The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Now we are the ice's only companions. At one shallow place the pieces surge and heave onto a glittering blockade. We get out of the canoe, stand in flowing water, and bash the ice dam with our paddles. “Not very elegant,” John says, laughing. A lead opens up and what's left of the ice sluices through, as does our canoe. We jump back in. Ice shelves are cantilevered over the water. Beneath are rows of icicles, fingers testing the water. Warm or cold?

  Every change in temperature causes incalculable disruptions. It can undo the connectedness between a species and its environment. Spring now occurs six to twenty-four days earlier, depending on the landscape, elevation, and latitude. On this Wyoming river, warming has led to reduced summer stream flows, with dire consequences for fish populations, as well as for birds and animals dependent on them. The early onset of spring throws breeding, nesting, and birthing cycles off and the migration patterns of insects, birds, plants, and animals into turmoil. Grass and flowers come earlier but dry up sooner, altering the availability of food.

  A muskrat swims in front of us, pushing a pile of sun-cured grass. Nearby, a beaver's domed house is buried in snow. Muskrats often live inside or right next to beaver dens. While a beaver's house is lodged in ice with a vent hole at the top, muskrats build flimsier shelters. They use the beaver's dammed-up water for ingress and egress, swimming out underwater to forage for food at the bottom of the pond.

  A muskrat's dive lasts only forty seconds. To hold her breath even that long, she must store extra oxygen in her blood and muscles—an ability that increases by 42 percent in winter, since food is less abundant and it takes longer to get back to the breathing hole from under the ice. Same thing goes for beavers, and in the Arctic, for seals, whales, and walruses.

  Now goldeneyes, bufflehead, mallards, and mergansers fly ahead of us, joining the swans and geese. Exposed willow roots hold spans of candle ice, long crystals bunched together in bouquets. A snow squall lofts by, like a sail filling with wind. Ice pans snap. A beaver tail slaps. It's percussion, not current, that's carrying us downstream.

  Like two separate thoughts running simultaneously, a mink works the margins of the river, while a coyote traverses the snowbank above. A bald eagle cocks its head at who-knows-what on the too-white page of the pasture. We paddle, but it's the river that's taking us. We drink in her sounds. The Inuit in Greenland thought that fog was born when a thirsty woman drank a whole river and spit it out as mist.

  Ice at river's edge is jagged, serrated like a knife. Whom does it cut? What has been sliced away? Earlier the radio carried war news. Hasn't there been enough violence right here with life ending, life beginning between every breath?

  Banked snow stretches in ribbony stripes that are sway-backed and bending. One beaver swims out from under willow branches, then another and another. Soon there's a whole line of them swimming in an S-shaped formation in front of the canoe. Are they trying to slow us down or lead us away? One thing is clear: they are in charge of river traffic, and we travel by their rules.

  Above a hidden side channel, a cow moose and last year's calf stand knee-deep in snow. When we pass, they charge down into the water, then run back up. Under a cold sun beaver slides glisten. A swan's nest rests on top of a domed lodge. A cut bank, so steep that snow will not stay on it, is a brown wall that bends us sideways. We pick up more geese as we go. There are now twelve pairs, plus all kinds of ducks. We portage over another ice dam, and where the river thins, mirrored mountains grind to nothingness. As water deepens, pieces of ice float with us—a company of geometric oddities—triangles, parallelograms, rhomboids. Midriver, they are snagged by a huge willow root like LP records stacked up against a twisted spindle. The river widens and tiny streams leak in. John narrates local history and points out where a stranger who corralled his horse for the night was found shot to death in the morning. He shows me the place where Tom Horn hid. “There was a saloon on that bank,” he says, “and a store, a schoolhouse, and a log cabin with laundry flapping. Shoshone Indians floated this stretch, but never this early in the year. They would have used it only during summer hunts. The reason white trappers called this the Spanish River was because it flowed into a part of the country owned by Spain.”

