Rain falls. We eat sausage and bread in a tin shed built for mochilleros—backpackers—to get out of the weather. The camp looks like a hideout for vigilantes—dank, cold, eerie. A gaucho wearing sheepskin chaps with the wool still on is unpacking a horse. Just beyond, in bold sunlight, Río Los Per-ros roars. Gary asks why it's called “Los Perros” but gets a shrug. I look up and down the river but there are no dogs. Instead, four ducks stand facing the oncoming current, opening their mouths to let food come in. We cross the river on a half-rotted swinging bridge. Just because we're walking in a circle doesn't mean the path isn't provisional. Anyway, circle isn't quite the right word. The path is what is passing under our feet and in our minds. It takes us around.
As we reenter the forest, a green cloud spoils our view. Water opens the way. I breathe deeply as the trail moves to the edge of the river. Just below the light and roar and whoosh of a waterfall there's a midstream island where we camp, squatting in frigid water to bathe, building a small fire to warm ourselves. Eating soup, we sleep in the water-arm embrace of white noise.
PANTANO
It is a fresh wound, a whole shoulder torn, with a watery ooze and a hole that's getting bigger. I'm walking through a hanging bog, one that is cupped by the upper reaches of a mountain. Stunted trees bend sideways like dislocated hands. As I walk, I see how the wound grows, where backpackers have climbed farther up to avoid the mud but, in so doing, have torn the Earth's skin more.
How fragile we are. We being humans and this mountain. The sun is gone and snow clouds pour in. The trees thin. Gary has sprinted ahead and disappeared, and it's hard to guess which of many trails he's taken. I choose one and enter the wound, trying not to get my feet wet because snow clouds are gathering and surely it will freeze by evening. My foot is a knife, tormenting the mountain's body.
A lone hiker comes from the other direction looking haggard, his leggings torn, boots muddy, with a trail of blood down his neck where his earring was snagged and torn. Is it wet up ahead? he asks. No, it's an easy forest walk to Lago Dickson. He thanks me. Sydney? I ask. “No, Perth.” Ah, the home of the writer Tim Winton! “Yes, it is,” he says, smiling brightly, and continues downhill. I go the opposite way, though for a moment I want to join him.
Bog walking is like these mountain conversations: it means jumping fast and running over uncertain ground. But my pack is heavy, I'm tired, and the spring has gone from my step. I hop, sink, pull my leg out, tip sideways, hop again. One misstep and my boot sinks deep. Soupy mud pours in around my feet. In the muck I see flecks of ice as if whole winters have been lost here.
Yet my sense of this place is of a shoulder that's inflamed. Rain and snow may fill it, trying to put out the fire, but there is no balm. The word pantano means not only “bog” but also “impediment.” I think of the ones between Gary and me and trip on tree roots buried in brown taffy. The coming storm makes me worry about hypothermia, wet feet and boots. I continue up alone. Es muy borrascoso—stormy. Am I lost? The ground steams. The stunted trees are bent completely over. I step on a path. It leads me out of the bog onto dry ground.
THE PASS
The way is rock-strewn and bare with tarns the size of footbaths. I wipe daubs of mud from arms and face, grinning because I'm in open country. To be above tree line is to be completely alive. A speck moves at the top of a ridge. It's Gary, glissading down the face of the mountain. A few minutes later he appears from behind an outcrop, exuberant: “That was fun! I think I'll do it again, okay?” He trots straight up and glissades down. Far above, snow-filled valleys nest between hanging glaciers, and waterfalls thread past the curved lips of lateral moraines. When he reappears, we join hands and continue on.
Walking switchbacks is like rising in an elevator: green walls fall away and the mountaintop comes into view. Here there are none of the easy graces of summer. No greenery, no cornucopia of flowers and food. The only inflorescence is rock, the way it turns in a stream and flicks light.
