Would it have mattered, I wonder as I read, knowing about the volcano, knowing about the deer tick, knowing that no matter how hard I tried I could not keep the professor’s grass green?
XVII
To fall in a dream might mean to lose control. Or it might just be waking up, the mind resisting sleep, the brain confusing a signal for rest with one for falling, reminding the body that it must take care, that it must stay alive.
Near the end of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Axel, Lidenbrock, and Hans, riding on a small raft, fall over what feels like an endless waterfall. “Greater,” Axel narrates, “than the great cataracts of America,” with a “surface like a shower of arrows, launched with utmost force … a network of moving threads,” going at a speed, he predicts, of ninety miles an hour.
Axel gives himself up for lost. “It will be understood,” he says, “that these ideas passed vaguely and darkly through my mind. It was difficult to think at all in this giddy journey which was so like a fall. Judging by the wind that lashed our faces, our pace must have far exceeded that of the most rapid train. To light a torch under these conditions would have been impossible.”
What Axel doesn’t expect is that the descent is not the end. Instead, Verne sees to it that the protagonists rise, that they do indeed go somewhere. Moments after that waterfall, the small raft that carries Axel, Lidenbrock, and Hans begins to rise and rise, though what those characters rise out of is the shaft of an erupting volcano.
XVIII
On one of my last nights in Wyoming, my friends and I pulled the car over on the side of the road on the way home from the mountains. We’d stopped in Centennial, a small town at the foot of Medicine Bow National Forest, talked about getting pie at the cedar-lined Bear Tree Tavern, and maybe we did, but then we drove on, past the handful of trailers and cabins, past the land one of our friends would soon buy. We drove down Snowy Range Road toward Laramie, talking and laughing and listening to music on the car radio, watching the green lights from the dials and the dashboard spill onto the floor, until someone in the backseat said, “Stop” or “Look.” I can’t remember; what I do remember is whichever thing they did say, we stopped and looked.
My friend parked in the uncut grass on the side of the empty road, and we all climbed out of the car. It was silent, and while our eyes adjusted, it was dark—totally dark—no streetlights or lit windows or city haze in the distance, no oncoming headlights or neon bar signs, no glare from the snow and no reflection of the moon off water. It was just black, the sort of black that might have been pure, that might have been annihilating, that meant it took several seconds before we could make out the faces of our friends or the lines of the road or follow the outlines of our own hands.
But then, as we waited there in the middle of the road, our eyes still open, we could see just above the black. Even in that great unknown, there were stars, a canopy.
ON TIME
DECEMBER 2015
On December 3, 2015, approximately eighty tons of ice were brought in large refrigerated shipping containers from the Davis Strait near Greenland to Paris, France. There were twelve pieces of ice in total, the largest of which, the New Yorker noted, was about the size of three New York taxi cabs “piled on top of each other.” Each of the pieces were floaters, breakaways from a larger ice sheet, cast off to sea. Divers and dockworkers from the Royal Arctic Line had collected those floaters, roped them behind ships, and dragged them to shore. Once at the shore, cranes loaded the ice into metal shipping containers, which were ferried by boat to Aalborg, Denmark, and then transferred to trucks, to be driven roughly thirteen hours, likely through Belgium and to France.
When the trucks pulled into Paris, they may have passed Le Marais or Notre Dame or the Musée Curie; they almost certainly crossed the Seine, making their way between the Garden of Luxembourg and the Botanical Gardens through the fifth arrondissement—the Latin Quarter—to the very center of the brick-lined Place du Panthéon, the church-turned-mausoleum that was once dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. There, in view of the columned building, the trucks stopped and deposited the twelve pieces of ice, left them in a twenty-meter circle, each positioned like the hour marker on a clock or on the face of a watch.
It was less than a month after the Paris terrorist attacks had taken place when those trucks pulled into France full of ice, and it was the week of COP 21, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, the same conference where the Paris Agreement would be negotiated. The blocks of ice were art, the joint project of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and University of Copenhagen natural history professor Minik Rosing. It was Eliasson and Rosing’s second installation of ice; the first had gone to Denmark the year before. “As an artist,” Eliasson was quoted as saying then, “I am interested in how we give knowledge a body. What does a thought feel like and how can knowledge encourage action?” Later, in “Ice, Art, and Being Human,” an essay on the website for the project, Eliasson and Rosing would write together that “one of the challenges of our time is that people feel disconnected from—perhaps even insensitive to—the world’s great problems. We do not see ourselves as agents in a global society.”
For nine days Greenland and France were inextricably connected as Paris hosted the installation that was those great, dripping pieces of ice. In videos posted after the fact, tourists and locals take photographs with and of the ice. They touch its sheer edges. One man, wearing a green vest, does the robot between blocks of ice. Cars move on the road just behind the blocks; once, a siren is heard going off in the distance. Somebody places a small plastic cup under one of the pieces of ice; in the video footage I see, the cup is about to overflow from catching all the drippings. The installation, Ice Watch, was a dual nod, Eliasson noted, to the shape that the pieces of ice made and to the way climate change itself is a race against the clock.
