meade

Hope (and Earth)

| Megan
Meade Glacier + Moraine, above terminus, July 2022. Image, my own.

What is the Earth?  It depends on who you ask. A geologist might tick off a list of minerals and talk of earth’s molten core and crusty mantle. An astronomer might explain that earth is a heavenly body orbiting around a G class star embedded deep in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. A farmer might tip back his hat, squat, and scoop up a measure of fertile brown soil in his calloused hand, “Dirt.”  A child might reply, “My home.”  Earth.   

One answer comes from those who inhabit the second largest ice sheet on earth in Greenland.  Greenland Eskimo lore tells of three inquisitive friends who wanted to discover the size, shape, and character of the earth. Setting off, they traveled for several days when they came to a huge ice-house. After some debate they decided to go inside, and to ensure that they didn’t become lost in its cavernous recesses they held on to one another and ran their hands along the seemingly endless stretch of wall.

On and on they walked, now searching to find the entrance through which they had come.  Time passed–days, months, years– and they grew weary. Strength waned and they all began to crawl on and on into the ice. Eventually, the last of their strength spent, no longer able to crawl, two of the friends sat down and died. The last boy continued on, and finally found the entrance. He stumbled out of the frozen house and made his way back to the village of his birth.  He was now a very old man.  He told his people, “The earth is simply a very big ice-house.”

——

Melt
by Megan Dickson

things melt like banana
popsicles on hot sidewalks

hearts at the cuddle of
a tender puppy’s nuzzle

sun as it sherberts into sunset,
dreamy scoops of carnelian, fuchsia, crimson

water being sublimated into
sediment, becoming sludgy mud

metal silver when heated to one thou-
sand seven hundred and sixty-three degrees

falsity as you live in truth in the world
as it is, not as you wish it to be

light refracted and gloriously dispersed
through water into the entire color spectrum

butter bubbling, sizzling in the fry
pan in anticipation of the next repast

bodies into one another, warm
with the savior-vivre of desire

——

Gerwingk was the first glacier my children ever touched, but I hoped it wouldn’t be their last. Three years later, summer 2022, we drove up through Canada across the Alcan and down into Southeast Alaska. It felt like an in-depth glaciology lesson. “Ways of glaciers 1010 CRN 9110297.” If you had looked at the area from a topographic map that highlighted the icefields we drove through it was clear the route was stippled with thousands of glaciers; consequently, glacial history and present glacial phenomenon were visible from every vantage point– ice sawn peaks, razor-spined arêtes, gorgeous blue and green high lakes, U-shaped valleys, hanging glaciers, mountain glaciers, and larger long sloping glacial plains from epochs of time gone by in Earth’s climate, glacial, and geologic history.

Our destination was once again, Skagway, Alaska. The same tiny town where I’d spent five of my seven summer seasons in AK. Cruising down White Pass in our Sprinter was surreal. It was a cold, spitting, foggy, wind-whipped afternoon. We pulled on our rain jackets and stopped at the Alaska sign as we entered the U.S. again from British Columbia. Entering town an hour later, we set up camp at Pullen Creek Park, a beautiful little camp and RV spot next to Skagway’s small boat harbor. That night, in true Northern fashion we feasted on fresh Lynn Canal shrimp, wild caught crab and halibut at Fish Co. right next to the harbor. Of all the places on Earth I’ve known and loved, Skagway still felt like home.

The next morning, we went in search of adventure. Alaskans do many things well, including subsist in a perpetually harsh environment, and air and water travel are among their specialties. When half of your state population lives in rural communities only accessible by flight or ferry, you get really robust systems for both. So up we went with TEMSCO helicopters to take a walk on the Juneau Ice Field the day after we arrived. The sun shone bright, the ice was blue, and watching my children drinking from a stream straight off the face of a glacier was sublime.

We landed that morning on the Meade glacier. One of 13 outlet glaciers from the interconnected plateau of ice that makes up the Juneau Ice Field. According to researcher Bethan Davies, and her associates, in an article published July 2, 2024 in the science journal, Nature Communications, the Juneau Ice Field boasted 1050 glaciers in 2019 with, “40 topographically confined outlet glaciers, which drain directly from the main plateau. Separate to this plateau are smaller ice bodies; 145 valley glaciers, 584 mountain glaciers, and 281 glacierets.”1 That sounds like a staggering number of glaciers suggesting an incredible volume of ice.

However, the question for Davies and other glaciologists is how long will glacial ice persist as global temperatures rise? What are the implications of accelerated glacial ice melt? Hypothesis aside, these are questions that no one has firm or easy answer for yet. What researchers like Bethan Davies and Mattia Poinelli2 do know is that the changes that have occurred in Arctic and Antarctic ice in the last ten years have been the most substantive positive melt outputs for glacial ice melt than in the previous 100 years combined.

