The ground had collapsed beneath me. I was tumbling then falling through the snow, as if it were a lake on a summer day and I was a bird plunging under the surface of the water. I hit the bottom of the snowpack and went through. The top layer of snow was gone, only sticking to me in wet, heavy clumps.
I was falling, dropping, like ice in a glass, like a stone in a river—clear, narrow, rushing—caught up in the motion or the feeling of motion, motion without action, without intention, just distance and gestures. I slashed my axe through the air but was crashing too quickly to catch the edge, the hole, the faint flash of blue, the walls of ice that were growing then caving in around me, or maybe I was caving in, into the walls, I couldn’t tell. Everything was moving too fast: the rope uncoiling behind me, the axe in my hand, the snow all around my head, the glistening walls, a last streak of sky above, damp air, and my body, folding and unfolding like a diver.
A diver with no pool, a faller with no net, no expectation of a net, of a catch, of a fix, of a sign, only air, only atmosphere. Moments layered, space gave way to more space or deeper space. Still, there was no longing there—no, not yet, not in that place—no room for longing, only quiet: the quiet weight of a body falling, of breath inhaled, unable to surface.
Almost immediately following his death in December 1966, rumors began to circulate that Disney had been “frozen alive,” his body stored alternately in Disneyland or in Glendale, California, in a large vault, on ice, until some day in the future when scientists could medically resuscitate him. Later some of Disney’s biographers suggested that Disney had volunteered to become America’s first cryonics patient, meaning his just-dead body would have been injected with antifreeze, cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen—negative 321 degrees—and stored in a body bag in a capsule, in “suspension.” Disney’s family and friends strongly refute this, though they concede that Disney avoided even attending funerals, that he was perpetually anxious about his inevitable demise.
It wasn’t just Disney, of course. White Wilderness was filmed at the height of the Atomic Age, a mere ten years after Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the first time in history, it seemed, it was possible to annihilate the entire human race in just a few swift blows. “I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” President Harry S. Truman wrote in a 1945 statement to the American people. “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us…. We thank God it has come to us, instead of to our enemies and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
Death had become a feature of the American national psyche; weapons of extermination had become gifts, products of American industry and ingenuity. Photos and video footage of the victims—flash-burned by radiant energy released in heat and light—were classified, hidden. Yet the effects and fallout of the atomic bomb were felt around the globe from Tibet to Greenland and even to Norway’s glaciers. In fact, it was with the advent of the atomic bomb that glacial dating changed. It was at this point that scientists began to date glacial accumulation and recession by studying radioactive fallout conferred in two layers from the 1951 and 1963 atomic bomb tests.
“Our films have provided thrilling entertainment of educational quality,” insisted Walt Disney of his collection of nature films, including White Wilderness, “and have played a major part in the worldwide increase in appreciation and understanding of nature. These films have demonstrated that facts can be as fascinating as fiction, truth as beguiling as myth, and have opened the eyes of young and old to the beauties of the outdoor world and aroused their desire to conserve priceless natural assets.”
The myth of the lemmings took off: newspaper comics, commercials, video games. In his 1976 children’s book The Lemming Condition, Alan Arkin tells the story of a young lemming named Bubber who is the only lemming to question the rest of the lemmings’ plans to jump into the sea. “What do you think it’s going to be like?” Bubber asks an adult lemming, Arnold. “How should I know?” Arnold responds … “radiating peace, calm and disdain.”
In a 2008 bid for the U.S. Senate, Oklahoma candidate Andrew Rice took the myth even further, using the lemmings scene from White Wilderness as part of his advertising campaign. “Washington politicians,” the narrator of the ad starts as the brown lemmings begin moving through the brown grass and over the rocks, “are a lot like lemmings. They follow their party, even if it’s over a cliff.” As the lemmings start falling into the water, the narrator begins talking about Rice’s opponent, Jim Inhofe, and all his political stands “supporting big business, shipping jobs overseas, against body armor for our troops.” “It’s time to change direction,” the narrator finishes as the video shows dozens of dead lemmings floating in the water.
Whatever Disney’s reasons—if he had them—for perpetuating it, the myth of the lemmings became big: bigger than White Wilderness and bigger than a ploy against collective bargaining or an admonishment about the perils of groupthink. The story of the lemmings, it seems, came to offer a measure of control, a reverse moral where rugged American individualism alone plays the trump card against the terror of the long edge.
Five minutes. I feel nothing, nothing except my right leg pounding like it has a heartbeat. The tip of my axe is dark and wet, and there’s some blood gathering around my sock; my pant leg and my shirt are torn from the axe; one metal crampon hangs off my ankle; the other is split in two. Otherwise I’m fine, or numb; I’m not sure. I’m sweating and shaking, and I don’t want to take off my gloves to see whether the tips of my fingers have begun to turn blue.
I heard it first, before I felt it—the weight of my backpack and my body and the fall—snapping hard against the single knot that held me. I lurched, the rope burning against my legs and my waist as my body moved forward and the rope yanked backward, careening between one wall of ice and another. But then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped: I stopped, faceup, hanging in midair. And then it was quiet.
