Hope (Now)

July 29, 2024July 30, 2024 | Megan

Middle Teton, from the meadow before Surprise Lake, 2024. Image, my own.

—–

Redolent waves of raw, hot pine tannin coursed across my senses in each trough of the trail. My bike and I undulated, at times, from below the root systems to the top of the bole of the Douglas Fir growing along most of the track. Pseudotsuga mensiesii, countless needles seemed to breath in unison in the softly rushing air from bark scabbed boughs to the tip of the tiny glimmering twigs into the understory all around me.

The loamy dirt still held some of the rain that had smattered over us just minutes ago, and then passed just as quickly as it had fallen. As we rode, I could see the soil was darkly composted with old leaves, myriad fir and pine needles. Light filtered through the blackened jade of each needle, twig, bough, and trunk, making shadows long and variegated across the trail.

The moment caught and held, pausing for a breath—one, two, three—sky, trees, breeze, light, earth, leaves. My gaze panned down the next switchback. I reminded myself to attend to the trail ahead of me rather than losing myself in the trees which might end in a disastrous fall. I trained all my focus again on my body, my rhythm, my flow. The rise and fall of the pedals, my eyes focusing two or three feet in front of me, intake of breath and exhalation, gear up for the rise, baby crest then pedal, pedal, gear down for the descent, flatten out my stance.

Churning out the miles I couldn’t help but repeat in my mind—here it is, this is it. It’s this kind of presence that makes human life palpable, enjoyable, full. But it may also be what keeps us from tackling major storms and stumbling on challenges that we face in life’s broader contexts. I am lucky. I can escape to the mountains whenever I please– cooler air, summer rains, mountain lakes, trails and more miles of trails. But so many humans do not have that luxury.

I thought of my boys at home. Thirty or so miles on the back side of the mountain I was ribboning down. They might be jumping on the trampoline, reading on the back patio, watching a Tik Tok on their beds. Their existence is often the perfect burr to return me to why I find climate change action important. In her article, “The Global Temperature Just Went Bump,” dated July 25, 2024, Zoë Schlanger explains that Sunday, July 21^st was bested for “hottest day ever recorded on Earth” by the following twenty-four hours, Monday, July 22^nd. The hottest day in 1,000 years… “since the peak of the last interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago.”¹ Can you believe it? You, I, and my boys just lived it. Let’ s not hold our breath, kids, I’m certain we may see another record breaker this summer. Again, wild.

Maybe we, humanity, feels as though we’re ready to experience a warming period on earth that has been sped up to three times the last warming period. You know, like listening to an audio book on unintelligible chipmunk speed. Maybe we feel that we’re ready for hotter temperatures, more severe storms and weather patterns, shifting moisture bands, and a world that has very little Arctic or Antarctic ice. The impact that we have made on Earth’s climate have created climate shifts over 150 years that are closer to those that warmed the interglacial period Neanderthals experienced over several thousand years.

These scientific observations are mirrored in the human experience my boys and I are living, real-time in our quaint and un-airconditioned 1913 settler’s cabin (renovated, perhaps three different times). Our little home loves to rest in the heat at seventy-eight degrees. I can now tell you from a summer of experience that this ambient temperature is quite tolerable. For me, preferable to an office space frozen to 65 degrees while the outside temps tip towards the 100s. But still twenty or so degrees cooler than the ninety-eight to one hundred and six-degree days outside.

The boys and I are thick into the summer of a system of open windows, open blind louvers at night, queue the fans, open the whole house wide for the cooler nighttime air. Then reverse the process in the morning, at 7:30 a.m.—close the windows, shut the louvers on the blinds, keep the fans running, front porch full-sun in the morning, back porch a lovely ten degree drop at dusk. I think about the folks living in places like Phoenix, Tucson, Jacksonville, Charlottesville, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Death Valley, to name just a microcosm of the American cities that have experienced unprecedented heat waves this year.

What if I lived in a climate that never saw cool? What would I do if I were eighty and my air conditioner crapped out in this heat wave? From many folks’ perspectives, it doesn’t look good. George Packer, in a sweeping prospectus of Phoenix, one of America’s fastest growing cities, in his article titled “What Will Become of American Civilization?,” details the heat that killed 644 people last summer in Maricopa county for The Atlantic. Packer explains that those who pay the price for the heat really are the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless, and “those too poor to own or fix or pay for air-conditioning, without which a dwelling can become unlivable within an hour.” I think of my boys trapped in a little house without AC in a desert without a way to cool down. What a tragedy.

