The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Our tent faced the mountains, its screened window a perfect triangle. Through it the moon was a half-eaten orange. My attention was fully focused on Sam; we were idle and together all day long. As a result, the world slowed as if Earth had paused in her massive rotation. Every tiny thing loomed large: flies coming to life in a sunny window and the ones on their backs, their legs wheeling as they died. The days were real, Sam was real, and his death would be real too.

  It was August, and on a Friday a brutal wind blew all afternoon. I had offered to take a friend's mother to a luncheon on a remote ranch. When I returned, friends from California— Robin, Jim, and their son, Crister, were at my camp. But something was terribly wrong. They were crouching over Sam. He was having a grand mal seizure. He had lesions in his brain from being hit by lightning with me years earlier. Since then he had become prone to mild seizures. But this one had him thrashing, and it would not stop. By the time I found a vet, two hours had gone by.

  He lay in a cage at the local clinic for six days. The seventh day, Gary came down from Montana to be with me. When we arrived at the clinic the next morning, I was shocked to see Sam sitting up. When I called out his name, he turned and looked at me. He'd been lying flat for six days; he'd been deaf for six months. Now, suddenly, unbelievably, he could move and hear.

  At noon Gary and I put Sam in the clinic's outside pen to lie in the sun, then went to lunch. When we came back, Sam was walking around and sniffing. He heard us coming, turned and looked at us as if to say, get me the hell out of here. I called Brent, the vet, to come outside. He said he'd never seen a recovery like this before. He hugged me, he hugged Sam. The emergency passed; Gary returned to Montana.

  Sam and I went home that night. He slept soundly on his bed next to mine. Part of the reason I'd opted to live in a tent was so we could be together at dog level, and the arrangement had pleased him. Three days passed. Sam wobbled and walked, lapped up the buffalo broth I made for him, sniffed flowers, and slept. I had to go away for a night and left Sam in the care of friends with whom he had often stayed. The next morning he crashed. I felt overwhelmed by guilt. I raced to the clinic where he'd been taken. For ten hours I sat with him. By evening he was dead.

  My neighbors Rita and Jamie came for me. Rita drove my pickup, and I held Sam on my lap. I talked to him, draped over my knees, all the way home. Mark was at the cabin. When he saw Sam, he quietly grabbed a shovel. I hadn't thought where to bury him, but the moment we drove in, I knew. Across a swale from the cabin's south-facing window seat, there's an eight-foot-high boulder erratic, deposited there during the last ice age. The rock stands alone on a knob below a cirque of eleven-thousand-foot mountains. It's lion colored and dappled with lichen. A crease runs down the middle like Sam's furrowed brow.

  Mark, Rita, Jaime, and I took turns digging Sam's grave. I held him for a long time, then wrapped him in his red blanket. He was still warm when I laid him in the earth. A small white rock, dug up from the well, marks his grave.

  9

  That was six months ago. Now it's late winter and there's a full moon. From John and Lucy's cabin I drive to the end of the drifted-in lane and ski to Sam's grave. The moon is so bright it looks like the sun. Snow is deep, soft in some places and in others hard drifts. The crust breaks open; I plunge in. Changing from skis to snowshoes, I still sink deep. Yet a path opens up, no matter which way my webbed feet turn. The way is lumpy, mountainous, bare, an undulating circuit into white. Over the lip of a moraine, I come to my unfinished cabin and, across the way, the boulder where Sam is buried.

  The moon is an eye watching us. Gaby and I start for the grave. But the snow is deep and I sink down. Fumbling for incense and matches, I realize my fingers are wet. The incense breaks and the matches fail to light. While walking among the dead one is supposed to envision drinking amrita from skull cups, but right now I only want to summon Sam's ghost and make sure the red blanket in which he's buried is still keeping him warm. I want to hold him again.

  A few more steps and I'm up to my waist in snow, then down in it. Am I sinking into a storm? I flail ridiculously, then catch myself. Gaby is thrashing too. She stands on my feet like a child learning to dance. When I fall again, something breaks inside me.

