Dispatches from the End of Ice
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Dispatches from the End of Ice
Dispatches from the End of Ice
BETH PETERSON
TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS
San Antonio, Texas
Published by Trinity University Press
San Antonio, Texas 78212
Copyright © 2019 by Beth Peterson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Book design by BookMatters
Cover design by ALSO
Maps and illustrations by Maya Blue
Author photo by Bobbie Peterson
Frontis: On July 12, 2011, the crew from the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy retrieved a canister dropped by parachute from a C-130, which brought supplies for some midmission fixes.
NASA/Kathryn Hansen.
ISBN 978-1-59534-899-9 hardcover
ISBN 978-1-59534-900-2 ebook
Early versions of these essays were published in River Teeth (“Glaciology”), Passages North (“Driving Wyoming”), Newfound (“Lost: An Inventory”), The Pinch (“Speed of Falling”), the Ocean State Review (“Baffin Island”), Flyway (“Theory of World Ice”), the Mid-American Review (“Wittgenstein’s Cabin”), Terrain.org (“Finding Atlantis”), and Post Road (“Journey to the Center of the Earth”).
Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 39.48-1992.
CIP data on file at the Library of Congress
23 22 21 20 19 | 5 4 3 2 1
for Kate Northrop, Elizabeth Chang, and S. A. Stepanek
CONTENTS
BEFORE
Baffin Island
DISPATCHES FROM THE END
Theory of World Ice
The Philosopher’s Cabin
Driving Wyoming
Lost: An Inventory
Glaciology
About the Collection
Pauling’s Core
The Iceberg Proposal
The Speed of Falling
Cairns
To the Center
On Time
AFTER
Atlantis
Notes
Acknowledgments
BEFORE
BAFFIN ISLAND
THE AMERICAN MIDWEST
A few months after I leave the windswept plains of the Wyoming West for the last time, a flat, white document box comes for me in the mail. When I see the package resting against my front door, I will wonder for a moment if it’s an old passport finally returned or maybe my university diploma. I pick up the box and, still standing on the porch—tall, narrow blades of bluegrass edging the boards, springing up through the wooden-slatted floor—carefully slide it open with a house key. It’s not a passport, a diploma, or anything else I’ve been waiting for. Instead, out of that box slips a small, hand-tipped map, dated 1750.
The map is of Norway, but not the Norway I know. There are no country boundaries between Norway, Sweden, and Finland, only lakes, mountain ranges, and rivers. Regions are separated by color and by tiny dots, bordering the edges. Letters in the place-names—Berghen, Gothland, Stavanger—are fine and carefully printed, some closer together, some farther apart, the lengths and angle of e’s and t’s varying based on their size and position. The sides of the map are crosshatched in black ink, but the rest of the map is painted in faded yellows, blues, and greens. There’s a water spot in one of the corners, then just above that, the name of the mapmaker, Robert de Vaugondy, and his own handwritten note in French “with privilege.”
For almost a year before that box arrived in the mail—a gift, it turns out, from my friend and former professor, Kate—I’d been thinking about maps. I’d hung maps around the tall, white walls of my apartment; I’d watercolor painted a five-foot-wide outline map of the world in vivid blues and purples; I’d placed an old wooden globe that had once been my father’s in the center of my desk, traced its continents onto scraps of paper. I’d even contacted an acquaintance from college who had become a cartographer and asked him if he could tell me how contemporary maps were made.
It had started with a question from a friend. I had intended to write a short collection of poetry in those days in Wyoming, but all my poems had been turning into scenes: nonfiction rescue scenes. At first, those scenes were traditional rescues—bystander saves boy from near-drowning in local lake; family of four and eleven cats escape house fire—but gradually they had become stranger and more unrecognizable: deer jumps through back window of 1998 gold Toyota Tercel; mobile home blows off semi-truck bed in Virginia Dale, Colorado; two men struck by lightning under the same flowering willow. After reading a draft of one of these scenes, a friend had penned a single note on the bottom of my page. “Where,” he asked, “is the rescue?”
I read that note and then I read it again; I walked around, it seemed, for days, along the high mountain plain bordering the city where I lived, trying to pinpoint an answer to my friend’s question. I knew that with his where is the rescue? my friend was asking whether I was actually writing rescue scenes if the people in the scenes don’t get rescued. In the end, though, it was the other part of that double-meaning “where” which always eluded me. The thing I needed to know was where; where in physical space—in what mapped place—would we be safe?
THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
Norse mythology tells a story about a vast chasm and about a rescue. The chasm was famed to be the entrance from one world to the next, the exact spot where the earth originated and where, in the end of all days, it would disappear. As the tale goes, the cosmos was first made of three parts. To the north was the homeland of ice; to the south was the homeland of fire; and between them was a great gap called the Ginnungagap. Described by one writer as the “chaos of perfect silence” and by another as the “yawning emptiness,” the Ginnungagap represented nothingness: an immense primordial void.
