Dispatches from the End of Ice

by Beth Peterson

  We walked, that day she showed me the house, from the university to her place so I knew where I was going. We walked from the small entryway—coats and hats hanging on racks—to the living room with its large fireplace and piano, through the reading room, kids’ artwork all over the walls, into the kitchen, downstairs to the basement washer and dryer, upstairs to the den with its worn sofa and chaise and basketball hoop inside, to the black-tiled bathroom with national park posters hanging next to the tub, out again to the large white bedroom with its single round window facing the front yard.

  It was different—that house—than my own single-story, open-plan apartment. Those first weeks in Wyoming I was always walking room to room, in and out, up and down. It felt like the house was located in the very center of everything. I could walk anywhere from there: Julie’s house, Paula’s apartment, the local Episcopalian church where I’d sometimes attend services, the park where I’d often sit and read.

  VIII

  Our class meets in a basement room with no windows, so even when it’s not movie night it feels subterranean, like we’re all always descending to get there, but descend we do, into the text, into the ideas, into the room. Sometimes we descend so far, I wonder if we’ll ever come up for air. We talk about many scenes from the book in great detail, but the scenes my students are most interested in are the dream scenes, the scenes where the narrator of the story makes a descent into night, where he becomes untethered in some way from his own reality.

  I would guess that my students don’t know what it’s like to cross an icy country on foot, to descend a volcano, or to ascend another, but they do understand what it’s like to wake up in a cold sweat, trapped in their own minds, in their own lives or apartments. I’d guess they also understand too a little of what it’s like to see something for the first time, to realize the cellar is not the only thing below.

  “If at every instant we may perish,” I quote to them from Verne one day in that basement classroom, hoping it consoles them, hoping it’s comfort, “so at every instant we may be saved.” I try too to secure the class another classroom, “something aboveground,” I mention in my email to the room scheduler, “or one with windows.” The person who replies tells me that the room across the hall—the same configuration as the room we’re in—might be open but that everything else on that side of campus is taken.

  We stay. We walk down together sometimes, a few of us at a time, following the same path from my office, past Speaker’s Circle and the back of the business school, past some wooden benches and the side of the building where students often smoked before and even after cigarettes were banned, and down, into our basement classroom.

  IX

  “The whole fossil world lives again in my imagination. I go back in fancy to the biblical epoch of creation, long before the advent of man, when the imperfect earth was not fitted to sustain him. Then still farther back, to the time when no life existed. The mammifers disappeared, then the birds, then the reptiles of the secondary epoch, and then the fishes, crustaceans, molluscae, articulata. The zoophytes of the transition period returned to oblivion. All life was concentrated in me, my heart alone beat in a depopulated world. Seasons were no more; climates were unknown; the heat of the earth increased until it neutralized that of our radiant star….

  “Ages seemed to pass like days! I followed step by step the transformation of the earth. Plants disappeared; granite rocks lost their hardness; the fluid replaced the solid under the influence of growing heat; water flowed over the earth’s surface; it boiled; it volatized; gradually the globe became a gaseous mass, white hot, as large and luminous as the sun.

  “In the center of the nebulous mass, 14,000 times larger than the earth it was one day to form, I felt myself carried into planetary space. My body became ethereal in its turn mingled like an imponderable atom with the vast body of vapor which described its flaming orbit in infinite space!

  “What a dream! Where is it carrying me?”

  X

  In the dream I’m falling. In the dream I’m lying on the attic floor and then I’m not. In the dream it’s a clear day, always, the sky a systematic shade of blue: blue like the reflection off a salt pond, blue like blood, blue like a wave impending, blue like the irises in my own eyes, in my father’s eyes, in my mother’s eyes, in my brother’s eyes, in the eyes of only one of my two nieces.

  In the dream I’m fine, always, and then, in the dream, I’m not. In the dream I never see the lip, the cliff’s rim, the mountain’s drop, the perfectly perpendicular edge of the top of the glass-sided sixteen-story building, only air, distance dissolving.

  In the dream I’m neither floating nor being carried along, just moving. In the dream it’s neither cool nor hot; in the dream I don’t see the ground; I don’t see the leaves on trees or people walking along the sidewalks or street signs or rivers or valleys or anything below. I only see sky, the sky ahead of me, all around me—but never touching me, never penetrating my skin—fading from a bright blue to a pale, unnatural gray. I never touch down in the dream; I just fall and fall until I jerk awake and realize I’ve thrown the white cotton sheets off the bed again.

  I watch the moon through the skylight or sometimes the dim morning light flinging shadows around the bedroom floor. After a while I get up; I drink a glass of water. I open the window and suck the cold air into my lungs. I plant both of my feet onto the ground.

  In the dream, I realize early one morning, I’m never walking.

