Dianne Chisholm Photography

Do we dream arctic landscapes or do they dream us? Saturated with ice, they play illuminating tricks, turn travelers into seers. We enter their frame of vision and, in delirium, we navigate, hunt and think.

one iceberg

encompasses many

drifting,

folding,

turning

 worlds 

Here on the ice-fjord we venture the most capricious route-finding. Our aspirations swing wildly with the wild terrain. We’re prepared for solo reconnoitering, yet soothed by the hum of a hunter's passing boat. Scrambling gneiss bedrock becomes our passion. Convoluted, metamorphic stripes, grainy footholds on dreamlines, trace a possible evolutionary direction. Though we know that as a species we're lost.   

Out on the fjord in a small boat, we feel the ice work its way under our skin. Conversation falls adrift as we become intent on following the floes. So alluring is their looming, floating transfiguration. Even in packs they're startlingly singular. Artless originals. Broken from something bigger yet themselves engulfing, they harbor their own atmosphere. We enter a fog of visions, infused with a desire to see more than we can know.            

Justus thinks he can boat us from Kulusuk to Kaarale in three or four hours. A kilometre out, Ammassalik Fjord becomes so ice-choked we doubt we'll get through. But he tilts the prop and deftly jostles us over the thickest patches. At Sermiligaaq Fjord the ice clears all the way to Kaarale, where we anchor against a rock spit between two outlet glaciers. We heave ashore our gear, wave Justus goodbye and launch ourselves into the elemental, ice-riddled open.            

Tom flies our Helio Courier so low in high terrain that we're submerged in altitude. We lift over chromatic tundras into engulfing whiteness, distant blueness. Ice thickening over rising alpine turns the climate arctic. Makes ascending altitudes as otherworldly as polar latitudes. Glacial seas like polar ice encompass mammoth mountains in atmospheres impenetrably dense, unfathomably deep. 

Onwards we argonaut. 

Having lost all sense of gravity to groundless levity.

We trek from fjord to fjord through Tasiilap Kua as all around us moves: ice, snow, water, rock, wind. From faraway the valley's pinnacled rampart looks monumentally solid. Close up, it convulses with self-demolition. Collapsing seracs and flying boulders trigger avalanches off hanging glaciers. Melt waters hurtle down fissured bedrock in rivers of furious convergence. Glacier lagoons burst gravel dams in iceberg stampedes. 

Silence here is suspenseful. Stillness grips us with tenseness. We rest in a state of arrested perception, then scramble over the pass before our time is up.    

Outside we stumble along a pebbly cinder path across hraunvettvangur, holey lava fields. Ankle-length slickers trip and nearly plunge us into open-mouthed caves, where only trolls will find us. Black cones loom gloomily against darkening skies. Bracing bitter winds tear our eyes. Our fluorescent lime-greens glow in the gloom with extraterrestrial radiance and, still, we lose our bearings.   

Inside is windless, warm, bright. A rickety rig drops us twice Hallgrimskirkja’s height into the volcano's magma chamber. Openly exposing us to an eruption of colour: euphoric reds ochres indigos greens. Vaginal labial oracular. We bask in volcanic art, painted by Jörð, the Earth herself. Shadows at the edge frame chthonic mystery. Just how extinct, we wonder, is “extinct”?

My approach to glaciers has only ever been on foot. So alien, this approach by sea. No lead up by land, no acclimatizing leg-work, no tooling with pick, adze and points, no tackling seracs and crevasses with ropes and screws, in short no meeting or connecting with the ice. Tall ship Antigua floats us to the face, aurora dancing over bowsprit, moon lighting sails. A magic carpet dreams us to fjord-head, to dawn’s glacier spectacle.

The ship is our ground and grounding. We learn the ropes, man the rigging, climb the mast, sway to sea ways. But the ice is a distant thing, remote and sublime. Zodiacs tour us closer. Landings bring us closer yet. A walk to the quiescent snout affords momentary, exotic intimacy.

Sailing Svalbard’s isfjorder leaves me cold. Though I know your names, gaze upon your faces Dahlbreen, Holmiabreen, Stupdendorfbreen, Mittaq-Lefflerbreen, Erikbreen, Monacobreen, Seligerbreen, Esmarkbreen, your love remains intangible. Not footing the distances you have traveled, I fail to sense your struggle. What you are going through is foreign to me.