  Mornings, the ice pans are the river; afternoons, the river is sun, its smooth skin disturbed by intruding gravel bars. We look for the wolves but see none. Late in the day, clouds slide in front of the sun and a light breeze wrinkles the water. Snow begins to fall. It alights on pieces of floating ice and melts quickly as more takes its place. “Just like us,” John says quietly. “We haven't been here long, and we'll soon be gone.” In falling snow the bow of the canoe goes white.

  4

  Home for the evening. Not lonely but alone. I think about what the river has shown me: the slinking mink, the tangled willow roots, the stain of sun on snow, and the tfwnk, ping, splash, and crack of its ice. Swans are white flowers floating. If this river were mine, I would call it the Unfastened, where scooped cutbanks shake winter free.

  Just before dusk I strap on snowshoes and return to the river. Since tipping over the first day, I've longed for full immersion. On the bank, I take off one boot and stick my toe in. Instant pain. Try again, dipping the whole foot to the shin. I take off my clothes, step in, squat down, shoot back out of the water fast, get dressed, go home.

  Dark comes. Black clouds blank out the ebbing moon. Tcaxa'lxe'l is a Navajo concept of darkness: sun cannot penetrate it; protection and invisibility are conferred by it; this darkness can move without making noise, which is why it can enter the body of anyone it likes and search their mind.

  Early morning. Behind mist the sky whitens. Falling snow means the world is dissolving. A fragment of the horned moon breaks off in cloud. I step over the track of a wild swan.

  5

  John has been telling animal stories all morning—when and where he saw them, about the senseless killings of coyotes, swans, and wolves, and the blowing up of beaver dams. The story of the nervous moose was most unusual. While John was walking across a narrow bridge to the Carney ranch, a moose and her calf refused to move. She charged John; he leapt over the side of the bridge, hanging on to the edge. The moose stomped on his hands with her hooves, and he fell down ten feet onto the river ice. Stunned, he felt to see if his legs were broken. They weren't. Before he could stand up, something dropped right beside him. It was the moose and her calf. They'd both jumped off the bridge. “They fared poorly. Their necks were broken and they died right there next to me,” he says.

  We put in on the river near the place where the moose and the calf jumped to their deaths. Five tundra swans, three Canada geese, and two cinnamon teal fly up as we glide near the bridge. Farther along, a mother moose and her calf splash down into the water. “Will we be all right?” I ask. We drift nearer. Two coyotes chase each other across a stretch of snow. The moose lift their heads as we approach but ignore us. The animals from his stories keep appearing before us. “They must have heard you talking about them,” I say. John smiles.

  Where snow has pulled back, the ice has stretched to the breaking point and tiny beaches appear. A sandhill crane rests in a shaded cove. We see no muskrats and only one beaver slide, the impression etched into snow by its fat tail. An ice ledge breaks as we round a rock. “This is the section of water where the river bends so far back, it almost meets itself,” John says. “We'll go an hour or so, and find that we're only a few feet away from where we began.”

  Oxbows slow time. They gnaw at rock and chew through land. They are a sinuosity trying to become a circle. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes not. It all depends on time, weather, and geology. Is a circle a line drawn around something, or is it center and edge, snowy island and river moat, massif and trail bound together? Unless we understand the nature of the circle, how all things are drawn together and flap with one wing, we cannot save the world or keep ourselves from destroying it. Habitual thought and neurotic habits keep us bound up in our own airtight chambers with no sanity, no oxy
gen. But a circle keeps turning. “The return is important and different from the start,” my monk friend said. But when and where does returning begin, if it's all just a circle?

  Today our canoe drifts by. As if the hands on the clock needed to be greased. We defy time; we loop backward and forward like a god, sweeping the hand of fate this way and that. In the process, things come in doubles: the same house occurs twice, and there are two of every bird and animal—coyotes, moose, swans, muskrats, ducks, beavers, and geese. Spilling snow, slowing time, throwing off riffles, the river is trying to remake itself as a whole world.

