Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  The ice carapace of Mount Arcturus is the main subject of the first shot, the icefield below its summit a dark amoeboid blur to one side. The clerk in the camera shop explained to Hal that the glare of sunlight on the snow caused this effect.

  13

  Byrne’s portrait also survived the fall. He finds himself frozen inside it. Her gift to him.

  Grey peaked hat. Knee-length, weather-stained mackintosh over a dark flannel shirt. Tinted spectacles on a leather strap around his neck. Knee breeches, puttees, overshoes mottled with damp. Waterproof railway gauntlets in one hand, calfskin notebook in the other.

  Prematurely white hair, thin white beard lining a long, bony face. Eyes look slightly Asiatic. Squint caused by sun glare on the spring snow at his feet. Chiselled lines at the corners of his eyes, alongside his thin-lipped mouth.

  The markings of time. The ice has been at work here too.

  24

  Nineteen-fourteen. Britain and its dominions go to war against the German Empire.

  Elspeth watches Byrne come down the path to the glasshouse in his shirtsleeves, hatless, grim-faced. His last day of the season.

  —I can’t believe how quickly the temperature has dropped this year. One day all the streams are rushing, and the next everything’s frozen over and silent.

  Elspeth smiles.

  —I seem to remember my father saying something like that on one of his birthdays.

  She has knit Byrne a green wool pullover. He tries it on in the parlour, holds out his arms and turns to let her admire her work.

  —It’s warm, he says. Thank you.

  That night he packs the pullover in his valise to take with him to London. He will wear it against the English damp, and take it with him to the war, to where Rawson has already gone. He will be wearing it one day on a village street in France. Past him will file another seemingly endless procession of faces, the soldiers, this time most of them chalk-white, the eyes looking away into some place more distant and unspeakable than the depths of a glacier. He will write about this moment in a letter to her, one that he decides not to send but keeps tucked in the back of his notebook.

  Four years will go by before they see each other

  again.

  25

  Trask’s son is kept busy in his father’s gift shop. There are more people than ever coming into the park these days, despite the fact of a war. Trask has an explanation for this.

  —The sad fact is that when somebody falls to their death in the mountains, like poor Miss Becker, all the fools in the world come running to see if they can accomplish the same thing.

  A customer mentions the new flying machines, built to make war in the skies. Jim Trask follows the man out into the street and stares up at the peaks, livid in the rose light of sunset. To be able to soar to those heights.

  He leaves home one day, unexpectedly, setting a short note and the bulk of his savings on the shop counter. This distant war has occurred at the opportune moment.

  26

  People talk of the war as though it is rumbling up the valley toward them. They imagine Jasper as the last bastion of the British Empire, defended in the final hour against the armoured Huns. Dynamiting the cliffs at Disaster Point to build a wall of rock rubble where townsfolk would patrol and keep watch fires.

  The ambrosia of English poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Tennyson, is recited every Saturday evening at the town hall as a tonic.

  In 1916, German soldiers arrive in Jasper, shackled and locked up in freight cars. The idea is that little surveillance will be needed in a place where there is nothing to escape to. Given the choice, any sane man would stay behind the fences and barbed wire.

  Much of the old settlement is still intact, half-submerged in the willow scrub. Some of the salvageable buildings are renovated, to serve as the nucleus of a prisoner of war camp.

  That winter the German prisoners build a palace of ice blocks on Connaught Drive, for the annual February carnival. The blocks are cut from the frozen Athabasca, hauled up by sledge to the town, chiselled into shape and sprayed with water to cement them in place. The plan is to build a scaled-down ice replica of the Taj Mahal.

  Given the tools and the material, this proves to be beyond the engineering skill of the prisoners. Instead they build a four-sided castle with battlements.

  It is to this castle, lit from within by torches, that The Ice Princess, chosen by the Chamber of Commerce, will come at the end of her horse-drawn carriage procession through the town. The problem will be to keep the Princess from freezing in the thin silk costume they have designed for her.