Who cares if glaciers die. This sea voyage to the end of the world may be just that: end-of-world tourism, last-of-the-ice voyeurism. Who feels for polar ice lands without toeing the ice-toe, becoming ice-borne.

The map is not the territory. We guess our way through this roadless, glacier-mangled landscape, more complex and immense than we ever imagined. Surging ice-choked tides, spongy spring-fed tundra, thinning cliff ledges and labyrinthine lateral moraines baffle our route-finding. Icebergs explode below precarious footholds and derail our concentration.

Sigeq uumaleq, the ice is alive.

Dynamic geology rewires our sensibility and eventually sets us on track. We become ice-fjord people, less regimented, more free-flowing. 

Do Glaciers Listen?

We do. To Glaciers. We do.

At our peril. We fail to.

Listen.

Of Svalbard's 21,000 glaciers, we meet a dozen or so, some intimately close, others from a sublime distance but always only for a fleeting, shallow nano-second of a glacier’s deep time. Most are Spitsbergen-type, tide-water valley-glaciers, though from the top of a rocky island in Nordaustlandet, we can glimpse the Vestfonna ice sheet.

We walk up to, touch Holmiabreen, Esmarkbreen. Scramble over moraines to contemplate Erikbreen’s clawed toe. Tour by zodiac the bays and faces of Dahlbreen, Smeerenburgbreen, Monacobreen, Seligerbreen. Gaze from our windy anchorage upon massive Mittaq-Lefflerbreen, Stupendorffbreen. And sail past countless, valley glaciers, whose names no one knows.

Having no indigenous people, no people of the land, Svalbard’s glaciers lack memory-keeping place-names and stories of kinship and care. Explorers, mappers, first-comers named the land after their own people, then left. To this day, the archipelago’s occupants stay only five years on average. Long enough to venture the landscape, not long enough to build land relations.

Bad weather cuts short our long trek from Tasiilaq Fjord to Diilerilaaq via Sermilik Fjord. We return two years later, when, instead of downpours and piteraqs, we're blessed with mostly clear days and mild winds. Justus drops us where we previously left off and we strike out alone, just the two of us. Again we encounter no one, neither hunters nor trekkers. Again the vastness daunts us until, days out, we find our tundra legs. 

Our crux is to navigate Innertivit's rock maze without getting lost. There's no obvious route up this engulfing, convoluted ridge. Yet as we scramble blindly we gain a panoramic view: Ikaasatsivak Strait, Amitsivartiva Fjord, Sermilik Fjord, Johan Pedersen Fjord, the Greenland ice cap, and even the distant north Atlantic.  

But it's what spreads out right before us that steals our gaze: chromatic rock tiers, hanging boulder gardens and sky-pooling rainwater catchments. The nearby sidles up to the faraway.    

Late winter is wayfaring season in East Greenland. Dog-sledding is the vehicle of choice for long journeys over unpredictable ice and into avalanche-swept mountains. Frozen fjords, inlets and straits invite exploratory seal-hunting, ice-fishing and route-finding between distant settlements. Sermilik Fjord no longer freezes over, so we begin our two-man expedition from Diilerilaaq to Isortoq across the icecap by boating our dogs and sled across open sea water. Skiing the fast ice is also an option, though behind every frozen iceberg and pressure ridge we fear a polar bear.

We drive Hringvegur (the Ring Road) through climatic subarctic extremes. Cross-country weather reports earthquakes and eruptions. Daily. 

Today Bárðarbunga erupts under Vatnajokull's watery icecap. How many jökulhlaups will it trigger? How far will its toxic plume balloon? For now we strive to cross Skeiðarársandur Bridge before ash-ridden gales hurl us into raging glacier rivers.

Down the road we risk ascending windy, winding, cascading Öxi Pass, traversing Odáðahraun's storm-darkening lava desert, coursing blindly through blizzards blasting down Eyjafjörður.

Even in relative atmospheric calm, we’re rerouted by avalanches of burly sheep, geysers of boiling mud and fumaroles of poisonous steam.

Ísland, the only country in the world where our bathroom shower runs hot from the magma. Where icebergs drift by our car bumper. Where everywhere steamy, icy waters plunge, surge and pool in gorges, calderas and lagoons. Yet none so moving as Vatnajokull's melting tears. 

Floating ice shelves, ice islands, ice capes, towering ice cliffs appear port side. Looming large. Close. 

White continent rises from black waters as we cruise through peninsular portals. Antarctica’s here!

