I. Heart
Sickness works like this. There is something foreign in the body. A virus, a bloom of bacteria, havoc of single-celled organisms in the gut. The immune system blitzes what is unwanted—cells suffocating others that shouldn’t be there, purging the respiratory or digestive systems, amping up a fever to shatter a virus to bits. You feel sluggish, drained, exhausted. Then the body rids itself of the unwanted, or medicine pitches in. You get better, or you die. Don’t forget this part: the binary we’re taught of disease.
Autoimmunity works like this. There is no foreign attack. There is no external threat. There is only DNA gone askew, the body tripped up, attacking itself, fatigue of a fight without truce. Confusion. Antibodies spilling into the bloodstream. A body forgetting it belongs to itself.
If my breastbone were an alpine table, this all would have started cupped in the ridges of my ribs, those soft basins heavy with bad water. Something went wrong in the bedrock—could be the Swedish heritage, could be the Basque. Maybe there are tailings wedged in the talus, leaching bitterness the color of a favorite sunset.
This is how my body feels, an ecosystem misreading itself, rooted back to exhaustion and granite pressure. I’d place the first sighting, that pinpoint on a map, beside my heart, the dome over my lungs. Name it solid, constant. Name it a tiredness that holds me down when I want to run. Name it by feel, by years of knowing something is off. The pressure tightens across my breastbone. When I breathe in, it strikes like lightning.
I’ll tell you a secret. I’m afraid of nature right now. Not of bears or tumbles from cliffs, not of windstorms or mountain lions or wildfires scorching trees to matchsticks. I’m afraid of the looming unknown that has nothing to do with exploration or discovery. I’m afraid of the mess.
Of course, we’ll start with glaciers. They’re melting. You know this.
At the end of the last ice age, glaciers sauntered back north, exposing mountain ranges they’d gnawed to hills and marshy basins. These lowlands seeped full of meltwater, forming today’s Great Lakes. If you drive far west from this region, some of the first snowcapped mountains to thrust up from the plains are the Beartooths. Most people, weary from the flatness of the Dakotas, promised Rocky Mountain majesty, stumble from RVs to watch shaggy goats from the roadside. Snowfields drip near year-round, faster and faster these days.
Glacier National Park gets most of the press for glaciers in the Lower 48. Glacier just won’t be Glacier without glaciers, people say, weighing the loss of a namesake as much as the great slabs of ice themselves. But the Beartooth Mountains have glaciers tucked against their flanks as well. There are hundreds, both cirque and rock glaciers, more than Glacier National Park. Of all the glaciers in the Northern Rockies, the Beartooth Range holds 15 percent of them.
I wish I could say I’d touched one of those melting bodies like I have in Glacier National Park. From a distance, sure. My dad and I scattered our family dog’s ashes with
