Dispatches from the End of Ice: Essays

By Beth Peterson

In the spring of 2017, the president of the United States declared the U.S. would soon leave the Paris Climate Accord. Six weeks after that, an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C Antarctic Ice Shelf. Within four months after that, the U.S. suffered Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and the most significant California wildfires in its history. In that same year, over 70 species of animals reached the status of critically-endangered or possibly-extinct. Also included in 2017 were a global spate of earthquakes, mudslides, monsoons, and a great deal of melting ice.

This takes up the subject of all these disappearances, but rather than through the fast-reporting of news outlets, it tries to “essay” towards understanding: inviting the reader on a research journey: listening in on conversations, making their way through muddy trails, across oceans, and even right up to the surface of the ice.

The book engages multiple types of disappearances—from the highly-publicized disappearance of the poet, Craig Arnold, to the lesser-known disappearance of lemmings on ice—and in the end, seeks to understand taxonomies of loss and the furthest limits of naming.

Though loss is an oft-written about subject in literary essay collections, disappearance is not, and in the last ten years—during which many significant environmental shifts have taken place—there have been no noteworthy essay collections published that are themed around ice. Beyond this, though there is certainly a growing interest in European nature writing and in nature writing about European places, less has been published (in English) on nature in northern Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781595349002

Beth Peterson

Beth Peterson is a two-time lightning strike survivor and the author of "Life After Lightning", a true and inspiring story that details her miraculous journey of spiritual and self-discovery. After surviving not only one, but two separate lightning strikes, she found herself facing severe physical, mental, and emotional damage. Given the choice to remain in the peaceful afterlife free from pain and suffering, or return to Earth and confront her inevitable struggles, Beth bravely chose to come back and share her experiences and wisdom with others.

Book preview

BEFORE

BAFFIN ISLAND

THE AMERICAN MIDWEST

A few months after I leave the windswept plains of the Wyoming West for the last time, a flat, white document box comes for me in the mail. When I see the package resting against my front door, I will wonder for a moment if it’s an old passport finally returned or maybe my university diploma. I pick up the box and, still standing on the porch—tall, narrow blades of bluegrass edging the boards, springing up through the wooden-slatted floor—carefully slide it open with a house key. It’s not a passport, a diploma, or anything else I’ve been waiting for. Instead, out of that box slips a small, hand-tipped map, dated 1750.

The map is of Norway, but not the Norway I know. There are no country boundaries between Norway, Sweden, and Finland, only lakes, mountain ranges, and rivers. Regions are separated by color and by tiny dots, bordering the edges. Letters in the place-names—Berghen, Gothland, Stavanger—are fine and carefully printed, some closer together, some farther apart, the lengths and angle of e’s and t’s varying based on their size and position. The sides of the map are crosshatched in black ink, but the rest of the map is painted in faded yellows, blues, and greens. There’s a water spot in one of the corners, then just above that, the name of the mapmaker, Robert de Vaugondy, and his own handwritten note in French with privilege.

For almost a year before that box arrived in the mail—a gift, it turns out, from my friend and former professor, Kate—I’d been thinking about maps. I’d hung maps around the tall, white walls of my apartment; I’d watercolor painted a five-foot-wide outline map of the world in vivid blues and purples; I’d placed an old wooden globe that had once been my father’s in the center of my desk, traced its continents onto scraps of paper. I’d even contacted an acquaintance from college who had become a cartographer and asked him if he could tell me how contemporary maps were made.

It had started with a question from a friend. I had intended to write a short collection of poetry in those days in Wyoming, but all my poems had been turning into scenes: nonfiction rescue scenes. At first, those scenes were traditional rescues—bystander saves boy from near-drowning in local lake; family of four and eleven cats escape house fire—but gradually they had become stranger and more unrecognizable: deer jumps through back window of 1998 gold Toyota Tercel; mobile home blows off semi-truck bed in Virginia Dale, Colorado; two men struck by lightning under the same flowering willow. After reading a draft of one of these scenes, a friend had penned a single note on the bottom of my page. Where, he asked, is the rescue?

I read that note and then I read it again; I walked around, it seemed, for days, along the high mountain plain bordering the city where I lived, trying to pinpoint an answer to my friend’s question. I knew that with his where is the rescue? my friend was asking whether I was actually writing rescue scenes if the people in the scenes don’t get rescued. In the end, though, it was the other part of that double-meaning where which always eluded me. The thing I needed to know was where; where in physical space—in what mapped place—would we be safe?

THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

Norse mythology tells a story about a vast chasm and about a rescue. The chasm was famed to be the entrance from one world to the next, the exact spot where the earth originated and where, in the end of all days, it would disappear. As the tale goes, the cosmos was first made of three parts. To the north was the homeland of ice; to the south was the homeland of fire; and between them was a great gap called the Ginnungagap. Described by one writer as the chaos of perfect silence and by another as the yawning emptiness, the Ginnungagap represented nothingness: an immense primordial void.

