The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  No land in sight. Glaucous gulls wheel by, showing their claws. I long for sweet corruption: a sip of tea, a bit of chocolate, Gary's embrace. A patch of cobalt shows briefly before whitening. Who said the abyss was black? Brash ice swishes past the steel hull as if stroking it to a deeper tenderness—one that is inherent in every season, even winter, but is often overlooked. Winter has the first kiss and the last laugh. Shhh … shhh … shhh … Breath sweeps mind. Snow erases it.

  Part Six

  ON COLD CLIFF

  Here where the trail disappears

  form asks shadow where to.

  —HAN SHAN

  THE BLACK MOON

  Hanyen. “Cold Cliff.” That's where I'm walking. In Wyoming another winter has arrived. By October 30 three feet of snow had fallen; by November 8 there were four. Now the steps I make to get up on this cliff are canyons and sinks and, in some places, holes that go down so deep they form another set of legs, perhaps the ones these storms walked in on.

  Below is a glacier-carved meadow, and beyond, the cordillera's stacked revetments. Since early October walls of white have been drifting. Now the cliff edge is a sculpted cornice and the mountains’ granite blades are tearing snow clouds to get back to blue.

  I've been snowed in at my cabin for a month. My cell phone only works on this hill, and even then it's iffy. Too often the cold makes the batteries go dead before the call goes through. My pickup is parked three miles away at the paved road. I'm trying to get out, but it's taking a long time. Each day I squeeze more belongings—both clothes and books—into a big Dana backpack, step into snowshoes, and trudge off the moraine, but two round trips—twelve miles a day breaking trail all the way—is all I can manage. The light is gone by four in the afternoon, and one night, as I came in late on snowshoes and floundered in drifting snow, three wolves followed me home.

  My neighbors are gone, blizzards sweep through, white dunes sail. Mornings, I tromp down a path between the cabin and my pickup, but snow keeps stacking up and the tracks drift in as soon as they are made. There is hardly a sign of my comings and goings, of my having been here at all.

  Red sky at sunrise means more storms to come. But for now there is sun and the world is encased in heavy sparkle. All the way up the mountain, lights are flashing. Sun beats against snow and snow against sun—a one-man percussion band, winter's Morse code tapping out what message?

  Smooth slopes, sagebrush, aspen branch, pine needle, barbed wire, fence post—all are spangled. I peer down; the snowflakes that cover a willow leaf are flat blades, radiant wings, pearles-cent cloth. Gary was supposed to visit; now he's not coming. I brush my hand across the leaf's surface: clear-cut. The flapping stops, and the light show. The flakes are shorn.

  Why does the world keep erasing itself? And who's doing the erasing? Returning to my cabin exhausted, I see that a moose has used my trail. Oh, I'm happy—her deep tracks making curve cuts inside of mine. We don't need conjugal visits, the moose and I. Her unseen presence is enough.

  Below Sam's grave the moose's tracks split off from mine and go north. The pulsing sparkle subsides. The cabin sheds snow from its roof in stiff manes, as if white horses were standing in front of the windows. There is no view.

  As I sit quietly, snow scratches air like sand. I bring tea into water with a whisk. Not leaves but powder swirling. This blizzard. I drain the cup. It breaks. The snow around the cabin is green.

  Early evening. At Hanyen a heavy-grained dusk encloses the cliff. Under the snow, wild blossoms are shut tight and withered grasses still lie tangled. I think of the terns, flying the Tropic of Capricorn toward Queen Maud Land, thrumming the strings of magnetic-field lines as if playing a guitar. Their flight paths gird the planet north to south, crossing the Hol-arctic ones of fulmars, the east-west flights of hummingbirds, the round-the-world peregrinations of albatross at el fin del mundo.

  Not moving. The day decays. Not into snow—it's too cold for that—but into the fast fade of sun-embossed slopes. I face the great wall of mountains. Altar or barricade? Maybe both. Dark envelops me. Then, from behind a peak, something shines, but what? Now I see: a black moon rises.

  Not quite black but copper all blotched, or else dried blood with mist spraying from it, and the center gone black. Who rubbed ashes on this face? There's a tale of a Chinese monk who drowned trying to catch the moon, but what story tells of a moon that has burned?

  Up it goes, oh, so smoothly, a spinning rosewood burl rotting to ebony, an ember floating, seeking oxygen with which to fan its own fires. Now I see: it's only a stony globe, a dark seed.

