Dispatches from the End of Ice

by Beth Peterson

  I wonder now if John Franklin and his men saw the signs. Their ships, after all, were named the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, Terror being a throwback to when that ship was a warship used in the War of 1812, and Erebus named after the Greek god for darkness, the son of chaos, and the entrance to the underworld.

  John Franklin’s wife was famed to have demanded a search for him, eventually helping launch seven expeditions to look for him, his missing men, boats, and any possible records that he might have left, buried in cairns. She also contacted celebrities of the day, including Charles Dickens, to try to advance her cause, traveled herself to the north of Scotland—the closest she could get, at the time, to her husband—and even went to a seer to try to get news of Franklin.

  In the end, it wasn’t until 2014 that the HMS Erebus was discovered, near King William Island in northern Canada, by a boat sent from the Canadian government. Two years later the HMS Terror was found by the Arctic Research Foundation, incidentally, in Nunavut, Canada’s Terror Bay.

  I’d talk sometimes in those days in Norway about life back in the States as “real life.”

  “This is your life,” my friend Annette leaned over and said once, “as real as it will get.”

  It was strange to have found in Norway a place that felt so much like it was my home, though it was not the place where I’d grown up or would return to at the end of all those summers and years. I was walking in the places where my great-grandfather had once walked and the places my grandfather still dreamed about, but they were not the places of my parents and they were not my own. When I first went to Norway, I hoped for but did not expect a home or even an embrace; I thought I was coming with open hands to the place, but I did not realize that sometimes opening one’s hands to one thing means closing them to another.

  Even the cairns are perhaps whiter in my memory than they were at the time: the white of birds’ bellies, the white of sky, the white of bleached wood after rain, the white of frozen rivers, in pale early-morning light.

  It’s in that clearing where I first see one, only slightly higher than the earlier vantage point of my eye: a pile of small rocks, not far off in the distance. The rocks in that pile are misshapen and barely balanced but smooth, no doubt from years of wind and rain. One stone is wedged on top of another, tightly, each a different hue of granite, a slightly different patch of mountain. Stacked there in the middle of nothing but rock and sky is a cairn, stone on stone. I reached down and touched the top stone on that first cairn I saw on the glacier, but I did not move it, did not take any stones away or add anything to the stack. It was knee-high; the stones were flat and mostly smooth, the cairn broad at the base and narrower and thinner as the small flue rose upward, the sun behind it flaring into the rocky valley below, light: light that could melt the snow, crack the ice, dissolve the rock into a wide, open plain.

  After that first cairn was another. It was a bit smaller, tight and low to the ground, with nearly whitewashed rocks that were layered in a circular formation. The base stones were mostly large—perhaps the size of bricks—with the upper stones increasingly smaller like on the first cairn, but this time pebbles were wedged into the open spaces of the cairn, shoring it up against water or wind or people walking by. The outer perimeter of the cairn was arranged in almost perfect symmetry, the edge of one rock exactly meeting the edge of another. Beyond its stones was a view of the valley: scraggly bushes, mosses, wild grass, and, in the distance, dense groves of trees.

  I walked on, following as best as I could the angle of the cairns down the steep and curving slope of rock. Just when I thought I’d missed it—when I contemplated hiking back up to the last pile of cairns and starting again—there was another cairn stacked low to the ground, and another. Standing in a rough line, like evergreens, were several others. Each cairn was a similar height and composition, each within eyeshot of the next, each someone else’s—or several people’s—essays of rock, attempts to map the way forward or behind, perhaps signaling the way home or the farthest reach of where the glacier once went before the warmer years, before the retreat of the ice. There were millions of cracked stones and then, rising from them, cairns.

  The cairns—and the place—marked the way, yes, but what way they marked I did not know. I followed them anyway, feeling a paradoxical weight of gratitude and longing. One stone spire at a time, I moved over rock piles and down ledges, past walls of ice, scrambling sometimes, moving quickly always from one stone to the next. Each of the piles of cairns led to another within view, and each gradually led down, off the glacier, and toward the low lake where I’d begun.

  At the end—arriving at the last pile of cairns, a small stack of just a few white stones, square mostly and low to the ground—I found myself on a wet, grassy knoll, looking back out over the lake and the dark trees and the silt and sand. I was not where I started, but from where I’d come I could see a trail and it wasn’t far off.

  TO THE CENTER

  I

  “It was Sunday, the 24th of May, 1863, that my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, came rushing suddenly back to his little house in the old part of Hamburg, No. 19, Königstrasse. Our good Martha could not but think we was very much behind-hand with the dinner for the pot was scarcely beginning to simmer.” And so begins the Frenchman Jules Verne’s extraordinary voyage, Journey to the Center of the Earth. The first English version of the story took some liberties in the translation. That version starts, “Looking back at all that has occurred to me since that eventful day, I am scarcely able to believe in the reality of my adventures. They were truly so wonderful that even now I am bewildered when I think of them.” The persona of the narrator changes with this shift from a simple relayer of information to interpreter of it. A note of disbelief is added, and an identification with the reader. It’s the word “truly” my eyes rest on, though, when I read the English version for the first time. “Truly” implies room for lack of truth, I remember a professor once telling me, suggests that facts here can’t speak for themselves.

