by John Updike
Now the dreams of Eastwick still recurred, but Jim’s leathery long body was not there when they ended, and reality was a hotel room where an elderly woman had hung up her old-fashioned XL underwear to dry on the bathroom cord. Red lights like little dragon eyes blinked at her from the corners, meaning she didn’t know what. Fire protection, she guessed. Or a run-down battery. Or an unexplained emergency. She felt shapeless in her nightie, a pale cloud in the mirror. Her body in its gown gave off that sweetish stale smell, like cooking cauliflower or the underside of oilcloth, which she remembered from standing close to her grandmother with a child’s sensitive nose. Ruddy noses out of joint, that Australian bitch had said.
As the tour moved south, by bus, from Jasper to Calgary, through a series of huge old resort hotels thrown up by Canadian ambition and painstaking Scots craftsmen, Alexandra kept her eye on the lanky mustached man with the Southern accent. The group’s sole loners, they could not help winding up walking side by side to scenic vistas and thunderous gorges, and sharing a table at some meals, though always in the company of others. A short Asian couple, he a Taiwanese and she a Malay, both of them eagerly conversational but hard to understand, were easy to join at a table—easier than the other Americans, who sensed something occult and off-putting about Alexandra and whose smugly mundane mind-set and demotic lingo did rouse, as they suspected, her snobbish distaste, and easier than the eight Australians, handsome and prosperous and bumptiously happy to have escaped, if only for some weeks, Down Under. Once the Australians had eaten and drunk their way through the Rockies, they were going on to devour Texas, its steak and rodeos, and then to New England, its lobsters and leaves. “But,” Alexandra pointed out to one couple—a bloke and his sheila, gendered aspects of a single rugged Australian identity—“the prime leaf season may be by.”
“A bit or two’s bound to be left,” the male said cheerfully. “We’ll extrapolate.”
“Our guidebook,” the wife said, “says it lasts to the middle of November. It’s the lovely village greens with their white Puritan churches we’re dying to see.”
“A lot of them have burned down, over the years,” Alexandra told the couple, with a vehemence that surprised her, too, “and they get replaced by hideous cut-rate glass-and-steel bubbles, or by pre-fab A-frames. Or are not rebuilt at all. New England isn’t as religious as the rest of the country.”
The two faces glazed over, trying to picture these disappointments, and penitently Alexandra assured them, as they turned their backs, “You’ll have a wonderful time. Be sure to try fried clams.”
The Asian couple, too, impressed her with their appetites. Little and trim as they were, they heaped up sausages, pancakes, and unnamable Oriental delicacies (Canada catered to Asia, its Pacific near-neighbor) from the breakfast buffet on their plates, their smiling lips bright with oily intake. They ran through roll after roll of film, and never missed an optional mountain hike or an arranged opportunity to shop. At Jasper, bravely embarking to walk by herself around the little lake the hotel faced, Alexandra took a turning that led her onto a golf course, groomed for play but without a player on it. It was eerie; but then she saw the Asian couple, small in the tapering green distance, coming merrily toward her, crying a mysterious word that sounded like “Rost! Rost!”
As they drew close, the Malay woman, who had the better English, explained: “We made same mistake. Very tricky turn back there. We met worker. He told us, not very poritely, this private golf course. He said go back to dirt road to go around rake.”
“You rost, too!” her husband summed up, his grin triumphant.
Alexandra found herself, unaccountably, blushing, feeling herself stupidly torpid as she loomed above this bustling, undiscourageable pair. Together the three of them strolled back up the deserted fairway, past a green still pale with the morning’s dew, and deep sand bunkers without a footprint, and a fresh-mowed tee whose markers were water-smoothed stones taken from the lake shore and painted different colors for different abilities. Banished from this artificial paradise, they came back to the unmarked dirt road; Alexandra turned right, and the couple hurried to the left, to return to the lodge in time to take a bus to a tram to some celebrated outlook miles away. Alone again, she reflected upon the appetite for life, and wondered if her own relative lack of it, and the stab of nausea she now and then felt in the midst of the ordinary, were symptoms of disease. She had always dreaded cancer, and had given her cells more than seventy years in which to scramble their code and percolate through her veins with a deranged passion to multiply.