Davies explains, “Work like this is crucial as the world’s glaciers are melting fast – all together they are currently losing more mass than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, and thinning rates of these glaciers worldwide has doubled over the past two decades.”3 This melting has the potential to change many of Earth’s systems including raising sea levels, shifting ocean currents, displacement of animal species, and other changes to the cryosphere that threaten to destabilize earth’s weather patterns, ecology, physical and human geography.

On this warm, July day, standing on the back of the Meade Glacier, none of these realities feel very pertinent. But it’s these kinds of questions which will undoubtedly be passed on to my boys and their children. Generations of humans who will have to work out complex climate shifts if we are unwilling to thoughtfully approach questions of climate change while we, too, are residents of Earth. Truly, we may not have started the fire, to give Billy Joel a worthy nod. Earth’s climate systems have shifted many multiple times before the first humans evolved into the sentient creatures we are today. But running, hiding, and choosing an apathete’s approach to our environment doesn’t strike me as very efficacious, either.

——

Gabriel Dawe’s work on display at the Renwick with the building’s 19th-century architectural details as a backdrop. Ron Blunt/ Renwick Gallery/ SAAM, Washington, D.C., 2015

——

Locals in Hope are fond of asking, “What’s the best thing about Portage Valley?” Quickly they’ll reply, “Anchorage in your rear-view mirror.”  If you happen to leave Anchorage safely behind, you won’t have trouble figuring out which way to go. Just take The Road. The Road runs northeast along Knik Arm of Cook Inlet toward The Great One, Denali, and also escapes to the southeast, along Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet.

Ironically, the Hope Highway dead ends just past the quaint little restored mining town. This little town has known its share of cataclysmic events. The 1964 earthquake created a tsunami that engulfed part of the town, sloughing it powerfully into an extended tidal basin. Now the still-tiny town really does live by the tourist season boasting a “gold panning experience,” salmon fishing in Resurrection Creek, and during some summers a glass blowing class. Most of the residents live there only part-time or work in Anchorage to make ends meet.

Not only do Alaskans in Hope, and elsewhere, know a thing or two about cataclysmic natural disasters and severe weather, their history is peppered with feats of conquest. Originating in the Bering Sea, the Cook inlet is named for the famous explorer Captain Cook. Not the nemesis of Peter Pan, Captain James Cook FRS, of Hawaiian infamy, had no hook. But like many great explorers of his time, he tirelessly sought the Northwest Passage, which drove him past Hope, not yet a dot on any map in 1778. 

Traveling up the inlet toward Portage Valley, Cook and his crew navigated the narrow stretch of sea in dangerously shallow waters. Rather than finding a passage of any kind, the crew quickly realized that Turnagain arm had no outlet. Strange tides, now known to have the second greatest range in the world, caused the stalwart seafarer, Cook, to allegedly yell to his mates, “Turn again! Turn again!” Tacking back and forth out of the waterway, zig-zagging as quickly as they could to return to the larger Gulf of Alaska and back to meet the Bearing Sea, and safety. Can you imagine? Some of the greatest explorers in the world came so close, but they never discovered Hope. And just like the Turnagain arm of Cook Inlet, the road to Hope ends. It dead ends.

*(This is the third essay in a selection of essays, poems, and reflections on ice, glaciers, family, love, loss, and the stunning power of the natural world as it is and also as it functions to support human life. Previous essays include Hope (Alaska), and Hope (and Ice). All words and images unless otherwise noted are my own.)

Crevasse on the Meade Glacier, Juneau Ice Field, July 2022. Image, my own.
  1. Accelerating glacier volume loss on Juneau Icefield driven by hypsometry and melt-accelerating feedbacks http://Accelerating glacier volume loss on Juneau Icefield driven by hypsometry and melt-accelerating feedbacks ↩︎
  2. “Ice-Front Retreat Controls on Ocean Dynamics Under Larsen C Ice Shelf, Antarctica” https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL104588 ↩︎
  3. “Alaska’s top-heavy glaciers are approaching an irreversible tipping point” https://theconversation.com/alaskas-top-heavy-glaciers-are-approaching-an-irreversible-tipping-point-233811?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=bylinelinkedinbutton ↩︎

Hope (and Ice)

| Megan
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I , 1907; Gustav Klimt; Oil, gold, and silver on canvas
Neue Galerie, New York

The Matriarch, Grandma Dorothy dressed in a gold lamé housecoat each year for Thanksgiving dinner. The table, set with rose china, was laid out long in her small basement apartment. Poised and gracious in her kingdom, she sat at the head of the table and smiled at each child and grandchild as we voiced gratitude for our blessings. She, in turn, gave thanks for “all of you.” 

