Dispatches from the End of Ice

by Beth Peterson

  In his unfinished work On Motion, Galileo argued that different weights fall at different rates. His experiments showed, he said, that lighter bodies moved ahead of heavier bodies at the beginning of a fall, but later, heavier bodies overtook the lighter ones and arrived on the ground first. Though some historians wonder if he actually performed the experiments, Galileo said he came to his conclusions after dropping equally sized iron and wooden balls off the side of the leaning tower of Pisa.

  If you walk straight west from Fuglesteg—the stone house, the low-lying mountain, the path we’d been traveling that day—you would reach the very tip of the Sognefjord, the deepest and longest fjord in western Norway: our fjord, with its aqua ice-fed waters set against our small seaside village, some strawberry farms, and miles of birch- and spruce-covered mountains. You would see a long blue dock stretching into the water, a concession for the cruise ship tourists who now come five or six times a summer, and then the white three-story guesthouse with its fading black tin roof, the sort of ceiling that makes every summer storm sound like an ending.

  If you traveled straight east from Fuglesteg, you would reach the widest part of the Jostedalsbreen Glacier, via a high mountain pass, covered in snow most of the year, and a rocky plain, Turtagro, where Olympic ski teams often race in blue-jacketed packs for springtime practice. To the south, you would see more small villages gradually becoming towns and then the cities of Bergen, Lillehammer, and Oslo. To the north, you would cross more mountains and more fjords, and then eventually you would find yourself at the exact point where the Aurora Borealis—in its brilliant flashing green—lights up the dark expanse of the Arctic Sea.

  Of course it’s impossible to walk anywhere directly through the high mountains in Norway. Maybe this is why the farm, the stone house, and the trail are all called Fuglesteg in Norwegian or, in English, “the path for the birds.”

  It was my suggestion that we would walk the path for the birds. We were eating breakfast in the guesthouse that morning, watching the river outside break against the banks. The sun was out; some sheets blew on the clothesline; a white curtain swayed in the wind.

  It was his first summer in Norway, but it was my sixth or seventh there, hiking and kayaking and helping my friends fix up the old three-story house in the center of that tiny Norwegian farming village.

  There were a dozen things we could have done that day, an uncharacteristically warm day for early June, in that place that was so urgently beautiful. One of my friends suggested Bolstad Nosse, a grueling five- or six-hour hike to the top of a local lookout point. Another mentioned a local church, suggesting maybe we could hike there or take a bus and walk the long grassy hill behind it.

  How about Fuglesteg? I offered instead. The hike would be easy but not too easy; the views are always worth it, I reasoned. There was a stone house at the end of the trail—hundreds of rocks, placed by hand, in an exacting symmetrical formation—that would be a good place to see.

  Everyone had agreed to Fuglesteg, but especially him. He always agreed, was always up for anything, outside, with friends, and especially if it would serve them, make them happy. And the day—or the beginnings of it, at least—was happy. We had walked the trail in twos and threes on an eight-inch-wide dirt path through a farm field, up a double-tread road through a cluster of white birch trees, or something that looked like them, and then onto a single rock path that switchbacked, every few hundred meters, steeply. We walked past a tangle of power lines and a pounding waterfall that we could hear before we could see, past a graying barn and a grassy knoll. At almost every turn, we could see the tree line and snow in the distance and open, expansive views of the whole valley, straight to the sea.

  I learn about the iron and wooden balls that were possibly dropped off the tower of Pisa at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. I’m with my friends Andrew and Laura. They’ve been in Italy a few weeks already on summer holiday and invite me to join them for five days. We talk about going to Rome or Venice or even Pisa but decide, in the end, to spend a few days in a quiet farmhouse in Tuscany and the rest of the time at a city-center apartment in Florence.

  The heat is stifling. I feel it late at night, as soon as I walk down the metal airplane steps toward the runway and the airport doors; I feel it again when I stand outside the front of the airport, trying with little luck to catch a cab to the city; and I feel it when I wait, at the wrong train station, for my friends for over an hour. It’s hot enough I sweat right through my shirt and immediately feel I have made the wrong choice in packing no dresses.

  The whole time we’re in Italy, the heat never lifts; everywhere we go, the Italians we meet tell us it’s the hottest summer on record, that it will no doubt cool down sometime soon, that it has to. At the farm there’s a pool that we swim in multiple times a day, but in Florence there’s no reprieve. Within a few hours of my first full day in the city, I’ve badly sunburned my neck and cheeks and I’ve come down with a heat-induced migraine. Laura and Andrew seem better adjusted than I am, or better packed at least; they’ve brought matching straw hats, a large tube of sunscreen, and only lightweight clothes; compared to me, they seem to glide through the place.

  “I’m melting,” I tell Laura after a morning wandering through the streets, following Laura’s tour book to various Renaissance statues and important pieces of architecture.

  “How about a museum?” she asks and then says that while I cool down inside, it will give Andrew and her a bit of time to finish some shopping, that perhaps we can meet up later that day.

  I look through the list of museums in her tour book: the Uffizi Gallery, the Accademia, the Innocenti Museum, the Pitti Palace. One stands out and is also close to where we’re walking.