  27

  A patriotic fever of naming soon fills up the blank spaces on the map of Jasper National Park. Battlefields. Commanders. Dead heroes. La Montagne de la Grande Traverse is renamed in honour of Edith Cavell, an English nurse at a Red Cross hospital in Brussels, tried and shot by the Germans for helping wounded Allied soldiers escape into Holland. Trask unveils the plaque at the base of the mountain.

  In memory of those valiant young men and women who have gone on ahead of us to the Elysian fields.

  28

  Jim Trask returns to his father after three years, from a ruined world, a future of destruction.

  Byrne is on the same train. He understands something more about the ice as a time machine when he sees Jim in his Royal Flying Corps uniform, direct from the Great War, having flown not over mountain passes and hidden valleys, but fortified towns, broken bridges, smoking fields.

  From the east coast Byrne passed through a sequence of crowds on his way back to Jasper. An unsettled time. Soldiers, families, young women. Children travelling alone. He brushed past giddy revellers and tearful reunions. But there were just as many faces numb with grief and shock. Bodies bent around wounds. The train stations seemed to him like the waiting rooms of overcrowded hospitals. And as he came west, the numbers of people milling about the station platforms dwindled. The train began to empty.

  He approaches Jasper in a wintry dawn, alone in the lounge car. It seems to him the train is sliding towards the icy edge of the world. With himself and the young man, Trask’s son, its only passengers.

  The young man rides into town in the refrigerator car of the train, resting on a sawdust-covered block of ice carved from a frozen river. Around the block of ice are bags of freezing salt. Led by the local pipe band, the bearers carry the boy from the train, up the street past his father’s gift shop, to Father Buckler’s new stone church on Turret Street, and past it to the cemetery.

  Elspeth

  When Ned Byrne came back to Jasper after the war, I was still at the Empress Hotel in Victoria.

  The Grand Trunk had gone bankrupt, and the chalet was all but boarded up for three years. The staff found work where they could, or if they could. I was lucky. I knew what was coming, and so I wrote to my friend in Victoria, the woman I had met on the train that first brought me to Jasper. She knew the manager at the Empress, and helped me get an interview. Three weeks later I left Jasper. At the time I didn’t think I would be coming back.

  The war ended, and the next spring a letter came from Frank Trask. He told me about Jim, and how he and his wife had considered leaving Jasper and moving back east. But now he was working again. The chalet was his, he’d bought out his partners. He was thinking about adding a new wing. An auto road from town was just about finished. Now he needed someone to manage the chalet, someone who knew it as well as he did. He was willing to offer a share in ownership, but I was going to have to give him an answer soon. I wrote back and told him I’d think it over, and get hack to him within a week.

  Ned had written to me as well, a few months earlier. He was living in Jasper now, year-round. He still saw a few patients in town, but as he admitted to me in one of his letters, he was really there as an amateur glaciologist. That’s what he’d called himself once, the summer he left for the war, and I’d laughed. Glaciologist. I’d never heard the word before. I’d never considered there might be others like him, s
cientists who studied only glaciers. I thought he was the one man on earth who bothered that much with them, that this science was his alone, that he had invented it. Arcturology. The science of being distant, and receding a little every year.

  I remembered a freak blizzard one evening in July, when Ned showed up for one of his therapeutic baths, despite the weather, and sat in the pool up to his neck, letting the snow pile up on the top of his head like an absurd crown.

  And another evening, not long after Freya’s death. Spreading a fresh white cloth over the dining room table. For him. Setting out two places of the chalet’s best china, two crystal goblets, port wine, sherry, and a carafe of Frank’s glacier water, with the labelled bottle beside it. I thought that would make him smile, since he knew as well as I did that Frank went no further than the creek for it. But I thought the arrangement still needed something more. Something he would appreciate. So I went out to the glasshouse and cut a handful of lilies and put them in a blue vase on the table. He came in, sat down at the table, looked at the lilies, and then started talking about his long lost botanical collection. The orchids and other rare flowers that he had hoped to take back to England with him, that would’ve earned him a place at the Royal Botanical Garden. And then he went on about the high alpine wildflowers and lichens that grew amid the bare rock. Within an apparent desert of water, soil, shelter, the resilient life that will find the merest sliver of sunlight, and bloom. And I listened, because I always listened. When he was finished his lecture, I took the vase off the table, went into the kitchen and dumped the flowers in the dustbin. He came in after me.