Everywhere I see how glaciers have shaped this place: rock walls carry the signatures of moving ice. These glaciers are remnants of the last ice age. In two and a half million years the earth has been gripped by glaciers and continental ice sheets at least fifteen times. Glaciers have sculpted roughly one third of the earth's landmass. During ice ages, birds, fish, plants, trees, and mammals were pushed toward the equator. What's left behind are new surfaces: kettle moraines, outwash plains, pingos, and scoured barren grounds. Ice scrapes the earth as if it had claws. Look closely: this is all that is left of the world's body after ice has picked the bones clean.
The mountain pass we are supposed to cross looks close but is a few hours’ walk straight up. On the way a serac falls and the waist of a glacier—a series of accumulation crevasses— crumbles. The rhythm of glaciers is not something we can hear. It is an ancient memory of sound carved in long grooves and nervous chatter marks, thundering erratics bouncing on the undermelody of shushing streams of ice. Glaciers represent what is bold, inscrutable, exposed, quiet, and glinting in us, as well as what is delicate, dynamic, and precise. If we walk among them long enough, perhaps we can learn from them.
We walk on rubble. Spires are wind-sharpened. We look up at glaciers while walking on the dents and scuff marks that ice has left behind; we walk on its walking. Traversing the spine, we reenter the womb and climb into the cranium, where mist pivots. The sky borrows from ice its radiance, its adamantine clarity, and we spend lifetimes tracking down those elements within ourselves. Moving single-file, Gary and I are reptilian—one undulating organism. Behind us the green-tailed, tree-covered cordillera falls away like sorrow.
ICEBERGS
Gary tries to take a picture of the two of us, sitting on top of a moraine wall, looking down at a meltwater lake strewn with icebergs, but his attempts fail. “I've got to go down there,” he says finally, meaning the lake. “I've never seen an iceberg.” He runs down the steep side of the bowl. At the bottom he slides, half stumbling, then jumps a patch of water onto a berg. Crouching, he's pensive, studying cracks, the half-hidden explosions of turquoise, the glacial till embedded in ice. On his hands and knees, he wipes meltwater on his face and gauges a glacier's brightness by holding a piece of ice to his eye. He's looking at time and impermanence, how each snowflake may be trapped for three hundred years, compressed as ice, and put in service to the body of a glacier before being released at the terminus; he sees how a glacier grows by giving away almost as much as it has received. Accumulation and ablation, to get and to give: these are the balancing acts of any human or glacier.
A waterfall peels out of a cave, rounding the granite lip over which it has traveled for thousands of years. Everything we need to know about beauty, justice, time, movement, subtlety, and surrender is here. Ideas implicit in nature but difficult for us humans to enact in our own lives.
We climb and climb. Hoarse-throated streams rush past. No scent of humans and horses, only the tang of snow. A single flower sheltered by an overhanging rock shivers.
Late in the day we make camp five hundred yards below the pass on a flat surrounded by krummholz—stunted trees to which we tie the tent in a hard wind. I gather twigs and make a fire. We finish our nightly meal of soup in spitting snow that quickly becomes a blizzard. Night comes as a white monstrosity. Shadow asks the body, are you there?
Snow taps the tent. Down the long valley, la falda—the green skirt of trees—is dusted white. What we see of the world is only the mind's invention, Philip Whalen, the poet, said. Once, during a bad spell after a miscarriage while cow-boying, I slept on the raked gravel of a friend's New Mexico courtyard. The rough texture consoled me and mirrored the way I felt after losing the child.
Now we sleep on a barren womb that was once filled with ice. I have no children, and I'm with a man who wants them. Isn't all this beauty enough? I ask. Do we need more? When I go out to pee I step on snowflakes, each one a singular geometry, what Frank Lloyd Wright called “the grammar and spell-power of form.”
Gary lays the black condor feather by my sleeping bag and takes off his clothes. He seems weightless, not thin, but slim-waisted, with narrow legs that move like wings. He is under me, beside me, over me, then under again. Wet snow slaps at the tent. A zipped door flutters. The feather lifts and we go with it—all the hesitations between us lightened. Wind rattles stays and nylon. Snow plasters the roof and sides. We slide into a pulsing darkness—not a fearful place but a room of winter where we are quiet, lost inside each other for a long time.