I’m alone on deck three. Hugging the railing against bracing spray. Looking out from where outward looking is most possible. We’re a small ship in an immense landscape making our way slowly and getting smaller. 

Inside, it’s warm and the music is playing. Guests lounge over drinks and coffee-table books of sublime icescapes, savoring their distraction. I find shelter in the port-side doorway, between frames.           

Spindrift billows high above the ice cap, signalling an approaching piteraq - a biting, buffeting, katabatic wind. With the gale behind us, we sprint over wind-crusted snow to pick kiliilaq, mussels, on Sarpak Island’s far, open shore. On return we lean hard head on, struggle to keep our footing and our mussel-packed pulk from flying. Sledge dogs brace upright, backs to the howling gusts or they curl snout to tail under rising drifts. Ravens launch ecstatically into aerial acrobatics.

Drawn by diverse icelands, my travels trace a polar arc. From southeast Greenland to the southern Great White Continent.

In the company of strangers, I travel farther than ever from human habitation. Yet as we cruise the Antarctica Peninsula we’re engulfed by inhabiting others. Pelagic seabirds, whale pods, seal colonies, penguin rookeries rouse and populate our senses.

We move closer to shore and the ice itself becomes animated, animal: shape-shifting, magnifying, terrifying, alluring. In zodiacs we explore icebergs and icebound coves and bays, seeking eye-level encounters with basking, ice-borne creatures. When we explore on foot the creatures approach us and for an unreal moment we and the wild become intimate.

We welcome this proximity to the ice, so preciously accommodated by our luxury ship. But when the ice, not the ship, frames our perspective, immersion feels more like invasion. Or a vain escape from the Anthropocene. Anchored in the familiar, we revel in the alien, lose track of our footprint.

We pause to rest and savour the autumnal hues at Eagle Plains, the Dempster Highway's only pit stop.    

Just forty kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, nothing here feels very arctic with all its traffic and trees. Yet the colours express the nature of this “true north.” So bold against the black spruce bogs and plateaus.        
 

We make Tasiilaq our home base one summer. Summer lasts from early July when the ice breaks up to late September when darkness returns with nightly northern lights. We're here a few days at the start and end. Weeks between we're out on the land.

We meet Roberto, Tasiilaq’s most seasoned outfitter, to arrange boat transfers, satellite contact and the loan of a 12-gauge shotgun for polar bear protection. Through him we meet Harald, a respected hunter, and Axel, who knows how everything works. Being popular and fluent in Danish and English, as well as Tunumiisut, Axel sometime aspires to be East Greenland’s first Inuit tour operator.    

Summer sees the return of MS Mary Arctica and MS Johanna Kristina, two Royal Arctic freighters bringing weekly rounds of fresh vegetables, building supplies and weak Danish beer. A few loud blasts signals SHIP’S IN! We rush to the harbor with everyone else. Including Gerda in her pink VW van, here to fetch ice-cream for her eclectic bookshop. Like every kid in town we warm to her company and heap on the scoops, no matter how cold the day.     

This summer Tasiilaq’s ablaze with niviarsiaq, dwarf fireweed that paints the town in hot magenta. Flower pots line village windows and flourish like hothouse plants. We amble beyond Flower Valley to discover another sort of blooming: all-season plastic garlands laid on fresh graves.    
 

Heavy snowfall transforms Tunu settlements, more the town than the roadless villages, quelling traffic, driving pedestrians indoors, and dampening commerce to a hush.

I fly to Tasiilaq from Reykjavik via Kulusuk on the tail of a four-day blizzard. Spring is already greening Iceland, whereas here it’s whitening everything. So much snow. It blankets trammeled ground, worn paths and old routines with revitalizing freshness.

Snow-intensified light irradiates colorful exteriors and casts an air of expectancy. Everyone’s out and about, opening windows, clearing entrances, digging out vehicles, skiing ungroomed slopes, breaking trail to the shop for groceries, gathering by the post office for a communal smoke. 

I stroll the one cleared road, waiting for Max to dog sledge across snowbound Ammassalik Island. He’s trailing a phalanx of track-setting snowmobiles over inundated mountains and glaciers. Once he’s here and rested, I’ll jump aboard and we’ll return to Diilerilaaq the way he came. What a revelation: to see the dogs in their element and tugging at their traces, unchained.