  What are you doing? he said.

  I dropped the vase on the floor and it smashed. He just stood there and stared. I was embarrassed now, I bent down and started picking up the pieces of the vase. And then he laughed, that maddening laugh that saidExcuse me, but I just walked in the door. I’m afraid I have no idea what’s happening here.

  Once more he was pretending not to see, to feel. Or maybe not really feeling anything other than just dismay at the fuss and bother I was causing him. As if he hadn’t shown me his kind nature, never shown me he could laugh and feel pain and be something other than a shell

  Freya would’ve laughed at me if she’d seen this. I’m not like her. I don’t know why people expect me to be, hut they do. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the colour of my hair. But I’m not full of fire. I’m not a woman out of a myth, like Freya or Sara, I don’t have that kind of power over anyone and I wouldn’t like it if I did. I spent my winters here, in this snowy valley, waiting for the return of this man. I was faithful. I’d had to conserve my fuel.

  I stood up and said, come here. He came closer, wrinkling his brows, not sure what this was leading to, and neither was I. Closer, I said. All right, he said. He moved closer, with this perplexed grin on his face, and I reached out my hand, slowly. At first I intended to simply touch his face, I’m not sure why, to see if it was as cold as his voice, I suppose. Then I hit him. Pretty hard, on the side of the face. Slap. I knew it was ridiculous the moment I did it. He went red. He walked out of the room, and then he turned around and came back, and then walked out again. He couldn’t speak. And it was suddenly so funny. Right then he looked, I don’t know, like Charlie Chaplin. Walking out, coming back, walking out again.

  When a week had gone by I sent Frank a telegram. “Your new manager will be arriving at the end of June.”

  When I stepped off the train in Jasper, Ned was there to meet me. He had changed in some way. I had always thought he looked older than he really was, but that was no longer true. When he spoke I heard for the first time the voice that belonged with that weathered face and white hair.

  He kissed me and said,You look a bit sunburned.

  This was a time when people understood the world would never be the same. You could be forgiven for desiring a little joy in your life. For seeking comfort in familiar rituals. People wanted to make some kind of gesture, something momentous and hopeful. There were a lot of sudden marriages.

  The question was there between us for those first few days. Unspoken, but there in the embarrassed silences, the way we avoided being alone together. But after a few days it seemed we’d resisted the fever. And now we could be ourselves again. I suppose neither of us felt very comfortable with grand gestures.

  TERMINUS

  THE TERMINUS OF THE GLACIER IS AN INSTRUCTIVE PLACE. CEASELESSLY CHANGING, AND YET ALWAYS THE SAME, LIKE THE SEASHORE. ICE STREAMS BECOMING RIVERS, MOUNTAINS WRING DOWN INTO VALLEYS.

  THE TRANSITION ZONE BETWEEN DOWN INTO VALLEYS.

  1

  Nineteen-nineteen. A photograph of the era:

  A black bear, chained to a post at the golf course. Sir Harry Lauder, on a visit to Jasper, poses with Arthur the Bear. Within the photograph’s frame the placid fairway runs level behind them, bordered by a neat row of pines. Trask, who arranged this tableau, is visible as a truncated arm and hat brim to one side.

  Sir Harry, in straw hat and tweed golf togs, leans on his pitching wedge and eyes Arthur askance. The beloved singer is well aware of the comic incongruity. He knows just what pose to strike for the camera.