  XI

  Axel and Lidenbrock walk and walk in Journey to the Center of the Earth. At first, when the pair arrive in Iceland, meet their guide Hans, and begin their quest to reach the center of the earth, they ride on horses through the country, lodging with families in one small village and then another. After a while, though, the ground becomes too difficult for the horses to smoothly traverse and the travelers continue on foot. Axel and Lidenbrock and Hans walk in single file by fjords and over a bog; they walk over long stretches of basaltic rock and past massive blocks of stone. They walk all the way to the base of a mountain, and then they walk to the top of that mountain, five thousand feet above the sea. Once they reach the summit they locate the ancient volcanic crater Arne Saknussemm’s rune has led them to find. They descend that crater, make their way to the very bottom of it, and then they keep walking, into the black, down toward the center of the earth.

  Before Axel and Lidenbrock even get to Iceland, they practice walking. They walk through the narrow streets of Copenhagen and up to the top of the tallest steeple in the city, the Von-Frelsens Kirk. They circle up and up the spiral staircase, around the steeple’s spire. They walk inside first and then, after 150 steps, continue outside, on the very edge. Axel is giddy as they walk; he is sick; he exclaims, “I shall never do it!” He climbs on his legs and then his knees and then his stomach. He sees the city below covered in thick smoke, sees the universe spinning.

  Then finally, when he’s made it to the steeple’s farthest point, he descends each of those steps, back to the ground. And then he tries it again, five times more in the next five days. “My first lesson in vertigo lasted an hour,” narrates Axel, “and when at last I was allowed to descend and my feet touched the solid pavement of the street, I was lame.”

  XII

  Gradually, that summer in Wyoming, I began to walk farther and for longer, eventually beyond the city’s bounds. I moved from one coordinate to the next; I mapped the landscape with my body. By the end of the summer, I began to go nearly every day to a high alpine park, Happy Jack Park, where I’d walk the Ridge Trail, the Meadow Trail, or the Campground Loop. I wasn’t sure what I’d find in that place, but I hiked it still, wanting to figure it out as I went along. Sometimes there were animals—cows, birds, deer—or other runners or hikers, but often it was only me, walking quietly and still slowly, through the low brush and trees and high dirt paths.

  On the best days in Wyoming, I’d walk Happy Jack with my favorite professor, Kate, and her bright black dog, Cl
ara, or with Julie and Paula. We’d walk through a high alpine forest, tucked just far enough away from the main highway that people who were not locals did not go there. It was a dark woods, the red of hemlocks and cones and needles from pines and spruce padding the air and the ground. There were a few hikers and animals on those days too, but mostly it was quiet, the white sky occasionally making it through breaks in the trees, stripping the shade bare. It was cool; there were forget-me-nots, wild violets, a few small campsites and bike tracks, but otherwise narrow footpaths and high-altitude air, away from the pressure of the city and the buildings and the relentless streets. We’d walk and talk, and if Clara was there she’d lope ahead, a flash of black dodging in and out of trees.

  One day I went on the Summit Trail at Happy Jack and tried to make a big loop but accidentally ended up on another trail at the wrong parking area. I turned back the way I’d come and wandered one trail, then another, until somehow I ended up off the trail entirely, looking for my way back as dusk quickly closed in on me.

  It had been cold when I started hiking, rain threatening in the low clouds on the horizon but not yet touching down. The trail had been wet in places, wide patches of dark mud, packed down by livestock and bicycles and other hikers and making the route almost impassable. The woods were even darker than usual that day, and the wind seeped through the loose weave of my jacket. I continued on anyway, shaking off the cold. I saw only one person as I went along. That person was a runner, a thin woman dressed in a bright yellow jacket and matching shorts. At some point in the trail, past the patch of mud and wildflowers and after I’d already turned back from the wrong parking area, we crossed paths. I moved to the side so that she could keep her pace, hurrying past me. She nodded at me as she ran by.

  The trail narrowed as it continued upward and finally broke through the trees to a high plain, full of brush and gray and orange rocks, sometimes small and flat, sometimes massive boulders that looked like they’d been tossed by large machinery.

  I walked for an hour or two before I realized the path I was on had tapered, from a wide lane, almost to a trickle, barely enough room for both of my feet to pass. As I looked around, I didn’t remember the scattering of rocks or the knee-high bushes or even the tops of the trees blanketing the view; it all looked like something I might see in Wyoming, but not like something I had seen this day or other days on the same trail.

  I walked around for a few minutes, circled the path to see if there was something wider in the distance or if I could find my way back to the place I’d come from, but one narrow trail just led to another. After a while I sat down on a large flat rock and tried to remember where I’d seen that runner, what the route was that I’d taken since that last clear spot. The sky was already darkening and I worried—on that rock—what I’d do if I had to spend the night out in the park, with only light clothing and half a bottle of water, my phone and wallet locked in my car at the first parking lot where I’d ventured from.

  Reasoning that the park wasn’t that large, that if I just wandered, I might find a road, I finally got up and started walking. After a few minutes, I heard the heavy steps of a herd of cows and then bells, likely strapped to their necks. I walked on, followed the sound, and as I turned a bend, there was a patch of wildflowers that looked strangely familiar. Just past them was a single cow standing next to a wide, stony trail.

