Rock, Paper, Fire

by Marni Jackson

  LOUIS AGASSIZ was the first glaciologist, before the word was coined, his reputation made with the publication in 1840 of his two-volume Études sur les glaciers. He described the landscape transformed by glacial activity as if it were a woman’s body, with a breathless and detailed pensée on the striations and valleys, the rounding and hollows, the cruel results of time and friction. Agassiz wasn’t a brilliant scientist; he mostly synthesized what was already out there, including the work of colleagues who were uncredited. He was an adept promoter, a quality that flowered after he moved from Switzerland to the U.S. and embraced marketing as a faith. Although his fame didn’t last, he became one of the best-known scientists in the world.

  The mid-nineteenth century was the golden age of glaciers, and Agassiz’s work spurred a taste for both exploration and research. Glaciers were mysterious, holding ancient secrets, and the Industrial Revolution had yet to begin its carbonspewing assault in earnest. And they’d seized the imagination of English Romantic poets, who saw in them a spiritual grandeur, an expression of the sublime.

  Agassiz’s reputation climbed quickly and brightly but then quietly subsided in middle age. He refused to embrace Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories, and held to the increasingly discredited idea that species remained identical throughout history. Agassiz also adhered to Catastrophism, a school of thought advocated by his former teacher, the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Catastrophism stipulated that the earth’s timeline was short, and defined by violent events that produced severe climate change and resulted in extinctions. Cuvier was careful never to link his theory to religion—none of his papers refers to Noah and the Flood. But Agassiz made the link, viewing glaciation as the event that did the Flood’s—God’s—work, equal parts geology and miracle. Scientifically, he was left behind.

  Before the end of the century, Agassiz’s ideas were replaced by the prosaically named theories of Uniformitarianism and Gradualism, which posited that geologic change occurs slowly over long periods of time.

  But Agassiz may have the last laugh, now that Catastrophism has come back under another name—climate change. At the time he published his seminal study of glaciers, the Columbia Icefield that is located at the northern border of Banff National Park was roughly twice the size it is now. In geologic terms, 187 years is a blink. But the glacier has retreated 1.5 kilometres since then.

  The implications are profound, and not just for tourists and hikers. The Columbia Icefield is actually a collection of thirty glaciers, and the meltwater from them feeds three oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arctic. It is the hydroponic apex of North America, the kingpin of continental glaciers. It is no exaggeration to call its retreat a catastrophe.

  Glaciers don’t melt at arithmetic rates. As they become smaller and their bulk provides less defense against the warming climate, and as more detritus is exposed and its darker hue attracts more sun, they melt at something that is closer to a geometric rate. Like certain people, one day they are suddenly old. You saw them only a year ago. And now, in the glare of the supermarket, there they are, the face subtly collapsing, a blurriness, a weight in the eyes that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps it had always been there, but you just hadn’t noticed it.

  THE YEAR I turned fifty, a scattered group of old friends reconnected via email and decided to return to Banff to ski. We came from Winnipeg, from Vancouver, San Francisco, Hong Kong. I flew out from Toronto. I hadn’t seen some of them in thirty years. We caught up, reminisced. We recalled making fake IDs by photocopying a paper version of a classmate’s birth certificate and using Wite-Out to eliminate his name. We made multiple copies of the blank version, typed in various whimsical aliases, soaked the paper in tea to age it, put them in a dryer, then ironed creases into them. With these small masterpieces we were able to get into the Voyageur Tavern and see a 300-pound stripper named U.C. Moore wrap her giant panties around a friend’s head, scaring all of us.

  There were missing friends too. A suicide, and the usual complement of tragedy, medical issues, alcoholism, divorce, and debt.

  I was long married, the father of two, in reasonable shape. I had a touch of plantar fasciitis, a small arthritic spur on my hip, and an ongoing bout of existential nausea. “Something has happened to me,” Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Nausea; “It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything obvious. It installed itself cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little awkward. . . I was able to persuade myself that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was a false alarm. And now it has started blossoming.”