The road became a path in woods—white spruce, Douglas fir, paper birch, quivering aspen, a froth of nameless undergrowth, and, in a passage of sunlight, a thick stand of lodgepole pines, straight and slender and some of them, suffocated by their own shade, fallen into the lake, littering the edge where small waves cast nets of refracted sunlight across a shallow bottom of rounded stones. Huffing plump girl joggers and a couple on the tour, gnarled Québecois even more elderly than she, passed her coming the other way, counterclockwise. For stretches she was quite alone. If you meet a grizzly bear, their group had been advised by their tour guide, hold utterly still; if it’s a brown bear—smaller, without a hump—fight like hell. Alexandra listened for wildlife and heard nothing, not even a bird. But the lake shimmered companionably, reflecting as in a lightly corrugated mirror the aspens’ trembling gold. Beyond the trees across the lake, the Rockies bared themselves; they were a pleasing dove-gray, a giant geological sample of Canadian understatement. The mountains were made of limestone, laid down by unthinkably many small aquatic creatures armored in delicate shells. Their tour guide, Heidi, an ebullient former airline stewardess, had explained that a billion and a half years ago this part of the globe was just off the western shore of what is now North America, on the sloping edge of the continental plate. Sediments transported by vanished Mesozoic rivers accumulated and were compressed, and a change of direction in plate drift about two hundred million years ago crumpled and folded the great sheets of solidified sediment, thrust them upward, and piled them into the tilted layers and sharp peaks, honed and whittled by wind and abrasive glaciers, of the apparently motionless mountains around her. It was all—the continental drift reversing direction, the folding of rocks like ribbon pasta in the earth’s warm ovens—as challenging to belief as the most fantastic dogmas of religion, but accepted by everybody sane in the modern world. The weight of evidence accumulated all the time, like all those protective shells contributed by tiny creatures as keen to live, as self-important and ultimately insignificant as she. Alexandra’s relation to Nature had always puzzled her; she leaned on Nature, she learned from it, she was it, and yet there was something in her, something else, that feared and hated it.
At an exceptionally lonely section of the road, another presence, large, strode toward her. As quickly as her heart skipped, her mind hoped it was a grizzly and not a brown bear, and all she had to do was remain still. She was too old and feeble to fight like hell. The presence metamorphosed into a tall, erect-striding man, the melancholy-mustached semi-Southerner, wearing a blue-checked long-sleeved shirt. His name was Willard McHugh, and he came from the Nashville area: he had told her this much about himself. But now, intent on keeping his pace, he merely nodded, in a formally friendly way, and kept striding.
She, too, had not been tempted to stop. They were too much out in Nature, it would have felt indecent. He was shy, and so was she. Nature had burned them, somehow. Heidi had explained how lodgepole pines need fire, to crack open their resin-sealed cones. It was horrifying, really, how complacently Nature accommodates violence; Nature loves it and needs it to such an extent that the wardens of Canada’s national parks, in the absence, these last seventy years, of enough natural forest fires, had taken to setting them, to initiate regeneration and encourage biodiversity. Diversity—why do we all assume it’s so good, when it is uniformity that makes us comfortable?
Thinking of such basic things, and of how un
cannily fate had presented her on this trip with Jim’s physical doppelgänger, Alexandra missed the short cut back to the lodge through a parking lot. She worked up such a sweat of annoyance and panic, walking the long way around the serpentine shore, with its picnic tables and trash barrels unctuously urging her not to pollute—to be kind to Nature instead—that she had to take her second shower of the morning just to make herself presentable for lunch.
The next morning, at around eleven, she was standing with cold feet on the Athabasca Glacier, confronting Nature again. The bus, heading south toward Lake Louise, had made a planned stop. The Columbia Icefields, trapped in a bowl of peaks along the Continental Divide, pushed outwards through the mountain passes broad glacial arms, of which the Athabasca was the handiest to the highway. Fat-wheeled big vehicles, driven by youngsters and called Snocoaches, took tourists down a precipice—“the steepest grade drivable,” the boy’s miked voice claimed—onto the ice. Alexandra and her fellow-tourists dutifully extracted their bulks from their seats and clambered down, expecting something wondrous. She was prepared for a world of inhuman purity, but the glacier was as grimy as a city street, only harder to stand on. It was dirty, and pitted, and hollowed. It gurgled beneath its slick skin. Though summer was over, melting was still in progress, and made footing treacherous. She didn’t know much about being an old lady—just think, every second you live, you have never been this old before—but knew that she shouldn’t break a hip. Years ago she had seen a male taxi dancer interviewed on television and he had said, of his customers, “Once they fall and break a hip, they come back to the dance hall all right, for the company, for the memories; but the dears don’t ever dance again.” Not that she had done much dancing with Jim—just a weekend square dance now and then, when they were new to their marriage and game for most anything. She had liked the patterning, the weaving in and out and the flickering quick touch of other hands as in a sabbat orgy, but the New Mexico women with their bouffant hairdos and twirling, ballooning skirts and the men in their two-tone boots and bolo ties threaded through jade or turquoise slides, frowning in their concentration on the voice of the caller twanging above the fiddles, came to disgust her. They were bankers and feed merchants disguised as cowhands; they exuded the glossy falsity of the bourgeoisie at play. And Jim’s game leg would complain for days afterwards. So they gave up square dances. Giving things up agreed with Alexandra—appealed to her inner witch. There was so much unnecessary and superfluous clutter connected with living. Living itself, all that eating and propagating, was a study in superfluity. A cancer.
The boy driving the bus had been given an ingratiating patter to recite: “Folks, these special glacier buses, called Snocoaches, cost a hundred thousand dollars each. Relax—we calculate that more than half of them return intact, with many of their passengers still aboard.” There was unanimous nervous laughter. Down the precipice they plunged, and then coasted on the level ice to a stop beside some other Snocoaches. The driver recited into his mike, “One of the commonest questions we get is ‘Why is the ice so dirty?’ Well, glacier ice is made of snow, meters of it compressed to a centimeter or two of ice. As you may already know, every snowflake and raindrop has to form around a tiny piece of dirt in the air. The snow melts, but the dirt stays there.”