Still, this void didn’t stay empty forever. Over time, the land of ice and the land of fire began to move toward each other, gradually overtaking the Ginnungagap. Then, one fateful day, sparks from the land of fire and a frozen river from the land of ice finally met. The fire’s heat warmed the ice until there was frost and then melting frost, and then the melting frost transformed into a frost giant and into a cow; the cow’s milk was the giant’s food; the cow’s food was the salty ice.

It wasn’t just ice though. Caught beneath all that ice was a man. That first day, as the cow licked the ice around her, the man’s hair appeared. On the second day of licking her hot tongue against the frozen water, the man’s head appeared. On the third day, the whole man was freed, cracked out of the ice like a nut from its casing. It was this man, Buri, whose great-grandsons would one day slay the giant, flinging forth from the giant’s frosted body the stars, the sky, and the earth as we know it.

SKJOLDEN, NORWAY

I had not yet heard of the Norse myths when I first traveled to Norway, though perhaps I should have. Sometime before, when my Norwegian grandfather moved several states north—from a two-bedroom apartment he could no longer keep up in the South to a studio in the Midwest, just a few miles from my parents—he’d given me a stack of his old books: Dante’s Inferno, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Faustus, and then one entitled Norse Stories.

I think you’ll like these, he told me, pointing toward a cardboard box on his old tan loveseat one afternoon, shortly after he moved in, before he’d even hung pictures on the walls. I cracked open the lid of the box; the ten or eleven books inside were all several decades old. There were a few worn paperbacks. Mostly, though, there were hardcover books, with slightly yellowed pages but still-crisp bindings. The first book I took out of the box was that book, Norse Stories; it was a blue-green hardback, with the title printed in circular letters, just above a pattern of vines-becoming-dragons that wrapped around a single sword.

I brought the books home but did not read them, not before I left for Norway. I was planning then to be in Scandinavia for just one summer: to explore a new place, to trek into different air, to live for a while outside of my own language and uncertain attempts at navigating a career and life and relationships. When I got to Norway, I climbed mountains; I kayaked through snow-fed waters along the long green shoreline; I hiked the edges and then the interiors of Norway’s wide fields of glacial ice—which, glinting in the high summer sun, even in the distance, seemed limitless—and I knew already in those first months that I would be back.

THE NORTH SEA

As early as the fifteenth century, cartographers set out to map the Ginnungagap. Early maps placed this supposed locus of creation somewhere between Greenland and the Atlantic coast of Canada. The gap, it was then believed, proceeded from a vast sea that circled the earth; the gap was a borderland between that outer ocean and the inner one, the ocean that wrapped around, lapped up onto the known world. Later maps pinned the Ginnungagap to the Davis Strait, home of the Northwest Passage, or to the southwestern tip of Baffin Island, with its fierce, fifty-foot tides, its ice-capped mountains, and its polar bears and caribou. In a 1606 map Icelander Gudbrand Thorlaksson located the Ginnungagap between Greenland and modern-day Ireland. In a 1507 map Johannes Ruysch—likely roommate of the artist Raphael—cast the Ginnungagap into the North Sea, as if to say don’t travel beyond this point.

The first map I find of the Ginnungagap is a 1636 rendering by Thordur Thorlaksson, Gudbrand Thorlaksson’s son. The map is preserved in a digitally archived book, with inked-in images, dark and delicate, of a bear, a fox, two men standing side by side on the top of that map, and mountains—drawn as puffs of smoke—circling a central landmass. In the place, though, where there’s supposed to be the Ginnungagap—on the southern side of Davis Strait, just below Baffin Island—a woman’s hand obscures the image. It was an inadvertent copy, no doubt, perhaps quelling a gush of wind from an open window, bumping a green oval save button a moment too soon, or scanning one page-view while meaning to stop, turn the book, and scan another. In any case, three of the archivist’s fingers are caught in that image, covered in pink silicone wraps; the other two and a large diamond ring are unwrapped but still bear across the page, each finger perfectly manicured, French-tipped nails pointing east.

LARAMIE, WYOMING

In one of the rescue scenes, I’m hiking with friends along a high mountain pass; it’s summertime, but it’s just begun to snow. We make steady but careful progress, one foot in front of the other, until we can’t move forward anymore. Though we’ve been walking in twos until that point, suddenly all seven of us are there at the same bend. While we’ve been walking in all that falling snow, none of us has realized that there’s a sheer cliff just beyond and the fog has come in thick behind; there’s no way go to back and there’s no clear path ahead.