  This confronting of existence alights at some point, a quiet argument that we carry within us. Where is this all headed? The answer too obvious to state out loud.

  Skiing was a perfect, if temporary distraction. The act of negotiating a steep hill requires concentration. And unlike many other sports, it doesn’t force you into the unpalatable head of your opponent. It is pure experience.

  Both Sunshine and Lake Louise had expanded dramatically since I’d last visited, twenty years earlier. The forty-fiveminute wait at the Olympic chairlift was gone; the high-speed lifts eliminated line-ups. The frequent breakdowns that had left us swaying in bitter crosswinds for nervous lengths of time were also mercifully gone. We were still good skiers, among the better skiers on the hill, but that was because everyone under the age of forty was on a snowboard. We were part of an evolutionary slow fade.

  At lunch the next day, my friend Martin checked his phone constantly for news of pending interest-rate hikes. His nickname was Captain Leverage, I was told, due to his heroic relationship with debt. He had stayed in Winnipeg and when his father died he’d taken over the family manufacturing business. I remembered his taciturn father washing his Cadillac in the driveway, his beautiful mother pouring vodka over Tang crystals in the kitchen.

  Neale was the only one on a snowboard, though it wasn’t a nod to hipness or progress. He’d had a leg injury that made skiing painful, but somehow allowed for boarding. He had aged very little, and was married to his high school sweetheart, the woman he’d been dating when I left Winnipeg thirty-three years earlier. His life seemed miraculously intact, though this was an illusion. There had been two previous marriages, three kids, and two divorces.

  I spent time with Paul, my closest adolescent friend, who was now a successful developer in Vancouver. In the mornings, as he drove the rented SUV up to the mountain, he would phone his father, who was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, talking to him in cheerful, repetitive tones.

  Paul and I recalled a summer night out at the lake when he was behind the wheel of his mother’s Thunderbird, an otherwise responsible boy, heading for law school, racing wildly on the Number One highway in the dead of night. Trying to pass a white Grand Prix on a blind hill, that reckless teenage faith. The memory still brought an unsettling frisson of mortality.

  All of our worlds held secrets now. Certainly that had been true of an absent friend who had killed himself by driving a jet boat into a bridge support on the Red River. He had managed to keep his world contained until that last desperate act. This anarchy lies in many of us, I suspect; not necessarily suicidal ideation, but the anarchy of a mind overburdened by disappointment and doubt, or simply time. The hill had been a testing ground for us when we were young, a release of pent-up energies. It was more relief now, the visceral experience of skiing displacing other thoughts and worries. Another kind of freedom.

  IN 2004, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica drilled to a depth of 3,270 metres, providing a geologic record that goes back 800,000 years. The methane and CO2 that are trapped in bubbles in the ice provide a record of carbon emissions that stretches back to the mid-Pleistocene epoch. During glacial periods, CO2 concentrations varied between 180-190 parts per million by volume (ppmv). During warmer phases, that figure rose to roughly 280. After the Industrial Revolution, CO2 concentrations showed a spike. Then, from 1975 to 2005, emissions increased seventy percent.
The current concentration of CO2 is 391 ppmv, the highest in eight hundred millennia. If this trend continues, the sport of skiing may erode at a rate that is faster than the glaciers.

  Switzerland noted a 3.7 percent decline in skier visits in 2012. At Whistler, the 2001 figure of 2.3 million skiers dropped to 1.7 in 2009. The 2011/2012 season in the U.S. started with the weakest snowfall in twenty years, which prompted a 15.7 percent decline in skiers from the previous year.

  Snow conditions are increasingly unpredictable, though partly mitigated by sophisticated snow-making machines. But the unreliability of snow means that there are fewer advance bookings, as skiers wait to see where the snow is. And this creates problems for resort owners. The recent economic downturn has taken a toll as well; uncertainty, in all its forms, particularly plagues the ski industry, which needs both snow and prosperity to survive.

