Dispatches from the End of Ice

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Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 21

by Beth Peterson


  It was a beautiful day that first time on the glacier; you can see in the photograph that my face is reddened, probably from both wind and sun. The landscape was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I don’t remember many of the particulars, but I do remember climbing up over a section of blue ice and suddenly having a view of mountains from every angle. I took a photograph of that too: blue skies—bluer than I’d ever seen—set against white, crusted snow, and mountains upon mountains.

  On our way home from the glacier, back on the sunny bus some of us had ridden to get there, we all stripped off jackets and gloves and boots. As I was in the habit of doing—in order to get off the fitted sleeves of my hiking overshirt—I unstrapped my watch and put it in the back of the seat pocket in front of me with my gloves and my hat. When the bus stopped at the place where we were getting off, I grabbed the hat and the gloves but somehow missed the watch; it would be some hours before I realized it was gone.

  It was my favorite watch—a gift from my parents—one I’d worn through two summers leading canoe, kayaking, and backpacking trips, through another summer as a camp counselor, and another where I’d moved to Colorado. The watch was one of several things I left or misplaced that first summer in Norway. Perhaps I’d simply packed too much in my oversized backpack, or perhaps it was just carelessness. I worried that I would not come back to Norway, that I would return to life in the States and forget about what I had seen there; perhaps I was leaving my own lost possessions like a trail to lead me back.

  The thing is I did return to Norway. Less than a year later I boarded the same bus—with different friends this time—to and from the same blue ice. It was on my way home that it happened. I walked down the aisle and sat down near the back. Like the year before, I began unzipping my fleece and jacket and taking off my gloves. It was then that I saw it there—the purple watch, caught in the netted back pocket of the seat in front of me. I picked it up amazed; the band had faded some, but the digital face was still keeping time.

  DECEMBER 2018

  Months pass and then years after I find the recovered watch. Still, I think of that story often. Sometimes I wonder if it’s supposed to tell me something about time, maybe the way time marches or drives on, with or without us, no matter what happens around it. Or perhaps it is supposed to be a story about the way that things we’ve lost sometimes return to us, however unexpectedly.

  The truth is, even more than the story of the recovered watch, I can’t stop thinking of that photograph with my friends on the glacier. My arms were behind my friends’ backs in that photograph; you can see both of my hands, but in those first happy days in Norway the watch is just out of sight.

  JUNE, SIXTEENTH CENTURY BCE

  The earliest clocks were not made digitally or designed with metal parts. They were actually made of water. Stone bowls or cylinders were designed with a single tiny hole, large enough to either drain or take in water, drip by drip. As the bowl or cylinder filled—or emptied, alternatively—the water moved past a series of etchings, each mark in the stone indicating an hour.

  I don’t know where the water came from that filled those clocks, but I read somewhere that eventually mercury was used in water’s place. With its propensity to freeze and melt, water couldn’t keep entirely accurate time.

  AFTER

  ATLANTIS

  MOUNT ARARAT, TURKEY

  When I was still a child, the first story I heard about a flood was the tale of Noah’s ark. There was a man in that story—Noah—building a boat, and then groups of animals loading themselves onto that boat two by two. While the land around them flooded, Noah, his family, and all those animals rode out the forty-day storm tucked safely inside their floating wooden home. At the end of it all, the waters receded and a rainbow was given to Noah as a promise that there would never again be a flood that large, one that covered the whole earth.

  UPPSALA, SWEDEN

  It would be some time after hearing about the ark before I would read of another flooded land, this time the island of Atlantis. In that story—first recorded by Plato in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias—there is an ancient island kingdom that is a superpower in its own right. “For at this time, the ocean was passable,” Plato would write, “since it had an island in it in the front of the strait that you people call the ‘Pillars of Hercules.’ This island was larger than Libya and Asia combined, and it provided passage to the other islands for people who traveled in those days.” The island that Plato described wasn’t content to only keep to its boundaries, however, even as vast as they were. Instead, as Plato recounted, “this power gathered all of itself together, and set out to enslave all of the territory inside the strait, including your region, in one fell swoop.”

  The island’s power got larger and larger as it swept across the region, conquering one people after another. Still, like many of the stories I heard as a child, this superpower couldn’t get away with its evil advances forever. As the narrative continues, Athens—one of the regions the island attempted to take over and subdue—rose up and decided to fight for its freedom. Even when deserted by their neighbors, the Athenians fought valiantly and, in a surprising feat of victory, overcame the island power, freeing all the people who had been enslaved. Immediately after Athens won, violent earthquakes and floods began to shake the area. Following what Plato calls “the onset of an unbearable day and night, … the entire warrior force sank below the earth all at once, and the island of Atlantis likewise sank below the sea.” In a reverse ending to the story of Noah, the flooded waters didn’t reveal land; instead, the whole place was lost into the dark depths of the ocean.

  Throughout the years since Plato penned the story of Atlantis, many locations have been proposed as possible homes for the ancient submerged city: Malta, Israel, Canaan, the Bimini Road in the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, the Madeira Islands, the Bermuda Triangle, and Indonesia. Ships, explorers, and mapmakers alike have searched for Atlantis or even made claims that they have found it.