  Back across the swale we go to the unfinished cabin. Inside, I light a Coleman stove and melt snow in a pan for water. How many hundreds of times have I done this? In Greenland villages, ice is hacked from stranded icebergs and left stacked behind each house like cordwood to be melted for drinking water.

  Gaby drinks snow water and I sip tea. We are hiding from the power of dark energy that's threatening to rip apart the cosmos; we teeter on the edge of time at the event horizon of a black hole embedded in a hot cauldron of gases equal to 2.6 million suns. We are told of a dark, circular shadow where the rays pass through, never again to emerge. We worship a sun that is killing itself and will be gone in 5 million years, first collapsing, then expanding uncontrollably until the seas boil away and Earth becomes a charred ember.

  I tell these things to Gaby, but she doesn't care. Satiated, she lies on her back, paws up, and smiles. I turn off the stove and stretch out on the cold floor beside her. Outside, a few flakes drift down and a wind picks up. Slowly, slowly, snow fills in our tracks, erasing the dog-and-human lineage of Sam senior to Rusty senior to Rusty junior to Sam, and the circle of Mark, Pat, and me.

  A burr pricks me. I pluck it from under my leg and hold it up: its stickers are arranged in spirals. Rotate it one way, it's a universe auguring inward. Rotate it the other way, it's the riptide of dark energy tearing the burr apart. I toss it and step into my skis. Every second is a universe. Gaby barks. Snow glistens as far as the eye can see.

  I dawdle the rest of the day, skiing around, napping on snowbanks, whittling a stick that a beaver has already whittled. To touch winter this way—with my elbows and back and hair—is to operate on desolation, sew it up with tropical sinew, and solder it with sun-fires.

  Late in the day the sun glazes mountains, valleys, rivers, and ponds with a pearl-powder shine. Sagebrush pops up as if it had grown suddenly. Earth breathes, leaving behind a faint scent. The place where Sam is buried is a view of the world without end. It is the center and the edge of time; it's the place where eyelids fall away. I'd like to be buried beside him.

  Finally Gaby and I head for the highway. The sun's last gasp is a flare of pink that torches a path upward to a dissolving cloud. By the time I reach the road, the stripe has loosened into a ruffle. Dusk comes and the pink slips from sight—just like the way Sam left the world. Night is a regular uncertainty.

  10

  It's March. Dawn light is the color of snow. Snow looks like day. Day is bent sideways by red willows that are ribbed with white. South-facing eaves drip; north-facing eaves are hung with icicles. It snows everywhere. In the cab of my pickup, I listen to the news. The war with Iraq is imminent. We're so good at making war on each other, but peace is difficult. We humans are addicted to conflict; we make war on lovers, friends, neighbors, and nations of plants, animals, bugs, fish, and human tribes. We want things our way and now. It's hard to understand that all such tensions are really the dynamic expression of union.

  Out the window, a magpie alights on a moose's back. Under the snow, extended families of muskrats huddle together to stay warm; I make dinner for John while Lucy is on call; five snow crystals combine to make a single snowflake that falls; ravens nest communally. Winter teaches us cooperative living, not war.

  Later. I ski down to the frozen river. A cloud lies over it like a feather boa—soft over hard, mist over river ice. I ponder the Diné (Navajo) words that can mean two opposing things at once: the word for “up” can also mean “down.” Everywhere in nature I see opposites moving toward resolution. Species do not compete but rather cooperate within a natural hierarchy.

  A wind comes from the north and blows out the sun. Winter begins again. I split more wood and light a cooking fire. A curtain falls: it is a snowbank sliding. I thin
k of the economic and political lessons of the glaciers I saw at the other end of the world. Here, planes of light shift mountain shadows up one cliff, then erase them from the opposite wall. I rattle back across the icy ski track. The sky darkens and the moon rises. Unlike the sun, the moon worships us, while we “civilized” beings make “progress” by perpetuating rolling waves of destruction against every living thing—the entire sentient world—and, in so doing, kill what tenderness resides in us.

  A hundred years ago a Zuni predicted that at the end of the world there would be famine. “It is already in our midst but we can't see it because it's hidden by the false bounty of the stores. At the end, our tools and technologies will rise against us. The stars will fall and we will all be boiled by hot rain.”