  Downstream we encounter commercial traffic: muskrats pushing stacks of dried grass to a far bank. Behind us, beavers slap their tails, not applauding our passage but warning us to stay away. There's almost no ice now; we've dropped from eight thousand feet to seven thousand four hundred feet in altitude. Each hairpin turn holds a swan; each straightaway is home to a mink, a duck, or a squadron of beavers. Another turn and we glide back the way we came, but on a new piece of water. Here the river bends so sharply it is an elbow digging into its own back. A willow-studded island is almost halved.

  Water seeking water, that's what we're seeing. It's nothing new. Like everything and everyone, the river is filled with longings, no matter that they come to nothing. No bitterness ensues. At least we have lived and died and lived again. Every bend is a kind of death. Not death's death, but the end of the instant, and the release of the riverscape before the next one comes.

  The canoe bends hard to the left. We pass a pile of ice that is see-through rubble, reminding me that I no longer have to believe the contents of my mind. In the dirt of the south-facing bank a young willow is sprouting, but the other side is a white wall, its midriff sag a measure of how long winter has lasted and how close we are to spring. A frigid wind begins to blow; a snow cloud lifts up from a knot of mountains behind us; we are pressed forward into shadow, into turbulence. There is un-evenness everywhere and union within it.

  The river keeps bending back and carving away. It is trying to show us what we know and how to move. More sandhill cranes fly in. Ahead, a lone duck dives down as if catching the river in its beak. At the point where the river comes closest to meeting itself, I can see the duck grabbing at things as if catching strands of water in its beak. He finds one, then another, and another, and pulls, until finally, the whole river comes straight and begins its long southward journey.

  Part Four

  HOW MEMORY ENDS AND BEGINS

  … the right journey

  is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

  that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart—

  —DEREK WALCOTT

  MARCH. WINTER's END

  Rough and fresh. That's how the day felt as it began and ended. Just another one the meadowlark blew into being, Gary says. A meadowlark has been singing on a post near his barn. I am in Montana again. There has been almost no snow all winter, and spring has arrived with blustery rain that alternates with hot sun. A scent blows our way, signaling the new season, but the source of the spring sweetness eludes us. We drive north and east to the foot of the Garnets, then the Rocky Mountains, to find where the scent is coming from.

  Where the Blackfoot River bends double, we get out and walk. A flicker is knocking itself out on a leafless cottonwood tree. On a pond-dotted plain encircled by high mountains, we come upon sandhill cranes, as well as Canada geese, snow geese, and mergansers. The ground is damp. A few miles away, farmers have begun to plow. I wonder how many ground-nesting birds are lost to machinery each year. Our urge to undo things must come from an idea that what we find in the natural world isn't good enough, that our tinkering will make it better. Spare us the scandal of improvement, I say.

  The cranes hop and flap—intimations and warm-ups for their mating dance. Then they settle down to look for food. Picking up cow pies in their beaks, they shake out the bugs. Just up the road is Glacier National Park, a place that is about to lose all its glaciers. The big ones are only a third the size they were in 1850, and the smaller ones have disappeared altogether. The total area covered by glaciers has declined more than 75 percent, and the temperatures have risen almost 2 degrees.

  High mountain biota, trapped in the last cool refuge possible—at the tops of these peaks—are in rapid decline. Populations of pika and marmots are disappearing, lower elevation plants and animals are intruding on high alpine aeries. Cold-loving plants and animals have nowhere else to go. It's predicted that just a 3 percent rise in temperature will destroy 80 percent of alpine island habitats. I try to readjust my eyes so I can see what goes missing.

  The ten warmest years have occurred in the last ten years. The summers have been scorchers, with months of hundred-degree days. When the Bush administration excised a long section on climate change from the 2003 EPA report, a New York Times ad ran with the caption GEORGE BUSH COOKS THE BOOKS ON GLOBAL WARMING. Now he's doing what he can to have seventy-five thousand natural-gas wells drilled on a mesa forty miles from my Wyoming cabin.

  Some days it seems there is no basis for reality. We are unan-chored and have no sacred alignment with life. The gas wells are going into the middle of an antelope migration corridor. We wonder why we feel lost. Too many of us are “merchant class,” all about buying and selling. Our intimacies have been given up, not just with one another but also with the billion, trillion elements of life in motion around us, a cyclical spectacle always showing a new facet of its permanent changeability.