  Even Sweden has been proposed as a site of the lost Atlantis. Between 1679 and 1702, Olof Rudbeck, the botanist who planted some of Sweden’s most famous gardens, argued that his hometown of Uppsala was the location of the lost Atlantis. In his 2,500-page Atlantica, Rudbeck set out to prove his theory, using mythology and etymology as evidence for his over one hundred reasons why Uppsala matched Plato’s narrative.

  Looking through the online holdings of a rare map store in California, I find an inked-in map commissioned by Rudbeck. Latitude and longitude lines are sketched on the bottom and right side of the map and veer in thin lines across it. Mountains, rivers, and towns are added to the map, along with dozens of small islands following Sweden’s shoreline. There, in approximately the spot where Uppsala now stands, is the label “Atlandah.”

  WHEATON, ILLINOIS

  When I was in graduate school, I lived in a city that occasionally flooded. My whole life before this, I’d never lived in a low place, never had to consider the flow of water. The old farmhouse which I shared with two other roommates in that city, though, was prone to inundation. Bordered in front by a parking lot and in back by railroad tracks, it was out of place just a few buildings from the main thoroughfare to downtown. On the second floor we were fine, but in one storm after another, our neighbors in the downstairs apartment pulled sofas and rugs and bookcases onto our porch to dry. The narrow driveway flooded, and so did the campus parking lot down the street.

  Temporary No Parking signs appeared during storms, and my neighbors and I usually remembered to move our cars. One weekend when we were all away, though, one of my roommates accidentally left her car in that low-lying campus parking lot. When she returned, there was her lone white car, drowning in two or three feet of water. Though the neighbors’ apartment did not flood during that storm, several buildings on campus did. In one dorm the weight of the water caused windows on the first floor to break, forcing students to evacuate into lounges or to stay with friends, some for the rest of the semester. That nigh
t a friend of mine who lived in the dorm walked outside and saw lightning strike ground in front of her. Some years later she would tell me that the image never left her, that when she saw that bolt on the campus lawn she thought at first it was a tree on fire.

  After the storm was over, black-and-white newspaper photos showed students swimming in the streets. None of us knew that the water was not only coming down from the sky but also up from the sewers.

  THE DOGGER BANK, NORTH SEA

  In 1999 French author Jean Deruelle published Atlantide des Mégalithes, a book that drew on older Atlantis theories as well as historical and geographical research to propose that a strip of submerged land called Doggerland was the one-time site of Atlantis.

  Deep in the North Sea between the UK and Europe, Doggerland was named in the 1990s by British archaeologist Byronny Coles after “doggers” or Dutch fishing boats that used to travel there. Though many meters under the surface now, that land is thought to have once been above water, before massive floods took place there in the middle of the seventh century BCE. Deruelle and others proposed that the floods were triggered by a series of earthquakes that broke open methane deposits on the ocean floor and caused more than 180 miles of Norwegian coastline to collapse into the sea. From that force came a tsunami. The Dogger Bank—and whatever inhabited it—was lost, once and seemingly for all time, beneath the North Sea.

  Deruelle believed there was clear evidence that the Dogger Bank fit the Atlantis narrative, most notably because it is one of the world’s few submerged places that is home to a “Great Plain,” one of Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis. In the years before Deruelle wrote his book, trawlers had dragged up some man-made artifacts from the area, further evidence, in Deruelle’s mind, that an ancient civilization had once claimed this spot.

  In the almost two decades since Deruelle’s book, the Dogger Bank and its surrounding area, Doggerland, have become a site of more study. In 2015 a team of researchers from the University of Bradford and several other British universities received a €2.5 million grant from the European Research Council to study and map Doggerland using vast remote-sensing data acquired from oil and gas companies.

  UPPSALA, SWEDEN

  Sometime after finding the Swedish Atlantis map in the California map store, I visited Uppsala. On my way, I made a detour in nearby Stockholm to see the Vasa Museum, home of a 1,200-ton wooden Swedish warship that sank in 1628, less than twenty minutes after taking off for its first voyage and only two years before Rudbeck, that originator of the Swedish Atlantis theory, was born.

  I took my time walking through the museum, circling all around the bronzed ship, past its tall masts and intricate carvings: a lion with a coat of arms in its paws, two baby angels, the Greek god Hercules, and a series of warriors. While touring exhibits about the people who would have worked on the ship and packed or handled the artifacts on display, I found myself most interested in the narrative of the sinking—a top-heavy boat catching the wind, then taking on water only 1,300 meters from shore, while the crowd of onlookers who’d come to see the maiden voyage watched, unable to help. Walking through that museum, I wondered whether the sinking of the Vasa was on the edges of Rudbeck’s consciousness when he began to study Atlantis, whether the idea of something being not lost but drowned, or maybe buried, led to his revisionist theories on Plato’s island.

  Later that day I boarded a train for Uppsala, an old and impressive university city with smoky cafés, streets packed with bicycles, and a narrow river running through downtown. I visited the university, a local castle, and the red brick Uppsala Cathedral, the site where Rudbeck is buried. I wandered through the gardens that he planted but still could not find anything in all those places that echoed the myth of Atlantis.