  The facts of the story are that Verne’s protagonists, Axel—a young student—and his uncle, Otto Lidenbrock—a professor, scientist, and savant—uncover a hidden runic manuscript that falls out of a book. Once decoded, the runic manuscript takes them from Germany to Copenhagen and then across the sea to the snowy wilderness of Iceland, glaciers all around. Finally, they journey to an extinct volcano that the writer of the rune, Arne Saknussemm, assures them will lead to the very center of the earth. “Descend the crater of the Jokul of Snäfell,” the ancient rune reads, “that the shadow of Scartaris softly touches before the Kalends of July, bold traveler, and thou wilt reach the center of the earth, which I have done.” Axel and Lidenbrock and their trusted Icelandic guide, Hans, do descend the crater and, after a series of adventures and misadventures, find themselves at the center of the earth.

  II

  I first listen to Journey to the Center of the Earth on a ten-hour drive to Wyoming. I’m planning to teach an intermediate British literature course themed around science and empire a few months later and have decided we’ll read Verne alongside Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and The Voyage of the Beagle. I download the entire book—unabridged—and burn it onto a set of six or seven silver CDs. As my car crosses the low highway through Kansas farm fields, beside combines and four- or five-foot-high stalks of corn, I listen to Axel narrate his trip from Germany to Copenhagen to Iceland, from making it to the edge of the volcano to descending with the help of ropes, strange acoustic phenomena, good conjectures, and the ever-faithful Hans into its heart.

  “Is the Master out of his mind?” the housekeeper asks Axel while Professor Lidenbrock frantically scurries about, making preparations for their journey.

  Axel nods.

  “And he’s taking you with him?” she asks.

  He nods again.

  “Where?” she asks.

  “I pointed toward the center of the earth,” Axel recalls.

  “Into the cellar?” exclaime
d the old servant.

  “No,” Axel said, “farther still.”

  After some time, the tractors and silos and eventually even fields outside my window subside. They’re replaced by arid ground and boarded-up sheds. Towns and villages and filling stations come less and less often until they almost disappear altogether. When I open the window, heat surges in, weighs on my leather steering wheel and the backs of my hands. My car moves steadily still, the engine pulsating warm, the road outside a blur of similar lines against the moving interior.

  And then, hours later, there are mountains, in the distance at first, and then closer and closer still. I pull over on the side of the road when I can first see them. I shut off my car and walk down a dirt road beside the highway for a little ways. A pickup truck flies by; a dog barks somewhere barely within earshot. Otherwise, it’s me and the dusty stones and an empty field and the mountains in the distance, hanging over the edge of the horizon like a precipice.

  III

  I walked and walked the only summer I lived in Wyoming. I was staying in a professor’s house in town: tan stucco with terracotta tiles and a built-in wooden table in the kitchen and skylights in the upstairs bedroom, but no working lock on the front door. There was a bicycle out in the garage, the professor had told me before she left town for the summer, and I put most of my own things in storage and moved in. I can’t remember now whether I ever even opened the garage door.

  I walked to friends’ places; I walked downtown; I walked to coffee shops and restaurants and to the doctor’s and the local park and the laundromat. And when I didn’t have someplace to go, I walked around the tree-lined neighborhoods by the university, trying different blocks each day, sometimes carrying a folded guide to Laramie in my front pocket, tracing on it in pencil the places where I’d been. I walked around the wide oval-shaped pasture at the center of campus and walked every route I could to my nearly empty office with its own long wooden table, taking different footpaths there, even different staircases inside.

  I walked, nearly every day, to a vegetarian café downtown, even though I was not a vegetarian. I would sit in a creased red booth in that café and order the same lunch, sometimes with a book or a pen and paper, sometimes just watching the people move along that broad, open street, a few glass-windowed stores and restaurants on one side, nine or ten sets of railroad tracks on the other. Then when I was done, I’d walk twelve blocks across town, past the post office and the edge of the university campus, to a yellow-painted coffee shop. Sometimes I’d just walk by; sometimes I’d go inside and buy a drink.

  I walked in the mountains and at state parks too. I walked along the red rocks of a high climbing park, Vedauwoo, and noticed, for the first time, all the pines browned or whitened, eaten from the inside by waves of beetles. I saw a family of bears once on a steep walk in the mountains; another time, I turned at a fork in the trail and there, maybe three or four feet away, was an adult moose.

  IV

  One of the legends about Verne’s life—probably not true in whole but maybe in part—was that when he was a young boy, ten or eleven, he is said to have sought out a spot as a cabin helper on a ship planning to sail to the Indies. He wanted to retrieve a coral necklace, his biographer niece explained, for his cousin Caroline. As the legend goes, Verne made it onto the boat but was caught by his father before the ship set off for the next port.

  In another story the young Verne rowed his own small boat from the local harbor, trying to catch up with a larger ship sailing out to sea, but when caught was made to promise that, while still a boy, he’d only travel the world in his imagination.

