We turn just after that, onto a high ridge that veers back into the denser woods. Perhaps that’s where we go wrong. After only a few minutes, instead of continuing to walk up, toward the mountain, we seem to be going down. We walk and walk some more, and I feel certain this must just be a dip before a rise, but there is no rise. When we finally turn around and walk back, we can’t find the path up from our map.
Somewhere near the lowest part of our descent, I hear three sharp blasts of a whistle, as if someone is calling for help, but in the dense trees, I do not know where the whistle is coming from. I cannot make my way to it.
/LÔST, LÄST/
The phrase “losing it” began to be commonly used in the 1990s. When researching the phrase, I come across an English-language-learners’ website, where a new English speaker titles their post “Am I losing it?” and asks, “Could you please tell me the best meaning for this sentence? By the way, should I just use it when I’m talking with my friends and family?”
Two people reply to say the phrase means getting angry or losing composure. One woman from England adds that it also means “losing one’s marbles” or, sometimes, “losing the plot.”
LOST PLANES
Air India 101 is not the only plane to have crashed into Mont Blanc. In fact, fifteen years before Air India 101 took off—November 3, 1950—another plane crashed into the mountain in almost that exact spot. That plane, a Lockheed L-749a, Air India 245, the Malahar Princess, was carrying forty Indian soldiers from Bombay via Istanbul and Geneva to London. There was stormy weather that day. Rather than coasting over the top of Mont Blanc, Air India 245 crashed straight into the Bossons Glacier at 15,344 feet. It took three days before search parties could reach the plane; there were no survivors.
LOST SAINT
One summer I visit my friend Laura, who has recently gotten married and moved to Europe. She and her husband, Andrew, take me to country pubs and an old fortress; we have a picnic in a meadow. The day I arrive, they pick me up from a small train station in a medium-sized city, the city where Andrew grew up. “Would you like to have a tour?” he asks, and I nod. We wander by shops and restaurants, through a garden, past a river, and then he points out the city’s cathedral.
“We should go inside,” Laura says, and grabs my arm. We walk right past the paying entrance. “Andrew doesn’t believe in paying to visit churches,” Laura says, as we push open a side door and walk through.
We wander around the cathedral, past its long wooden pews and cement plaques and tombs for famous people who were buried in that spot. After a few minutes of walking around, and while Laura and Andrew are looking at a tomb and discussing some historical figure, I walk to the very front of the church, to a narrow hallway behind the lectern and communion table and seats for the priests.
There’s a wooden door there and it’s open. Though I’m not sure what this place is or even if I’m supposed to be there, I step inside.
Inside the room is a small chapel, filled with paintings in woodcut frames, each painting of a different Christian saint. My eye is drawn to a single painting, though. There’s greenery around the saint; he has wispy brown hair, wears a cloak, and is carrying a long wooden staff, still bearing the marks where it was sawn off when once a tree branch. A small nameplate below the painting reads “Saint Christopher.” A woman standing just behind me looks at the same painting and says to her husband, “He’s the saint of lost things, isn’t he?”
“No,” her husband replies, reading off a small yellow cardstock brochure that he has in his hand, something he likely picked up from the information table in the corner. “He’s the saint of travelers,” the man finishes, “and also of mountaineers; he once carried the Christ child across a river.”
Though I’m not of a tradition that venerates saints, in that chapel, my friends waiting just outside, I kiss my palm and touch the saint’s head.
SAINT OF THE LOST
The real saint of lost things is Saint Anthony. One time, tradition says, he prayed for a lost book to be returned to him and it was. He also had a gift for preaching. One day—years before he’d preach to crowds of thousands—there was no one there to listen and so he went out, by himself, and preached his message to the fish.
LOST AND FOUND
When I’m in college, a friend invites me to a Pentecostal tent meeting. It’s the South, but even so it’s an unseasonably warm winter.
Partway through the meeting, the preacher tells the crowd that sometimes God gives signs to lost-people-who-have-been-found by God: sometimes healings, sometimes “physical manifestations.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, not until the woman next to me leans over and shows me her palm. “Look,” she says, pointing at her hand. “That glinting you see; that’s diamonds.”