  After snow, clouds slide up the valley like smoke, and salt sage holds tiny lights of frost, lording over bunchgrass. The blue wisps of alpine fescue look like smoke: what will be left of the world after being ravaged by fires. A raven grooms herself on a glacial erratic cocked sideways. Long ago, glaciers seeded this valley with boulders and stones, broadcasting them like pieces of time—old biscuits and discarded ideas. “You stay here, while I go on,” the glacier said, dropping an armload of granite, tipping its hip and shoulder, lowering its head until all the rock had slipped from her.

  The same is true in human love: one stays, one goes; there are successes and failures. It does not matter which way the glacier stepped or if she maintained her equilibrium. There are always these deposits being made. Gift or insult to stability? Which are they? Perhaps both. As in any movement—a walk, a waltz, or a leap of love—the grace is in how boldly we falter. The awkwardness itself is the dance: a stepping forward, a slipping back, a storm pitching over the notched cirque of a mountain wall until sun reappears.

  Part Three

  THE UNFASTENED:

  ON THE SPANISH RIVER

  1

  John and Lucy invite me on a “winter float.” They like to be the first ones on the river. It's 12 degrees and the river is covered by ice. We drag the canoe through deep snow, and wait. An eagle flies a perfect circle above us as the day warms. People on the other side of the globe are killing each other, but here, the earth is just waking up: a stunted icefall starts to thaw, a bruised avalanche chute sheds white curds and wisps, an island in the stream bursts through its miniature ice cap.

  There's a thrumming whonk the river ice shifts. “Let's go,” John whispers. We slide the canoe off the snowbank and bang it onto a crack until water leaks through. Panes of ice wheel from the bow, like the workings of a clock churning suddenly. My mind's sheer cliffs lie flat. World-sorrow drowns. River water runs, the color of fish skin and kiwi sorbet. Riffles chatter, clouds part. When the sun comes, the river takes it as its own, and the canoe floats on top of that burning.

  Ahead we hear shallow water running fast. John steers left, aiming for deeper water, and we glide a blue, sluicing channel that puts us on a collision course with a rock. I'm in the front of the boat, digging in hard with my paddle, but John's geometry isn't working. We hit the midstream boulder, tip, and fall.

  A duck flies up. There's green by my ear. Water floods in. I'm on my back in frigid water that finds its way to my skin. John stands. He's laughing. His camera case is floating downstream. Lucy extricates herself from under the canoe's middle strut, spitting water. “Were you just going to let me drown?” she asks. John smiles. We're dressed for winter, not canoeing, and our knee-high arctic boots are brimming with water.

  We right the canoe and climb through thigh-deep snow among willows. The sun emerges and there's frost fall in the air: the “glitterati” have come to bring us winter cheer. The house up ahead has smoke curling from its chimney. Western hospitality dictates: we barge in, dripping, and warm up by a stranger's fire.

  “How'd you like your river trip?” John asks, grinning, on the way home. We were on the water barely ten minutes. It takes the rest of the day to get warm.

  2

  The wind is wrong, and days go by before we can go out on the river again. In the night I wake with a strange longing: to feel cold water close over my face, for full immersion. I can't help but think about all the kinds of war we wage, and at the same time remember the river: the fractured ice, the glinting green, the startled duck, the way water let the slim hull of the canoe split open the river, and the way it flowed back together again, healed. With the melting of the ice packs, deforestation, desertification, and low snowpack, our water world is drying up. What kind of perversity allows us to create landscape as an aspect of mind and with that same mind become its destroyer? Why is there beauty?

  In the morning the pissed-off moose that lives by the cabin munches willow contentedly, and the black bear on the hill takes another wintertime nap. I try to keep these rustic joys and our destruction of the natural world in mind simultaneously, but it is a tortuous practice, one that leaves me despairing.

