BERGEN, NORWAY
When I first traveled to Norway, I carried with me everywhere a blue laminated notecard on which I’d penned the addresses, approximate locations, and best routes to anywhere that seemed important: the airport, the guesthouse where I was staying, the bank, the U.S. embassy, the store, the post office, even the national park where the Norwegian glaciers are. I had no phone with me in those days and no way to get online except one shared dial-up computer that cost four or five dollars a minute; it seemed prudent to always keep locations on hand.
I brought the blue card back my second summer in Norway and my third, but I realized even then—taking out the card my first day back that third year—that the place had changed. The bank and tourist information stops had both moved somewhere down the street; bus and ferry route numbers were different. The village where I stayed—once remote—now had cruise ships arriving five or six times a summer. When I returned to the glacier, there was so much less snow and ice that I thought at first that I had boarded the wrong bus.
My sixth summer in Norway, I searched for a map of Baffin Island. What I stumbled onto instead was a rash of recent news. Researchers led by Gifford Miller from the University of Colorado had been studying mosses on the island, carbon-dating the plant life that they were finding under the island’s receding ice caps. Not long after beginning their study, the scientists began to uncover a strange phenomenon; as the ice melted, there was a fifty-year period when plants at different altitudes seemingly all froze at once, defying usual expectations for higher or lower freeze points dependent on altitude.
The time period, Miller and the rest of the researchers recognized, must have been the beginning of the Little Ice Age, at the end of the thirteenth century. After studying computer climate models and environmental disruptions at that historical moment, the scientists made a further realization; the abrupt onset of the freeze suggested something else important and yet undiscovered: the ice was caused by something swift, something catastrophic.
The Ice Age wasn’t a fluke or a cycle, Miller hypothesized; tiny particles of sulfur suddenly blocked out a portion of the world’s sunlight. In Miller’s view, these tiny particles—the ones that caused many of Europe’s glaciers—were slung into the atmosphere by fifty years of erupting volcanoes.
There was a photo accompanying several of the articles. It wasn’t of volcanoes or even glaciers though. Instead, it was of Gifford Miller—ruddy face, short gray hair, black waterproof trousers, hiking boots, and faded red shirt, one button anchoring the collar—out on Baffin Island. Miller was crouched close to the ground; he held a clear plastic bag in one bare hand and combed a small rocky outcrop with the other. Behind the small rock island where Miller perched was a long expanse of glistening, wet snow, reaching all the way to a low bank of clouds and then the end of the frame.
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
Jorge Luis Borges famously tells the story of a single map that gets so large that it begins to cover the whole world. “In that Empire,” Borges writes, “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
The short story that map appeared in was a single paragraph long and was published in 1946 as part of a larger piece called “Museo” (in English, “Museum”).
In 1982 Umberto Eco used the complete story as an epigraph for his own fanciful essay, “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” which argues that the one-to-one map of the world must not be plaster cast, lest it pave the whole world, and if the map is suspended in the air, the subjects creating the map would be unable to move because every movement would alter the map. If the map is carefully folded, there could be a dangerous clump of all the folding people, adds Eco, and if it’s opaque, it would block out the sun, thus changing the land that the map is trying to signify.
In 2006 Neil Gaiman likewise seemed to use the story as the basis for another very short story about a Chinese emperor, aptly titled “The Mapmaker.” “One describes a tale,” he begins, “best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory…. The tale is the map which is the territory,” he continues a line later. “You must remember this.”
Forty years after telling the story of the map-the-size-of-the-empire, Borges took on a new project. He decided to translate the first section of the Prose Edda, the section of that medieval Icelandic work which details for readers the Norse Ginnungagap myth.
“En el principio fue el tiempo en que no había nada: ni la arena, ni el mar, ni las frías olas; ni abajo la Tierra ni arriba el Cielo, sólo Abismo,” Borges writes in this translation, La alucinación. “In the beginning was the time when there was nothing: neither the sand, nor the sea, nor the cold waves, neither below the earth nor above the sky, only abyss.”
I try to work my way through the text in my limited Spanish late one night, Borges’s translation and a language dictionary on my lap, side by side. I get through a few paragraphs at a time, penciling in the words I remember, looking up the ones I don’t, trying to follow the logic of Borges’s words, the way he translates the images.
As I read, I can’t stop thinking about the map-the-size-of-the-empire, though. I can’t stop wondering if this translation somehow speaks to its reverse, to what happens when a map gets so small the places begin to slip off it entirely.
BAFFIN ISLAND, CANADA
Only one of my rescue scenes contains a map. It’s a map of Pilgrim’s Progress that I painted when I was eight years old. The map had been stuck on the top shelf of a closet in my parents’ house along with some stories I had written and some drawings of my brother’s; my father had found it when they were cleaning things out twenty-some years later, had brought it down and set it out on a dresser, maybe to look at himself, maybe so I would look at it.