  XIII

  I did not keep the professor’s grass alive. It started small: a few patches of brown in the side yard, between the professor’s house and the neighbor’s. I hadn’t walked into that part of the yard for a few days when I noticed a six- or seven-inch section of grass that was a lighter color than the rest, the individual blades of grass spiky and dry. This was the phase before the end, though I didn’t realize it at the time, before the grass would lose its ability to stand at all, would lie flaxlike on the hard ground.

  I sprayed the spot first with a hose—hoping for a quick resuscitation—and then I set up a long metal sprinkler on that part of the lawn. It watered all around, clicked several times, changed directions and watered again. I got up each morning, turned on the sprinkler and moved it from one position in that side yard to another. I placed the same sprinkler around the yard once in the afternoon and, for good measure, right after dinner or whenever I returned home in the evening.

  After the sprinkler came fertilizer, at the suggestion of a guy working at the local hardware store a few blocks away. “Catch it before the rest of the grass wilts,” he told me, “before things get out of hand.” Wanting anything but the grass to wilt, to get out of hand, I hauled the ten-pound bag of fertilizer he’d recommended back to the house and borrowed a friend’s spreader to add it evenly to the lawn. I walked in carefully overlapping rows from one side of the yard to the other, the small green spreader rolling along, casting a steady spray of tiny gray pellets across everything.

  Still, the spots spread from the side yard to the sunniest corner of the backyard and then even to patches out front, under the large spindly evergreen near the living room window. By the time the professor finally moved back into her house, most of the yard had changed color, no longer a bright green, instead a faded and fading one.

  XIV

  “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God’s grace.”

  I read these lines to my students one class as we talk about the way the center of the world is not entirely what Axel and Lidenbrock expect. I think about them as I walk after class to the small Bavarian-styled Episcopalian church in the middle of downtown, as I kneel on the kneeler, pray with the eight or nine other people attending that Wednesday service for the peace of the world, as the priest anoints my head with oil for healing, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

  It’s archetypal, the finding one’s self alone in a dark wood, the finding one’s way back out. “Here’s a secret,” I will read around this same time in an article. “Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost.” The writer continues, though, his reflection not ending just with losing one’s way. “If you’re lucky, you’ll remember a story you heard as a child, the trick of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, the idea being that after whatever is going to happen in those woods has happened, you can then trace your steps, find your way back out. But no one said you wouldn’t be changed by the hours, the years spent wandering.”

  XV

  I remember telling a friend when I first visited Laramie that the place had a foreboding sense about it, that it felt, when you drove in—and even when you stayed the night—like an abandoned ghost town that you stumbled into and then realized, “Hey! There are other people here, and those other people are just as surprised to see you.”

  It was the wide streets that made me feel this way at the time, I think, the occasional tumbleweeds actually blowing through them, and perhaps also that everything had been buried in several feet of snow shortly before I’d gotten there, and so people were mostly inside, or perhaps out in the mountains, skiing and snowshoeing and making the most of it. Some of the neighborhoods around campus—especially the neighborhood where the professor’s house was—were actually quite similar to the rows of Craftsman and Victorian houses in the city I’d lived in before coming to Laramie, even the white house with the two-story porch that held my apartment. I didn’t see that on my first day in Laramie, though.

  I took a photograph my first day driving into town. I’d passed the old cement plant, where arsenic dust would be found sometime later and then remedied by being covered in plastic tarps. I’d driven by the Albany County Fairgrounds and the red-and-white block-lettered sign for Bart�
�s Flea Market. I’d driven up Third Street, past a cigarette stand, two pawn shops; I’d just made it to Grand Avenue, one of the two main thoroughfares between downtown and the rest of the city. To get to the sandstone buildings and pine-tree-lined paths of the university, you turn right at the intersection, but I’d accidentally turned left, toward downtown and West Laramie. As I made that left-hand turn, for some reason, I pulled out my phone and pressed the small camera button on it, taking a picture of what was straight in front of me.

  The corners of that photograph include the curved edge of my car’s hood. There are white flecks covering the glass and the view and a single black windshield wiper, just off-center on the inside right of the frame.

  XVI

  Some years after my summer in Wyoming, I will read an article headlined “Supervolcano? The Big One in Wyoming?” The article details a rift that opened up somewhere near Yellowstone National Park the size of several football fields. It caused scientists to examine again the thirty-by-forty-five-mile caldera that is the impetus for the park’s geysers and hot springs.

  The rift, the writer notes, is evidence that perhaps the volcano lying some miles under the park’s surface may break through. If that volcano blew, the writer of that article, or maybe another, explained, it could be a magnitude eight explosion; its cloud would cover an area five hundred miles wide with ash, perhaps four inches thick.

  I look at a map as I read, and I think about the fact that five hundred miles means the volcano would coat all of the park and the surrounding counties and states; it would make its way to Casper and Gillette and even to the city of Laramie, to the tree-lined neighborhoods and the stucco house, and Prexy’s Pasture on campus and maybe the Snowy Mountains.