  I drive up the road to the end of the pavement, strap on snowshoes, and walk, recalling that when Anton Chekhov set out in the month of April 1890 for the island of Sakhalin, he was coughing up blood. It was a four-thousand-mile journey that lasted three months. He had only two coats, a pair of leather boots, a bottle of cognac, and a knife for “killing tigers.” He wrote to his sister: “I have my fur coat on. My body is all right but my feet are freezing. I wrap them in the leather overcoat, but it is no use. I have two pair of breeches on.”

  I wear Polartec and step lightly in a world that is warming, even though the day is cold. Later, I tend my householder's fire and make tea, heavily smoked Lapsang souchong. How lucky I am to be able to live anywhere in the world. Yet I can be just as stuck as those without such freedoms.

  Odysseus, on his way home from war, was taken by a flood, heaved onto shore, and made love to by a goddess. He survived “winter's hoary blasts,” wrung out “the scum of the wild ocean” from his hair, and remained “wonder-fixed.” That's my prescription for each of us. To be driven into action by the wild beauty and difficulty of a place; to make decisions about it based on biological health—what we can do for the earth— not how much money we can pimp from it.

  3

  We are following wolf tracks. The sun is out and water is leaking from under snowbanks at the edge of the river. The wolves traveled at dawn. There were two of them, John says. A gray wolf and one that is blackish brown. We can see where the snow inside their splayed tracks has been melted by sun and re-frozen so that now the tracks shine like dropped coins. Later, the rising moon will slide across them, followed by the shadow of the mountain, and snow will refill them until all signs of the wolves are erased. We follow the wolves into an aspen grove pinned to a slope, then lose them completely.

  A crust has hardened the meadow, and we portage the green canoe across it. We're attempting to float the river again. On the bank we find more tracks. The wolves came for water. I see where they pawed at the edge, broke through ice, and licked the shards.

  At water's edge, trapped bubbles wiggle. Shelves of ice that float from the sides of boulders like wings have turned to a sugary slush. We slide the canoe in and startle four swans. They flap hard, turn midair, and disappear upstream. We let the current take us down. The river is shallow, and sun on shallow water is warped time. Past becomes present. There is no future. A six-foot-high snowbank undulates as we pass, paddling in slow time.

  Panes of ice float alongside the canoe as if broken out of something we can't see. The war escalates. A war against Iraq that is self-serving and unfair. Almost two hundred years ago an Inuit man who was told about World War I asked why people who did not even know each other would fight.

  Nights, I'd been reading the Norse myth Ragnarok. It begins: “An axe-age, a sword-age, shields will be gashed; there will be a wind-age and a wolf-age before the world is wrecked.” By floating this river I am trying to understand the global war against the planet, against those who try to live in accord with it. I listen and look to see what, from the river, I can
learn.

  Winter is a time when we see into things. One minute, life is so much mush; in the next, it comes clear. We break through ice to come on more ice, one translucent door opening onto another. The construct of a single snowflake belies winter's genius: how seeming opacities translate into see-through, cartwheeling membranes that stack up and compress into ice mountains; diamond-hard sparks that slice away self-deception. If blizzards bring on oblivion, their winds also whisk it away. What's left is a swept-out room of stark beauty and clear light.

  Mallards fly up as we move downstream. Panes of ice hit the hull of the boat, spin away, bump into others, and drive them sideways, slowing until the broken pieces of mirror merge and float as one. Each is a lesson in geometry. How many shapes can there can be?

  Diamonds, swords, and goblets. That's what winter's GNP is. But the diamonds dissolve as we pass, the swords buckle, and the goblets break, joyously spilling their contents: water going back to water. Winter's starting point and font is water. Ice is water's best student; later, water learns from ice. We glide on the current of the vertical as if running across the edge of a sword. One cut and all delusion drops away.

  The canoe slides through a white tunnel on a river that ticks and spits. The banks are walls of snow, sinuous depositions that sag and glisten where the sun's torch has drawn a bead on ice letting water into the seam. The river is fast, its bottom gold. We paddle until the surface smoothes out, then let the current take us. The swans and Canada geese we spooked earlier keep landing on the river just ahead. Now, each time we round a bend, we startle them again. They fly forward as if their job is to pull the river into existence for our boat.