I try to look closer, but all I see is water.
GLACIOLOGY
It’s quiet on the glacier—and not the good kind of quiet. It’s the long quiet—the quiet that splits you open, leaves you flayed.
I try yelling.
“Matt—”
“Adam—”
“Lydia—”
“Help—”
Nothing. Only low rumblings in the distance and the faint sound of water running, probably rainwater or melted snow, dripping through thin tears in the ice, pushing downward, drips becoming streams, streams becoming wide rivers of glacial runoff, pouring down the base of the mountain, splitting into the glacial valley, cascading into the fjord and then the Atlantic Ocean.
When my eyes adjust to the semidarkness of the crevasse, I size up the hole. I’m hanging midway between parallel walls of raw ice, thick and slanted and buckling in places. There’s an overhang two stories above; I see the outline. Shards of snow crack off it every few minutes, fall past me or onto my back and arms. Somewhere above the overhang, there’s a shaft of sky. Beyond this, the only thing I can make out clearly is a thin blue line, edging the glacial walls many stories below. Everything else is wet and dim, like the underbelly of a cement culvert in high tide.
It was the summer of the lemmings: the fourth year in the four-year cycle of boom and bust, massive population explosions then sudden and devastating dives; in the course of a few months, sometimes weeks, Norwegian lemmings fall off cliffs; they walk into rivers; they climb onto long sheets of ice and sun themselves to death. In a single area, populations swoon from several thousand to near-extinction.
No one knows exactly why this happens. Some scientists say that the Norwegian lemming deaths are caused by the early thaws, then late spring freezes that melt the tunnels, that put the lemmings on the top of the ice, bare and exposed. Lemmings burrow, create long, low caverns beneath the upper layers of snow. When the snow melts early, they can freeze in a single cold morning. Others say that it’s a stress mechanism: there are too many animals in one place, and in their sprint to get away from one another, they run off cliffs, they dive into deep pools of water, they expose themselves to the elements.
In the 1960s, scientist W. B. Quay suggested that in the every-few-year combination of bursting lemming populations and increased temperatures, something inside the lemming’s brain becomes unbalanced. Abnormal deposits begin to show up in their blood, and the lemmings begin to move at a frantic pace. These deposits shut off all the normal responses of the animal brain until the lemmings can’t eat, can’t dig, can’t reproduce, can’t do anything but move, in frenzied circles, in large groups, until they exhaust themselves to death. “It is mass hysteria,” wrote Ivan T. Sanderson in 1944, in the Saturday Evening Post, of a summer of the lemmings. “There is no turning back. These timid, retiring animals have lost all their natural sagacity.”
I didn’t know about the lemmings that day on the glacier, but I’m not sure it would have mattered if I did. All summer my friends and I had been eager to get onto the glacial ice. I’d hiked there once before, but it was the first time for most of my friends, and none of us were from Norway or from places with similar topography. We were
driven—it seemed—by the idea of traversing a private plane of ice, of finding ourselves in a landscape that was both swelling and drifting off-center at the same time.
We had gotten up early that day, taken the first bus, and arrived at the glacier before breakfast. It was clear, dry, and sunny and mostly cloudless, that morning of the glacial hike. Unlike the rest of Norway—wet and green—the high glacial mountains are dry, cold, austere: brown grass plains flattened by heavy snows giving way to sharp angular slopes and broad block fields of jagged rocks. When there’s no snow or rain or fog, you can see the backside of several summits in the distance, snow crusting over their ridged outlines, then dropping five or six thousand feet to wide rocky valleys. Beyond the tall mountains, miles of high plains and lesser peaks, gray and muted—even in the summer sun—seem to stretch straight to the sea.
Unlike some other sections of the glacier, this one took more work to get to; after we got off the bus, we hiked, for some time, down a single-track trail, over cold knee-deep streams and long washes of mud, before we made it to the perimeter of the glacier, the place where hundreds, maybe thousands, of feet of compressed snow met rock.