In that map, a long brown road curves from one of the book’s locations to another—the Tomb, the Great Woods, the Hill of Difficulty—each spot carefully painted and then outlined in black, sometimes with tiny characters drawn beside it. Random spots of green appear all over the map—trees perhaps—and my first name only is penned in thick marker at the top. Near the end of the road, the Palace Beautiful, painted in yellow, with a flag on top, two turrets, eight windows, and one door, is just around the bend from the Castle of Giant Despair, which is one large gray block.
In that rescue scene, though, what my eye focuses on is the very corner of the map. There the Celestial City is covered in water.
More than a year before I left Wyoming—a few months before I began to write all those rescues—my plane to Norway happened to fly over the Davis Strait and Baffin Island, the onetime site of the Ginnungagap. We were in the clouds but then the plane had dropped, and though we were high above the cawing of birds, it was as if we were among them. Just as we were approaching the island, we could see the sea and the soft edge of land, white stone cliffs, sharp and treeless, and ice—snow and ice—stretching across them, taut, like the walls of a staked tent or a wedding canopy. After each mountain, a single dip and then another, rising higher, falling farther. The sky was a few shades lighter than the water on the shoreline had been, but heavy still with the weight of dusk behind the double-paned airplane window, with the short slope of approaching dawn.
You see, though I could not predict what was to come, I felt instinctively in those moments above Baffin Island that if I ever landed there—in the space between the worlds—even with a map, I might not find my way out. I didn’t yet know, however, whether this tremendous ache of possibility was a comfort or a weight.
DISPATCHES FROM THE END
TH
EORY OF WORLD ICE
On a cool day in late May, a friend and I take a boat heading north toward the largest glacier in continental Europe. My hair, though tied back, whips around me in the wind and so I cinch the hood of my rain jacket tighter. I feel the steady bob of the boat and can hear, even over the sound of the engine, the waves slamming into the hull and onto the rocky shore. The air is damp, more from the wind than the occasional drizzle, but there is still a short-range view: rounded rocks and small villages rising from the water—wood against stone—all framed in the low sky beyond the boat.
Outside on the deck where we sit, the wind hits hard and the water from the engines tunnels behind the ship in a wide white track, no matter what section of the fjord. The track slopes and angles, blurs into a peninsula and is redrawn. I follow with my eyes several hills of white water, each cresting for a few seconds before hurling then edging itself back into the sea, back into the geography of only memory.
When the boat took off from the Bergen docks, a dozen other people lingered on the deck wearing rain jackets and sweaters, some leaning on the boat’s long railing, others milling about, looking at the water or the clouds or the city through the screens of their cameras or phones. A faded Norwegian flag flapped against its flagpole; the small orange rescue boat bounced up and down with the motion of the ship. Some people were smoking, others taking photographs of the city skyline: glass and concrete buildings, tall narrow houses, and the red tents that cover the local fish market getting smaller and smaller. Some people waved though no one on the shore waved back.
The boat continued on anyway, out of the rounded harbor, shouldered by rolling shoreline, by rows of shops and stone churches, by streets filled with houses and blocks of apartments, until it had left the city altogether. It moved past rocky strands circled by seagulls and small wooden cottages with tile or stone roofs, mostly crisply painted despite the water and the wind that must be constant. It blew its horn as a first and then a second smaller boat came into view but glided by them unaffected. It turned under an almost impossibly tall steel-cabled bridge, picked up speed, and cast out, into the open sea.
In 1894, outside under the stars, Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger had a vision. When he looked at the moon—its bright white surface shimmering in the night sky—he realized it was ice: the moon was made of ice. The galaxies were built by ice—great pieces of ice—that shattered into stars and planets as they fell. The deep matter of the universe, Hörbiger suddenly recognized, was ice; the cause for evolution was ice; ice was creating new worlds and destroying others.
A short time later Hörbiger dreamed that he was floating through space watching a pendulum swing farther and farther until it broke. That pendulum was gravity. “I knew that Newton had been wrong,” Hörbiger would write, “and that the sun’s gravitational pull ceases to exist at three times the distance of Neptune.” From this vision and this dream came Hörbiger’s Glazial-Kosmogonie, also called Welteislehre, or theory of world ice.
Central to Hörbiger’s new theory was an alternate history of the universe where the solar system began when a massive star crashed into a much smaller waterlogged star. From the force of the crash, pieces of the smaller star were flung out into space. The water that star had been storing up eventually froze and became blocks of ice; the blocks of ice fell into a circle and formed that great spiraling galaxy which the rest of us know to be the Milky Way.
The boat we’re riding on—a passenger ferry—is a narrow, very white catamaran. It’s a two-story boat; there’s an open area on the second floor with a few booths and tables and then, downstairs, luggage racks, a snack shop, and wide rows of plush seats, all facing forward, toward a computerized map of the voyage. The ferry is lined with windows and a few people follow the water through them, but most seem to talk or work or read or sleep.
The ferry is always part tourists, part locals. This day, there are maybe sixty or seventy passengers including a small group of schoolchildren, lots of older adults, and a few scattered young people like ourselves. We’ve taken the early boat—one of only two daily ferry departures to the small city of Sogndal—and it’s a weekday, which usually means fewer travelers and more locals onboard; likely, my friend and I are the only ones making our way, this cold day, to the glacier.
