My son’s
first glacier. He, who has been stumbling through his fifteenth year, moves as
if born attached to these tools, performing a dance more natural than walking.
Even his frontpointing appears effortless, delicate, as if he’s tiptoeing up a
sidewalk upon which his heels will never touch, as if youth holds some antidote
for ice and gravity. He wants what we all want: more.
Farther, steeper, higher, the whole
mountain, and then, of course, another.
He knows I go to the mountains, but
I don’t think he knows why. And here he is, treating this ice work, this frozen
world, with a kind of reverence, as if guessing that for him, too, salvation may be found
here.
Now that we cannot pretend they are
not shrinking, every visit to a glacier is more sacred than ever. The Byron is
so close, our backyard glacier, an hour by car from Anchorage and only a mile
more of flat walking on a well-maintained trail before we enter the primeval
world of snow: a jumble of seracs, leaning towers, perfectly named erratics
of rock and ice, the alluvial fans of debris where a dozen miniature avalanches
have spread their wares as a card dealer fans the deck, pick a card.
Random, he says, one of his
favorite words. He’s right, sure, but I don’t like to encourage him: he seems
to see the whole world in the word.
A glacier is called alive because it
moves, advancing, retreating, a frozen army.
It also speaks. Under the rush of
wind, the sound of rushing water. Under the snow, under the ice, creaks and
groans, every once in a while a crash, an echo. Ancient, almost translatable,
it says beware in every tongue. Jake Breitenbach knew that mountains
move: his elegy tells us,
his body encased within the Khumbu Icefall. And closer, on Denali, Mugs lies in
the crevasse that “swallowed” him “silently, quickly,” as his clients said.
When I would see Mugs around town, at the bakery, I was surprised that he
walked around, lived, and breathed the same air as the rest of us; but if you
knew what he’d been doing in the mountains, it would have never occurred to you
that he wasn’t immortal.
We
say he died doing what he loved. We say he was in the wrong place at
the wrong time. We say when your number’s up, your number’s up.
But for us this is the right place
and the right time. The mountain won’t move.
We will. Upward, we reach the toe,
or the head, opposites that describe the same feature when applied to
glaciers: the terminus. Or is this the beginning?
This is
the week of the Northern solstice when time becomes unhinged. We’ve got all
night, dad, my son says; he sounds exasperated that I want to stop just
after nine pm. The sun won’t set for hours, but now it’s gone behind a ridge.
In its shadow, we return to winter. We layer on all our clothes, point out with
our axes the possible routes to the summit, etching them into memory for future
use.
Why
the ridge and not straight up? he asks. Damn, I think, Day One and already
with the straight up. I explain the likely paths of the seracs above the
directissima, the probable crevasses, and then, for balance, the lesser
dangers of the cornices on the ridge. That’s a real word? he asks, direttissima?
He looks at me as if for once in his whole life I have told him something
possibly useful for navigating the world.
On the way down a new landscape
appears: ice chunks, aglow in the twi-night sun, float across Portage Lake like
burning ships. Above the lake, more snow and peaks float on the shadowed
forest, alight in the long alpenglow, gateway to the infinite: Begich, Boggs,
Maynard, their names map-learnt, not yet experienced.
I think of the way my British
friends say the word glacier: Glahss-y-ear, making it sound the
enchanted place that it truly is. My son and I have been to the glahss-y-ear
but my language won’t hold it. “Earth’s the right place for love,” Frost best
said, and like him, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
