There it was: the granite side of the mountain and the tall trees and the open air all around him.
Or maybe he blacked out. Maybe he tripped. Maybe his backpack released from his hand as he rolled and dipped. Maybe his camera dropped and he staggered to get it. Maybe it flashed through his mind that the camera was borrowed—his father’s—like his frame, his urge toward kindness and courage, toward keeping his promises. Maybe he made promises. Maybe he knew there was no time for promises. Maybe he yelled but no one heard him or someone did hear him but couldn’t recognize the voice or the person or the sound. Maybe he saw that between him and the ground was 500 meters, 1,500 feet, 18,000 inches of air. Maybe he did the math. Maybe he knew that gravity times time would be about 5.6 seconds. Maybe he realized that it was all breath, all weight.
Grief is the cost of love. This is what a psychologist friend who comes to the guesthouse after the accident says. We are sitting in the river room. It’s a pale yellow—three windowed walls ready to hold the light at any angle—I painted it myself some years back, from a white faded to brown after years of neglect. Couches and chairs circle the outside walls; footrests and casual coffee tables drift together in the center. There are candles hanging from the ceiling in mason jars beside stacks of old books. You can see the mountains, the river, and the fjord from any position in the room. This is why we call it the river room, after the Norwegian name for the guesthouse: Elvheim, the hut on the water.
A team of seventy rescuers with searchlights and dogs canvass the mountain and the ridge and the road the night he goes missing and the next day and the morning after that. This will be where we will hope he has walked out, that somehow he came after us and thought, too, that he should first continue to go up. We will hope that he is lost or has broken only a leg, that he is tired, that his camera flash has burned out and that is why he cannot signal to tell us where he is. We will ask someone to drive the road, all the way to the glacier, to see if they see our friend, his backpack or something he has left behind; Luke will run up the mountain, calling for him.
Two yellow helicopters will circle the ridge, back and forth for hours, while the rest of us watch from the stony shore of a glacial lake several hundred feet below. Sam, Ana, Tom, and I will walk up and down the blacktop and gravel road until it turns into highway. We will stop, only for a moment, when Ana says that she feels, in her stomach, that the way that we make our lives together will not be the same again. Sam says a prayer, but no one else talks. Instead we watch the beams from the searchers’ flashlights travel up and down the dim but still lit mountain for hours, until it is no longer night.
By the next day, a priest has come and two nurses. Friends have caught flights and buses from Bergen, from England, and from France. We talk and talk as we walk along the local roads and sit outside, watching the outline of boats and people and even the shoreline stones reflect off the water. What the psychologist says in the river room, though, is the only thing from those first weeks that I remember. I write his line on a piece of yellow paper, fold it, and put it in my pocket. For many months, I will think about the cost-benefit ratios of relationships. I will recite his line to myself until it begins to sound like an equation.
Although the museum has laid out a guide for what order and even in which direction patrons should walk to view the museum’s exhibits, I pay no attention to this and wander at my own leisure and also, out of order, visiting the collections I find most interesting first and later returning to the ones I’m not as excited about.
Somehow, in my personal ordering of things, I leave off one of the exhibits. In fact, I almost don’t notice it, but on my way to the gift shop where I’ll meet Andrew and Laura I happen upon a doorway to an exhibit I haven’t seen. It looks like the room is built for children, and at first I wonder if it’s a play place of some sort. As I walk in, I see that it’s a room full of experiments, an exhibit titled Galileo and the Measurement of Time. A sundial on the ceiling is controlled by a mirror in the window. A cycloid—or arched curve—is traced by a circle pushed along a straight line. There are two models that I find especially interesting. A straight wooden slide is placed next to a curved one, with a ball in each; the sign next to it reads “Brachistochrone descent: a descending body travels faster along the arc of a circle than along the corresponding chord (even though the chord is a shorter path).” Next to this is an inclined plane. I write down a single sentence from its label in my notebook: “This model illustrates Galileo’s law of falling bodies.”
