Dispatches from the End of Ice

by Beth Peterson

  The parables seem to grow in value, at least according to the time, but they also have a common moral: the nature of a lost thing is that it should be sought out, it should be found.

  LOST: BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

  For many years it was believed that certain people and even people groups had a better innate ability to find their way than others. Recently, though, scientists have begun to tie people’s ability to find their way—or conversely, to get lost—to cognitive maps, or the brain’s representation of physical spaces.

  Drawing on research done on rats, Paul Dudchenko, author of Why People Get Lost: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Spatial Cognition, suggests different types of neurons fire in the brain when people find themselves in different physical locations. He writes, “The combination of these different cells being active in different places of the brain began to look like a kind of neural map, a representation in the brain of different places in the environment.”

  In his book Lost Person Behavior, K. A. Hill argues that spatial orientation and cognitive maps are largely taught and learned rather than the genetically instinctual or biologically based sense of direction. “No controlled study to date,” he explains, “has found reliable evidence of a human ability to sense the direction of magnetic north—or any other direction, for that matter.” Hill goes on to write that people who seem to usually know where they are tend to “mentally update” their geographic position as they move in their environment. People who tend to get disoriented—lost—do not.

  There’s also a physiological side. When we’re lost, Hill adds, there’s a level of fear and a level of emotional arousal. The arousal causes the limbic system to be stimulated. In small doses, this can lead to sharper mental functioning. But when the response is too heightened, it can scatter our thoughts and make us unable to concentrate or even remember things that should be familiar.

  LOST WORDS

  When I turn thirty, my parents give me a necklace that reads “Not all those who wander are lost.” The saying, a quote from one of my favorite writers, is carved into a silver pendant. The pendant is small and shaped like a compass, with marks for north, south, east, and west imprinted below the words.

  The quote is fitting. By the time my parents give it to me, I’ve lived in ten cities and many more houses, apartments, and flats, enough that I can’t even remember all my past addresses.

  It is fitting, but I cannot decide, as I look at that necklace, whether it is true. “All that is gold does not glitter,” the rest of the poem that quotation comes from begins, “Not all those who wander are lost; / The old that is strong does not wither, / Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

  /LÔST, LÄST/

  According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the words “lost” and “loss” can be traced back to the Old English losian, which means to perish or to destroy. The similar root word los spread to Norway and meant there “the breaking up of an army.” There was also leus, which influenced the German words for lost and meant “to loosen, divide, cut apart.”

  LOST IN SWITZERLAND

  I try to see Mont Blanc one summer. I’m going to Switzerland for a couple of weeks and plan to fly through France, take a train across the country, and visit the French Alps before I make my way to the Swiss mountains. The week before I go to buy my tickets, though, terror attacks take place in Paris, and so I end up buying a direct ticket to Zurich instead.

  A couple of days before I leave for the trip, I explain to a friend that I’m sad to miss Mont Blanc. “Just a second,” he says, before disappearing into his study. He emerges a minute later with a map of Switzerland. The map is colorful—bright blues and greens—with mountains and towns illustrated in their approximate locations. There’s also a series of passes, roads, cable cars, and even an image of a train on the map. “There. That’s the spot,” my friend says, pointing to the Swiss mountain Schilthorn, just past the town of Lauterbrunnen and above the village of Mürren. “You can see Mont Blanc from that pass in Switzerland.”

  I look at the spot where he’s pointing. Mont Blanc is labeled in tiny letters on the map, surrounded by a deep blue sky.

  Five or six days into my time in Switzerland, my friends and I make it to Schilthorn. They decide to hike near Mürren, but I want to see Mont Blanc—if only from a distance—and so I take a series of cable cars up the mountain. The first cars are packed—standing room only—but more and more people get off at each stop, until it’s only me and a small group of Australian students in the last car. As I exit the final cable car, the air is noticeably cooler and thinner, a dramatic change from the early summer heat below. I put on my jacket and walk around. At the top, there’s a James Bond museum and a restaurant and then an outdoor viewing area with 360-degree views. There are a handful of people in that viewing area, but beyond us almost all I can see is mountains, a billow of overlapping crags, some shadowed by valleys and highways of snow, sharp angles of barren rock on others, becoming—hundreds of meters below—evergreen-forested slopes.

  I walk along the edge of the platform. There are signs detailing which mountains can be seen in each direction. I see Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. The sky is clear in all directions except for one. A low-hanging cloud obscures from view a single mountain in the distance: Mont Blanc.

  The nearest I come that summer to Mont Blanc is taking a photo in the airport at a store named after the mountain. I assume when I walk down the terminal gate toward the store that it will be an outdoors shop. It turns out it sells diamonds.

  LOST ON MONT BLANC

  Mont Blanc, I read in a tourism guide long before I visit Switzerland, is not only the highest mountain in Europe; it’s one of the most visited mountains in the world, with nearly twenty thousand people summiting it each year, math that works out to about fifty-five people per day.