…..

ukiigatta last winter.

ukioq the winter; the whole year.

ukiukkut the winter came upon her before she reached home, or finished building her house

ukiorippoq she has a good winter; it is a good winter

ukiorpoq the winter has come

ukiortaak the new year

— Nancy Campbell, “Seven Words for Winter”

It sprays, roars, quakes. We feel, hear Dettifoss long before we see it. Drawing closer, we get intimate with titanic earth forces. No guard rail stops us from leaping heart-first into the cataract and riding the wild wake to arctic seas.       

Jökulsá á Fjöllum, glacier river from the mountains, flows from under the volcanic icecap and floods catastrophically when things really erupt. It’s flooding now. But we can’t get enough. We drive round to the east for even more transporting, earth-shattering drops into the gorge.
 

The glacier is a climate-changer. Today it crystallizes heavy fog from the north Atlantic into shimmering arcs and auras. We camp near the collapsing ice shelf and weather its turbulent moods. Bask in exhaustive astonishment.   

Foxes, haloed by fox sparrows, hunt the mist-shrouded shoreline for mussels trapped under beached icebergs. And for fish, washed up on the rocks by the glacier's calamitous calving. Fleetingly, they appear, disappear in caves and crevices. Which animal, we wonder, is more mystifying, mercurial: the fox or the ice? 

And was that arctic explorer ever so charismatic as his namesake?    

They touch you, these ghosts, whose haunts this arctic frontier so well preserves. Chills rise like smoke from abandoned hunters’ huts. Spook our thoughts as we sail up Isfjorden.  

What do we know about this place? That anyone who ever lived here comes from elsewhere far away. That being mammothly icebound it is severely inhospitable. That those who survive polar night will likely succumb to Svalbard Fever, a virulent passion for testing human limits. That there have been waves of contagion among explorers, hunters, miners, adventurers. And now glaciologists, doubly plagued by this climate of no return. 

Curtains flutter from broken windows, wave at us from past utopia. A former Soviet coal-mining venture, Pyramiden attracted most migrants after Perestroika renovations. To the edge of the ice cap at the end of the ice age, industrial modernism arrives. In timely fashion. Accommodating workers from mainland Russia in state-of-the-art communal housing. A bust of Lenin looks over the town, and out, where Nordenskjöld Glacier meets the eye. Inside the Cultural Centre, the glacier reappears as a wall-size mural.

But not even here stays frozen in time. We witness the organic integration of labor and life. Disintegrate. Before our eyes. Into nonhuman afterlife. A skeleton staff guards against vandals while polar bears and arctic foxes enjoy a run of the town, and while the melting ice germinates a new species: scampering herds of “glacier mice.”  

We cross Drake Passage, push through the Antarctic Convergence and find a shocking abundance of life: petrals and fulmars; sperms and humpbacks; gentoos, chinstraps and adélies; weddells, crabeaters, leopards and elephants. 

Also, shocking death: a whalers' graveyard of rendering vats, oil drums, bleeding hooks, bleached skeletons. 

What ruined Whaler's Bay? The hope that an ice-free coast would harbor resource-rich industry. Plus opportune ignorance of the Bay's deep volcanic rift. In time a subglacial eruption devastates this outpost of optimism in a tsunami of meltwater mud.

I wander the ruins chilled to the bone despite thermal springs underfoot. 

We drive high up the Dempster in search of caribou. Those mythic tens of thousands said to bolt over the Richardson Mountains. Ankles clicking, hooves beating, setting the cosmos thrumming. 

If not caribou, then caribou hunters. They’ll know where the caribou are. A gas station attendant in Teetł'it Zheh tells us to find Randall Tetlichi. As does a seamstress at Tent and Canvas. A Peel River ferry worker says he’s likely camped at Rock River.  

Just off the highway near Rock River, we stumble upon a well-stocked bush camp. No Randall. But of course he's out scouting caribou. And to find him, we have to find them.

What folly.

To think you could build a road right through the migration and not force the animals to make scarce.  

In the old days
when we still lived our own lives
in our own country
we could hear
as faraway thunder
the caribou approaching
two or three days in advance

Then we did not count the animals, but knew
that when the caribou herd arrived
it would be seven days
before all the animals crossed the river
                         - Aqqaluk Lynge

Men on snowmobiles herd reindeer from winter grazing grounds to spring calving grounds across the frozen Mackenzie. It’s an annual spectacle: two thousand reindeer plowing through snow, skating on the ice road. Next year there’ll be no ice road. The event will take place, though less eventfully. Without that hurdle of ice.    