  A lunar eclipse occurs when the full moon's tilted orbit enters the Earth's shadow. A horizontal line strings the three pearls of sun-Earth-moon. Earth blocks sun; moon receives shadow. A few of the sun's rays keep scattering forward to tint the moon red. Then they too are blocked as the moon swings slowly into the shade.

  Moon is a dropped rock, accidental, moody, receiving only the light that sun deigns to give. Yet its tug is stronger than we are. Who of us can pull out a set of unturned waves, make them break, sweep them back again?

  Between is the blue-and-dustbin Earth with her throbbing glaciers, trapped air bubbles, star-beaded skies, rising oceans, and overheated cities hemmed together with cars.

  Sun is restless. Four days before this eclipse the most powerful solar eruption ever recorded occurred. The sun swelled and shrank as gases, pulled from the interior, burst at the surface, cooled, and were sucked inward again. It's magnetic-field lines aren't as orderly as Earth's. The sun's lines tangle with superheated plasma and are dragged sideways by ferocious winds until the gaseous knots explode in sunspots and burst through the solar corona in billion-ton clouds of matter, each one big enough to swallow several Earths.

  I look skyward. “Where is the dark seed which grows the forget-you-plant?” the Japanese poet Sosei wrote in 890. Black tulips might grow from this moon's seed, if it germinated. It does not. The mist dissolves. At midtotality the moon is utterly absorbed by night.

  Now black. It was only borrowed light anyway. The 1,382,000-kilometer-long shadow is the thing. It shoots oblivion into everything. I pace the edge of the moraine. The cliff floats and the moon is dead. A river of darkness runs between.

  I click on my phone. There's just enough battery time for one short call. My friend Tony answers. He's in the backseat of a car on his way into Manhattan. I ask if he can see the eclipse. He sticks his head out the car window, the New York wind hitting his phone and spurting out of mine. “Yes! Yes! Fangul! It's all—” Click. The battery goes dead. It's fifteen degrees below zero, and my phone-holding hand is numb.

  Far below I see something moving: it's the moose headed up-canyon. Come back! I cry. Use my trail anytime. Before my voice carries across the meadow to her, she's gone. I move down from the moraine. My snowshoes sink. There is no moon. Without it, will the tides stop changing? Will women get pregnant? Will we stop going mad?

  Yesterday I read about a bioluminescent sea sponge, the Eu-plectella, which lives in utter darkness at a depth of between five hundred and one thousand feet. Its body is made of light-emitting fibers called spicules, glass cores infused with sodium ions that make it shine. With the light it manufactures inside its own body, the Euplectella shines a path forward, then drifts on it to find food. In the abyss, it is its own sun.

  There's nothing like that here. Just wolves, bears, moose, elk, coyotes, and humans skulking around, and a moon that has disappeared from sight. Tonight the terns from the Arctic are dropping down from heights of twenty thousand feet to skim the sea surface for fish, before going aloft again. Equatorial night has already closed down fast on their wings; South African light will lift them.

  At the cabin I knock down the snow shed from the metal roof. The once-hidden view now reveals only a blank: night plastered on top of night, and no glimpse of the errant moon. In Greenland, before modern times, total darkness brought on psychotic events in arctic foxes, sled dogs, and humans. Running in circle
s, biting, howling, and hallucinating were common disorders due to mineral, fat, and light deprivation.

  I eat a handful of almonds and sit tight. Then something does show: the moon in transit is a bright rind bursting from the lower edge of a globe. As the black patch begins to disappear, the high peaks of the Rockies, crowded together in their secret mountain fastness, light up.

  Somewhere deep in the canyon the moose is following a trail and the string lake at her feet takes on silver. It is another kind of moon come down to her, a void describing a full circle, a full circle emptying into a void. She lowers her head, hits the ice hard with her right paddle until water seeps up. Silver floats to her lips. She drinks, then takes the moon's bright promise with her, into the heart of the mountains—all glacier-smoothed granite and hung with moon-spangled ice.

  Upstream, pushing into a tangle of willows, she nibbles a few red leaves as the inward-shining light of a blind moon and an imploding sun loosens itself all over the place. Then, dropping to her knees as do I—not to a false god or a real one, but to life itself—the moose surveys her surroundings, lies on her frozen bed, and sleeps.