Regal, despite the crippling arthritis which attacked her bony sylph of a body, she held herself with an aristocratic air. Her back stayed straight with practiced posture through two total knee replacements, three husbands, four births, and five decades of single motherhood. Her studied gait had slowed, but still kept its polished flow from her days at the Presbyterian Girls School in Missoula, Montana, where Bertha Harriett, her mother, had insisted her only daughter be enrolled.

Dorothy’s hands gave one clue to her impatient internal pace; slender, knuckley, and nubbed, they were never still whether fluttering in her lap, tapping the tabletop, or brushing out a rhythm on her thigh. Another clue to her core came from her eyes. Bright and clear, her hazel eyes couldn’t hide all her knowing. They blinked and batted, magnified behind her glasses which earned her the nickname Granny-Bird. Beyond the constant pain of fibromyalgia which inflamed all her soft tissue, my grandmother carried the wit and wisdom that only a lifetime of studied learning can teach and only a sage can repeat.

“I just ache all over,” she explained.

When I was twenty-three and she was seventy-nine, she was diagnosed with lupus. In near-constant pain, I drove her an hour to her primary care physician. She said to the doctor seriously, “Fix me.” Holding her hands outstretched as if in child’s pose, palms up, in release and submission to the pain, in hope for healing. Then looked him piercingly in the eye until he admitted with a stutter that none of her ailments had a cure, a salve.

There was no fix, no hope. Regaining his composure, he whispered to her quietly, “We are a horse and we are a rider. The horse grows old, tired and pained; the rider is young forever.” So, she continued to wince and sigh in her sleep and persisted in walking slowly, majestically enough so the burden wouldn’t show much.

—–

Question
by May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

Without cloud for a shift
how will I hide?

—–

No longer seven, Holland America Line Westours brought me back to Alaska in 2000 as a nineteen-year-old tour director. My job was to guide tour groups ranging in size from twenty to fifty people on nine-day land tours between Anchorage and Skagway, Alaska. The distance covered on each tour was somewhere around 812 miles, 1,624 round trip. 

During the second week in May, the tour director trainees converged on the Anchorage Hilton. I’d never been a room with so many extroverts. The uniform for that year was khakis and red shirts, and the majority of our training as tour directors consisted not of classroom instruction, but taking the actual tours that our guests would take when they arrived in Alaska.

A typical first day in a Holland America cruise-tour package included a stop at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, a brief city tour, followed by a trip out to Portage Glacier. Our fifty-five-passenger motor coach ferried the group the forty-five miles or so to the Visitor’s Center. There is no better way to see Alaska than from the windows of a motor coach. Greyline, Holland America, claimed the window had been engineered by Kodak, and I thrilled as I gazed on Alaska for the second time. 

Twelve years of nostalgia struck as we reached the Visitor’s Center, and I hurried off the bus into the building without a glance toward Portage Lake. Though I was now nineteen, it was as if I was there for the first time. With the other tour directors, I took a seat in the theater for Voices from the Ice. I was excited for my companions; I thought I knew the finale.

The movie ended, the screen rose, the curtain parted, and behold… a lake. There was no glacial face, no snout. No grand finale. No blue terminus of ice to awe at. Nothing but a dingy, mud-gray, motionless lake, dotted with giant melting ice cubes.

—–

ICE
by C.K Williams
(excerpt)


That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a block of ice:
the way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, fractures, facets;
dazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly complicate the cosmos of its innards.
Radiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a treasure horde of light,
when you stab it with the awl again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both faces sadly grainy, gnawed at, dull.

…

Imagine then how even if it shattered and began to liquefy,
the hope would still remain that if you acted quickly, gathering up the slithery, perversely skittish ovals,
they might be refrozen and the mass reconstituted, with precious little of its brilliance lost,
just this lucent shimmer on the rough, raised grain of water-rotten floor,
just this drop as sweet and warm as blood evaporating on your tongue.

—–

Skagway became Alaska’s first incorporated city on June 28, 1900, boasting 3,117 residents. The population has fallen steadily ever since, and the 862 year round residents remain set at sea level at the mouth of the Lynn Canal, the deepest fjord in North America. The “Gateway to the goldfields!” continues to be Skagway’s modern claim to renown. The famous picture of gold miners and fortune finders treacherously clambering over the “Golden Staircase”, grand piano included, is set right outside of Skagway in the now non-existent town of Dyea.