The picture only appears more grim as Packer projects forward, “A scientific study published in May 2023 projected that a blackout during a five-day heat wave would kill nearly 1 percent of Phoenix’s population– about 13,000 people– and send 800,000 to emergency rooms.”² Nearly one million heat stroked humans? Staggering. The situation even brings Packer a sense of shame that there is a 4,000 person waiting list for homeless persons who desperately want housing vouchers to get off of the street and out of the heat. Literally.

I’ve experienced my own micro shame at the warmth of my little house. Just yesterday I heard my youngest son speaking to his father on the phone, “Yeah, my room’s pretty warm. I’m okay.” I cringe a little and recognize that I’m also lucky enough to be able to install AC in my new-old abode if I were to choose to do so. It appears that from my children’s report, we may be contacting an air-conditioning company soon though my wish is to wait until next summer. I guess I’m willing to see what the next record breaking day feels like. Will my little home break 78 degrees? I may soon know. I’m certain if my boys get hot enough, they’ll also let me know. I’ll hear it from them.

—–

March 19, 2006. Many yesterdays ago, Logan, Utah. It’s early evening, one day before the official calendar date of Spring Equinox. Outside, snow falls through the dim blue haze of twilight. All across Cache Valley’s floor, the heavy wet flakes form standing pools with the slushy consistency of a 7-11 Slurpee. I’m inside writing. When things stop flowing on the page, I sink from the couch to the living room floor and piece together silk quilt squares from Grandma’s shirts, skirts, bathrobes, and mu-mu’s. Remembering is reflexive.

It’s a hard reality to face the fact that humans really have so little knowledge, perspective, or understanding of the future along their linear time-continuums. I didn’t know that the drive Grandma and I took in April 2005 would be our last. I look up from a neon square filled with exotic flowers that look like they’ve been bathed in black light and think back.

The sun’s spring angles were beginning to lengthen the days as I helped her into the passenger’s seat. Settling into the driver’s seat, I eased the car out of ‘park’ and pulled onto Highway 40 traveling Northeast. Warm breezes gently bent the tops of sage brush, bunch grass, paint brush, and river tamarisk.

Grandma asked me to roll down the windows even though she was dressed in long pants and a wool sweater to keep her shrinking frame from getting too cold. The wind flayed her gray curls like fingers, and my own hair whipped, unruly, this way and that. The smell of the baked red earth and burning sage made my teeth almost ache with the sweet biting iron odor. I didn’t know during that drive we were actually going to find hope. I was too young to understand.

Grandma carried an extra air of tired and confined energy about her. Eighty-one years and she was thin and ever thinner each time I’d visit. She had stopped working at the Mormon temple in Vernal each week, and she relied upon meals on wheels for lunch each day. She complained that she really couldn’t even taste the food that she ate. All this was portent of the end. But I returned my attention to the winding road, to the swell of the muddy Green River as it poured out into the sunshine through Split Mountain and the flicker of the leaves and the breeze in the trees around Josie’s cabin where we stopped to have lunch that day.

Once we were ready to leave, Grandma turned to me with an angelic smile and said simply, “Thank you. Today was lovely.” Loss is a funny thing. Often we lose things we love without warning. Standing at the passenger car door, helping Dorothy carefully out of her seat, her sweet hand in mine, I could never know it was the last time I would see her alive.

—–

OCEAN VUONG:

Oh, you know, you realize that grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. And I think, you know, this is the last act of loving someone. And you realize that it will never end. You get to do this to translate this last act of love for the rest of your life. And so, you know, it’s– really, her absence is felt every day. But because I’m becoming an author again in another book, it is double felt.

And ever since I lost her. I felt that my life has been lived in only two days, if that makes any sense. You know, there’s the today, where she is not here, and then the vast and endless yesterday where she was, even though it’s been three years since. How many months and days? But I only see it in – with one demarcation. Two days– today without my mother, and yesterday, when she was alive. That’s all I see. That’s how I see my life now.

—–

Grand Teton and Mount Owen, Teton Glacier, a tiny little blue striated sandwich in between, 2024. Image, my own.

—-

To reach the cemetery, I drive west across limestone plateaus which rise in graduated benches as Utah’s Great Basin climbs to meet the Uinta Mountains. The Mountain Home cemetery sits atop a ridge in the middle of farms of cattle and fields of alfalfa which are gradually greening on Easter Sunday 2006 as wheel lines rhythmically pulse water across field after field. When I am there, I hope she feels that she is home.