I touch the models; I try each of them out, placing small metal balls in the top of the different angled pieces of wood and watching as each of those balls moves along the line it’s been given, straight for the ground.
I read, too, that day I visit the museum, that the equation v = 9.81m/s^2 x t isn’t necessarily wrong, but it only works in a vacuum. It doesn’t take into account resistance. Air resistance, dependent not only on the friction caused by wind but also on shape and weight, changes the speed of falling; it throws off the standard calculation.
We sit in another room, in someone’s white five-story walkup apartment in Strasbourg, France: Tom, Luke, me, the others who had been on the hike. We have come to eat and drink and take a break from seeing the stone house from every south-facing guesthouse window and hearing his name mentioned again and again in shops and on the radio, by people we don’t know in supermarkets, in a language we do not understand any longer. We want to sleep too, get past the waking up in the middle of the night sweating through the sheets, feeling the sense that the mountain is there and we are there and he is there, but none of us can ever seem to stop falling, falling.
We drink glasses of wine and spiked cider. There are breads and cheese and curry on plates and candles here too, though perched on the ledge of the window and the white painted coffee table rather than hanging in small jars from the window frames. We’ve been in France ten days; we are together one last night before some of us return to Norway and some others instead go back home to their old lives in England. We have talked about him a little, though mostly we have talked about our time in France and the ways it has helped or not helped to be in a different place.
There’s a break in the conversation, it’s quiet, when a friend—the woman in whose apartment we’re staying—leans forward and says, Grief is like a shadow. Sometimes the shadow will be short; sometimes the shadow will be long; you can never predict it.
Some years after Pisa, a group of students repeated Galileo’s experiment. They realized then a surprising truth. It wasn’t that the balls were dropping at different speeds but that participants held the iron balls more tightly than the wooden ones, that they took an extra second or two to release.
It is Tom who first thinks he sees him. We are standing in a small dining room, just off the kitchen. I am next to Tom; he is facing the room’s only window when he sees someone coming toward the house, across the river on the wooden walking bridge. “It’s him!” Tom shouts—the first and only time I’ve ever heard Tom shout in the several years that I’ve known him—and sprints outside, in only his green soccer shorts and sock-clad feet, several of the others running behind him.
I watch through the open window, but I realize, several seconds before the guys are across the back lawn, maybe even out the front door, that the man on the bridge is not him. The man’s hair is too messy, too long, his frame too compact and thin, his clothes the wrong colors.
Tom makes it almost all the way to the man before he realizes. The moment breaks; I see it swelling: Tom and the clearly wrong man, the mountain behind them, the meltwater river from the glacier crashing against the rocks thirty or forty feet below.
CAIRNS
One year after the Breheimsenteret—the glacier museum—burned, I returned to that icy valley. I was drawn back to that place in a way that was hard to explain. I thought sometimes of how John Muir described the mountains of California as a sanctuary, a place where there was “an invincible gladness as remote from ex
ultation as fear.” The glacier was not remote from exultation or from fear. That’s the thing about a world on fire; you wonder if when the match was first struck, what would have happened if you had known to look.
That morning, like so many other mornings on the glacier, was startlingly cold but also bright: a high glare pushing wide swaths of light off the ice, straight onto our bare arms and wind-rapped faces. I could see a reflection in the lake left by the glacier’s wake, of the mountain’s edge and then more light—sun streaks—moving westward, across the water’s thinly ridged surface toward a land where we were less than citizens but more than travelers. I leaned in, against the wind, and tried to gauge the distance between myself and the farthest edge of the glacier; it was a mile, as a bird flies, at least, maybe more, but the ice was still clearly visible, small dunes of white and blue snow rising just beyond the water.