One thousand pieces of ice the same size as the Paris blocks—noted one reporter around that same time—melt every second in Greenland.
SEPTEMBER 2014
Just over a year before the Paris Ice Watch, I moved to Michigan, a place where both water and time would soon be on everyone’s minds.
Earlier that year, as a cost-cutting measure, the city of Flint changed its water source from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River. Almost immediately after the change, city residents began to notice that their water was different. Rather than the formerly clear stream, the water out of the tap was turning brown or orange. A General Motors plant in town observed that its engine parts were beginning to corrode after being washed in city water. In one particularly heated meeting at Flint’s city hall, residents brought bottles and even gallons of brown water taken directly from their taps and hoisted them above their heads, calling for an explanation.
Boiling orders came intermittently, but still the city assured residents that the water was fine. The mayor of Flint, Dayne Walling, drank tap water on television to prove to residents that it was sanitary. “Are you ready to drink it?” asked Collette Boyd, the TV-5 news anchor. “Yes, my family and I drink it every day,” replied the mayor, before taking a big drink from a white mug. The mayor was young, dressed in a blue power suit with a maroon and tan striped tie.
When a team from Virginia Tech comes to study the water—at the request of a concerned mother—they find lead levels more than a hundred times past the legal limit. Still, it’s not until twenty-one months after the city water is switched that a state of emergency is declared: twenty-one months of drinking and showering and bathing babies in that water.
Twenty-one: I will notice later how much the time will come up in discussions of Flint, in articles criticizing the city and the state and even the nation’s response. What if it had only been twenty-one days? I muse to a friend. Twenty-one hours? Twenty-one minutes of lead? Would it, should it, still matter then?
DECEMBER 2015
Two days before eighty tons of ice were dropped in the shape of a watch at the Place du Panthéo
n in Paris, technology and finance giant Bloomberg created its own clock. This was a digital clock broadcast on Bloomberg’s website. In the background is an image of the earth’s surface, clouds floating above the water and then gradually darkening to black. On top of that background, a series of white block numbers quickly tick upward.
The clock reads 409.49617940 when I first I see it; it’s a carbon clock, tracking historical carbon increases, since the United States started measuring airborne carbon dioxide in 1958. That year, in 1958, there were 316 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; now, sixty-one years later, there are 409 parts per million. According to Bloomberg, the “danger zone,” when sea levels will rise significantly and extreme weather will affect economics and the environment in drastic ways, is 450 parts per million. Bloomberg estimates that the world will reach this danger zone by the year 2040.
Just below the ticking clock, Bloomberg also includes a graph showing likely parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from thousands of years ago until today. Until the 1900s the line holds steady, mostly horizontal, usually somewhere below 280 parts per million. Between the 1900s and now, the line indicating global rises in carbon usage becomes nearly vertical.
FIFTH CENTURY BCE
In Ancient Greece, there were two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos—pictured as an old man with a gray, flowing beard—referred to chronological time, the basic movement of days and minutes and seconds. Kairos, on the other hand, is defined as “the right time”: an opportune time, a crucial time, a sort of seizing of a perfect fleeting moment. In art, the Greek figure for Kairos has often been portrayed as young, beautiful, and standing on his tiptoes, with winged feet ready to run. He’s also known for having a single lock of hair on the front of his head only, signifying that you can catch and seize Kairos if you see him coming up, but you have no way of holding onto him if you only see him from behind. In one marble relief of Kairos, the figure holds a pair of scales in one hand and a razor in the other, suggesting, it seems, that Kairos is found somewhere between danger and opportunity.
I call a Greek American friend to ask her about Kairos and, ironically, catch her in the middle of a Greek event in Houston. She confers with the woman sitting next to her and then says she can’t tell me much beyond one absolute fact; in Modern Greek, the word kairos means weather.
JUNE 2018
When I visit friends in Oregon, they tell me that they have just started watching a series of films and TV shows coming out of Norway, called “slow films.” The films are about various things—train rides, boat rides, campfires, even knitting—and are “slow” because they follow whatever they’re filming in real time. Viewers watch a boat drift up a fjord at the real speed it’s going and in the moments it’s going there; they see each stop the train makes or the person knitting one stitch and then row at a time.
“It’s mesmerizing,” my friend Sarita tells me. We’re on a hike, through an old-growth mountain forest. My friends, used to the climb, are moving steadily upward at a good clip; I’m struggling to keep up behind.
“Slow sounds great,” I answer her back, hoping she takes my meaning doubly.
My other friend, Sarita’s sister Luisa, chimes in to explain that apparently the shows got so popular in Norway that people who had been watching started to come out and meet the trains and boats, to wave as they went by or to welcome them in to their final destination. “Wouldn’t that be fun?” she asks.
I will think later, when I’m looking for those slow films online, about Andy Warhol’s iconic 1964 film Empire, which showed more than eight hours of black-and-white slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building. One year before that, his film Sleep showed five hours of the poet John Giorno sleeping. The films are “conceptual,” I had read Warhol saying in an interview; by that I assumed he meant they were to exist in the world more than to be watched. The thing is, though, they are watched, and their slow time or real time does something to the viewer, says something to us about time.