Later I peek out; there's been a break in the storm. Across the valley I see a scooped-out shelf where there was once a hanging glacier. Now it's an empty bowl. Lit by moonlight, it chimes.
Voices and laughter wake us. It's already noon. Last night's wind carried the half-moon in a cloud basket. Now it rides out of the sky on a condor's wings. The Brits pad up the trail below our tent, where Gary and I are having an argument about whether it's my birthday. We can come to no conclusion. There's always a blizzard on my birthday, I say. But we don't know what day it is, he replies. I snort. That doesn't mean it's not my birthday, I tell him. The Brits disappear as we break camp. Carefully, I roll my condor feather inside my sleeping pad and tie it onto my pack, hoping it will wing me upslope from behind.
The pass is a wind-hardened saddle so wide and bare it's like looking over the edge of the earth. We start down, then see something white—maybe it's the meteor that fell into the inland ice sheet of Greenland a few years ago and was never seen again. But it's not. It's a low-riding, slow-moving glacier with a six-mile-wide roof, called Ventisquero Grey.
We sit down, stunned. Its white hulk has no beginning or end. Blue-blasted crevasses and fluted channels fill our eyes. “Is it the moon rising?” Gary asks. No, it's the moon going down, I say. A midglacier ice stream softens into a smooth valley, its sides all ruffles. Blue leaves peel. Pinnacles of ice are top hats carrying debris, hauling turquoise down to a distant lake, whose blue milk we will drink in our tea.
DESCANSO
“Be your own lamp, your own refuge,” the Buddha said as he was dying. Same thing my Tibetan teacher told me before he passed on. But I'm lost; I'm dropping straight down. For a moment I see the glacier's white flank flashing, then it disappears. Hours before, Gary raced down into thick trees. It is a tangled labyrinth on a vertical slope with a footing of greasy mud that does not hold me. Sometimes the trees are marked with orange paint, but there is no trail. I bend under contorted branches and let myself down by hanging from a tree branch, then dropping two or three feet to the next foothold. The weight of the fifty-five-pound backpack punishes my knees. I slip, fall, and crack my shin against an exposed root. In a sudden fury, I take my pack off and throw it down as far as I can. The pack slides in the mud and bumps to a stop against a tree. I retrieve it and continue down. Eight hours later I've “mastered” something like 3.5 miles.
Why do we walk around and around, bodies hurting, every broken bone feeling as if it is breaking again? Gary suggests that a new translation of the Buddha's words about “being your own lamp” might urge us to install solar power in transcontinental circuits, lighting the big cities and the small.
On a ridge above the trees where I think I see mountains there is only scalloped fog, and my shadow moving across it, a lone figure bent under a too-heavy load. At the bottom I find other hikers, including the Brits, a couple from Germany, and a threesome from the French Alps, all huddled under a shed. It's raining again. I'm finding it hard to walk. We joke about installing a knee surgeon here.
THE BATH, THE RIVER, THE WALL
A half-moon hangs in the sky at midday. For the first time, the wind is pushing us from behind. We climb out of forest gloom and treachery onto a rocky ridge and make camp overlooking the glacier's crumbling terminus. At sunset, other trekkers join us. We watch pinks and purples drain off the top of the ice and pool in meltwater lakes on the glacier's roof, “like pink gin,” Nick says.
Gary goes into the forest to find a place to bathe. I find him crouched behind two enormous logs. A stream trickles down a staircase of rock and feeds into a shadowy pool. The leaves are dripping onto him.
He stands in a wide plié, then shifts his weight to one knee. His hair is wet. I take off my clothes and squat down at water's edge. Moss is our only washcloth. We are hidden and naked; we lower our bodies into cold leaf-broth. A soft rain falls down.
In the morning a roaring mountain stream brings us to a vertical rock wall. Wind gusts hard at seventy miles an hour. We climb the face on a rickety ladder made of cut tree limbs and cable. Nose to the wall, I meet a dull mirror of basalt. Who's there? An imposter. Everything about my life seems foolish and fraudulent. Wind kicks me in the ass. The backpack shifts sideways. Hope I don't fall.