  There is a point in middle age when you feel that there is still time to right the ship, that whatever you have neglected—health, teeth (a particularly sore and expensive point), partners, finances, children—can be dealt with by a concerted push. If we just cut out carbs, buy flowers, start putting money aside today; if we sit down and have that conversation about drugs with our teenagers, all will be well. Climatically, this is the moment that many people feel we are at: if we install solar panels, buy a Prius, rein in our consumption. But there are scientists who feel we have passed that point; regardless of our best efforts, we’ve already done too much damage, and it will all come crashing down.

  THE WORLD’S glaciers are disappearing, but they contain only about four percent of global ice cover. It is the polar ice sheets that pose the biggest risk. In 2006, the legendary Northwest Passage—impetus for three centuries of exploration—was free of ice for the first time in recorded history. In 2007, an apocalyptic year for ice, satellite photographs showed that twentyfour percent of arctic ice had disappeared in the previous twelve months.

  This left 4.17 million square kilometres of polar ice, a record low that only held until 2012, when a new low of 3.32 million square kilometres was announced. In the 1980s, the sea ice covered an area roughly the size of the U.S.; now it is half that.

  As the polar ice melts, water seeps to the bottom of the ice sheet where it acts as a lubricant, helping large pieces to slide into the sea. In 2010 an ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off Petermann Glacier in Greenland, where temperatures are currently rising at 2°C per decade.

  If all the polar and glacial ice melted, the seas would rise by sixty-four metres, according to Lonnie Thompson. The oceans would actually go higher than that due to thermal expansion: as the water heats, it takes up more space. Hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities would be vulnerable. Perhaps we can avoid, or at least forestall, some version of this disaster. But the political record is one of obfuscation, weaselling, and environmental summits that yield hopeful mantras and little action.

  The Gradualism of the nineteenth century may be behind us. Climate can change on a dime, more or less. The Catastrophic lurks. Exhibit A for this theory is Ötzi, the Tyrolean ice man, whose frozen body was discovered in the Eastern Alps north of Bolzano, Italy, in 1991 after it was exposed by a melting glacier. His body had been in the ice for 5,200 years. He’d been shot in the back with an arrow, and had managed to escape his enemies, only to bleed to death. Within days of his death, there was a “climate event” that was large enough to cover and preserve him for fifty-two centuries. Otherwise, he would have begun decaying or would have been eaten by scavengers. Evidence suggests that the climate event wasn’t local. The isotopes in the water molecules that compose the remaining ice on Mount Kilimanjaro also show a decrease from the same time period, indicating colder temperatures. A very sudden and prolonged cold snap seems to have begun in the Middle East, 5,200 years ago.

  Ötzi was forty-five, relatively old in the Copper Age. It is thought that he might have been a shepherd. Because his corpse was the best-preserved example of primitive man, it has become one of the most minutely studied in history. His lungs were blackened by campfires. He showed degeneration of knee and ankle joints, and had tattoos that may have been related to pain relief treatments. He was lactose intolerant, and may have been suffering from Lyme disease. The arrowhead that killed him was still lodged in his back. Perhaps he was a skier. Whatever else he was, Ötzi was a middle-aged man with health issues, trying to survive in a hostile environment.

  As Ötzi sat on the mountain, bleeding out, what was he thinking? Perhaps he was thinking about his beautiful mate and their golden children, or maybe he was thinking about the cruelty of this world, the difficulties of finding food, of avoiding enemies and predators. Or he was looking at the stars trying to divine man’s purpose. Maybe all he thought about was the pain of that arrow in his back, the coldness in his limbs. Whatever he was thinking, while he was thinking it, everything changed. The earth suddenly got much colder. It snowed for days, temperatures plummeted, and he was buried along with his dreams of love and survival.

  We dream of those things still. As we age, perhaps more so. We descend, becoming increasingly conscious of the speed, of the blur in our periphery, those events just out of reach.

  Masa Takei

  HUNTING AND KILLING

  When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes—remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education—make them hunters. — HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  TWO OCTOBERS AGO, a friend and I loaded his truck and headed out from Vancouver into the Cariboo-Chilcotin. We passed beyond the wet coastal mountain ranges of British Columbia into semi-arid lodgepole pine country. It was my second season hunting, and we had yet to get a deer. Plenty of signs, enough droppings for me to fashion a life-sized buck, some sightings—but still no success.