It had been quiet ever since—and more than anything, more than the height, more than the thin rope or the overhang, it was the quiet that worried me. Needing to do something—anything—I decide to swing the rope I’m hanging from back and forth in hopes of gaining momentum and wedging myself against one of the walls.
I hold the rope close to my chest with one hand and begin unleashing things from the side of my backpack with the other: some food, a couple of bottles of water. One at a time, I shed things into the dark below me. When there isn’t anything left to drop, I rehearse the plan in my head and pick a spot on the wall that I’ll aim for. I swing back and forth three times, before I decide to go for it. I grab the rope harder, bend my knees to my chest, and then hurtle toward the wall in front of me, slashing my axe above my head.
I’m too far from the wall to get any traction, to make meaningful contact; I hit the ice, hard, but I bounce off it as a slab of wall breaks and barely misses my back and falls into the darkness below.
I watch it drop, then I put one hand just under the knot and stretch my other arm straight out, to keep my balance. I don’t move, I don’t yell. I just hang there shivering, wondering, if I wait long enough, whether the high canyon walls will come together like stairs, will lift me.
I should have been prepared; we prime ourselves for accidents out there, practice clotting wounds, treating frostbite, splinting bones with long, narrow hemlock branches. In my wilderness guide training, we rushed into cold rivers and let ourselves go, into the thrashing current, so someone else could throw out a rope and feel what it’s like to save somebody, or to not try hard enough and to watch a person begin to drop, down, into the shimmering deep.
I should have been prepared, but I was not. I hadn’t banked on seeing the lemming. How could I? I would ask myself later, more as an excuse than a question. When I saw the lemming, that day on the ice, it didn’t look stuffed, like I would expect from the dead or the dying, or breakable, like a paperweight or a pool ball. Shorter than a field mouse but thicker, i
t was light and wet, like an infant still in fluid, and trembling—though that may have been the wind, or me, pressing up against it, shivering. Its eyes were dark, but its ash-brown hair was caked in a thin layer of snow.
I crouched down next to the lemming, as soon as I realized it was an animal—not some dirt or a rock or piece of trash or something else someone had left behind on accident, dropped from a pocket, out of a backpack, never recovered—and touched it lightly with my glove. It shook slightly. I didn’t know what to do: to cover it back in snow, to warm it, to wrap it in a hat or jacket or my bare hands, to see if it might be revived.
I did none of these things. “Walk,” Matt yelled back to the rest of us. The whole line was stopped by this point, waiting for me as I looked at the lemming. Behind me, my friend Adam hiked a few paces back to his place in the rope-line and pulled the rope tight between us. I stood up too, dusted the snow off my pants and gloves, and then I moved on, leaving the lemming lying in the snow, exposed.
As I began walking up the glacier, though, I saw another brown spot to my left—dark, even-shaped, just below the ice—and then there was another brown spot just ahead of me. Soon there were half a dozen brown spots lining the path, breaking through the surface. We were surrounded by dead lemmings, shaggy, gaunt, and encased in ice.
In 2006—partway through my first summer in Norway—a team of scientists, under the leadership of Ohio State glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, set out to analyze one of the world’s most remote glaciers, the Himalayas’ Naimona’nyi glacier, by collecting ice samples from the infamous 1951 and 1963 radioactive fallout layers.
Thompson—who has traveled all over the world studying high-altitude glaciers and is renowned for having spent more time than any other living soul at over 20,000 feet—expected some change in the glacial ice. Patagonia glaciers, after all, had retreated almost one kilometer in the prior two decades, Swiss glaciers had lost 500 meters in the prior three years, and five different Norwegian glaciers had receded over 100 meters each in just the prior year. At 25,000 feet—looming above the world’s highest plateau—Thompson and his team assumed rightly that the ice would likely not be the same as when it had last been measured.
What they didn’t expect is that the atomic fallout layers would be completely gone, that there—in the center of the universe, the place that Hindus call the devatma or god-souled land—all that ice would have already melted.
Sometime later a friend would ask me why, after that day on the glacier, I began to care so much about the lemmings. What he meant to ask, I think, is why—those days in Norway and then even once I had moved home—I got obsessed with lemmings, why I taped color photographs of lemmings on the wall and why I talked about lemmings when we were scraping paint from the back of the house and when we were lying, stretched out slim, in separate seats on the city bus. I checked out a small stack of rodent books, underlined important phrases in life-cycle field reports, but I never did answer his question. By the time I thought of something to say, we were no longer standing outside in the same cold dawn.
You see, I had once imagined myself constructing an alternate life in Norway: painting houses, buying groceries at the local shop, walking along the green coastline, watching the early morning light sweep up the cool wet night. It was a measured life, a controlled life, and not a real one. There is no night in the summertime in Norway, though sometimes the afternoon light, all at once, is blinding.
That day on the glacier, I heard Adam first, then Lydia, both muffled. “You’re okay.”
“We’ve got you.”
“Get me out of here,” I yelled up.
“We’re working on it,” Adam called back, again muffled.