In another rescue scene, I am trying to pick up a man from the bottom of a pool. It’s early evening. The walls and the ceiling above the pool are painted white, but the dark floods in through the high poolside windows; it reflects on the water. It’s the only reflection on the water; the pool deck is nearly empty; there’s no one watching from the bleachers, no one standing outside the locker rooms, no one walking by in the long white-tiled hallway.

The man lying completely still at the bottom of the pool is my lifeguard teacher; he has instructed each of the eight students in my class to dive first for a penny, then for a red plastic ring and, finally, for his body; he has told us to hoist each of those things through the aqua-blue water and up, onto the rippled concrete. The other students have mostly already finished and gone; one other girl and I are the only ones who remain. The lifeguard teacher has blown his whistle and then descended, fifteen feet to the bottom. It’s my turn to follow.

I do; I dive in a single clear motion, breaking through the water, going three feet then four feet then five feet down. Soon I’m seven then eight and then ten feet into the water, but as I see the body below me, it’s not like the penny and it’s not like the ring; it’s pale and out of focus. I reach for it once and then twice but touch nothing; I come up for air and then try again. No matter how far down I dive, I cannot make my way to him.

In a third rescue scene, I’m back at the pool, except this time the pool is my white-walled bedroom and the water is the humid air and I can’t tell if I’m sinking or treading water, only that it’s the middle of the night and I’m twenty-five and nothing I know is certain. Outside, sleet is coming down hard, with no sign of stopping.

THE DAVIS STRAIT

The Ginnungagap isn’t empty in every version of the Norse myths. One of those tales describes cold winds from that chasm transforming mist from the North into huge blocks of ice. The blocks of ice thundered as they fell into the gap and became rivers—there in the chasm—rivers of frost that flowed to meet the fire. In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the thirteenth-century source for the Norse legends, the fire is personified, a character at the very edge of the land brandishing a single flaming sword.

Another version of the story adds that the frost giant wasn’t just slain; he was thrown off a high cliff by Buri’s great-grandsons, back into the Ginnungagap. When the body of the giant landed, so much blood pooled that it drowned nearly everything around it. As the frost giant lay there lifeless, from his blood came the seas; from his skin came the land; from his hair came the trees; from his bones came the mountains; from his skull came the sky; and from his spilt brains—lush and gray—came all manner of clouds, straight out of the breach.

In an art exhibit entitled Ginnungagap, after the Norse myth, Swedish visual artist Sigrid Sandström created twenty-four multimedia paintings of varying sizes of the same icy landscape depicted in the Prose Edda. The paintings, some watercolor, some acrylic, were shaded in deep blues, blacks, and purples, sharp shards of ice and rock bordering a rift in one, softer rounded edges of snow spilling into a valley in another. Along with the paintings were two short films, playing on repeat. In one of the films, a man planted a black flag in an otherwise starkly white landscape. In the other film, a buoy propped up another small flag as it floated through the middle of a choppy blue sea. At the end of the installation, the man returned to take out the flag he had planted, and the buoy eventually drifted offscreen.

When a man plants a flag, noted art critic Jen Graves, in an article about the exhibit, he imagines that his ownership radiates outward from his hand like a nuclear blast, touching what has become his. But he does not make a home here. Sandström suggests that ownership is a poor substitute for knowledge—and that representing an object or a place in art is like staking a claim in inhospitable land.

SVALBARD, NORWAY

By the late 1600s mapmakers had begun to question their own renderings, to struggle, as one historian put it, to reconcile the geography of the Old Norse world with contemporary findings. Eventually even the word Ginnungagap began to change in meaning—from the sacred creative space at the world’s origin to any mighty or chaotic chasm—and Ginnungagaps came to mark on maps maelstroms or whirlpools and then the ocean itself. In the last maps that show the Ginnungagap, the word began to represent holes or edges where the world of people didn’t perfectly fill the world of fire and ice.

By the 1700s the Ginnungagap and even the idea of the outer ocean had been framed in the topography of fiction. Explorers had not found the entrance to other worlds or other oceans on any of their voyages, across sea or across land, and the art of mapmaking had gained a different focus and sort of precision. With a clearer knowledge of longitude and a more scientific attention to tracing observational on-the-ground information, European mapmakers turned away from the imaginative and speculative elements present in prior maps and toward mapping, as one historian notes, as utility.

In 1757, only seven years after making the map that came in that flat, white box to my porch, Robert de Vaugondy and his son published The Atlas Universel, a set of 108 maps that were noted not only for having more accurate latitude and longitude marks but also for citing in a preface their geographical sources. By this time, maps had begun to claim objectivity, operating, as theorist Anne McClintock puts it, as a technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a place in a pure scientific term, operating under the guise of scientific exactitude. Vaugondy and his son’s maps of Scandinavia and other places were sent to more than a thousand subscribers initially but then circulated even beyond those hands.