Grandma has two headstones. One slab of stone sits in the Manti, Utah cemetery, the other rests in Mountain Home, Utah. Her bones weren’t laid beside those of her third husband in Manti. Instead, her name, the short version– Dorothy A. Mickelson, is etched into the granite next to his– Clifton Christian Mickelson. I don’t think that her dates- birth or death- were blasted into Cliff’s headstone after she died. Her bones are buried here in Mountain Home. She said once, “I want to wake up among the gentle Farnsworths.” Her second husband’s people. How long will her bones lie there? One hundred years? Two? A millennia? More? I can’t tell.

There’s a kind of hope inked in Grandma’s big black scriptures. Maybe I will see it the way that Ezekiel describes, “there was a noise, and behold a shaking and the bones came together, bone to his [her] bone… lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them… and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet…” Like, holy shit, an entire human being reconstituted, recombined, resurrected. Incredible. The description of resurrection from an ancient prophet once filled me with joy. But maybe her essence is already carried through the world on dust, atoms, mycelium, and pollen from the flowers and grasses that grow through the graveyard. Now Earth will boast Grandma’s stuff, the simulacra of her life carried on the wind through Mountain Home and the Uinta Mountains.

—-

Reverberation
by Megan Dickson

It’s impossible to feel alone soaking in the reverberation of humanity ringing through the great halls of civilization. The echo. The sound. The deconstructed interplay of all those expressions and explications bouncing and bounding around in the domed, arched architecture. Dancing over the simulacra, art, massive and tiny, representative of nothing and everything. The absolute alacrity the beatific joy of each repercussive utterance. Jazz. A fusion of improvisational auditory stimuli. The resounding transcendence of humanity in the envelope of a space. Astonishing.

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Grand Teton National Park placard showing Teton Glacier’s retreat, 2024. Image, my own.

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Glacial recession obviously isn’t confined to Alaska or the poles. Even in Grand Teton National Park, the glacial retreat has been relatively well documented in the 19th century. It simply reminds me that no place on Earth will remain untouched by climate change. To our current understanding, there is no location where humans won’t experience the changes of the ever-warming earth. After hiking up some incredibly steep terrain with my sister a weekend ago, I can attest to how the heat affects humans in outdoor environments that used to be much cooler, even in the summer.

The hike itself up to Amphitheater Lake at 9, 850 some odd feet, is around 2,900 feet of elevation gain overall from the Teton Valley floor. The going is tough. Even for me, and I’m accustomed to life above 7-8,000 feet. I’ve go the lungs and legs for it, but this grade is brutal. The thing that drives you on when you hike is the peak. To reach the top. To look out over the many horizons you’ve melted. Up, up, and up we climbed. Not only did we want to reach the top, the gift was knowing that an icy glacier and snow-melt fed lake awaited us at our destination.

Up, up, and up the mountain. Jaw-droped and wide-eyed at the incredible crags, cliffs, arêtes, and sheer walls at the tipy-top of this incredible range. Mermaid–jump, dive, cool, swim. Down, down, down the mountain to a parking lot so hot that the waves of heat rise from the white gravel rocks making the horizon look like a circus mirror mirage. What does it all mean? The other reason to climb, hike, bike, or generally get outside is to leave the rush and pressure and unanswered questions of humanity behind.

To sync back into the rhythms of the Earth that have kept, housed, harbored, and nourished all life on this glorious planet for thousands upon thousands of years. Except this time, like a broken record, I can’t get the image of the recession of Teton Glacier out of my head. The reality is really ruining my vibe. Thought ridden, and wanting to focus on the moment, I pull off the narrow trail onto a rough patch of mountain meadow. I take deep cleansing breaths and remind myself that the answers humans need and seek from science, from sociology, from art, from politics, and from each other must be reached together– as a collective. When my personal understandings of how I can help to limit or roll back climate change become more clear, I will pivot. The simple wish is that humanity will have enough time to make changes in a world that seems perched on the precipice of climate disaster. Right now, all I can do is hope.

*This is the final essay in a series about climate change from one humble human perspective. The losses we stand to face in the future feel more real, more palpable each heated day of this record breaking climate summer– 2024. To my people: thank you for reading, liking commenting, and sharing. I am so grateful for the journey that writing creates– writer and reader in community together. You can read my other essays here on my website. Hope (Alaska), Hope (and Ice), Hope (and Earth), Hope (and Loss), Hope (and Love), Hope (and Fire), Hope (and Now).

