The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Now the ceremony of hall-pushing has been replaced by climate-forcing. Instead of releasing steam from naked bodies in spiritual pursuit, we are pushing against the temple walls of sila—the great power of nature and weather—with our “democracy of gratification” and its industrial wastes: heat-trapping greenhouse gases and aerosols; black carbon (soot) from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass burning, which absorbs sunlight and heats the atmosphere, melts ice sheets, and causes a dangerous rise in sea level.

  On the wall I've tacked a newspaper photo of a bird singing, maybe a meadowlark. Its breath is visible, white wafting up into the cold air, but I can only think about black. Soot, that is, and smoke, and oil.

  Gary and I lay out bits of food on the table, feeding each other like two birds. Later we walk in the dark, following a tiny stream through aspens and willows. For a time our legs pump together as if driven by the same pistons. We don't speak, but our skulls crack open like ripe fruit. Is this all there is to tenderness? Yes. And the way winter comes down piecemeal, one snowflake at a time, followed by spring.

  The moon rises. The moon is a circle, full in all its phases—full, half, new, dark. I search the ground and see where a single snowflake has fallen and melted; now, it's a thumbnail lake wedged between two stones. Ice teaches water about cold, but there is no ice without water. And no matter how small its pools, the moon still shines in them.

  We lie on our backs in Gary's dark room. It's just a shed, really, with no running water and a shit bucket in the back, and he's touchy about anyone being there. Rain begins. We light a fire. The coming of warmth is like thought attaching itself to form. There are these little acts of creation going on all the time, but so often they pass by ignored.

  We lie still. Holding each other makes the endorphins flow. A cracked window lets in the scent of rain. The small room becomes a place like spring itself—where emptiness fills up, where memory begins.

  Part Five

  A THOUSAND-MILE

  SAILING TRIP TO SPITSBERGEN

  ROUGH WATER

  May 26. Left Tromsö, Norway, this evening at a time when in London it would be getting dark, but where we're going it will be light all night. When the mainsail is hoisted the boat lists to starboard and halyards slap the mast. Six sails go up. A hard westerly wind fills them. I'm on a Dutch boat painted red, called the Noorderlicht—meaning “northern lights.” It's a 150-foot steel-hulled, gaff-rigged schooner built in 1910, and we're traveling to the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen.

  Light all afternoon, all night. The seas grow heavier. We pass the last Norwegian lighthouse perched on a point of rock, then plunge north into the wild Barents Sea. The lighthouse stands for human memory. As we pull away from it, the schooner is lost and memory is gone. The sea is the hypnotic present that exists behind thought; ahead, the ocean is dented and glinting. Now I know what I love about land: the firma part of terra exists to exert calm. As soon as we leave it, the sea heaves up as if trying to excise from its skin this boat, this steel splinter.

  We are alone on the water, a crowd of twenty strangers— scientists, naturalists, painters, writers, sculptors, photographers, a sound artist, and two film crews—going to the far north to see these arctic islands and better understand the dynamics of the North Atlantic Drift and climate change in a northern ecosystem.

  The Arctic Ocean, toward which we're headed, is 54,000 square miles of sloshing ice, a reservoir of cold at the top of this hot-box planet. Hung from its permanent ice are the islands of Spitsbergen (Svalbard), Franz Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya, Novo Sibirskie Ostrova, Wrangel, Axel Heiberg, Elles-mere, and Greenland. The ocean is, itself, an island of ice over which a semipermanent low-pressure system swirls.

  The Arctic is punctured by poles: the fixed North Pole at 90 degrees north, a drifting Magnetic North Pole, and a Geomagnetic North Pole, which is the tip of the earth's magnetic axis, located just west of Qaanaaq, Greenland. In the 1920s Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, who tried to write the history of weather, flew to the point of ice in the Arctic Ocean most distant from land—eleven hundred kilometers. The Arctic is a canary giving warnings about the health of the planet. Its ills are a symptom that points to root causes of every ecosystem's illness.