  LAST CALL

  Weeks ago the sandhill cranes circled, practicing flight patterns, getting ready to fly south. Swans huddled in the last patch of open water—a quiet dogleg off a stream. Ice had been growing at the edges of their pond, glazing over water like cataracts. By the time it reached all the way to the center, the cranes, swans, and the last pair of western bluebirds were gone.

  Now, as I snowshoe home in silence, the tilted-up, ice-carved fenders of the moraine seem lifeless. Icy winds make my eyes water, or are they real tears? We seem to have forgotten that we can choose how we want the world to be by making transformation possible—from GNP to GNB—from the production of goods to the possibilities of beauty.

  Reaching the cabin, I enact the same small rituals: lighting the kerosene lamp, starting a fire in the woodstove, making tea, lighting a stick of incense for Sammy.

  Some days I wonder why I'm here, why I'm anywhere, and what kind of “weather” and whose flight paths keep all the random bits of life from flying apart. It still astounds me that neural patterns “describe” events in temporal succession until an image appears in the mind's eye, then another and another. Narrative begins that way, and symphony, and the whole juicy mess of the human condition. Neural weather is wild, and so is the mind of river, ocean, blizzard, and moraine.

  Lately, when I'm very tired, I've felt neurological shifts— nothing alarming, just a brain lesion being scratched, or the part of my life relegated to lighting-induced amnesia trying to escape its blank cage. On those days I make coffee, strong. It looks like the night, and I drink it down. Outside, in the silence left behind by migrating birds, I listen for the B-flat of a black hole squeezing and heating galactic gas, pushing it into concentric ripples 35,000 light-years apart until a sound is emitted, a long-held note fifty-seven octaves below middle C. But I hear nothing and go back inside.

  To live remotely—though sometimes strangled by loneliness—to be pursued by wolves or bears that might eat me, or bulldozed down by an angry moose, prickles my skin, causes jubilation, fast heartbeats, and whoops of joy. Mornings I compose thought from birdsong; evenings I count droplets, like money, in rising mist. Here, and everywhere, the primordial overrides what we are conditioned to think, feel, perceive, and believe. I once had a dog whose breathing moved the world.

  Grasping and rejecting—there's been plenty of that in my life. But here the real keeps driving into the false. Morning comes. Night comes. Morning returns.

  I pack the last of my books and clothes and step into my snow-shoes. Standing in the doorway, I bow to the stacked-up “standing dead” pine trees that make this house, then to Sammy in his grave. Sideslipping down a cornice of snow onto an old track—the one I've been trying to keep packed hard for two months—I begin the three-mile jaunt to my pickup truck. The snowshoes still sink, but the hidden track beneath is firm and it holds me.

  Winter's embrace is offered this way. It is a long arm— ephemeral, hidden, and oddly sturdy. Far above are the bird paths that bind pole to continent, to island, to moraine, to pole. I make my own feeble track across wind-hardened snowdrifts and abandoned swan ponds, and wonder how much longer the season of winter will exist and if we'll survive. Behind me is the moose trail entering winter's oblivion, and the meadow, a thousand acres wide, its snowy expanse carved by wind en cabochon—in fluid curves instead of facets.

  The claws of my snowshoes scrape across hard crust and curds of fallen snow fall like little universes from the aluminum frames. I dig in hard with my poles and wonder if there's a black moon tumbling beneath this planet that is, like a tern, caught in shadow and pining for light.

  Wind drives fine-grained snow before my feet. Gaby is panting now, or is it a smile? Ahead, sun shafts light into the mountains and another storm mounds up behind. All I know is this—and maybe I don't know it at all: the winter world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  Like a heart patient who does not know if she will live through the night, I find myself pondering the future of ice, which is really the future of life. Will life continue, or have we put into action a global machinery that has already destroyed too much and cannot be stopped? In this book—a love affair with winter—ice has been the canary. To educate yourself about climate change, its causes, and how it affects us biologically and culturally, is easy and simple, and there is no excuse for ignorance.

  The following easy-to-find Internet sites will inform the reader of breaking news about all aspects of climate change, global warming, sudden cooling, the North Atlantic Drift, rising sea levels, water-world emergencies, desertification, the effects of pollutants on climate, ecosystem shifts, habitat fragmentation, species extinctions, the spread of disease, the early onset of spring, the causes of severe weather in temperate climates, the death of coral reefs, the melting of the last ice sheets, the changes in global atmosphere and ocean-circulation systems, and pollution transport systems, among many other topics.