  “I’ll visit the Museo Galileo,” I tell her.

  Though the news that would come across televisions and computer screens that first week in Norway and then later in England and then the States would not lay blame, would call it a “tragic accident,” the hike to Fuglesteg was not an accident; it was a well-planned afternoon.

  The trail was busy: other groups of hikers and walkers dotted the path, but we moved along steadily, up and up the trail. We were two-thirds finished with the hike, almost to the last rocky ascent, when someone mentioned wanting to get a good spot to eat our lunches. I was too hot to hurry; I’d already stripped down, one layer after another, until I was only wearing a light shirt and shorts; the girls behind me had stopped for three or four water breaks.

  He offered to run, to get there first, and to wait for us at the trailhead.

  The path was dusty and some of the trees hung onto the trail, but when he started up the trail ahead of us, he was like a sprinter just off his block. By the time the rest of us got to the stone house, he had been there for some time, waiting, asking if anyone would like him to get them a drink of cold water from the freestanding spigot.

  Still, even with the run, it wasn’t enough: the trail we’d done, the hike, the bicycle ride he was planning to take home. He wanted to see the view from the top, to take a photograph, a memory to bring down to the rest of us and then back home for the winter days at university on the British coast, studying for his PhD in mathematics, “maths” as he called it, where he worked on not just formulas but real-world problems, where he tutored his friends and acquaintances in the early mornings, telling them that good mathematics always makes sense.

  We were sitting in a circle, eating cheese and jam sandwiches, when he turned to me and said, “I think I’ll go on a bit farther.”

  Galileo was in good company with his ideas in On Motion about different weights falling at different rates. The theory made sense. It was Aristotle anyway who first argued that objects fall in relation to their weight. This was because all motion, Aristotle had reasoned, was, at the crux, a product of change.

  I imagine that he followed the trail around a bend and then upward, as far as he could go. Though he did not tell us that he was going to the high ridge above the house and the valle
y—the climb’s farthest point—and maybe didn’t even realize this was the endpoint he had in mind himself, perhaps his body took him there, and maybe always was taking him there. I imagine that he could see the stone hut: small, rectangular, each stone of a different size and height, but looking sheer in the distance; there, on the edges of the forest were the brightly colored shirts of the rest of us, making our way down the mountain in slow file. It was quiet, except for the crunch of needles underfoot and leaves. It smelled of pine, like the long rectangular table where we ate bread and jam for breakfast, like the exposed ceiling beams in the top floor of the house, like the forests he had walked for several years with his family, on the coasts of England.

  I imagine that’s when it happened. Maybe the stone house was obscured. Maybe the path narrowed but he didn’t care. He was still moving too fast to think, to stop, almost to breathe. His legs propelled him forward, always forward. The ridge was just ahead, so close he could see himself there at its exact crest, with a perfectly proportioned cirrus sky above and beyond, all around his broad body. There was a road on the other side of the ridge, one that led straight to the glacier and to the mountains. He thought that he saw a glint of sun on the blacktop.

  Maybe he turned, maybe he pivoted or tried to get a better view of the road or the stone house or the rest of us, and that was when it happened; he stepped back and his foot caught nothing. And then at eye-level he saw the tree line and the granite side of the mountain and he felt the air lift his shirt.

  I imagine that his phrase matters, “go on a bit farther,” instead of “go on farther” or “go a bit farther” or simply “go on.” I imagine that every detail matters: the brand of shoes he has worn, whether his camera takes AA batteries, the size of the water bottle that he has brought with him and the way he filled it up halfway, how he has eaten not one but two sandwiches, the fact—I realize some hours later—that he has taken off his jacket, that he has tied it around his waist.

  It will not matter that he has taken off his jacket; his jacket was dark; his shirt was dark; his pants were dark. Do not wear dark clothes, a man from the rescue team will tell us when he asks for a photograph for reference from one of our cameras, on the first day, in the first hours, when it seems he still might be found, and then again some days later when we are standing on the same over-grown lawn between our house and the rest of the village, after a policeman dressed in navy blue with a white stripe on his jacket and his pants has come to the door holding his hat in his hand, after we have left full plates of food on the table uneaten for two days, after the coroner has declared that she cannot officially identify the body found in the woods as him because every one of the teeth is broken from the fall, from the five-hundred-meter dive into the woods.

  Except it was not a dive, nor was it a leap into the black. This one thing I want to tell; this I know.

  It’s cool in the museum; I feel it as soon as I enter, a wave of cooler—though still not cold—air. I buy a ticket, follow the signs to the Medici and Lorraine collections. I see telescopes, thermometers, giant globes, discussions of the history of science and of electricity. I take photographs of various artifacts in each of the collections. I stand from several angles to capture on film the largest of the golden celestial globes.

  Once I’ve made it through several of the exhibits, I sit on a bench in the corner of one of the upstairs rooms to rest for a little while; it’s one of the few benches I’ve seen, in the museum or the city. Families and couples and individuals walk by with guidebooks or museum brochures, talking softly. A few kids sprint past, their mother following and calling something at them in Italian. A museum guard circles by a few times. On the third time, I wonder if he’s going to ask me to move along, but he doesn’t.