The land surrounding Skagway rises abruptly from the ocean with White Pass Summit hitting 3,292 feet just 37 miles North of town into sub-arctic alpine tundra, think scrawny, wind and ice-bitten trees and tiny kettle lakes. But Skagway City’s climate is temperate coastal rain forest, think lush top-soil and muskeg, thick fern foliage, and dense forests just outside city limits.

 I run. Chugging South down the Klondike Highway into the town of Skagway, I keep my eyes trained on Harding Glacier. This small hanging glacier, nestled in the armpit of Harding peak across Taiya Inlet from Skagway, has almost melted out of existence over my five summers in Alaska. Alarms sound off through my senses, as my feet scud over old glacial silt which lies alongside the road, “Fire!” Watching the midnight sun rise hotter and hotter in the Northern sky each summer has fueled my fear. 

Finishing my run, I stand sweating, in ninety-degree heat on Broadway’s boardwalk, the main drag in downtown Skagway. This heat just isn’t quite right. A mere four blocks wide twenty-three blocks long, tourists clog every artery of Skagway’s downtown district, weaving in and out of open store doors, gawking through shop windows. Down at the docks there’s only parallel parking for mammoth cruise ships that pull-in and drop their load of 3,200 passengers per boat, per day.

With five berths, the math is easy, these ships can release 16,000 people or more into town on any given summer day. None of them seem too concerned about the fate of Harding Glacier or the Juneau Ice Field. I see the signs of glacial recession everywhere. What should we do? Imagination plays a “what if” video clip: I turn to the man in the green fishing vest and dockers khaki shorts standing next to me on the boardwalk. He’s quickly licking the myriad of drips from a pecan praline double cone he just purchased from Kone Kompany, held tightly in his fist.

In my imagination, I unload, “Sir, I know you’re on vacation” I pull out my imaginary microphone, begin diplomatically, “but does this heat scare you? You know, we’re in Alaska, the North country? Do you believe in global warming? Does it look to you as if this blue ice is a bit uncomfortable in this unbearable heat? Look, everything is melting, you, me, your ice cream cone, the glacial ice. Which boat did you come in on, the Diamond Princess, Empress of the Seas, the Volendam, Carnival Spirit? Did you enjoy awing all the way up the Lynn Canal this morning from your deck chair at the blue ice hung across the shoulders of the Chilkat and Coast Mountains?  Nature dressed up just for you, sir. Do you want your grandchildren to be able to see what you saw? I really want my children to experience Alaska the way I did, glaciers and all. What should we do?” 

There it is.  Even though the scene played out in my mind instead of in real-time, I feel better. Sounding the global warming alarm. It’s not a him thing, or a me thing, it’s a we thing. Which doesn’t make the situation of Arctic warming any better, but it sure does make me feel a whole lot better to pass the blame on to the guy in the flop-backed fishing hat, or at least share it with him.

—–

Grandma was with me, lying on the purple silk bedspread in her room like a queen. I, her five-year-old courtier, heard the tiny tinkling tick of each bead hanging over her lavender pillows as my head parted them to rest on her shoulder. Opening a worn copy of The Tales of Old Mother West Wind, Grandma flipped to “The Tale of Johnny Fox.” We read for what seemed like days in a world where the wind had a name, and her animated baby breezes played tricks on the rabbits, beaver, and foxes who always seemed to get caught in the bluster.

At age six, I watched her morning routine. A garish multi-colored silk mu-mu, draped loosely over her small shoulders, got pinched under the little bulge of her belly then fell long to the floor. A tall glass of skim milk, burned buttered toast, bowl of soggy mini-wheats, all crumbed and dripped over a crossword puzzle. After breakfast, she’d shower and then stand naked and wrinkled, puffing loose folds of skin with talcum powder while listening to the tenor whine of the Bible on her old black tape recorder.

Even when I was eight, long after my parents were sleeping, I’d tip-toe into her bedroom and watch late-night reruns of MASH, The Love Boat, Star Trek the Next Generation, and eat bread-in-milk from mugs with spoons. She too was a night owl, and she’d sit next to me on her water bed, smelling of vitamin E oil and half-dry finger nail polish, her gray curls preserved for the night in a paisley scarf. I’m too young to understand that one day, I’ll lose her forever.

*(This is the second in a series of braided essays and poems about love, loss, ice, life, and what our world faces as we experience climate change at the human level. Here’s the first essay: Hope (Alaska). Thanks for reading!)

Terminus of the Meade Glacier, Juneau Ice Field, July 2022. Image, my own.