Still, this void didn’t stay empty forever. Over time, the land of ice and the land of fire began to move toward each other, gradually overtaking the Ginnungagap. Then, one fateful day, sparks from the land of fire and a frozen river from the land of ice finally met. The fire’s heat warmed the ice until there was frost and then melting frost, and then the melting frost transformed into a frost giant and into a cow; the cow’s milk was the giant’s food; the cow’s food was the salty ice.
It wasn’t just ice though. Caught beneath all that ice was a man. That first day, as the cow licked the ice around her, the man’s hair appeared. On the second day of licking her hot tongue against the frozen water, the man’s head appeared. On the third day, the whole man was freed, cracked out of the ice like a nut from its casing. It was this man, Buri, whose great-grandsons would one day slay the giant, flinging forth from the giant’s frosted body the stars, the sky, and the earth as we know it.
SKJOLDEN, NORWAY
I had not yet heard of the Norse myths when I first traveled to Norway, though perhaps I should have. Sometime before, when my Norwegian grandfather moved several states n
orth—from a two-bedroom apartment he could no longer keep up in the South to a studio in the Midwest, just a few miles from my parents—he’d given me a stack of his old books: Dante’s Inferno, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Faustus, and then one entitled Norse Stories.
“I think you’ll like these,” he told me, pointing toward a cardboard box on his old tan loveseat one afternoon, shortly after he moved in, before he’d even hung pictures on the walls. I cracked open the lid of the box; the ten or eleven books inside were all several decades old. There were a few worn paperbacks. Mostly, though, there were hardcover books, with slightly yellowed pages but still-crisp bindings. The first book I took out of the box was that book, Norse Stories; it was a blue-green hardback, with the title printed in circular letters, just above a pattern of vines-becoming-dragons that wrapped around a single sword.
I brought the books home but did not read them, not before I left for Norway. I was planning then to be in Scandinavia for just one summer: to explore a new place, to trek into different air, to live for a while outside of my own language and uncertain attempts at navigating a career and life and relationships. When I got to Norway, I climbed mountains; I kayaked through snow-fed waters along the long green shoreline; I hiked the edges and then the interiors of Norway’s wide fields of glacial ice—which, glinting in the high summer sun, even in the distance, seemed limitless—and I knew already in those first months that I would be back.
THE NORTH SEA
As early as the fifteenth century, cartographers set out to map the Ginnungagap. Early maps placed this supposed locus of creation somewhere between Greenland and the Atlantic coast of Canada. The gap, it was then believed, proceeded from a vast sea that circled the earth; the gap was a borderland between that outer ocean and the inner one, the ocean that wrapped around, lapped up onto the known world. Later maps pinned the Ginnungagap to the Davis Strait, home of the Northwest Passage, or to the southwestern tip of Baffin Island, with its fierce, fifty-foot tides, its ice-capped mountains, and its polar bears and caribou. In a 1606 map Icelander Gudbrand Thorlaksson located the Ginnungagap between Greenland and modern-day Ireland. In a 1507 map Johannes Ruysch—likely roommate of the artist Raphael—cast the Ginnungagap into the North Sea, as if to say don’t travel beyond this point.
The first map I find of the Ginnungagap is a 1636 rendering by Thordur Thorlaksson, Gudbrand Thorlaksson’s son. The map is preserved in a digitally archived book, with inked-in images, dark and delicate, of a bear, a fox, two men standing side by side on the top of that map, and mountains—drawn as puffs of smoke—circling a central landmass. In the place, though, where there’s supposed to be the Ginnungagap—on the southern side of Davis Strait, just below Baffin Island—a woman’s hand obscures the image. It was an inadvertent copy, no doubt, perhaps quelling a gush of wind from an open window, bumping a green oval “save” button a moment too soon, or scanning one page-view while meaning to stop, turn the book, and scan another. In any case, three of the archivist’s fingers are caught in that image, covered in pink silicone wraps; the other two and a large diamond ring are unwrapped but still bear across the page, each finger perfectly manicured, French-tipped nails pointing east.
LARAMIE, WYOMING
In one of the rescue scenes, I’m hiking with friends along a high mountain pass; it’s summertime, but it’s just begun to snow. We make steady but careful progress, one foot in front of the other, until we can’t move forward anymore. Though we’ve been walking in twos until that point, suddenly all seven of us are there at the same bend. While we’ve been walking in all that falling snow, none of us has realized that there’s a sheer cliff just beyond and the fog has come in thick behind; there’s no way go to back and there’s no clear path ahead.
In another rescue scene, I am trying to pick up a man from the bottom of a pool. It’s early evening. The walls and the ceiling above the pool are painted white, but the dark floods in through the high poolside windows; it reflects on the water. It’s the only reflection on the water; the pool deck is nearly empty; there’s no one watching from the bleachers, no one standing outside the locker rooms, no one walking by in the long white-tiled hallway.