  I notice after a while that most of the people in the gallery just ahead of where I sit seem to be stopping and gazing at something in a glass case. Everyone who moves into the room stops there and stays, pointing or taking photographs or simply circling around it.

  I get off my bench and walk closer. The glass case is shaped to be a perfect, translucent egg, laced with a single band of gold. It stands atop a narrow ivory column, also gold-plated. Even still, I can’t tell what’s in that case at first. It’s not until I walk to the very edge, so close that I could reach out and touch the egg if I wanted, that I see what’s inside. Browned from time, but arched straight up to the sky, is one of Galileo’s fingers.

  Fuglesteg was the second stone house. The first, built in the early 1800s by two brothers who stacked stone on stone without even telling their wives, had burned in 1985, from the rafters out.

  I learn this from some friends in the village, Edvin and Brit. They’re over at the house one day, helping us find tools and ladders to repair the siding on the guesthouse, and I ask Edvin about the history of the stone house and how it got there.

  “Well, that was the second house,” he says, “the one up there now. Come by our house; you can see old photographs in our town history book. I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”

  I do stop by Edvin’s house, one late afternoon. I knock on the door to see both Edvin and Brit standing there, their shoes and raincoats on, ready to leave. They invite me in anyway, and we stand around their kitchen table looking at a book of history from the local area with photographs of burned-out rafters and, later, people coming together to resurrect the house. In one photograph, only a small stack of stones remains, lining the foundation. In another, white dots of snow or rain obscure the foreground of the frame, and in the background, people are building.

  The day of the hike, we almost didn’t make it to Fuglesteg. That day we drove right past the trailhead, all the way across the ridge. We didn’t mean to cross the ridge or even to come anywhere near it; we turned the wrong way at first, though, trying to find a parking area, and headed up the two-way, one-lane mountain road instead of down it. Our driver—the owner of the car—was reticent to attempt a turnaround in too narrow or too steep a space, and so we continued driving higher for several minutes, curving our way around the contours of the mountain.

  One of the guys, Tom, was following us that day on a bike, unaware that we had missed the turn and that he did not need to ascend three or four hundred meters. We laughed as we watched his legs move rapid-fire as he stood on his pedals, the thirty-year-old metal bike frame shifting left and right. We yelled out the window, Go down; wrong way; turn around; stop biking, but he did not hear us against the wind and the noise from his own hot breath and the car, and so instead he kept pace with our own motion, thirty to forty feet behind.

  When we finally found a wide enough swath of road to turn the six-seat station wagon around, we had almost made it all the way to the top of the mountain. There was snow everywhere, but the light coming through the open car windows onto our faces was sharp and warm. Tom was there too, just behind the car, never once complaining about the missed turn or the long way up.

  “Who would ever believe,” Galileo wrote in On Motion, “for example that if two lead balls were dropped from the orb of the moon, one a hundred times larger than the other, if the larger reached Earth in one hour, the smaller would take a hundred hours in its motion? Or also, if from a high tower two stones, one stone twice the size of the other, were flung simultaneously, that when the smaller was halfway down the tower, the larger would have already reached the ground?”

  Eventually Galileo came to recant his earlier theories on velocity. He would say that his first impulse had actually been to discount weight, that he’d come to his incorrect conclusions through experience rather than logic, and that, upon standing outside in a hailstorm, he realized that hailstones of different sizes—“different bodies,” as he called them—were all traveling toward the ground at exactly the same speed.

  Maybe he didn’t feel hot and so he didn’t stop or pivot to look at the white stone house or the rest of us in our brightly colored clothes. Maybe he did make it to the top of the ridge. Maybe he had already been there, an
d it was when he came down that he started to feel lightheaded, like he had stood up too quickly in the shower, like the corners of his eyes were beginning to go dim. Maybe it was then that he realized he had moved too fast for his own good and so he stopped, wisely, to drink some water, to get his bearings, to make sure that it wouldn’t be the first time his legs gave out.

  Maybe he leaned on a tree for a moment; maybe it was a sapling and he knew that it could not bear his weight, but it felt good to rest his back upon something, to feel—however faintly—that his body and the mountain were interconnected, two sides of the same formula. Maybe there was a spot taking over his vision on one side of his right eye. It might have been the summer sun; he didn’t know and so he crouched, got low to the ground. His calves burned, digging into the steep incline. Maybe he told himself that it was worth it, that it was always worth it: the backcountry, the mountains, the lake district where he’d gone with his father and his friends, the marathon he ran only a month before, no training, just grit. Maybe he reached into the side of his backpack for his water and took a long drink. Maybe the cold felt good on his larynx. Maybe the liquid went down easy. Maybe he looked ahead and behind him.

  In this version of the story, this was when it happened. It was when he bent down, open backpack in his hand. The ground beneath him was dry, but he did not realize it was not solid. A small piece of dirt gave way under the shifting of his legs and then suddenly a larger piece split off and tumbled below him. He lurched off his tree, off his footing, off the steep slope of dirt and brush and too-thin trees. He reached forward with his open arm, flailing for a branch, some grass, anything that he might hold onto, but it was all just out of reach.