  The first morning out we awoke in the pre-dawn dark to find sleet encrusting our tent. We set a rendezvous time and my partner headed into the half-light to stake out a clearing he’d picked the evening before. I went in search of a clearing of my own. I found a copse of trees with a good view of fifty yards of game trail. But, as I grew cold and impatient, I began to stalk the strip of forest between the road and the clear-cut, where I found fresh tracks.

  Now, approaching midday, the sun was finally warming the landscape. My partner had called me on the radio. He’d quit early and was waiting for me back at the truck. I was only a stand of trees from the road when I spotted the buck’s eyes peering at me from above a freshly fallen tree, his small antlers jutting up.

  My focus narrowed. My breathing quickened and the deer joggled in the field of my scope. The first shot, through thick branches, missed completely. My second, after he’d bounded away and stopped broadside to look back, hit home. A solid shot through the engine room.

  The deer, a spike buck muley, lay in the yellow grass facing me, his eyes clouded over as if with cataracts, an entry wound the size of a dime in his chest. All I remember, standing over him, was a feeling of sadness and shame, as if I’d done something wrong. My rifle hung heavy in my hands. I keyed the mike on my radio and told my hunting partner where to find me. I felt as if I were turning myself in.

  MY PATH TO hunting started—as many things do—with lunch. I was a thirty-seven-year-old MBA who had taken a left turn from management consulting into freelance writing. Either way, I rarely got my hands dirty. My friend Ignacio—“Nazzy”—and I were eating Chinese food in a grudgingly gentrifying part of Vancouver. It was 2008, the depths of the Great Recession, when both an economic and environmental apocalypse seemed nigh. Just how nigh was reflected by our conversation, which had drifted to contingency plans for the imminent SHTF—“Shit Hits The Fan,” in survivalist-speak—situation.

  “I’d head to Patagonia,” said Nazzy, between bites of General Tao’s chicken, “and live off the land.” He was from Peru, but he would bypass home and keep going to where animals far outnumbered people.

  “You know how
to hunt?” I said, eyebrows raised in skepticism.

  He nodded with an air of gravitas. Nazzy and I had met in business school almost a decade ago, and though I’d come to realize that he possesses many skills, from ice climbing to tango dancing, he’d never mentioned hunting. Besides, he was just too doe-eyed, compact, and cuddly-looking to be a hunter. Or so I thought.

  As it turned out, he’d grown up hunting with his father, a diplomat. Together they’d taken a wide range of fauna on three continents. His father also hunted with a posse of companions known as Los Magnificos, whose exploits had become legendary. But now, in their twilight years, they were known more for their doddering misadventures, careening their trucks off the road and blasting away with their guns but rarely hitting anything. They were nicknamed after a popular TV show, Los Magnificos: what we in North America would call The A-Team.

  By the time coffee came around, Nazzy and I had decided that we’d hunt together. Los Magnificos, Vancouver Chapter. At the time, DIY food collection and locavorism were on the rise, and we found ourselves gripped by the ideal of selfreliance, by the urge to connect with something primal. I’d always eaten meat, and for meat to end up on my plate, something needed to have died. Just because I didn’t do the killing myself made me no less complicit. I could see what author David Adams Richards meant in his memoir Facing the Hunter: “. . .those who eat meat should be morally obligated to kill at least once in their lives that which they eat.”

  So Nazzy and I plunged into the acronym-rich bureaucracy involved in becoming a ticketed hunter in British Columbia. First was the PAL (Possession and Acquisition Licence), needed to purchase and pack a gun. We spent the weekend in a community centre with biologists, biathletes, and armoured-car guards. (In that class, evenly split between men and women, only one other person gave hunting as his reason for being there.) We handled decommissioned firearms and didn’t fire a single shot. Instead we answered multiplechoice questions.