The man lying completely still at the bottom of the pool is my lifeguard teacher; he has instructed each of the eight students in my class to dive first for a penny, then for a red plastic ring and, finally, for his body; he has told us to hoist each of those things through the aqua-blue water and up, onto the rippled concrete. The other students have mostly already finished and gone; one other girl and I are the only ones who remain. The lifeguard teacher has blown his whistle and then descended, fifteen feet to the bottom. It’s my turn to follow.
I do; I dive in a single clear motion, breaking through the water, going three feet then four feet then five feet down. Soon I’m seven then eight and then ten feet into the water, but as I see the body below me, it’s not like the penny and it’s not like the ring; it’s pale and out of focus. I reach for it once and then twice but touch nothing; I come up for air and then try again. No matter how far down I dive, I cannot make my way to him.
In a third rescue scene, I’m back at the pool, except this time the pool is my white-walled bedroom and the water is the humid air and I can’t tell if I’m sinking or treading water, only that it’s the middle of the night and I’m twenty-five and nothing I know is certain. Outside, sleet is coming down hard, with no sign of stopping.
THE DAVIS STRAIT
The Ginnungagap isn’t empty in every version of the Norse myths. One of those tales describes cold winds from that chasm transforming mist from the North into huge blocks of ice. The blocks of ice thundered as they fell into the gap and became rivers—there in the chasm—rivers of frost that flowed to meet the fire. In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the thirteenth-century source for the Norse legends, the fire is personified, a character at the very edge of the land brandishing a single flaming sword.
Another version of the story adds that the frost giant wasn’t just “slain”; he was thrown off a high cliff by Buri’s great-grandsons, back into the Ginnungagap. When the body of the giant landed, so much blood pooled that it drowned nearly everything around it. As the frost giant lay there lifeless, from his blood came the seas; from his skin came the land; from his hair came the trees; from his bones came the mountains; from his skull came the sky; and from his spilt brains—lush and gray—came all manner of clouds, straight out of the breach.
In an art exhibit entitled Ginnungagap, after the Norse myth, Swedish visual artist Sigrid Sandström created twenty-four multimedia paintings of varying sizes of the same icy landscape depicted in the Prose Edda. The paintings, some watercolor, some acrylic, were shaded in deep blues, blacks, and purples, sharp shards of ice and rock bordering a rift in one, softer rounded edges of snow spilling into a valley in another. Along with the paintings were two short films, playing on repeat. In one of the films, a man planted a black flag in an otherwise starkly white landscape. In the other film, a buoy propped up another small flag as it floated through the middle of a choppy blue sea. At the end of the installation, the man returned to take out the flag he had planted, and the buoy eventually drifted offscreen.
“When a man plants a flag,” noted art critic Jen Graves, in an article about the exhibit, “he imagines that his ownership radiates outward from his hand like a nuclear blast, touching what has become his. But he does not make a home here. Sandström suggests that ownership is a poor substitute for knowledge—and that representing an object or a place in art is like staking a claim in inhospitable land.”
SVALBARD, NORWAY
By the late 1600s mapmakers had begun to question their own renderings, “to struggle,” as one historian put it, to reconcile the geography of the Old Norse world with contemporary findings. Eventually even the word “Ginnungagap” began to change in meaning—from the sacred creative space at the world’s origin to any mighty or “chaotic chasm”—and Ginnungagaps came to mark on maps maelstroms or w
hirlpools and then the ocean itself. In the last maps that show the Ginnungagap, the word began to represent “holes” or “edges” where the world of people didn’t perfectly fill the world of fire and ice.
By the 1700s the Ginnungagap and even the idea of the outer ocean had been framed in the topography of fiction. Explorers had not found the entrance to other worlds or other oceans on any of their voyages, across sea or across land, and the art of mapmaking had gained a different focus and sort of precision. With a clearer knowledge of longitude and a more scientific attention to tracing observational on-the-ground information, European mapmakers turned away from the imaginative and speculative elements present in prior maps and toward mapping, as one historian notes, “as utility.”
In 1757, only seven years after making the map that came in that flat, white box to my porch, Robert de Vaugondy and his son published The Atlas Universel, a set of 108 maps that were noted not only for having more accurate latitude and longitude marks but also for citing in a preface their geographical sources. By this time, maps had begun to claim objectivity, operating, as theorist Anne McClintock puts it, as “a technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a place in a pure scientific term, operating under the guise of scientific exactitude.” Vaugondy and his son’s maps of Scandinavia and other places were sent to more than a thousand subscribers initially but then circulated even beyond those hands.
By the time I search for “Ginnungagap” on the world map—250 years after Vaugondy—I find that the word now only denotes a single icy valley on the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard, dipping deeply between a mountain and a fjord.