The ferry passes under one high bridge, then a second, stops at one tiny port and another; as the degrees of landscape change from cityscape to rock island villages, the rest of the passengers leave the deck to go inside, one and then a few at a time. The trip is briefly in the open sea but mostly shielded by rocks and small masses of land that get increasingly larger. In Norway—unlike the landlocked places I’ve always lived before—the water acts as a sort of seasonal interstate highway, sometimes the only way in and out of certain villages and landscapes. When rocks or mud or early snows take out the single-lane roads that line the fjord in some of these places, boats become primary means of transportation, and often, even in the best of conditions, are quicker and more direct than traveling by bus or car on land.
I like riding the ferries; when I first got to Norway, my friends had a little red hatchback that we drove up and down the mountains, six of us packed into five seats or sometimes seven or eight of us if someone rode knees up in the trunk, against the lined glass of the sloping back window. The car was convenient, but it meant I rarely rode Norway’s boats or busses; we moved either by foot or by car. The first time I discovered the ferries was a day that I was on my own. I was coming back into the country after time back home; that day, I made my way from one airport and bus to another, through the city, past the stone streets and wooden houses and green gardens and government buildings and market tents to the edge of the Bergen docks. I got on the ferry that day by myself and felt—as the waves swelled and we set off into them, a single boat on all the water of the world—awake for the first time in months.
All ice is made out of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a frozen state. Still, there are several different types of ice—ice disks, ice pellets, shelf ice, candle ice, ice dams, aufeis or ice in streambeds—and various forms of all this ice. The most regular form of ice is iceh or hexagonal ice, when liquid freezes to below zero degrees Celsius. Ice changes, though, depending on temperature and pressure. The ice found on one side of a glacier in Norway may be different even than the ice found on the other.
Whatever the type of ice, when enough heat is absorbed, the individual particles gain energy, enough energy to separate, turning the ice into liquid water. I see a diagram of this online: the hydrogen as small red dots, growing like branches from circles of oxygen. The ice in the diagram is fixed, in neat, perfectly shaped hexagons. In the diagram for liquid water, however, the hydrogen branches are randomly placed, blue and red circles moving in dizzying motion.
Early into the ferry ride, I meet a South African graduate student named Luke. My friend strikes up a conversation with him as we board the metal gangway from the Bergen city center to the small ship. The three of us are the only ones who have carried expedition backpacks onto the boat and the only ones who will later choose to sit outside during the cold, several-hour ride. We can see the long chop of the white wake from where we sit on the floor, on the white painted second-story deck, our legs stretched out toward the water, our backs firm against the outside wall of the ship’s cabin.
After some small talk about the ferry ride, Luke explained he was studying oceanography at the University of Cape Town, where he’d attended as an undergraduate and then returned. He’d had a gap year too, spent working as a crewmember aboard a small sailboat.
Luke was supposed to be traveling to Svalbard on this trip, an Arctic island between Norway and Iceland that is mostly used for research into far northern plants and animals and climate. The scientist he was working with canceled at the last minute, though, so instead of taking one of the twice-a-week flights north, he had come to Bergen and now was floating around the country, seeing glaciers and watching World Cup soccer games in local pubs for six we
eks until he went back to his life and his research in South Africa.
“Why did he cancel?” I ask Luke after chatting for a few minutes about his rearranged plans and scramble to find places to stay and things to see.
“I don’t know,” Luke says, shaking his head. “It happens sometimes.”
He pulls his hooded sweatshirt over his short brown hair and broad thin frame as we talk, layering a fleece and a rain jacket the same way I have. Luke is friendly and, like several of my friends abroad, also charmingly boyish. He asks my friend and me about Chicago and Norway and why we’re traveling here.
My friend rummages through her backpack and pulls out a small red-and-blue glass gnome. “I’m going to take pictures with this guy,” she replies. Luke laughs.
For a while we compare notes about our travels: broken-down trains, missed flights, the expensive and bland food we’d all been eating, the best spots to camp and hike. When my friend eventually goes off to take photographs from some other position on the boat, Luke and I stay and sit quietly, eating sandwiches and watching the long expanse of sea distend and surge.
Norway’s fjords—like its land—are glacial built, remnants of the last major Ice Age. The whole of Scandinavia was cast in those years in a sheet of ice, up to 3,000 meters thick over 6,600,000 kilometers of land. That ice sheet—the Scandinavian Ice Sheet—is said to have originated in Norway but then to have stretched throughout much of northern Europe, from Russia to the UK and Germany.
As the ice moved, it carved vast valleys and steep cliffs. When it retreated, many years later, sea filled in the valleys, creating clusters of long, deep fjords beside both Norway’s low rocky shores and its high, barely inland mountains, steeped in spruce and pine. The land, scientists say, is still rebounding from the weight of the ice, rising from the water several millimeters a year.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 2