For a few years before my friends tell me about the Norwegian slow films, I’d watched what would likely be classified as a slow film myself around Christmastime. “Yule Log” was a video of a fireplace that burns and crackles. There was something about the noise in the background, constant and steady, that I liked, and also the film seemed to make my tiny apartment seem more festive, like the fireplace was transported through my television screen.
It’s privilege, I realize only later, that allows me to watch those slow films, that makes me think I have some control over time.
JULY 2018
In summer 2018 I come across another web-based clock; this clock is hosted by the University of Oxford and shows a rise in greenhouse gases, moving toward a trillion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere. The clock was designed after a series of papers were published detailing the idea that cumulative carbon emissions are more important than year-by-year tallies.
The website for this clock is simple: a gray-and-white background with big red block numbers ticking away in a frenetic motion. When I first glance at the clock, the number on it reads 622,892,427,000. Only a minute or two later the number has changed to 622,892,437,000. I go back to the site the following afternoon—not even twenty-four hours later—and the number is 622,916,403,967. I read in a write-up of the site that in 2013 the Oxford researchers predicted one trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be reached by Wednesday, November 14, 2040. Not quite five years later, this date has already been moved up to Saturday, April 5, 2036.
I try to watch the clock, even for just ten minutes, to see how it moves, but the speed with which the numbers change is literally dizzying; it begins to hurt my eyes.
NOVEMBER 2015
Shortly after I move to Michigan, a new friend tells me about a public art installation class, Civic Studio, in which class members collectively design a major art project that comments on the nature of contemporary society. One Civic Studio, for instance, built an “Inconvenience Shop” where a bakery had once existed, raising all sorts of questions about commodification and about changing neighborhoods in our medium-sized Michigan city. Other Civic Studios got at environmental questions and questions of space, land use, and architecture.
The Civic Studio my friend tells me about is a Provisional Flood Club. In one photo I see of the space, there’s a boat hoisted into the air with the word “Club” painted in white capital letters on its side. In another photo a square Plexiglas container held up by red crates is partly filled with water. “If you peered down and looked through it,” my friend told me, “you could see downtown Grand Rapids rising above floodwaters.”
The art installation took the history of the area—a flood zone—and asked how local citizens could pull together if the waters rise again. “Everyone is already a member of the Provisional Flood Club,” reads a statement class members put out, “based on the inherent and shared connectedness as inhabitants of the earth and in recognition of water as a fundamental and vital aspect of life.” In another statement, summarizing what the Provisional Flood Club aims to be, they write, “As the climate changes, gentrification occurs, and feelings of anxiety and loneliness set in more intensely and frequently, the sense of vulnerability, urgency, and precarity that flood brings will play a larger role in collective imaginaries. Perhaps, as the Provisional Flood Club poses, this vulnerability will not be that which is our downfall, but it will be that which unites us across cultural, ideological, and class divides.”
Is it our civic responsibility—I will wonder after hearing about that exhibit—to be a provisional flood club? What if the flood is already here? What if we’re told the flood isn’t happening, that it’s all just ordinary water?
NOVEMBER 2016
Exactly one year after my new friend tells me about the Civic Studio, environmental discourse in the United States changes. First, references to climate change are wiped from government websites. Soon after that, the leader of the Environmental Protection Ag
ency says he would not agree that carbon dioxide “is a primary contributor to the global warming we see.” Soon after that, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan begins to be dismantled. Soon after that, the United States exits the Paris Climate Agreement. Soon after that, implementation of new ozone standards is delayed, first for a year but possibly indefinitely. Soon after that, a federal flood-risk management order is revoked. Soon after that, climate change is taken off the list of concerns to national security. Soon after that, car emissions regulations are loosened, and rules on coal and methane are rolled back. Soon after that—nineteen days into a government shutdown—Florida senator Marco Rubio tries to dissuade the president of the United States from declaring a federal emergency in order to build a wall by saying, “We have to be careful about endorsing broad uses of executive power. Tomorrow the national emergency might be climate change.”
JULY 2006
Nine years before the Paris ice clock, I travel to the glacier—Norway’s Jostedalsbreen Glacier. It’s my first year in Norway and my first time on the glacier. I’m with my friends Darrell, Annie, CJ, and Jessica; I can’t remember who else is with us. I’m wearing all black: long sleeves, long pants, and gloves, low-cut hiking boots, and a full-body red climbing harness. I know this from a photograph someone took and that I still have on my desk. In that photo, Annie is on the right and Jessica on the left. They’re both taller than me and both are wearing sunglasses. A rope and a carabiner are tied to Jessica’s harness. In the foreground, where we stand, is a short, flat stretch of broken rock. Behind us are several long washes of snow; two icy lakes are visible in the distance, and behind those are three mountains, all snow-covered. Two of the mountains are neatly ridged toward tablelike tops, and one juts out in sharp, jarring edges.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 20