The reindeer are not native to the Mackenzie Delta. They were driven by Saami and Inuvialuit across the Bering Strait from Siberia. It was an epic, ironic ordeal. For nomadic herders to help secure food for starving nomadic hunters forced to settle and abandon a thousand years of living and moving with migrating caribou. 

The herd is itself an animal. I sense this, riding Kylik’s snowmobile so close to the herd's periphery. Our approach sets the reindeer milling, a flexing of collective muscle and nerve that has larger, stronger, faster bodies circle smaller, weaker, slower. Grow a thick hide round a vulnerable heart, shelter stragglers in a blizzard of antlers. 

But what cosmic intelligence will adapt the animal to the melt? 
 

We’re here to photograph seascapes and frostscapes. In the off-season when they’re less famous. 

April low light lights up the sea, beach and sky, making them bluer, blonder, purpler. The setting sun irradiates a blizzard’s swirling flakes against dusk-faint northern lights. 

People are also here to surf arctic waters warmed by the warming Gulf Stream.  How coolly the surfers dance over snow to catch a wave.  

Alpine maritime arctic: an alluring mix. Most affecting are the fishscapes. Racks upon racks of drying cod. In numbers sublimely olfactory. From half these racks hang heads with tongues, great delicacies, cut out. From the other half hang beheaded bodies. Oh. The stench and stare.  

Local photographer, Kjell Ove, proudly assures us that all of the fish is used. Parts not eaten by humans are fed to animals or dug into the soil. 

The world’s largest cod stock is a wild seafaring animal. Norwegian Arctic Cod or Skrei (“to move onward” in Old Norse) migrate between Lofoten and the Barents Sea. Since the Vikings, fishers have been dipping their nets in the flow and making lucrative hauls. Today they supply a growing global market, while strictly limiting their catch to sustainable levels. With the warming are the skrei dying? If anything, I'm told, the fish are getting bigger. Where once was sea ice, there’s now greenery for grazing. 

North Sea oil made Norway a global energy-broker. But Lofoten islanders still value their wealth in fish. It’s not in oil, they say, but “in cod we trust.” 

Three generations of Isortormiit women harvest a polar bear hide. Eleunaq works closely with her mother, Ella, and together they mentor Peneli, Eleunaq’s daughter, Ella’s granddaughter. To harvest a polar bear hide by hand is an arduous and delicate affair. It takes these women two full days to scrape away the flesh and fat, and to nimbly carve out the head and claws. As they work, there’s a growing sense of communion. Between the women, naturally, but also between the women and the bear.

Almost every day this late-winter early-spring we dine on seal, boiled, broiled, dried, raw (ringed, bearded, hooded, harp). Other days we dine on fish (red fish, arctic char, Greenland halibut), or whale (fin, orca, narwhal). Occasionally we dine on naneq, polar bear.

Kalaalimernit , fine country fare!

To dine like this, we must hunt. By dog sledge on the frozen strait. Or by open boat on the ice fjord. From ice bergs, or from the floe edge, or on the fast ice for qatsimalek, seals basking in the sun. On fast ice we wear white camouflage, test every step with our ice pick, the ice is so dangerously unpredictable these days.

One hunter crouches silently with his rifle ready, while the other, aviliarpalittitsileq, seal whisperer, sings and scrapes the ice with his ice pick.

After the hunt, we flense, butcher, clean and rack, feed the dogs the flippers and offal, and share the best meat with village elders who, like Thomasina, can hunt no longer.

Gerti is a good hunter. Max is a great hunter. Julius is even greater. But Sâlo is piniarteqsuaq, the greatest hunter of all, and the last Tunumeeq to live by hunting alone.

Gerry shows us around Inuvik this twilit April afternoon. At sunset he takes us to the Muskrat Jamboree for muskrat dinner. It’s opening night at the East Three School and the gym is packed and rowdy. Mostly with Gwich’in and Inuvialuit families who come from all across the Mackenzie Delta. Since Gerry’s everybody's favorite uncle, we meet a lot of people. Including Mohammad, a prominent member of Inuvik's Sudanese community. 
  
The festivities begin and I roam the room behind my camera. Being no dancer, drummer or storyteller but a conspicuous southerner, I partake surreptitiously as a photographer. Gerry’s nephew, Jimmy, notices my ruse and proudly, defiantly, flashes me his drum. 
  