  Nearly a hundred climbers die every year in the Blanc Massif. At busy times, local officials perform an average of twelve rescues per weekend, often of hikers and climbers who are disoriented, unprepared, or find themselves injured or in bad weather.

  In 2007 two outhouses were helicoptered in and, after being placed at 13,975 feet, began to be emptied, also by helicopter, every few months and sometimes weeks. This was an effort to keep Mont Blanc—once known as the white lady as well as the symbol for modern mountaineering—from becoming, as someone puts it in an article I read, “Mont Noir.”

  LOST IN MONT BLANC

  The everlasting universe of things

  Flows through the mind and rolls its rapid waves

  Now dark—now glittering—now, reflecting gloom

  Now lending splendor, where from secret springs

  The source of human thought its tribute brings

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mt. Blanc,” July 23, 1816

  LOST PROMISE

  The summer I visit Switzerland, the president of the United States declares that he will be withdrawing the country from the Paris Climate Accord. “As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do,” he says in his official statement, “I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States, which is what it does.”

  In that same statement, the president explains that the United States will instead increase coal jobs. “We’re having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of.”

  LOST PLACE

  Within six weeks of that announcement, an iceberg the size of Delaware breaks off the Larsen C Antarctic Ice Shelf.

  LOST COUNTRY

  Four months after that, the United States suffers Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and the most significant California wildfires in its history.

  LOST SCIENCE

  Five months after that, the Environmental Protection Agency pulls three of its scientists—set to talk on climate change—from the lineup of a Rhode Island conference.

  LOST MAP

  In spring 2017, the same spring the Larsen C Ice Sh
elf splits, the New York Times features the three-part series “Antarctic Dispatches,” titled “Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea,” “Looming Floods, Threatened Cities,” and “Racing to Find Answers in the Ice.”

  In the first of those dispatches is an online moving map of Antarctica’s ice. Blue lines of ice flow down the Ronne Ice Shelf, the Brunt Ice Shelf, the Amery Ice Shelf, the Shackleton Ice Shelf, the Ross Ice Shelf, the Getz Ice Shelf, and not far from the Cape of Disappointment, down the Larsen Ice Shelf. Even when I set my computer down and stand up to get a drink, I can see, in the distance, nearly every part of the map moving toward the sea.

  “The acceleration,” the New York Times writes, just below its moving map of receding glacial ice, “is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration.”

  /LÔST, LÄST/

  In 1300 the word “lost” came to mean “wasted,” “ruined” or “spent in vain.” By 1500 it also took up the meaning “gone astray.”

  LOST FATHER

  For some time afterward, there was a custody battle over the mummy, Otzi, found in the Alps. Since Otzi was discovered right on the border of Austria and Italy, both countries wanted ownership of his body. Eventually it was decided that Otzi had been located five meters into Italian territory. After that, more court battles raged about who should be compensated for Otzi’s find and for how much. Two women separately declared that they had seen the body before the Simons did. One said she had “spit on the body to claim it.” Neither woman could verify their claim, though. In the end, Otzi’s body was placed in a museum in Italy, in a freezer that mimics glacial ice conditions.

  On October 15, 2004—two years before the Simons were awarded nearly $100,000 for their discovery of Otzi—Helmut Simon returned to the same place where he’d found Otzi. It should have been an easy climb—four hours of hiking—but it began to snow once Simon was already on the mountain. Temperatures dropped; unable to find his way, Simon slipped into a three-hundred-foot ravine; his body was found eight days later.

  Helmut Simon was not the only one connected to Otzi to have died. Since 1991, seven people who have had close contact with Otzi have died: Rainer Henn, a forensic pathologist, died in a car crash; Kurt Fritz, a mountain guide, was killed in an avalanche; Rainer Hoelzl, a journalist, died of a brain tumor; Dieter Warnick, a rescuer, died of a heart attack hours after Simon’s death; Konrad Spindler, an archaeologist, died of ALS; and in 2005 Tom Loy, also an archaeologist, died of a blood disease. The German press has called it “the curse of Otzi.”

  Simon was once quoted as saying, “Otzi was like our son.”

  LOST MANTRA

  When you search for what is lost, you need to be careful, it seems, not to become lost yourself.

  /LÔST, LÄST/

  In the 1630s the phrase to “lose one’s heart” emerged to mean falling in love. In 1744 the phrase “lose heart” began to refer to discouragement.

  LOST STUDENT

  One of the friends I travel to Switzerland with tells me that a student of hers once got lost in the Mount Hood wilderness area in Oregon. The student had decided to go hiking on her own one Sunday night in late March. She was supposed to be backpacking with a small group of friends, but in the end, for one reason or another, each of her friends canceled on their plans. Rather than postpone the trip, the student sent an email to a friend mentioning she’d be on Mount Hood and then set off. She’d packed a sleeping bag but left it in her car and set out on foot with only a backpack that carried some clothing, climbing supplies, and a day’s worth of food.