Also in view from the parking lot where we stood, bouncing on the balls of our feet to keep warm, was the hollowed-out space where the glacier museum had once been. Yellow tape was up, which had been blowing in the wind for months, and construction equipment had been hauled in on long trucks to dig out the rubble at the end of the still-standing sidewalk to nothing. A makeshift tent had been set up fifty feet from the site as a temporary information center, with a small café, a few notices about the fire, the timeline for a new building, and some tour guides waiting to help visitors who came by.
We’d stopped inside that tent but only for a moment, long enough to read the signs and to take a photograph of the museum’s plan for reconstruction, a photograph that I’d accidentally delete only a few hours later. We’d left for the glacier late that day, and my friends were eager to get onto the ice, to make their way to the other side of the mountain, the side that drifted over the high white ridge and dropped off somewhere beyond our line of sight. I wasn’t climbing, only hiking, but I too was ready to get off the bus and start my own walk to the rim of the blue ice.
A small white passenger boat—no more than fifteen feet long—moved steadily toward us across the lake, its metal engine casing bobbing in and out of the water as the captain steered in a half-circle around the rocky bend. The boat stopped just for a moment, a dozen or so meters away, before the captain charged it straight at the shore, close enough I could see the drops of water beaded across its helm. My friends took this as their cue, picked up their backpacks and gear, and scrambled down a narrow break in the bushes and scrub toward the lake and the ever-nearing boat. They’d decided already to pay for the charter across the lake, an expensive but efficient way to get to the ice. I was in no rush, and so I decided I’d skip the boat this time. We’d meet sometime later, catch an afternoon or evening bus home together.
When my friends and all their gear had been loaded from the shore, I shot a photo for one of the guys and then tossed him his camera. He caught it with both hands just before the boat coasted away, my friends and their guide and the boat’s captain becoming smaller and smaller shapes against the brief calm of the morning, against the rush of ice-turned-water.
I picked up my backpack from the ground where I’d set it, adjusted my gloves and hat, and began walking down the single trail that led around the glacial lake to the nearest edge of the ice. Once I was out of the parking area and the lake where I’d left my friends and in the low woods, the wind cut back immediately and I realized, unzipping my jacket, that I’d been straining to hear over it. I wasn’t sure what I was listening for—maybe the boat, maybe other hikers—but I heard nothing beyond my own light breaths and the sound of my feet moving along the trail. There were trees and underbrush lining the path. Still, in the gaps between those trees, I could make out leaves, and maybe even small rocks, moving on the periphery of the water.
The word “cairn” comes from the Gaelic carn or “heap of stones.” As the Greek myth goes, cairns began with the god of travelers, roads, and writing—the guide to the underworld—Hermes. In a debate between Hermes and another god, Hera, over the murder of Argus the all-seeing giant, onlookers were instructed to throw a stone toward the god whom they believed to be telling the truth. Despite the fact that Hera was probably justified in her complaint—Hermes did indeed kill the giant—all the other gods deemed her in the wrong and him in the right. So many rocks were thrown toward Hermes that he was buried under the pile. The first cairn was born: a god inside the stones.
Cairns have long been boundary markers, grave markers, and markers of pathways, summits, and trails. Almost since ships were first built to sail, white-stone cairns were constructed on the edges of seasides, as their own sort of rudimentary lighthouses, directing travelers on their way. European explorers, historian Michael Gaige explains, would even leave messages in cairns, hoping that their friends and fellow countrymen might find them. Future travelers would either destroy the cairns to find the messages (or to reclaim the land for themselves and their country) or would use the cairns for navigational purposes until they found a spot with no cairn where they could set up their own. Of course, cairns come in many forms, and they weren’t just constructed to light paths along the sea or to alert and inform future travelers, but also to indicate roads and trails, the tops of mountains, and even to mark the perimeter of long, snow-drifted glaciers, alerting travelers that it may be dangerous to continue on, past the point where they lay.