  My last stop in Sweden was a boat trip through the archipelago, “channels” as Rudbeck called them, borrowing the term from Plato. It was a bright day with a slight wind as the low boat motored away from the shore and headed out of the harbor and then past one after another tiny island, just off the coastline. Mostly the other boats we passed were small, like ours. Sometime midway through the day, though, a reconstructed sailing ship—maybe from the time of the Vasa or the doggers—sailed by, the body of the ship dark wood with a deep-red mast and a Dutch flag billowing in the sea air.

  I try now to imagine, as I think about that ship, Rudbeck himself standing on the deck of a similar boat, looking out over what he is certain is the ancient Atlantis: not just an island, but a country.

  ATLANTIC OCEAN

  When I began to study the story of Atlantis, I assumed the place was named after the Titan god Atlas who, after getting on the wrong side of a war, was condemned to forever hold up the sky, the same god collections of maps—atlases—are named after. It turns out that there are two Greek gods named Atlas. The Atlas who ruled Atlantis wasn’t a Titan; he was the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea. Perhaps his end shouldn’t have been surprising, given his parentage. Perhaps it’s also not surprising that the name “Atlantic Ocean” is tied to this god and his submerged home.

  Of course, Plato’s Atlantis isn’t just a story of a lost city; it is a cautionary tale too, a moral about what happens when a place gets too powerful and tries to rise up against its neighbors.

  There’s one other thing I learned upon revisiting Plato. Some scholars consider Critias to be the first environmental text; in it Plato also laments the destruction of forests near Athens. Many great floods, he explains, have eroded the soil and changed the landscape until the city has become like “the bones of the wasted body.”

  SANTORINI, GREECE

  Jean Deruelle and Olof Rudbeck are not the only ones to argue Atlantis might have been real. Many historians and scholars believe that there could have been a historical basis for Atlantis, even if the stories that have come down to us are fictionalized. As in the case of the Dogger Bank, these theories often hinge on cataclysmic events.

  Perhaps even more likely than the earthquakes of Doggerland is the eruption of a volcano in Santorini, Greece, sometime between 1600–1500 B.C.E. Not only did the lava and ash consume whole cities, it’s thought that a tsunami followed, submerging nearby coastal areas. In the 1960s, an ancient Minoan settlement was discovered beneath the ash of the volcano on Santorini. Pottery and furniture and frescoes began to emerge; soon, three-story buildings appeared. It seemed newly possible that this site—buried and not that far geographically from Plato’s Athens—may have been the basis for Plato’s story. Seventy miles away, on the island of Crete, scattered artifacts discovered along the coast seem to back up this theory, or at least the idea that a series of very large waves had hit land there too.

  A few historians line up the Santorini eruption with the Biblical story of Exodus. They see that great migration of the Israelites from Egypt as coinciding not only with the Old Testament story of the Israelites fleeing slavery under Pharaoh, but also with some unforeseen natural disaster. Others have said maybe the myth of Atlantis is evidence, however distant, validating the story of Noah and the flood, Atlantis being what was left in Plato’s day of the memory of that long-ago event.

  WHEATON, ILLINOIS

  My classmates and I called that year in graduate school when everything flooded “the year of the plagues.” It had started with mumps; that fall we had gotten an email that a case of mumps had been discovered at our small college. Unfortunately, the mumps-carrying student didn’t realize what they had and so had gone to a couple of classes and the library and eaten in the dining hall. Only a few weeks later there were already thirty-some cases on campus. Infected students were quarantined in their rooms, and student workers were tapped to leave trays of food outside their doors.

  After the mumps came the cicadas—masses of them—a hum in the background of every conversation. They had emerged as part of a seventeen-year cycle, coming out of the ground in droves. One local newspaper noted that each cicada’s call was equal to the decibel noise of a kitchen blender. People worried about the effec
t on outdoor weddings that spring; a local music venue moved the date for its yearly classical concert so the cellos and violins wouldn’t have to compete with the droning.

  Before the cicadas left, the roof of a campus building caught on fire while some students were still inside. A blowtorch had been left on by construction workers above the main auditorium. The workers had gone home before anyone realized what had happened. Soon the roof started smoking. Campus safety officers and firemen rushed to clear the building; the auditorium was closed for the rest of the year.

  Finally there was the flood.

  Our plagues weren’t the same as those of the Old Testament—boils, locusts, hail, a river turned into blood—but they were close enough to make us wonder.

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  In 2005, a year and a half before the campus plagues, the levees broke and New Orleans flooded. Hurricane Katrina had hit that August, beginning in the Bahamas and making its way over Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico, and up to Louisiana. New Orleans—with Lake Pontchartrain to its north, Lake Borgne and the Mississippi sound to its east, the Gulf of Mexico to its south, and the Mississippi River winding through it—was supposed to be protected by a series of levees and floodwalls. Within twenty-four hours of Katrina’s landfall, one then two then five then ten then fifteen then twenty of those levees and floodwalls gave way to the water. When all was said and done, at least fifty levees and flood-walls had failed, leaving 80 percent of the city sitting under water.

 

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