  The very best science magazines are available online as well as in print. They are indispensable, since no published book can keep up with news about climate change. They are: nature.com, scientificamerican.com; sciencenews.com; newscientist.com; peopleandplanet.net, and sciencemag.org; as well as the online services of NASA, NOAA, and the EPA.

  Other valuable sites can be found by using search engines and specific sites. The ones I used daily were: SIRS, Google News—climate change, Yahoo, NOAA, NRDC, Climateark, Worldwildlife, and Questia, among many others. All these will lead the reader to many more links about the changing environment.

  The following books were invaluable: E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life; Paul Mayewski and Frank White, The Ice Chronicles; The Random House Atlas of Bird Migration; David Allen Sibley, The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior; E. C. Pielou, A Naturalist's Guide to the Arctic; Peter Marchand, Life in the Cold; James Halfpenny and Roy Douglas Ozanne, Winter: An Ecological Handbook; Paul Ehrlich et al, The Birder's Handbook; Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield, Holistic Management; Carl Safina, The Eye of the Albatross; Bernd Heinrich, Winter World; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays; Derek Walcott, Omeros; Suzuki Bokushi, Snow Country Tales; Muso Soseki, Sun at Midnight; Red Pine, trans., Poems of the Masters; Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain; Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens; James Welch, Fools Crow; Gladys Reichard, Navaho Religion; Rockwell Kent, Voyaging; Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle; Colin McEwan et al., Patagonia; and Fridtjof Mehlum, The Birds and Mammals of Svalbard.

  In addition were the conversations with biologists, clima-tologists, ornithologists, and geographers I met during my travels. Among them were Kristen Larson, George Divoky, Ko de Korte, Paul Mayewski, Allan Savory, and, especially, Brendan Kelly, at the University of Alaska, who elucidated quandaries when no one else could.

  Every conversation we can
have about the beauty and vigor of the world and the damage being done to it is vitally important. In so doing, we pay homage to what Ted Hoagland calls the world's “infinite harmonious unruliness.”

  Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks to those who assisted me during the writing of this book. First, to Marty Asher of Vintage Books, who called me in my winter-bound tent to ask if I'd write it; to my editor, Dan Frank, whose enthusiasm and vision have inspired me for twenty years. To Rita Donham and Jaimie Burgess, my Wyoming neighbors, deep thanks. To John and Lucy Fandek for midwinter shelter and an unforgettable canoe trip through ice; to Betsy Greenwood and Tom Brown, Maggie Miller, Rick and Jennifer Ridgeway, Malinda and Yvon Chouinard, Happy and Ken Price, and Jan Andrews, all of whom lent me their homes, provided showers, food, and, most important, friendship. Throughout the writing of this book, Mark Domek was single-handedly building a beautiful cabin for me, which I now happily inhabit. Thanks to his family, Pat Poletti, Callie, and Sara. I'm grateful to my childhood friend and architect Karl G. Smith, who put the cabin on paper; to Huntley Dornan, who helped with research; to Michael Wenger at San Francisco Zen Center, an extraordinary friend who talked to me about circles and ceremony; to Barbara Wenger; and to Bill Porter— Red Pine—for his marvelous translations and commentaries.As always, I'm indebted to my teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Thanks to my dear pal in London, David Buckland, and his Cape Farewell Project that took me to Spitsbergen; to Ko de Korte and all those who sailed on the Noorderlicht; to my sister Galen Wood, and to Mary Hebner, Tamara Asseyev, and Hillary Hauser, who provide moral support wherever I am. To Robin, Jim, and Crister Brady, who helped with Sam; to Brent and Patty at the Pinedale Vet Clinic; to Annick Smith and Bill Kittredge, friends and neighbors during stints in Montana; to John McGough, who has given my horses a home; to William Gilchrist, who took care of Sam and Gaby during my long absences; to my friend William Merwin for his poems and translations; and to my mentor, Edward Hoagland. In memory of those recently lost: Louis Netzer, Bunker Sands, James Welch, and John Lewis Hopkin, who gave me my first dog, Rusty; and to the memory of canine friends who “went over the ridge” during the writing of this book: Sam, his sister Yaki, and his friend Chester. And to Gary Delp, my love and thanks.