To See a Glacier

Abstract

My first exposure to the glacier was from a distance, the unsettling sight of the moraine—an enormous denuded topography of cracked mud, greasy silt, and all manner and size of stone in front of a vast amount of dirty ice. And then, there was the equally startling sight of the wall of ice, white and ethereal turquoise-blue, rising up behind it. To see a glacier, to touch a glacier, that was one of the reasons I went to Alaska. It's a measure of my desperation that I was willing to leave my farm in western Massachusetts for several weeks right in the middle of haying season, spend a few thousand dollars I could scarcely afford, and travel more than 10,000 miles round trip to land myself in the middle of Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest protected wild lands in the country, just for the chance to experience some elemental power I romantically believed was embodied in the ice, both metaphorically and literally. I went because I wanted to believe that we could protect not just wild places but also something as complex as the balance of humankind with the rest of nature. I was unprepared for what I found there.