The drum dance drowns out everything

We hear the beating of the heart
here at the end of the world
and feel that life has no end.
                           – Aqqaluk Lynge     
 

We're driving the Mackenzie River's frozen east channel in a poorly-outfitted two-wheeler van. Cautiously, as well-rigged heavy-haulers zoom by. The road is an engineering marvel, open to everyone. Whatever they're operating, people take to it naturally. This driving on ice. Nothing but ice.  

We hope to reach Tuk before the road melts much more. Just around the bend is Spring, the ice road's final season. An all-weather road will replace it next winter. For now we'll drive the Mackenzie and the Arctic Ocean till it's the end of the road for the ice road.      

Near Reindeer Station, Gerry stops for us to test the ice. Look! he points to frozen methane bubbles as big as the van’s balding tires. Feel! he urges, as he glides along the road's glassy surface, smooth at the centre, tread-roughened on the “lane ways." 

Looking down into the road's blue-black depths, I slide on solid sky. Looking ahead to its vanishing point, I sink in existential mire. As far as the eye can fathom there are bubbles. Ready to burst forth their gassy exhalations with the Delta's billion other thawing permafrost pockets.  

We drive far west to Snaefellsjökull volcano, past lava deserts, lofty waterfalls, sorrel fields of shaggy ponies, and lone farmsteads with their own churchyards. Do we press our flimsy two-wheeler up the rugged mountain road to the glacier? The prospect seems more irreverent and reckless than daring. Given the glacier’s iconic stature in Laxness, Verne and the Sagas. And its unprecedented melting. We vacillate, as glacier-fit Arctic Trucks© rigged with nitrogen-bloated tires roll by.   

When a flotilla of lenticular clouds blow in over the volcano, we turn around. Though who knows in what direction we ought to face the winds of change.  
 

"In Tunumiisut, you say 'Diilerilaaq,'" Gerti insists, pronouncing the settlement’s place-name for "the strait that runs dry when the tide runs out." We've been saying "Tiniteqilaaq" as printed on our map in Kalaallisut, official (West) Greenlandic.

A hunter-turned-entrepreneur, Gerti manages the Pilersuisoq, the local supermarket franchise, and rents us his guesthouse. After closing shop for the day, he takes us out on the ice fjord in his heated, cabin cruiser.

Max, “the Frenchman” and a hunter-turned-teacher, invites us to share the "outside world" with his four, senior students. We try to interest them in where we come from. But Canada is too outside their world, unimaginably remote. When Max shows them an illustrated, sixties’ settlement ethnography, how keenly they recognize their pipe-smoking, harpoon-wielding, seal-hunting elders.

We meet Chiho, a geophysicist-turned-artist who left megalopolis Tokyo to live “close to nature.” If not playing the organ for the village church, she cures, cuts and stitches sealskin kamiks, anoraks, mitts and women's summer shorts. Her mentor, old Thomasina, grew up in a turf hut, married a hunter and enjoyed a nomadic life, until a piteraq swallowed her husband and his kayak. Unable to live on the land alone, she reluctantly settled for settlement living.

Despite Diilerilaaq’s seal-rich habitat, Diilerilaarmiit are leaving for Tasiilaq, East Greenland’s only town, or for Nuuk, Greenland’s only city.

Some say an oligarchy of Nuuk politicians is conspiring to centralize Greenland and abandon those “backwards,” eastern settlements. Others suspect a plan to exploit Diilerilaaq’s natural potential as a tourist resort.

Some Tunumiit, like Gerti, seek to modernize. Outsiders, like Max and Chiho, strive to revive traditional culture. Many locals struggle to find a place in their dislocated homeland.

In all ways, settlement living is unsettling.

Shismaref  Kivalina Tuktoyaktuk

outposts forcibly settled become unsettled

by forces anthropogenic and climatic

drive those stilts deeper
buildings keep sinking in heaving permafrost, or sliding into the Arctic Ocean

even pingos crumble
millennia in minutes  

the people have long seen things come and go
the caribou, the reindeer, the oil boom, the ice road
but for now the fox fur market remains stable and the unburiable junk keeps piling up
 

Where’s the river?! we shout into the dust storm that engulfs our four by four as we drive over the bone-dry, silt-caked, glacial floodplain. Wardens at Sheep Mountain Station explain how meltwaters from a rapidly receding Kaskawulsh Glacier changed course overnight. Instead of flowing into Kluane Lake and north to the Bering Sea, they turned south to the Kaskawulsh River and the Gulf of Alaska - leaving a desert in their wake.