By the time I search for Ginnungagap on the world map—250 years after Vaugondy—I find that the word now only denotes a single icy valley on the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard, dipping deeply between a mountain and a fjord.

BERGEN, NORWAY

When I first traveled to Norway, I carried with me everywhere a blue laminated notecard on which I’d penned the addresses, approximate locations, and best routes to anywhere that seemed important: the airport, the guesthouse where I was staying, the bank, the U.S. embassy, the store, the post office, even the national park where the Norwegian glaciers are. I had no phone with me in those days and no way to get online except one shared dial-up computer that cost four or five dollars a minute; it seemed prudent to always keep locations on hand.

I brought the blue card back my second summer in Norway and my third, but I realized even then—taking out the card my first day back that third year—that the place had changed. The bank and tourist information stops had both moved somewhere down the street; bus and ferry route numbers were different. The village where I stayed—once remote—now had cruise ships arriving five or six times a summer. When I returned to the glacier, there was so much less snow and ice that I thought at first that I had boarded the wrong bus.

My sixth summer in Norway, I searched for a map of Baffin Island. What I stumbled onto instead was a rash of recent news. Researchers led by Gifford Miller from the University of Colorado had been studying mosses on the island, carbon-dating the plant life that they were finding under the island’s receding ice caps. Not long after beginning their study, the scientists began to uncover a strange phenomenon; as the ice melted, there was a fifty-year period when plants at different altitudes seemingly all froze at once, defying usual expectations for higher or lower freeze points dependent on altitude.

The time period, Miller and the rest of the researchers recognized, must have been the beginning of the Little Ice Age, at the end of the thirteenth century. After studying computer climate models and environmental disruptions at that historical moment, the scientists made a further realization; the abrupt onset of the freeze suggested something else important and yet undiscovered: the ice was caused by something swift, something catastrophic.

The Ice Age wasn’t a fluke or a cycle, Miller hypothesized; tiny particles of sulfur suddenly blocked out a portion of the world’s sunlight. In Miller’s view, these tiny particles—the ones that caused many of Europe’s glaciers—were slung into the atmosphere by fifty years of erupting volcanoes.

There was a photo accompanying several of the articles. It wasn’t of volcanoes or even glaciers though. Instead, it was of Gifford Miller—ruddy face, short gray hair, black waterproof trousers, hiking boots, and faded red shirt, one button anchoring the collar—out on Baffin Island. Miller was crouched close to the ground; he held a clear plastic bag in one bare hand and combed a small rocky outcrop with the other. Behind the small rock island where Miller perched was a long expanse of glistening, wet snow, reaching all the way to a low bank of clouds and then the end of the frame.

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

Jorge Luis Borges famously tells the story of a single map that gets so large that it begins to cover the whole world. In that Empire, Borges writes, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.

The short story that map appeared in was a single paragraph long and was published in 1946 as part of a larger piece called Museo (in English, Museum).

In 1982 Umberto Eco used the complete story as an epigraph for his own fanciful essay, On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1, which argues that the one-to-one map of the world must not be plaster cast, lest it pave the whole world, and if the map is suspended in the air, the subjects creating the map would be unable to move because every movement would alter the map. If the map is carefully folded, there could be a dangerous clump of all the folding people, adds Eco, and if it’s opaque, it would block out the sun, thus changing the land that the map is trying to signify.

In 2006 Neil Gaiman likewise seemed to use the story as the basis for another very short story about a Chinese emperor, aptly titled The Mapmaker. One describes a tale, he begins, best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory…. The tale is the map which is the territory, he continues a line later. You must remember this.

Forty years after telling the story of the map-the-size-of-the-empire, Borges took on a new project. He decided to translate the first section of the Prose Edda, the section of that medieval Icelandic work which details for readers the Norse Ginnungagap myth.

En el principio fue el tiempo en que no había nada: ni la arena, ni el mar, ni las frías olas; ni abajo la Tierra ni arriba el Cielo, sólo Abismo, Borges writes in this translation, La alucinación. In the beginning was the time when there was nothing: neither the sand, nor the sea, nor the cold waves, neither below the earth nor above the sky, only abyss.

I try to work my way through the text in my limited Spanish late one night, Borges’s translation and a language dictionary on my lap, side by side. I get through a few paragraphs at a time, penciling in the words I remember, looking up the ones I don’t, trying to follow the logic of Borges’s words, the way he translates the images.

As I read, I can’t stop thinking about the map-the-size-of-the-empire, though. I can’t stop wondering if this translation somehow speaks to its reverse, to what happens when a map gets so small the places begin to slip off it entirely.

BAFFIN ISLAND, CANADA

Only one of my rescue scenes contains a map. It’s a map of Pilgrim’s Progress that I painted when I was eight years old. The map had been stuck on the top shelf of a closet in my parents’ house along with some stories I had written and some drawings of my brother’s; my father had found it