Had Alexandra known that? That snowflakes and raindrops each need a germ of dirt? Does the sky hold enough dirt to supply them all? Suppose the heavenly dirt runs out? And this Canadian theme of compression—was that what kept pressing on her chest at night? If everything—snow, sediment, rock—keeps compressing, why doesn’t the world get heavier and smaller, until it becomes a black hole? This was the kind of question she used to ask Jim, who never laughed at her, and always tried to give an answer, out of his practical knowledge. Men for all their hidden rage did have that—a plain sense of cause and effect, a practical desire to be reasonable. Women love them for that.
She looked around for the lanky, morose man from Nashville, but their tour had been scrambled up with several others, and everybody around her looked strange, silhouetted against the glare like those space creatures emerging from the light in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The glacier sloped upward, and in the distance she could see a ridge, a murky wall, a long frozen waterfall. The herd instinct of the apparitions on the glacier was to shuffle toward it, fish moving blindly upstream, until they met a row of red traffic cones and a sign prohibiting further progress. Thus confined, the tourists milled about, treading cautiously, dark blots on the ice like restless aggregates of dirt. Groups of Japanese on other tours coagulated to have their photographs taken.
A familiar couple, the short Asians, came up smiling to Alexandra and offered to take her picture. “The grare is terrible,” the woman said, pointing her camera experimentally.
“Code feet!” her husband cried, pointing downward and grinning.
Alexandra posed with first one of the couple, and then the other. Holding these compact bodies, with their low centers of gravity, under her arm eased her sensation of tippiness, of endangered balance. To their left, a long crevasse held a running stream of meltwater that had carved its channel down and down, into perilous curved spaces tinted a luminous lime-green. If she were in a mad moment to walk a few paces and let herself slide and slip into this purling crevasse, no one nearby would have the wit or strength to fish her out. That was why people don’t travel alone: to be protected from their own craziness. Companions however incidental keep us focused on the fretful nag of living. We all are swaying on the makeshift rope bridge that society suspends above the crevasse.
Back on the special bus with its giant balloon tires, the dutiful tourists and their fear of death were teased by the boy driver: “O.K., now, folks, we are going to endeavor to steer this device back up this impossible grade. Like I said before, the odds are close to fifty-fifty. You can all help me by holding your breath. Think light, light.” Idiotically, they all, Alexandra included, inhaled with a loud gasp and didn’t breathe again until the bus had swooped up the slope and swung into the pebbly, muddy parking lot. “Folks, we made it,” the boy announced in his almost-American accent. “Upon disembarking, look to your right across the Icefields Parkway to a small stone cairn in the considerable distance. That marks the spot the Athabasca Glacier had reached by 1870. Since then it has retreated by one-point-six kilometers. For our good friends from south of the border, where they haven’t yet managed to sign on to the metric system, that’s pretty much all of a mile. Come back in another hundred thirty years, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll be lucky to find a snowball here.”
Alexandra entertained a vision of a world without glaciers: all mountain slopes stony, and a ruinous leaking and weeping in the valleys, and all coastal cities drowned by risen sea levels, and wheat flourishing in northern Canada’s tundra, and the American Midwest a desert lightly etched, from the air, with its old farm roads.
In the lobby of the hotel at Lake Louise hung framed photographs of the region as it had looked around 1900, when the Canadian Pacific had replaced the first log chalets with a timbered château, Victorian Tudor in style, housing hundreds of guests. The view as then photographed from the front terrace across the lake showed a sprawling glacier on Mount Victoria, of which the present glacier was a nibbled remnant. Alexandra discovered she could not walk around the lake as she had in Jasper; here, after a mile’s stroll along the shoreline, she met a dead end of rocks and fallen timber and could have followed an upward path to “a cosy teahouse” and “tiny and picturesque Mirror Lake” or else turned back toward the immense château. She turned back, keeping an eye out for advertised beavers, which she did not see. The walk was crowded with the hotel guests, including children and people in wheelchairs. It did not unduly startle her when, in the gloaming, the man from Nashville crept up behind her and shortened his stride to fall in with hers. Here it comes, she thought, without quite knowing what “it” was. She knew that people being noticed always notice it. Auras in a state of matched vibration
compel the bodies to collide.
His voice in her ear was sugary with Southern courtesy, the mournful music of losers. “Isn’t the blue of the lake remarkable,” Willard asked, “even in this dying light?”
“It is,” she responded cautiously. “Except all the glacier lakes are this color, more or less. Heidi explained why in the bus, but I didn’t understand it.” Heidi was always twittering away into her little bud microphone, as if she were still soothing passengers in an airplane.
“Rock flour,” Willard stated, “scraped from the mountains by the glaciers as they rub along. Minute mineral particles.” He drew the word out: “mine-ute.”
His pedantic possessiveness made her restive; she felt obliged to quarrel. “It’s not a process I find easy to picture,” she told him. “I mean, why would rock flour make water bluer? And that glacier we saw yesterday, it didn’t look like it was rubbing anything. It looked stuck.”