  A decade ago I sailed the inland waterways of southeast Alaska with Brendan Kelly, an arctic-seal biologist who had spent twenty years doing fieldwork on the ice. When I talked to him recently, he said, “Climate is what we all talk about now, because the ice is going fast and whatever oscillation we impose on the computer models, the same linear signal shows up. That signal is the one made by automobiles and industry—human-caused pollution—and it's very strong. This warming trend is a frightening thing. As the albedo effect—the ability of ice and snow to deflect solar heat back into space—decreases, things get warmer. More solar heat is absorbed, and the increase in temperatures grows exponentially. Which means we lose more and more ice.”

  He continues. “The history of climate is cyclic and fluctuating. It's hard to superimpose an indicator like human-caused pollution when there is no analogue to draw from. There has been no other time in the history of the world when greenhouse gases, airborne methane and mercury, desertification and deforestation have been around. Now we have to put the fluctuating signals of climate against the nonfluctuating one of anthropogenic changes. The trouble is we don't know exactly what we 'll get. And there's no place in the world where we see atmosphere, oceanic, and ecosystem changes more dramatically than in the Arctic. It's called ‘the polar amplification effect.’ We could lose more than half the sea-ice cover in two decades or faster. When climate changes too fast, extinctions happen. We better begin to think of how we're going to save ourselves.”

  House-sized swells lift up. The Dutch crew of three—Ted, Maaike, and Ward—plus a cook, Anna, are hardy and efficient. Maaike's “five-kilo dog,” Isbrun, runs the decks until it gets too rough, then retreats to the captain's quarters below. His name means “burning ice,” a reference to arctic legends of an earlier time when animals could talk and understand what humans said and ice burned to give heat and light.

  Nothing is burning tonight. Instead, we have gray skies, persistent rain, and ocean swells that lap the sides of the Noorderlicht like cold flames. This voyage, called the Cape Farewell Expedition, is the brainchild of David Buckland, a British photographer and sailor with a penchant for science. Four years ago David announced that he wanted to go sailing in the Arctic. What he refers to as his “selfish” dream changed into one that will make a contribution to society. The voyage will be used as a narrative tool to explore marine biology, oceanography, geography, ecology, and the arts in an interactive program for schools in the United Kingdom.

  Because the crew is so small, we all help on deck according to our abilities. Round-the-clock watches are assigned; mine is from midnight until three. On deck I'm given a harness and clip into the rail near the wheel. Rain turns to sleet, then rain again. We can see because it is light, but we can't stand: the decks are covered in ice. With the starboard rail almost under water, one slip and anyone could go overboard. Who would see?

  Below, the misery of seasickness begins to take hold. It's more than rough; fifteen-foot swells break against the forward rail. Midway through my watch, Maaike brings a slice of rye crisp spread with jam. “Better to have something in your stomach,” she says. The rigging creaks and the Noorderlicht shivers. Still jet-lagged, I feel my equilibrium unravel. As soon as I go below to lie in my bunk, I'm sick too. Oh, misery …

  Once there was a Penobscot Indian (in Maine) who was taking care of his sick wife and dreamed that “the ground suddenly began to heave like a wave, rising and falling round and round near where the sick one lay.” He saw a bird flying under the ground. As soon as the bird was discovered, it came up from beneath the earth and died. After, the ground stopped heaving and the man's wife regained her health.

  I search for the bird under this boat, but it will not reveal itself. Gre
at black-backed gulls fly by, darting in and out of the concavities of the sails. The first night merges into the second day, and we're still under way, still wave-tossed, still heeling over hard in an eighteen-knot wind. But the crew is happy: we're doing what Ward, the second mate, calls a “natural nine”: nine knots under sail.

  May 28. Too sick to write. Watery buildings are falling on me. The deck jumps. The floor slides. We're living at a steep angle that I can't get used to. No one can walk, sick or not. A bench slides across the cabin and hits my shins. The film director and his fourteen-year-old son, Liam, take turns vomiting in a pail. Casper, a brainy journalist, runs to the rail. Maaike comes through with more rye crisp and suppositories. “What are those?” Nick, a cameraman and watercolorist, asks.