  Imagination he had. Verne had heard stories of adventurers from his teachers; whatever the cost, he wanted to find himself among them.

  As an adult, Verne would spend days in the National Library, carried far off by research on geography and science and reading others’ travel narratives. He’d meet with famous geographer Jacques Arago, sail around Europe himself, buy boats and name them after his son, the Saint-Michel I, the Saint-Michel II, the Saint-Michel III, and say that he wanted to invent the novel of science.

  V

  My students and I talk about context, about thinking through our own and others’ lenses as we read. We talk about Lyell and Hutton; we read about the Victorian turn from a religious young earth to an older geologic record. We talk about imperialism, colonialism, power, the nineteenth-century deists, and the rise of science in the cultural discourse.

  My students and I try to decipher, to decode, why so many years after the fact, so many people still read Journey to the Center of the Earth. One student makes an argument that it’s Verne’s reliance on classical Roman and Greek mythology. “It’s everywhere,” she tells our class, pointing out each Greek and Roman reference in the text that she’s found, the rest of us flipping along as she calls out one page number after another, ending with her strongest evidence that this is why the travelers eventually land in Stromboli, Italy. Another student comes to class with a huge map he’s hand drawn: the earth according to Verne’s novel. Certain sections are colored in with colored pencils or carefully labeled. At the middle of everything, in the middle of that student’s drawing, the earth is hollow.

  We talk about how Freud might read this text and Said and Marx and how it contributes to, works with, and works against the literature of exploration. My students talk about the descent into the self, the descent into logic, the descent into science, the descent into madness, about madness, about machines, about the fossil record, about the emotional registers of the savant and the scientist and the student, and the way the story doesn’t end where it begins, that Verne sees to it that the protagonists go somewhere.

  One student throws a viewing party for a movie adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Someone rents the DVD, someone else brings popcorn, and my students come back the next Monday telling me how, strangely, Axel was not Lidenbrock’s nephew in this version, how there are villains added to the story, and also how Axel and all the boys at his university seem randomly to break out into song.

  VI

  That summer in Wyoming, sometimes my friends Julie and Paula and I went walking together in the Snowy Mountain range, an hour or so past town. One time, my car barely got up to the mountain parking lot, the accelerator jumping when the car went downhill, stalling as it went up. But we did make it there, to a trail in a quiet evergreen forest. We took a photograph before we began, balancing someone’s camera on the roof of my car, and then running to get into the shot. Paula’s on the left; Julie’s on the right; I’m in the middle. They’re both taller than me and dressed better for a hike, Julie with a backpack along and Paula carrying food and water in a bag on her hip. I have a water bottle in my hand but nothing else beyond a green cotton shirt and a single car key in the pocket of shorts which that summer had become much too big.

  “Be careful,” my doctor had warned me earlier that week. “You’re getting too thin.” Amy, a slim thirtysomething with plastic-framed glasses and fine blond hair pulled back loosely, was sitting on a stool while she said this. I sat on her table, the same way I had nearly every week for the past four months, next to the sign that read “Health Care is a Right, not a privilege.” We had both thought after a host of inconclusive tests that maybe it was stress, though sometime later I would discover it was likely a deer tick, burrowing down into my body.

  I was careful, but on this day I was walking.

  In the photograph we’re small and distant, set against a line of trees, tall grass, and blue sky.

  The trail crossed a bridge over a small, snow-fed mountain stream almost immediately, tiny shoots of whitewater pummeling rocks and moving fast, downward. The path beyond the stream was dry and narrow, millions of needles layering the ground and trees all around, rising upward, beyond our view. It was bright still—even with all those trees—spots of sun regularly making it through breaks in the branches and onto the trail or our own moving bodies.

  We talked as we w
alked around bends and up, over fallen trees. We continued past one long stretch of loamy mud, trampled in by large animals sometime before. We walked alongside uneven boulders cut into the trail and hundreds of aspen with their paper-white trunks, scattered Douglas fir, and thousands of lodgepole pine, some green with branches stretched out, others dead or dying.

  We walked up and up. There had been no one else in the parking lot and there was no one else on the trail, only us, moving deeper into the woods, farther into the mountains, no map in hand.

  VII

  The only thing the professor asked of me was that I keep her grass alive. The mail had been forwarded, someone hired to mow the lawn, the answering machine turned off, her friends and colleagues notified of her travels.

  It seemed like an easy task. When she left and I moved my things into the upstairs bedroom—a suitcase, a laundry basket, and a box of books—the grass was full and green, the sort of green that’s bright, unnatural almost in a high-altitude plain where the sun beats heavy and the wind comes through long and slow. The grass in her yard was soft underfoot when I moved in; I got into a habit of sitting outside in a patio chair, my feet resting in the grass, in the early mornings when I’d eat breakfast. I’d scramble through it sometimes too, on my way to water the flowers in the afternoons. She had told me she had no bones about whether the rest of the plants stayed alive, “just the grass,” she’d said when she showed me the house a few weeks before the summer. I watered the flowers anyway.