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Denali, the Great One, and Fireweed. Taken from Talkeetna, Alaska, 2019. Image, my own.

Hope (and Ice)

July 10, 2024July 14, 2024 | 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.

Hope (Alaska)

July 6, 2024July 17, 2024 | Megan

Satellite image of a massive iceberg breaking away from the Larsen C ice shelf in the eastern Antarctic Peninsula. The false-color image was captured by the Landsat 8 thermal infrared sensor in July 2017. Image credit: Joshua Stevens, NASA Earth Observatory, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

I stand near Hope, the muskeg path falls steep and spongy to the rhythmic, slate waves of Turnagain Arm. Gold, not ice, is what originally situated the town’s two hundred residents at the Northern root of the Kenai mountains in 1896. Now locals may be pondering which is more precious, or maybe the current answer is still ‘C’, “tourists.”

The first-green of fragile ferns springs up over dirt-peppered gobs of crusted snowmelt along either side of the trail. In the still-frozen snap of early May, birch bark flakes paper-white against the greywacke sandstone and granodiorite. Black and white spruce limbs and needles twine, their winter-fixed dance now a spring still life. Farther up the mountainside, an unseen breath of cool air wavers through the dark boughs of Lutz spruce posts, scrawny and more solitary.

Hope and the rest of the Kenai Peninsula are divided from mainland Alaska by this choppy spume of Turnagain Arm. The watery arm is bounded by towering mountain ranges on either side—Chugach and Kenai. Seward Highway, one of the most scenic in the world, scratches its route out of Chugach bedrock on Turnagain Arm’s northern side. Standing on Turnagain’s southern shore, at the base of the Kenai Mountains, I look across the inlet.

The Cretaceous bulk of the Chugach, the parallel mountain range, sketches dark crags and cliffs into the northern horizon line as the contrast meets the dewy green iris of my eyes. Tall against the cerulean arc of the sky, the mountain’s ancient rocks remind me that I am young, barely twenty-one. Yet, I watch the world being born before me. Behind these mountains, small peaks protruded from blankets of fresh snow and ice like the breasts of rock Eves, nunataks, carved clean by this glacial ice. Creation isn’t finished here.

—–

Tenacious, tactless, and bursting with energy that can’t be contained in a somebody who’s seven, I was the kid who couldn’t be shut-down, shut-up, or put-out at a slumber party. Sticking my tongue through the enormous gap between my front teeth, I’d lay plans to stay up all night. First, I’d giggle raucously with my three other sleepover friends till ten. As the party started to die down, I’d begin the war if I could, two against two, two live-wires versus the two heavy-eyed and tired. Mercilessly I’d poke, prod, and pester our sleepy victims, sticking things up their noses and in their mouths, pelting them with jolly ranchers till midnight.

My co-terror would undoubtedly grow sleepy when I couldn’t dream up any more interesting battles to wage on the dreamers, and she’d drift off to dreamland herself. The war would wind down, and I’d remain alone and awake, watching creepy alien shows on the Sci-fi Channel. The living room floor seemed strewn with huge wriggling worms. Snoring seven-year-olds moaned and drooled and twisted into grotesque shapes which became part of the alien landscape all lit up by the TV’s fluorescent flicker. I’d be wide awake till dawn, and finally exhausted, fall asleep.

It’s this very same seven-year-old that Grandma Dorothy trots off with to Alaska in August of ’88 to visit her youngest son Bruce, and his family. Only Grandma didn’t just travel with one seven-year-old. That would have been too easy. Instead, she takes two. Flying on a jet-plane for the first time in our lives, my cousin Jenny and I can’t sit still for one moment of the five-hour flight. When we reach Anchorage, Alaska, we are reunited with a third cousin, seven-year-old Sarah. Grandma’s three babes. All girls, we were all born to Grandma in ’81 through her three sons—Ken, Floyd, Bruce.

It’s getting late, far past bedtime, probably nearing midnight Anchorage time. The three of us have been put to bed. I’m not tired. The black-out blinds in Sarah’s room, designed to keep out Alaska’s midnight sun, are framed in late summer light. To me, this isn’t night.

“Look, it’s not even dark,” I say.

“I know,” Jenny chimes.

“Does it ever get dark?” I ask Sarah.

“In the winter,” she replies.