  Too often our only consort is ego, but even she is a mystery and, willy-nilly, we let her have her way. Often, we are afraid of prolonged intimacy with any one subject, person, or place, for fear that we'll see too much and lose our capacity to tell winners from losers, or have to forfeit our “permission” to kill whatever gets in our way: weeds, fish, lovers, friends, foes, insects, solutions, and animals.

  We no longer sing landscapes into being as the northern Maidu once did, or cause bits of floating earth to be stitched together with deer sinew. We bring on droughts because our rain is ineffectual. It falls on ground that is overgrazed, fallow, plowed up, burned off, or paved over. We only destroy. We are serial killers, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson reminds us.

  Over lunch another biologist, George Schaller, tells me that it's not population that concerns him at the moment, but greed. We want so much, and so much is foisted upon us. We don't go outside often enough to experience the natural fecundity inside ourselves or of the world.

  In twenty years there will be no glaciers on the planet. Lodgepole pine and western cedar will give way to hemlock and spruce, and these in turn will invade alpine meadows where elk like to graze. The forest fires that have ravaged the Yellowstone ecosystem this summer have reduced the white bark pine that is an important food source for grizzlies. The warming of streams is causing cold-water trout to move upward in altitude, but that climb can bring on early ice that may kill them.

  In the meantime, the forest fires send eroded soil into the rivers; bumblebees and other alpine-flower pollinators are confused by smoke. A warmer world is an unhealthy world. Funguses, rusts, and insects are moving in and killing some species of frogs, trees, and butterflies. Virulent viruses are killing domesticated animals and people.

  In Switzerland, a botanical garden that has specialized in tropical plants for fifty years recently lost a tree. When one of the botanists went on a hike in the foothills of the Alps, he discovered a palm tree growing. “A palm tree in Switzerland,” he lamented. “And some still say there's no global warming.”

  Sun glistens. Gary and I savor the last vestige of cold. Snow on the north-facing roof of the cabin slides, then stops, freezing into what looks like a wave. Icicles, what in Japan's “snow country” dialect are called dagi, hang from it. In 1835, a few years after Charles Darwin toured the southern Andes by boat and horseback, Suzuki Bokushi wrote Snow Country Tales.

  Bokushi lived in the heart of the Japanese Alps and tells of being buried
in snow for eight months of every year. When a villager began measuring snow, it averaged 185 feet, often more. The snow was wet and heavy. Walkways were cut with wooden shovels between thatched-roof farmhouses. It was necessary to dig them out every day, lest they become entirely buried. Blinds woven from miscanthus reeds hung from the eaves to keep blowing snow off covered verandas. The people lived in darkness. Oil lamps had to be lit all day. They walked through snow tunnels between villages and towns. The word mabu connoted not only a dark tunnel, but also a woman's secret love affair.

  Bokushi wrote: “When it finally stops and enough can be dug away so that a tiny window can at last be opened—then oh! The brightness that greets our eyes makes us feel as if we were suddenly born into a shining Buddha world!”

  The culture of the Japanese Alps was cold-adapted. For heavy loads, they used long sleds called shura; kajiki were snowshoes made from the twigs of the jagara tree; snow vests were made from tree bark; snow boots, shoes, and leggings were all made out of straw. Long poles that measured snow depth were used to calculate how much tax should be imposed on the residents each year. When people went to the mountains, they had to use special, honorific words to appease the gods, the kamisama. Up there, a straw raincoat was yachi, sedge hats were tetsuka, a person dying was magatta, and a woman's sex organ was referred to as a “bear's den.”

  A yearly bacchanalian event called hall-pushing took place in a temple where men and women first disrobed, then, on command, all began pushing a wall. Naked and sweating, the participants were so tightly packed that their breath became the local weather. “The exhalation of this multitude is like smoke or fog. It dims the sacred torches and rises up to the roof, where it condenses and falls like rain; the steam pouring out of the open peaks of the gables billows into the sky like a cloud.”