back every time it tries to disappear.

  4

  I first came to Wyoming in the winter of 1975. By January 1976 I was filming in a lambing shed on a 250,000-acre sheep-and-cattle ranch. The first day I was there a solar eclipse darkened the sun and the sheep bedded down the way they do at nightfall. Twenty below dropped to 30 below. When the sun returned, roosters crowed and the sheep stood, yawned, and began their day all over again.

  Starting over again was what I would soon be doing. The man I was to marry died of cancer that October. Afterward, I stayed on and bought a ranch. Sixteen winters came and went. Extreme cold was most terrifying and most beguiling. The sound of cattle and horses eating all night long to stay warm kept me awake, as well as the white-eyed blizzards, the shakedown of adamantine frost fall.

  Winter on a cattle ranch means there are newborn calves warming up in the kitchen, round-the-clock watches for first-calf heifers, and middle-of-the-night rescues of neighbors stuck in a snowdrift. One night we had to rescue a newborn calf from the jaws of a hungry coyote. Its legs were on the other side of the fence and had been gnawed on. I shooed the coyote away, and we carried the calf to the barn, where she was doctored, warmed up, and fed with a bottle.

  Another night one of my dogs, Rusty (the father of Sam), led me to a herd of elk that had bedded down in the upper pasture, just for the joy of showing them to me. We managed the ranch not for high productivity but for the health of the ground. We ranched sunlight and grass. The elk, birds, deer, humans, cattle, horses, cougars, bears, coyotes, and dogs that lived there benefited.

  The ranch house was a hundred-year-old, uninsulated monstrosity that I hated. The plumbing and electricity had been jerry-rigged into place, and in winter it was hard to keep water flowing. To take a bath, I had to heat the tub with a space heater to keep the first bit of water that flowed from the tap from freezing to the bottom.

  Mild frostbite was common. I wore arctic boots at the dinner table. One day I rescued a bull that had fallen through the ice on the lake. Night was coming on, it was 20 below, and he was soaking wet, so I pushed him into the cattle squeeze and dried him off using a pink hair dryer connected by a couple of hundred yards of extension cord plugged in at the house.

  Sometimes, in the winter, other people's sheep and cows came off the mountain into our back pasture, and we'd feed them until the owners could trail them home in the spring. Our ranch was at the base of a cirque in the mountains, and our pastures were the natural catch pens for strays.

  Winter is not just bone-aching cold and white skies. It's the complexities of the season that I love. Sometimes at the ranch warm winds blasted through in January. Steam rose up the rock faces of mountains, while veils of gray clouds wafted by. A black cloud hung over the waterfall. Icicles dripped, then re-froze into wild, bent-back daggers. I had four hours of chores in the morning, two at night. In between, I wrote.

  There were almost no visitors and few forays to town. Winter confinement could be excruciating. If winter means going inward, it also involves the barbs and stings of the place to which you are confined. But the demands of the season and animals returned me to sanity. A bum calf would need feeding, or a wild heifer would have to be brought to the calving barn. The only way to get her in was to think like her, to anticipate her terror. Inside the barn, I played Chopin nocturnes to calm myself, as well as the cows. My own itches left me then, and I could give myself over wholly to the needs of the animals. Later, the northern lights would pulse up—we had a pledge among friends to wake each other if the aurora showed. I knew then that what I had,
where I lived, was enough.

  But things change. Now I live in another part of the state on the skeletal remains of a glacier. Hundreds of scoured-out kettle ponds surround me. Some have water, some do not. Sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans, and Canada geese summer in the ones that do. It is a place famous for its snowy winters.

  My neighbor John says, “The winter of 1986 was the biggest snow year I can remember. Hell, when we shoveled the snow off the roof, we had to fling it upward! It snowed eighteen inches every night, and by the end of the first three weeks of winter, there was nine feet on the ground. To go anywhere was to go down a tunnel. We'd plow a lane to feed the cows and then it'd snow all night and more snow would blow in and bury them. Once the snow slid off the roof and buried ten or twelve yearlings. Another time the cows were crossing the river and the ice broke. They fell in and were trapped in the water. In thirteen minutes, all thirty-five head died, right in front of me. At the house we had to shovel out holes where the windows were, and one for the chimney. A lane had to be plowed from the front door to the barn and the garage, and from there, all the way to the highway—about five miles.”