The Grammar of Ice
The first growlers and bergy bits first appear early in the morning on our second day in the West Arm. We have left our campsite at Reid Glacier with a heading for Johns Hopkins—Glacier Bay’s crown jewel. With each stroke, more fragments arise, drifting smoothly toward us on the tide.
Their shapes are conceptual, like clouds on a sky of glass. Some resemble animals—whales, birds. Others take abstract forms, arrangements of mass and negative space. The sun climbs higher, and the ice sweats. As the ice grows bigger and denser, claiming more of the horizon, the wildlife recedes. Sighing humpbacks and birdsong give way to the seltzer-like hiss of ice slowly melting into the sea.
We glide past Lamplugh, now technically a tidewater glacier only at high tide. The tide is mostly in, so the water almost grazes the glacier’s toe. Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht is anchored here. On the day boat that ferried us and our gear into the backcountry, the park ranger told us, “He’s been paddleboarding around with armed bodyguards.”
Lamplugh’s wall of intense blue ice, striped with dark bands of moraine, rises more than 150 feet above us. There is no movement from the superyacht.
Staring up from a kayak into the face of the glacier, it is hard to believe such a thing is capable of dying.
A death measured in feet. Up to a hundred per year.
Listening to the park ranger on the day boat, I could not help but marvel at the language of glaciology. It has accumulated over time the way a glacier itself does. Words picked up from different places, transported, and deposited into the mouths of scientists, naturalists and outdoor guides.
Growler, bergy bit, serac, nunatak, moraine, moulin, crevasse. Calve, creep, surge, advance, retreat, accumulate, ablate.
The words come from French, German, Greenlandic, Germanic English—and the classical languages—the lexicon piles into a kind of verbal moraine. Even glacier carries older sediment inside it. It glides into English through French, but farther down lies the Latin glacies: ice. Terminus, the end of a glacier, is Latin too: a boundary, an end.
I went to graduate school to study two languages we habitually call dead. Yet, as any classicist will gladly tell you, Greek and Latin are everywhere. They survive by a kind of linguistic succession: glacies becomes glace, becomes glacier; roots migrate into other languages; meanings mutate; grammatical structures leave traces.
Dead does not necessarily mean disappeared.
This is useful to remember while paddling into Glacier Bay’s West Arm, where glaciers have their own strange grammar of death.
They advance. They retreat. They creep and surge and calve. They accumulate and ablate. We give them verbs because, although they impose a sense of permanence, glaciers are defined by infinite, colossal movement. A glacier that ceases to flow eventually ceases to be a glacier.
Glaciologists have a word for what follows the ice: succession. Again, Latin. Succedere: to follow after.
In Glacier Bay, succesion is unusually literal. You can see it from the deck of the dayboat or a kayak’s cockpit. As the glaciers retreat, life follows.
The farther we paddle into the West Arm, the farther backward we seem to travel through ecological time. Flashes of humpback tails no longer break the water’s surface. When we land for lunch on an alluvial fan just north of Jaw Point, it is the first time since we entered the park that we do not wear bear spray on our hips.
The closer we get to Johns Hopkins, a vernacular of rock, gravel, glacial sediment and ice takes over.
We are paddling toward the beginning.
The process of glacial succession has been studied in Glacier Bay for more than a century. In 1916, botanist William S. Cooper began marking plots on newly exposed ground to watch what happened after the ice withdrew. His work became part of the longest-running study of post-glacial plant succession in the world.
At first, almost nothing. Then came organisms capable of making a life from almost nothing: lichens and mosses; low mats of dryas; horsetail and fireweed. They grow and die and, in dying, leave something behind. Roots catch sediment. Organic matter accumulates. Something resembling soil begins to form.
Willow and alder follow. Nitrogen enters the impoverished ground. Eventually spruce rises through the thickets; later, hemlock. Given enough time, bare glacial sediment becomes forest.