  When the student didn’t come home after some time, the friend alerted the authorities. Her credit card was traced; video footage showed her at a store on the way to Mount Hood, buying shoes and an axe. Search-and-rescue teams were sent out to comb the mountain and surrounding woods.

  Six days after she went missing, a National Guard helicopter spotted her. She had run into a whiteout while trying to summit the mountain, then fell forty feet and injured her leg. She’d dragged herself up to an area where she thought someone might see her. Miraculously, they did.

  “Were you afraid?” my friend had asked her student.

  I am surprised when my friend tells me the student had replied “No,” that she knew eventually she would be found.

  LOST VALLEY

  If Air India Flight 101 had flown fifteen meters higher, it would have missed the edge of Mont Blanc entirely. After the crash it was determined that a communication error led to the plane hitting rather than missing the mountain. The air traffic controller told the pilot to descend after Mont Blanc. The pilot seemed to think he had already passed the mountain.

  Conspiracy theorists, though, wondered if the plane was made to crash intentionally. Former CIA operative Robert Crowley claimed that a bomb had been placed in the cargo area of the plane. Homi J. Bhabha—the father of India’s nuclear industry and the chairman of its Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay—was onboard that plane on his way to attend a conference in Vienna. The crash, Crowley and others suggested, was meant to slow India’s development of a nuclear bomb.

  The plane flying Air India 101 was a Boeing 707-437. It was named Kanchenjunga, after the third highest mountain in the world, an Indian peak that is said to be the home to the valley of immortality.

  LOST IN ICE

  Since the Air India 101 crash, the Bossons Glacier has been the site of many significant finds, both fragments of the plane and items it had been carrying.

  In 2008 a mountain climber found a set of Indian newspapers there, dated January 1966.

  In 2010 a British university student on a class field trip found a blue mail bag that contained seventy-five letters and cards.

  In 2012 two climbers discovered another bag of mail, this time a twenty-pound bag of diplomatic mail marked “On Indian Government Service, Diplomatic Mail, Ministry of External Affairs.” That bag contained copies of the Hindu, the Statesman, and Air India calendars among the mail.

  In 2014 an almost-fifty-year-old camera was found by another French climber near the site of the crash. That same year a treasure hunter, Daniel Roche, found fifty pieces of jewelry on the glacier. He said the jewelry wasn’t as valuable as the unnamed student’s find of the hundred jewels the year before. In any case, he planned to keep what he had found.

  One year later Roche found an upper thigh and a hand sticking out of the ice.

  The same month Roche found those body parts on the Bossons Glacier, three other bodies were found in the Swiss Alps. Two, found on the Diablerets Massif, were a shoemaker and a teacher who had disappeared seventy-five years before. The other body, found on the Lagginhorn, was a German hiker who had died thirty years prior.

  LOST FRIENDS

  My friend’s student was not the first to be lost in Oregon’s Mount Hood Wilderness Area. In August 2010 the bodies of a friend-of-a-friend, Katie Nolan, and her climbing partner, Anthony Vietti, were recovered from the Reid Glacier on Mount Hood, eight months after they went missing, once the warmer weather had melted the snow enough to see them, there, suspended in time.

  LOST CHANCES

  A few months after Katie Nolan’s body is found, I attend a wedding in Oregon on the edge of the Mount Hood National Forest. I plan to hike Mount Hood myself while I’m out there and even pack, in a carry-on, all my glacial gear: harness, day pack, wool underclothes, headlamp, food, waterproof everything: gloves, jacket, pants, and boots, leaving room only for a bridesmaid’s dress and a couple regular changes of clothes.

  While we’re there, the rest of the wedding party and I stay in a small Scandinavian-themed cabin, the Heritage, that is poised high in the evergreen forest. The cabin is lined in dark wood with blue shutters. On the wall is a framed copy of the Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian next to some museum photos from Oslo.

  As it turns out, I never make it to Mount Hood. It rains and snows the entire five days that I’m there except for a twenty-minute brea
k in the middle of the ceremony when a slice of light appears through the branches, through the windows of the wooden rotunda where the wedding is held and onto the bride’s bare back.

  The light doesn’t last; as soon as the wedding is finished, it begins to hail—like rice, one of the other bridesmaids says, only harder.

  LOST ON MOUNT HOOD

  Two years after the wedding in Oregon, I do make it to Mount Hood. My friend Kim is visiting the United States from England and offers to meet up in the Northwest; I suggest Mount Hood. On the day of our hike, Kim drives our tiny rental car up a narrow gravel road that looks, at first, like it’s a driveway or logging road, at best. But it goes up, curving higher into the woods, and so we follow it.

  Finally, we find ourselves at a small parking area. We park next to the one other car there, put on our hiking gear, and start upward, into the woods. We’re supposed to be making a loop toward Mount Hood. The shady uphill path moves us that way at first. After thirty or forty minutes, we can see the mountain itself, ahead of us, its snowy outline looming above the trees. I take a photograph of Kim and myself and the mountain. We’re wind-whipped and my face is red from the hike, but the sky is clear behind me.