Love, Loss, and Water: A Meditation on a Metaphor

Abstract

I once spent an entire day on a crowded observation deck watching Patagonia's largest advancing glacier, Perito Moreno, calve into the water. This is a glacier described as “defiant” for its continued growth in a warming world, as if ice melts due to weakness of character. I didn't want to pay the extra money to take a boat ride around Lago Argentina, its bright blue surface scattered with floating chunks of discarded ice, so I was limited to one vantage point and an unending soundtrack of multilinguistic tourist chatter. It was quite boring after a while: too much time to passively sit and stare, and too little time to witness any significant changes in global climate patterns. I thought a lot about food during those hours. But there was only one daily bus between the town and the glacier, and I reminded myself that there might not be glaciers when I'm old. At one end of the observation deck, a hand-painted sign warning tourists not to climb the railing depicted an image of an ice projectile impaling a startled stick figure's head. So I stayed on the deck, watching, hour after hour, trying to focus on the privilege of sharing the world with ice rather than fantasizing about what I'd eat when I got back to town.