A few moments later there was a sharp pull on my waist, and then snow was falling around my shoulders, chipping off the open side of the crevasse, and sliding down in sheets as my friends Adam and Steve yanked the ice-caked rope over the edge of the hole. Suddenly the rope and my backpack and my body began to lift, one arm’s length at a time, up toward the light and the others’ voices and the long plane of ice and snow above.
And almost just as suddenly Steve was yelling, “Your arms—give me your arms,” and I could see a widening patch of sky and someone’s blue fleece jacket, bright and matted, over the last lip of the crevasse. I was reaching, scrambling, pitching myself toward the surface, and someone was grabbing my arms and my backpack and yanking me up, away from the hole. Then I was being dragged through the snow and out into the open air, more air than I could take in, and I was lying on my back, on the sun-spotted ice, heaving.
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
All our lives are collections, curated through memory.
—RICHARD FORTEY
EXHIBIT 1
Norway’s Breheimsenteret—like the two other glacier museums perched on the edges of the Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe—was an architectural feat of sorts. Intended to resemble two ice towers with a crevasse between them, the thousand-foot, $15 million building’s logic—like much of Norwegian architecture—was imitation, was representation: stone walls, wooden doors, large-paned reflective windows that, on a clear day, mirrored the mountains back at themselves. The shake-shingled roof of the museum—split in two and merged by a single center-stripe of paneled glass—arched upward like a bell curve, a narrative arc, reaching for a seemingly endless expanse of snow and ice in the distance.
Built in 1993, the Breheimsenteret was conceived as part welcome center, part museum: a crosswalk, if you will, between the local arm of the glacier and the whole Jostedal valley just to its east. There were ice displays, geographical relief maps, and large, nearly wall-sized photographs of the glacier. There was an information desk where college-aged museum staff in matching collared shirts fielded questions about ice flow and regional flora and fauna. There were guides on hand ready to book kayaking tours on mountain lakes, rafting trips on nearby rivers, or walks and climbs leaving straight from the museum, veering three kilometers northwest around the Nigardsbrevatnet Lake—a lake that less than one hundred years ago was part of, and not yet the edge of, the glacier—and straight onto the glistening, aqua-tinted ice. There was a restaurant too and a souvenir shop, beside films, images, and signs about endangered animals and plants, glaciation cycles, and the long and little ice ages.
Though the museum, like the glacier, was inconvenient to get to—a thirty-kilometer drive from the nearest village, several hours from the nearest major city, on a one-lane two-way road that was impassable for much of winter—in the summer months of late June through early August, busloads of travelers made their way from Bergen, Oslo, and cruise ports all along the coast, through evergreen-lined valleys, past dozens of rural villages, hundreds of high mountain farms, and down the country’s only four-kilometer toll road to the not-quite twenty-year-old glacier-shaped building that still, in those days, was as much a testament to the marvel of modern tourism as it was to the cultural history of the Jostedalsbreen region or the shifting science of a never-ending, ever-shrinking glacial landscape.
EXHIBIT 2
“In contrast to the souvenir,” writes Susan Stewart, “the collection offers example rather than sample, metaphor rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection…. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world.”
EXHIBIT 3
Museologist Jeffrey Abt suggests that the first contemporary museum, in the sense of being a place for the “systematic collection and study of evidence,” was Aristotle’s. Of course, the word “museum” predates even Aristotle; the Latin musea comes from the Greek mouseion, temple to the muses, or a space intended for the study of the arts. Both Plato’
s library in Athens and Ptolemy’s library in Alexandria were called mouseion, although Plato’s library—like most Greek mouseion—was more interested in philosophical conversation than in collection, and despite its inclusion of rooms for study of various disciplines, by most historians’ accounts, Ptolemy’s space seems to have been more of a glorified research institution than a modern museum.
Aristotle’s museum was different. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle had traveled with his student, Theophrastus, to the Aegean island of Lesbos, home of the poet Sappho and, according to myth, the head of the musician god Orpheus. On their island trip, Aristotle and Theophrastus not only studied but also collected plants and historical artifacts, and they brought these back to Aristotle’s mouseion in Lyceum. The Lesbos study was not the end either. Aristotle built up a community of students and scholars around him and, amongst this community, promoted his collection of certain historical, cultural, and natural artifacts. Theophrastus thought Aristotle’s museum collection significant enough to list instructions for its completion in his own will. Build a bust of Aristotle, he instructed the will’s recipients. Replace the tablets that contain explorers’ maps and make a life-sized statue of Nicomachus.
Though the term “museum” gradually fell out of vogue, for the next several centuries after Aristotle and Theophrastus wealthy individuals and families and then private offices of the church and government—from Charlemagne to the Medici—continued to build significant collections of art, artifacts, and other cultural and historical objects.
EXHIBIT 4
“The thrill that students or children express on first seeing the exhibits in the galleries at a great museum never fails to impress me,” writes D. V. Proctor. “It is a moment when eyes, hearts and minds, if not ears, are alert and receptive; when energies are stimulated and rearing to be unleashed. Even the most hardened secondary school boy or girl admits to interest being aroused at this moment, even if this is a mere flash in the gloom.”
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 10