At the edge of the ice, our guide, Matt, took a rope out of his backpack and the rest of us began putting on our gear. Once we had our boots, crampons, axes, and backpacks adjusted, he snaked the long diamondback rope across the snowy ground and we all tied in with loose grapevine knots around our waists. Though there weren’t any other groups of hikers or climbers on the trail that morning, the snow was dirty and footprinted from hikers and climbers the day or night before. Ours was a popular entrance route to the glacier, only a few hours’ hike from the summit where the larger ice forms were.
That’s where Matt was taking us, toward those masses of ice. They were blue, even in the distance: mounds, caves, gleaming hallways. Those blue ice forms—the only thing distinguishing the glacier from a snow-covered mountain—would be our first chance to do real, technical climbing: lurching across five-foot wide crevasses, scrambling up and down nearly vertical surfaces, inching over hollow ridges of ice, past deep wells of water, a thousand feet below.
Minus Matt, the rest of us had been hiking together all summer, up and down Norway’s western coast. We’d already climbed two of the region’s highest peaks, once in a snowstorm. Our last big hike had been Fanaraken, one of the most trying climbs in the area. We could see the glacier from the top; I took a photo of it: six of us in winter jackets in June, standing on the edge of a narrow cliff. Behind us was a vertical drop, thousands of feet down, then miles of white snow, so much snow the background of the photograph looked blank or overexposed.
This day, we were hiking through all that snow: sinking in knee-deep, yanking a leg out, finding some tenuous sense of balance and repeating. The snowfall was recent, had come late to Norway that summer. Snow’s always riskier than ice, especially on glacial summits like this one, summits that had an early thaw then a late last storm, hiding the crevasses—long low cracks—that spread like a graph up the mountain.
Sweat and snow had already soaked through my gloves and the cuffs of my pants. It had become rhythmic: our boots sank into deep snow, then we climbed out of it and then sank back in and we climbed back out, stopping between the sinking and climbing only to relash on the metal crampons that were made for ice, not unsteady surfaces. By midmorning no one was talking except for the occasional this is so hard I want to gouge my eye out from Lydia, a medical student in the back of the group.
We were finally heading out of the first snowfield—toward all that blue ice—when I noticed it: a brown spot on the ground, just to my left. It was too dark and even-shaped to be mud and too far from the trailhead to be a rock or a patch of dried grass. I stopped and the guy behind me—a lanky twenty-year-old—stopped too. “Are you all right?” he called to me. When I didn’t answer, he walked up to where I was standing. I pointed to the spot: “Look at that.” He looked for a moment and then crouched down and kicked at the brown spot with the toe of his leather boot, cracking the thin layer of ice that was covering it.
Underneath the snow and ice was a small, frozen animal: a lemming.
In the 1950s, Walt Disney’s White Wilderness became the first documentary to film the lemmings’ dramatic deaths. The climactic scene of that movie taped hundreds of lemmings “migrating toward mass suicide” in Alberta, Canada, brown and white bodies falling, sliding, scrambling over the northern Canadian terrain in a frantic pack. They pushed down and up, and into one another, all tracking a single lemming in front, until they reached a high cliff. The leader jumped: flew gracefully through the air toward the water. Then the rest jumped, and hundreds of lemming bodies, all on tape, were raining into the Arctic Ocean.
Except that in 1958 it wasn’t the year of the lemmings. And it wasn’t an ocean; it was a river and the filmmakers had paid twenty-five cents per lemming, gathered hundreds of them, put them in cardboard boxes for keeping, then onto a spinning white turntable, which they angled up and down until they had gotten the camera shots, and then they pushed those lemmings to their deaths, off the turntable, toward a long low cliff angling into the water. Some people say that when they watch that movie they see the lemmings hesitate, that they stop slightly, for a second, before they jump.