  Arthur stands upright on his hind legs, the chain taut behind him. He holds his front paws out, as if reaching for the man beside him. His small black eyes are barely visible in the photograph. He does not know that his image is being captured, frozen onto film, and perhaps for that reason he looks a little blurred, as though his innocence of the camera keeps him slightly out of focus.

  It is difficult, if not impossible, to cross the gap, to say what his awkward straining posture conveys. No human emotion seems quite adequate to describe the gesture of the animal.

  2

  Freya first returned to Hal as water.

  He was huddled with others in the doorway of a trench dugout. A morning in late winter. He had been sleeping and was nudged awake by the voices of the men around him.

  He remembered where he was and tried to pull the shreds of his unfinished dream around him like a blanket. It was no use. He was awake again, stiff and sore, his head clogged by a cold that has worn him down for days. The men were moving around him. Another day beginning. Someone stumbled over his leg. Are you dead, Rawson? Let’s go.

  He looked up, and saw a row of icicles hanging from the beam above the entrance to the dugout. Beads of water budding at the tips, glittering in the sun as they broke free.

  I sometimes have the feeling the ice is alive.

  He reached up, broke off one of the icicles and held it to his dry, cracked lips.

  3

  In the dream, Hal climbs down from the summit where she left him and crosses the penitent snow, her landscape.

  Hal.

  She is there by the ice lake, sitting on a blanket, a picnic basket beside her. Cutting into an orange with her pocketknife. Hal steps from the snow onto the ice, sheds his jacket and sits down beside her. She hands him a slice of orange. The day is warm, aegean. They stretch out together on the blanket, under a turquoise heaven, and laugh about his fears. They kiss.

  Now they are together on the long train east. Newlyweds. They will live in his father’s riverside cabin. He will write and she will travel, he would not keep her from that great passion. She will make excursions to the mountains of Wales, to the Lake District, and come home with tales of storms sweeping across the dark waters of Windermere.

  He wakes and knows the dream is wrong. A betrayal of her fire, the spirit that rushed through him and was gone. He remembers an evening in her room at the chalet.

  —About that city, Alexandria the Farthest. You said there was a legend.

  She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, a map unfolded in front of her.

  —Yes. The locals say their ancestors were the only people who defeated Alexander the Great. And they did it without drawing a sword. The story went something like this. When he arrived in the region with his army, Alexander was forced to call a halt. There was a slight problem, you see,
his soldiers no longer wanted to fight. It was discovered that during their victorious march across Asia, the army had collected a huge city of tents in its wake. A city of refugees, people whose cities were burned, escaped slaves. Wandering merchants, confidence artists, prostitutes. And a few travel writers, too, no doubt. Rootless people, pulled into the wake of this great thundering mass of armoured men. And when Alexander’s soldiers discovered this, they couldn’t believe their luck. They’d never stayed more than a few days in any one spot, and here was this maze of tents and pavilions travelling along with them, a place to go drinking, to hear fantastic tales from other lands, to dance and make love. Discipline in the ranks all of a sudden went to pieces.

  —Hard to believe.

  She laughed.

  —That’s what Alexander thought. His goal of world conquest was so close. Aristotle had told him India was at the edge of the earth and he was almost there. So he sent out a proclamation, demanding that these camp-followers pack up their things and go home, for the good of the army and the empire. But it did no good. Next he tried attacking the tent city and burning it, but as his advisors pointed out, sacking one city of refugees would only end up creating another, and the problem would begin all over again. In the end he had to set his army on a forced march through a desert, promising the men plunder such as they had never seen when they reached India. Well, after a few days of this relentless pace, the tent city lagged behind and was left to its fate in the middle of a wasteland.

  —And this became the city of Chojend.

  —Eventually. The story goes that they wandered the desert for a few years, like the Israelites. Until their momentum ran out, I guess. Although they say some of their number kept on moving, searching for Alexander’s army, and were lost to history. That’s the millennial part of the legend: the hope that the wanderers will come home some day.

  —So what brought you there?