We’re reading Charlie Brown comic books with a flashlight, trying to stifle our laughs with a pillow. One short comic strip makes us giggle till we’re red from burying our heads in the nylon folds of our sleeping bags. Charlie Brown and the gang are playing football. Charlie fumbles again and again, a complete failure, but Sarah, Jenny, and I don’t care. Realizing in retrospect that anything can be funny to three girls at age seven, it’s the one-liners that get us. This time it’s Linus. Holding his blanket and stumbling toward the fifty-yard line, he wants Charlie to pass him the ball. His arms raised high, his blanket trailing at his side, Linus yells, “Pass me the pig-skin, Sir!” Laughter grips our sides and cinches our lungs tight as we try desperately to snort air through our pillows. A floor above us, Sarah’s baby-sister Sophie starts to cry.

“Aw crap! We woke up Sophie,” I say.

Grandma’s voice shoots down the stair well, “Girls, go to bed.”

We’ve been caught, and our laughter dies. I settle into my sleeping bag, hoping for rest even though the light hasn’t died behind the blinds. The sun is still awake outside.

The next morning over breakfast, Uncle Bruce announces that we are all going to see Portage glacier. When the breakfast fiasco is done, we pile into their van and head out of Anchorage onto the Seward highway. We drive for a long child-time. Full-lunged, and over-dramatic, now we sing songs from all of our Broadway favorites. Then dissolve into rich peals of kid-laughter.

The incredible scenery passes unobserved by girls of seven who are content to chatter, giggle, and imagine with one another. Free from the van, we run headlong to the Visitor’s Center entrance in Portage Valley, unaware that with one glance toward the lake we could view the glacier face to face.

Inside, we are ushered into a movie theatre.

“What are we watching?” I whisper to Sarah.

“I don’t know,” she replies. The lights go dim.

“Quiet,” whispers Grandma.

The main screen cues and I read the title Voices from the Ice. The voice of the narrator begins its drone, and my eyelids threaten to become too heavy to rise. With a thundered, crumbling resound, an iceberg voices its descent from the glacier’s face and plunges toward the chunky melt water above the terminal moraine. I startle in my seat at the boom. Another massive chunk of ice calves off the front of the glacier and plummets into the lake. Now, fully awake, my senses are filled with wonder.

I ignore the commentary as the narrator’s monotone voice continues. Instead, I’m intent on watching Portage, one of over 600 named glaciers in Alaska, 30,000 estimated in total. These gargantuan ice mammoths gouge striations into rock, churn up sediment in track-like moraine. The scars left by the glacier remind me of the deep notches that appear in black pavement as cars scrape in and out of a parking lot entrance. Only these scars are not formed on soft blacktop but in granite bedrock as glaciers’ miles-thick arms of ice drag debris of all different sizes ranging from sediment, to pebbles, to boulders, on up to erratics– boulders the size of cars or small houses which glaciers ice-belt down mountainsides and across valley floors.

The camera pans from the expanse of snow across the ice field to a close-up shot of mesenchytraeus solifugus, a tiny indigo ice worm, as it wriggles through the structural holes in an individual ice crystal. What seems like a sterile chub of ice reveals life in microcosm.

I sit silent and still as the movie ends and the lights come up. The screen rises slowly to the ceiling, and the red curtain behind it parts. Real and a deep raw blue, Portage glacier rises from Portage Lake. The crystalline blue ice incongruously toes through pillowy gray skies. My breath fled. Before I know that glaciers are dying, with clean seven-year-old eyes, I am awed by ice for the first time.

—–

Encase: In Case
by Megan Dickson

Melt me out, I’m not
going to make it in this
hostile environment

—–

There my sons are, jumping into a glacial lake for the first time. Bodies all bare and ready for the shocking cold. Running down the rocky shore so as not to lose resolve, they squeal into the water like little seals, a little less lithely. It’s like an exclamation point inside me. Grewingk Glacier’s lake is the swimming hole today, in Kachemak Bay State Park, Kenai Peninsula.

I couldn’t have dreamed up a more exciting family adventure. We’re here to celebrate my cousin, Sophie’s wedding, and it’s the first of many firsts for my boys in the ways of ice. My seven-year-old son holds up a puppy-sized, crystal clear chunk of glacial ice. His expression, open-mouthed awe. Just like I felt thirty years ago. Everything in me feels dazzled, just utterly magiced. A day really can glow and glitter in memory forever. This is wild.

—–

*(This is the first in a set of braided essays about ice, glaciers, Alaska, love, loss, and what climate change looks like at human-level.)