  “They're for seasickness. You stick them up your bum.”

  He looks shocked. “My bum?”

  Maaike smiles, puts one in his hand, and walks away.

  Gary Hume, a painter from London, staggers through. I ask why he looks so well, and he says jauntily, “Oh, I just spit up like a cat when I need to [he makes a small cackling noise], then I get on with what I'm doing.”

  I'm less lucky and sit cross-legged on the saloon's banquette shaking with cold. I doze this way, “like a little blond Buddha,” someone says. Once, when I open my eyes, I see Phil, one of the cameramen, sliding across the floor on his knees, elbows shoving the plastic bucket toward someone who needs it. Jamaican by birth, Phil was an ordained Catholic priest who requested dispensation from the pope to be released from his vows. But his sense of service is still intact; he's always helping, making us laugh, busing dishes for the cook, offering kindness laced with humor to everyone.

  What time is it? Rain has not stopped. Gray light smears itself over a gray ocean. Gary Hume is at the helm, then Ward, then Ted, David, and Carolyn, a friend of the Cape Farewell project who has come to help sail. I can see but I don't want to. No one eats, no one talks. A few years ago a friend, Bill Hunter, who was sailing solo from Hawaii to California was lost at sea during a bad storm. Fifty-foot-high waves dismasted his small boat. He set off his EPIRB—an emergency location signal— but the coast guard couldn't make the rescue because the waves were too big. Bill must have gone below and closed the hatch— it's possible to survive this way no matter how many times the boat rolls—but when the helicopter returned the next morning the hatch had broken apart and Bill was gone.

  There are times now when I wonder if we'll ever get to land. Or will we have to sail on rough seas forever? Up on deck something is banging hard, but I can't see what it is. There's only rain and a circle of gray seawater. The boat lifts and plunges, slicing waves and lurching into troughs like a horse that goes halfway over a fence then drops dead midair. I don't want a sea burial. Can I have something on demand at least once? (I know the answer, but never mind.) I want a complete absence of movement; I want land.

  May 29. Midnight. Only a circle and nothing else. I sip “ship's broth” made by the captain. Wind comes out of the north—the direction we 're going in—and the sails are taken down. This boat is too big to tack all the way to Spitsbergen. “In a while they'll shift around to the northeast,” Ted, the captain, says quietly. He's all angles and bones, as if wind had sheared everything unnecessary from his eyes and face. We drink ginger tea and watch long-tailed skuas fly low through gaping troughs. “Ahhhh, my favorite bird,” says Ko, almost purring as he stands beside me on the rail. He's a tall, bearded Dutch naturalist who looks Russian. Like us, the skuas are migrating north, except they'll get there long before we will.

  Ted hardly speaks at all. He just squints, keeping his eyes on the gimbal-steadied compass and the uneven water ahead. A graduate of architecture school, he once worked for a year in an office but hated it. “A friend and I saw this boat. We quit our jobs that afternoon, bought it, and here I am.”

  The sea is a universe, albeit one whose superstrings have been chopped up. “It looks like une grande salade,” Gautier, the French photographer, says. His Leica swings from his neck like a black timepiece. But here there is no time, and no photographer's “opportune moments of revelation.” Nor is there any land. It's been gone from sight for three days. Only the sea and the bardo of the sea: no reference points, no rescue.

  9:00 a.m. The Noorderlicht heads up into the wind. On Ted's command we hoist the sails because the wind has shifted over to the northeast as he predicted. The process takes half an hour—no America's Cup grinders on this baby. The temperature has been holding at 38 degrees Fahrenheit but now drops to zero. Rain continues and the decks are ice. Clipped in, I step up to the wheel. The boat plunges and I fall. Pain radiates from my lower back, and ludicrously, my foot gets caught in the spokes of the big wheel. David, who is at the helm, looks down: “Hmm. It's a bit difficult to steer this way,” he says, laughing. I'm laughing too as he extracts my foot, but my tail-bone is bruised. “Should have kept your tail on,” he quips.