Norwegian lemmings are the only lemmings whose populations fluctuate randomly, who die in such massive sweeps that they almost don’t come back. They fall from the sky with the rain, geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg proposed in the 1530s after hearing lemming reports from two Norwegian priests, and they die when the grass grows in spring. Collared lemmings, the type of lemmings that live in Canada, in the United States, in most of the places other than Norway, don’t live in packs and they hardly ever migrate.
We were gradually making progress up the mountain—following the shallow recessions of each other’s footsteps straight through the hard glare of the high alpine light—when all of sudden, without warning, I felt it: a sharp jerk on the rope.
I looked up just in time to see our guide Matt—ten feet in front of me—stumble slightly and then lose his balance altogether, his small frame hurtling straight into the snow. He swung his arm out, grasped for the rope, and threw his yellow backpack behind him, trying to backtrack from his misjudged step. Still, a second later both his legs were gone, plunged in waist-deep.
I stopped, as did everyone else behind me. The snow had been wet all day, but it was the first time any of us had slipped in beyond our knees. “Are you okay?” I called to Matt from behind, holding one hand on the rope and kneeling to feel the ground myself. It was firm, solid, virtuous: an Illinois cornfield in winter, a Wyoming road in the middle of March. Or so I thought at the time.
In one smooth step, Matt leaned forward, yanked his legs out of the snow, and righted himself. He brushed his pants off, then bent down and jammed the metal handle of his pickaxe into the snow a few times, the way he had done every few minutes along the hike—shallow holes, concentric circles—mapping our path up the glacier. He picked up his backpack and started ahead.
“Walk,” Matt called back to the rest of us, still standing.
I adjusted my backpack and gloves and then I walked on, veering wide of the hole where Matt’s leg had sunk, just past the path of circles he’d made with his axe. At first, the path was fine—steady walking—but as I got to the final circle, the snow suddenly felt wrong, strangely light and loose, less like an icy corridor and more like a frosted-over creek at night.
Realizing what was happening, I threw my body forward, but I was too late. One of my feet started slipping, and then the other, and then I was gone.
Initially scientists believed the Norwegian lemmings’ cycles were tied to the cold. In this thinking, the lemmings’ migrations were an effort to get away from cold. The theory made sense: the mosses lemmings eat freeze in ice; the thin layer of snow where they dig tunnels and nests cakes over, hard, forcing them to find lower ground. But then, in the 1990s, biologists began to notice a
n unexpected phenomenon: despite rising temperatures, the lemmings’ population peaks were falling. Plows were no longer scraping dead lemmings off the roads, and there were no longer lemmings’ carcasses at the edges of rivers, contaminating water supplies. And then in 2001 lemming fossils from the Pleistocene—the Ice Age—were found on an island off the coast of northern Norway near a rocket-launching site.
Biologists began to say it wasn’t the cold but the heat that is a problem. In cold weather, the snow’s consistency stays relatively constant; the lemmings can camp out below the snowpack, tunneling in deep and eating everything around them. When winter temperatures are too high—spiked by man-made emissions, greenhouse gases, and fossil fuels, the same rising temperatures that crack ice, fracture glaciers, create crevasses—it’s then that the snow melts and frozen water floods the lemmings’ tunnels until they collapse, drowning some, forcing others to freeze to death, suspended between snow and ice. When the cold returns after a spell of heat, the mosses that the lemmings eat and the lemmings’ nests, made with long strips of their own hair, turn to ice. There’s no warmth; there’s no food. The lemmings are forced to scramble for limited resources, aboveground, over the rivers, and into the valleys. The stress from the overcrowding and hunger causes the lemmings’ adrenal glands to swell, creating excessive hormones, increasing inflammation, and lowering lemmings’ resistance to disease until the increased hormone production becomes too much and the adrenal glands simply shut down.
“The lemming population is falling and the peaks are disappearing…. A relatively small effect on one particular species is having a broad effect on the system,” says Nils Stenseth, lemming researcher from the University of Oslo. The fall of the lemmings’ deaths also means a fall of the lemmings’ peaks. Ironically, the lack of deaths signals a lack of life.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 9