Paul Basu, another historian of cairns, suggests that in Scottish tradition, the cairn was first a stone of remembrance, that the common Gaelic phrase, “I will put a stone on your cairn,” means I will never forget. “Cairns embody and invoke,” Basu writes, “an effective transformation of a depopulated region into a landscape haunted by the memory of loss.” In Jewish culture too, small stones were placed on gravesites as a mark of respect and remembrance. Joshua and the Israelites built a cairn before walking around the walls of Jericho seven times, praying and shouting and blowing their horns and then watching the walls fall down and claiming the land. That cairn was a stack of twelve stones, built on the edge of the Red Sea, reminding the Israelites that God had come through for them in parting the waters and would come through again as they moved into the promised land, the land of milk and honey. “To remember,” I once hear a Biblical scholar explain—and recall when a student tells me about the Jewish tradition of cairns and about her own experience of placing a small white stone on her grandmother’s grave —“is commanded more in the Scriptures even than to obey.”
After some time, I begin to make my way to the ice. I’d already hiked the wet and winding three-kilometer path from the parking lot, where my friends caught their boat; I’d followed that to a wooden boardwalk, fixed straight into the side of the mountain, extending outward like a bridge between land and rock. After climbing the boardwalk’s many steps, I’d finally arrived in view of the farthest lip of the glacier. A ways after the boardwalk, there was the field of blue ice: twenty- or thirty-foot-high walls of compounded snow, shining and dripping. Beneath the glacial walls was a river, pummeling through the granite and crashing into the lake, the icy glacial water and runoff turning a long plume of water lighter than the rest. Lighter doesn’t necessarily mean cleaner though. As I sat midway around the lake on a low sandbar earlier, I had watched the silt slowly wash in across the shore, turning over the water on the small lake like the tide on a sea.
I had taken my time—a few hours, in fact—walking the still-snowy trail, following the bright backpacks of some people ahead and then continuing on my own when I had drifted too far behind the pack.
Even though it’s a popular means of getting to the glacier, the trail would have been mazelike save the occasional red o’s or arrows spray-painted right onto rocks or trees. The Norwegian Trekking Association uses these red markings interchangeably with evenly stacked stone cairns, indicating paths throughout the country; it’s one of the world’s most consistent trail systems. Hikes are rated by point values, and small boxes with visitor logs are placed at the ends of trails so that hikers can sign in and record their poin
ts.
Hiking is a way of life in Norway. Despite Norway’s complicated family-owned private landholdings, it is considered every citizen’s right to “roam.” The “right to access” or “freedom to roam” law, allemannsrett (“all men’s right”) in Norwegian, means people have rite of passage in any uncultivated area, no matter who it’s owned by. It’s legal to camp or hike through any property and illegal for landowners to construct prohibitive fences around their property. People can swim in the rivers and forage wild berries from anywhere that they can find them: the sides of highways or someone else’s backyard. Land, in this way, is neither wholly public nor private. By law, it lives in a liminal space, somewhere in between. This—and the rise of tourism surrounding the glacier—explains the dozens of people, maybe more, whom I see along the trail, and especially when I reach the river at the glacier’s edge. There are six-foot boulders, open ledges, and piles of broken rock, but people walk around them casually, taking photographs and eating bread-and-cheese lunches packed in brown paper bags.
I walk along the rocks myself for some time until I arrive at a single-chain metal fence, thirty feet—maybe more—from the glacier. Metal posts holding up the fence are drilled into the rock. The walls of ice—even in the short distance between—tower overhead. The walls are uneven: webbed in places where the water has melted and pushed through. There are overhangs and bright crystalline tunnels, sunk into the face of the glacier but glinting where the light and shadows glance off the millions of granules of ice.
In the distance, long lines of roped-together hikers make their way up the snow-covered mountain in the not-quite-arctic air. The light moves off those higher places, too, making them hard to look at and hard to look away from, as if watching the midday sun from a dark room. The ice in front of me appears rippled, perhaps the result of shifting, or heat, or maybe just time. Somewhere nearby, there’s a sharp cracking sound, and just beyond that is the roar of thousands of gallons of meltwater moving, creating channels below surface.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 16