  We've sailed together before but not on the open seas of the North Atlantic. A wave the size of a warehouse crashes over the bow. David grins. Fourteen years ago, when a virus attacked his heart and he had nine cardiac arrests, his first thought in the recovery room was: “I want to sail.”

  Maaike brings tea and cookies from the lower depths of the galley, a part of the boat I haven't been able to go to for days. She and David check the chart and make a GPS reading. A rough spot capsizes the teacups. “That could be us,” Albert, the soundman from Guyana, says. He's more than green at the gills.

  “It's always like this on the Barents Sea,” Maaike says. “We call it the Devil's Dance Floor.”

  The island-born explorer Willem Barents gave these islands the name Spitsbergen because of the pointed mountains he saw as he sailed this coast in 1594. The Dutch were desperately searching for a northwest passage to avoid the Spanish-ruled seas of South America and Cape Horn, and to gain supremacy over the British in the northern oceans.

  Barents captained the Mercurius in 1594 and made it to latitude 77 degrees north. Another trip was organized in 1596 when a group of Dutch merchants offered a reward to anyone discovering the northwest passage. Two ships went out, and Barents was on one of them. From Bear Island they sailed north but were blocked by ice. Barents persuaded Captain Jacob van Heemskerck to sail east around the tip of the Russian island, Novaya Zemlya. “We came upon a great heap of ice that we could not sail through it,” he wrote in the ship's journal.

  It was September and the ice came in fast, crushing the ship. The crew built a driftwood house on the island with “seawrack for the roof and chinking of the walls.” They cooked polar bear meat over a central fire but suffered from scurvy. For entertainment, they built a “golf course” between the hut and the crushed boat.

  During the winter, bears took over the ship. In the middle of March the sea began to open. On June 13 Barents and his crew went off in open boats—converted from rowboats—“to get out of that wilde desart, irksome, fearfull, and cold countrey.” As they passed Icy Cape at latitude 75 degrees north, Barents, who was very ill, asked to be lifted up so he could see the great promontory. They did so. Afterward he examined a chart, asked for a drink of water, and promptly died. It was June 20.

  The survivors sailed on without their captain and were rescued by Russian fishermen, who nursed them back to health. The starving men were taken to the coast of Lapland. One of them wrote: “Wee saw some tress on the river side, which comforted us and made us glad, as if wee had then come into a new world.”

  BEAR ISLAND

  Up on deck I see life: barnacle geese fly by, and white-beaked dolphins leap straight up out of the water. The seas calm to a roll. “The ocean is no longer fighting us. Now she is just breathing,” Ko says with a smiling solemnity. Isbrun, the dog, is in Ted's arms, shaking with excitement because he can smell and hear the whales before we can. Two humpbacks lumber by, their notched tails flicking water sparks through the air. Dolphins dive in our bow wave.

  Ted turns the boat in a wi
de circle and cuts the engines. We wait. The whales reappear; whale-play goes on for half an hour. We roll from side to side; the whales undulate as if causing the seas to move. They can dive and stay under for an hour, storing huge amounts of oxygen in their blood. “Just like the people in the Andes who have 20 percent more hemoglobin than lowlanders,” Ko says, grinning. “Humpbacks don't need to adapt to the cold. They're already insulated.”

  Kittiwakes wheel overhead, dipping into billowing sails and out again. The sun isn't shining, but the rain has stopped and the sky has brightened. Isbrun runs from porthole to porthole. “She's a whale hound,” Maaike says. Sick as I've been, I can't suppress a big grin. Three days have passed. I'm not sure if it's afternoon or morning, but I'm optimistic: climbing the latitudes is like climbing a ladder: the farther north we go, the better the weather. After all, the Arctic is a polar desert even if we are at sea.

  I'm shocked to find out that it's near midnight. We're under way and Maaike is at the helm. She is good-natured, small but strong. I ask her how she started sailing. “I was born on a houseboat and it went from there,” she says briskly. Brunnich's guillemots fly by, moving much faster than we are. Is this a race? No answer. Something grabs Maaike's attention. In the distance a white bubble appears on the horizon. “It's land,” she says. “Bjornoya. Bear Island.”