In zodiacs we approach steep disintegrating face. Barraged by herds of bobbing, sloshing, swishing ice-calves. S tilts prop. Motors gently into the melée. Cuts engine. We scramble to unwind cables, place headphones, microphones, hydrophones, channel waves of clamourous white noise.

Drift till almost hemmed in. Gravitate to bedrock islet, shelter from ramming ice-tide. Atop islet oval ice-bulb beacons solid blue. Round and round we circle, magnetized by bulb’s seeming, firmly-fixed lastingness against wake of glacial detritus.

Spitsbergen glaciers are technically “warm.” Heated by the Gulf Stream, they float above bedrock on meltwater mattresses. Spurred by global warming, they out-race “cold,” fast-frozen, Antarctic glaciers. Sprint brashly to a watery grave. Chilling us with cacophonous rush swish swirl.

Leave islet, bump through brash to crumpling face. Where cluster walrus-sized bergy bits. But no icebergs. My memory fishes up Greenland icebergs, blue-whale big and bound for deep seas. Whereas these Spitsbergen glaciers drop stunted calves, shore them in shallow sills.

Hover at 300m safety limit. Hear uncanny two-dimensional soundscape compose itself. Resonating nearness and silencing distance mark time between us and the face with space of elemental indifference, our mortal interval: listen!

On July 14th, the day we fly into Pang, an Arctic front blows pack ice far up Cumberland Sound. Villagers wrestle their boats from the ice-mired shore and salvage the beluga that hunters landed a few days prior.

Josee frees his outboard and taxies us to the end of the fjord. “Do the deepest crossings at lowest sun,” he warns, as we disembark on our trek across Auyuittuk. We do and even so we flounder up Akshayak Pass's meltwater funnel, sink to our knees in boggy tundra, battle waist-deep torrents. Moraines cave underfoot. Glacial lagoons breach gravel dams.   

Auyuittuk: Inuktitut for “land that never thaws.” 

In the village we meet aging elders. Inusiq tells us stories of living on the land when caribou were abundant and weather was readable. Evie teaches us to light a seal-oil lamp, her eyes lit with memories of the qaggiq, the communal igloo. Ian interviews them for his film on Qapirangajuq: Inuit Elders and Climate Change. “I worry,” Evie says to the camera, “if it all melts, will we have any land left?” 
 

precarious ice

Anthropocene ice

enduring ice

really old ice

Pleistocene ice

decrepit ice

dynamic ice

dense ice

blue ice

coral ice

architectonic ice

sublime ice

devalued ice

Capitalocene ice

deleterious ice

Chthulucene ice

dying ice

no just ice

Wandering adrift on Reynisfjara beach, I lose all sense of time. Not just the hours. But millennia. My only clock, a spit of basalt columns that marches before me with geologic regularity.  

Am I in Reynisfjara, or somewhere less fixable? at the confluence of Arctic and Atlantic, where the sea eats away the land; above the rift that births new earth, where lava flows with the ice; chilled by global warming's southern-most northern front. 

I'm here at the crux of involvement, so groundlessly grounded, so inhumanly alive.

The Tlingit place name says it all. Sít Eeti Geeyi, “Bay Taking the Place of the Glacier.”

Kayaking the Bay’s upper West Arm, we become part of the process of glacial recession, of glacierbaying—

Gazing face-on on the crumbling glacier from our kayaks at high tide.

Looking over the glacier’s vast retreat up the mountains from our moraine scrambles,

Listening to the glacier roar, thunder, crash outside our tents all night.

Wandering among beached “calves” at low tides.

Shriveling in the glacier’s icy, misty, rainy deluge.

We enter Xunaa Shuká Hít (Huna Tlingit Tribal House) in Bartlett Cove. Behold “the Face of The Glacier,” hand drawn,painted and carved across the back wall of giant cedar planks. In the center of the glacier’s face is the face of Kasteen, the legendary young woman who provoked the glacier to surge and destroy her Kwáan (homeland). Her glittering abalone eyes reflect the glacier as it buries her, just as her face envisages her people’s encapsulation in glacier being and becoming.

(I respectfully paraphrase this story as told to us by Owen James, one of the House’s three carvers.)