Halfway up I think of the things I'd like to do before I die: live for a year with binocular vision, speak only animal languages, start sleepwalking again, and do away with all automobiles. I grab rung after rung and pull myself up. In Japan I met Yamabushi, ascetic mountain monks who climb ladders made of knife blades and are hung upside down by their heels in frigid waterfalls. Mountains invite us to humiliate ourselves. They bring danger and difficulty, and drive beauty to the bone.
From atop the tree-branch ladder, a waterfall's icy cascade is winter-in-summer sliding down. I wash my face. Bad dreams from the night before still hang on. Dreams not about the Earth coming to an end but about my own demise. I was hiding from soldiers in a high cupboard in my childhood bedroom; I'd been discovered there and taken away. The dream woke me. I flung a desperate arm over Gary's back and wondered if I'd ever be able to sleep alone again.
LAGO GREY
To our dismay, we find we've entered civilization. We pitch our tent at the only place possible—in a designated campground at Lago Grey. It's noisy and crowded but cheerfully so. There are Australian, Argentine, French, German, Iranian, Chilean, and British backpackers on the circuit, as well as day tourists brought in by boat from the other shore. At the kiosk Gary and I buy a small box of local wine, sit in the sun with our backs against a rock wall, and let the alcohol have its way.
The lake is raw silk, blue-gray with slubs of ice threaded through. “Or nubs,” Gary says. “Or maybe toes.” He's smiling. Mountains pierce space; space pierces the mountains. “The kind you fall through?” Gary asks. “The kind you are made from,” I say. The party boat chugs across the lake toward us, lands, and takes all but the backpackers away.
The snout of the glacier changes from blue to gray. Above, there are other mountains with glaciers like white scarves pulled around their necks. Lake water slaps black gravel at our feet. What we are seeing here is either a lake in the making or a glacier on the make, but because we've temporarily lost our power of discernment, we can't tell.
In the morning Gary fashions a walking stick for me to ease the weight on my knees. I hoist my pack on, dig in. Every time I take a step my knees lock up, and for the first few yards I have to hit the backs of my legs to get them moving. Absurd as I am, I keep going. I think of the short staffs carried by Zen monks during ceremonies, meant to represent an upturned tree. Roots up, they signify strength, discipline, and imperma-nence. I imagine this whole forest torn out, the trees upended, their roots flailing at the sky.
THE BUMBLEBEE
Raindrops, sun, a single cloud wheeling between two condors. Why do we walk in circles? The birds circle nothing, their flight pattern describing the mathematical theory of zero, an open mouth from which la bufera—perpetual storm—falls. We take a side route that goes up to interior peaks. It's an easy walk, a low traverse around the edge of the mountains. A young gaucho races toward me on a gray horse and excitedly tells me that a hiker broke his leg and he's going to get help. Bueno, adiós, I say. Not long afterward, he returns, leading another horse back up the mountain. Soldiers troop by, with the injured man, his leg in a splint, riding the palomino. I ask if he needs pain pills. He grins. “I've had plenty, thank you,” he says.
It rains again
. We make camp quickly and take to the tent. River sounds push Gary into sleep, and I listen to sila—how the mind-litter roils with chaotic weather. We are made of weather and our thoughts stream from the braid work of stillness and storms. For years Nietzsche searched for what he called “true climate,” for its exact geographical location as it corresponds to the inner climate of the thinker. He might as well have gone searching for the ever-drifting North Pole. It would have been fitting—because the tip of Earth's axis of rotation wobbles like a spinning top, the peregrinations of the North Pole describe a circle.
ío Frances roars by. When the rain stops I wash our shirts and socks and hang them on a line between two trees. After sausage and crackers, Gary goes his way, and I hike up the mountain and sit in a pile of boulders overlooking the river. There's a glacier tucked up in a cirque, and its edges are ragged. The trim line of lenga trees is clearly visible: leggy roots hang over the cliff carved away by ice, as if surgery has just been performed.
The Future of Ice Page 3