We tend to think of succession among humans as legacy: what comes after us, what we leave behind, the evidence that we were here.
Here succession is more literal. One form of life makes the conditions for another.
The glacier retreats. The forest and animals follow.
After consecutive days of sunshine, Chocolate Falls runs thick and loud, brown with silt and rock flour: bedrock pulverized beneath the enormous weight and movement of ice. The glacier grinds the mountain into sediment, and the meltwater carries it down to the sea.
Nothing disappears cleanly here. Mountain becomes flour. Ice becomes water. Rock becomes soil.
Our camp is about a mile from the calving face of Johns Hopkins. The velvety black sand beach glimmers like a diamond field, littered with ice. There are no trees here. To make a fire, we hike along the waterfall looking for twigs, then sit beside it roasting pieces of cookie dough as the tide comes in.
The tide beats us.
Water rushes over the stones and extinguishes the little fire with a hiss.
“Glacier Bay hates fire,” my paddling companion says.
I think of this later, lying awake in my tent, listening to Johns Hopkins come apart in the dark.
BOOM.
Ancient languages hated fire, too. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that philologists hate fire on their behalf. So much of what was written in Greek and Latin is gone that classical literature is, in part, the study of absence: works known only by title, poems surviving in quotations by other writers, histories reconstructed from fragments, words preserved because someone happened to copy them before the manuscript disappeared.
We call Greek and Latin dead languages, although their words are everywhere. Glacier. Terminus. Ablation. Succession.
What survived did so by being carried forward.
BOOM.
You only hear calving after the ice has crumbled.
The muted sound moves through the tent without the sharpness of thunder. Waves curl onto the black sand in the dark—black on black, edged by a moonlit line of white foam. I unzip the tent to make sure the water is not going to reach us. It stops less than fifteen feet away.
BOOM.
A lost text and a calving glacier share something uncanny: by the time you perceive the loss, the event has already happened. The sound reaches you afterward. The fragment is evidence of something already gone.
In the morning, the tide has gone out and rearranged the ice during the night. It is a long carry of gear and boats to a sea puzzled with fragments. The beach is so jammed that when we launch, we can barely get our paddles into the water. The pieces shift and drip in the sunlight.
Then, we turn away from Johns Hopkins.
We began by paddling from life toward ice. Now we paddle from ice toward life.
The farther we travel down the bay, the vocabulary changes. Geological verbs become biological ones. Calving, moraine, terminus, ablation give way to pups, nesting, shedding, swimming, feeding.
Kittiwakes and terns crowd the nesting cliffs. Sea otters raft together with pups on their bellies. Harbor seals tend their young. Humpbacks blow and surface around us, flashing their tails before diving deep.
The next morning, a bear swims out toward our island camp and walks the stretch of beach where, moments before, our kitchen had been. We launch in haste.
The morning after that, a pod of orcas appears. A large male splits from the group and turns toward us before disappearing beneath the water; the females travel with the juvenile.
It is the most unedited wildlife I have ever encountered. A library of life. Not simply the abundance of it, but the diversity, coming after the strange quiet of the glaciers.
Life conjugates itself everywhere the ice has been.
Somewhere behind us, below the blue wall of Lamplugh, Zuckerberg’s superyacht is still anchored.
After ice measured in centuries, succession measured across hundreds of years, mountains pulverized into flour, forests assembling themselves out of gravel, I find myself wondering about the languages of the future. A future, perhaps, without glaciers—or at least without the glaciers as I see them today.
There is something almost too neat about the tech baron floating beneath a dying glacier. Greek and Latin persist here in the vocabulary of ice, while aboard that boat is a man whose world is built in another kind of language: code.
Growler. Bergy bit. Calving. Ablation. Glacier.
Python. Java. C++.
Languages accumulate. Languages disappear. So do glaciers. And human beings. The surviving fragments carry forward long after the worlds that produced them have changed. Perhaps, at first, they are rearranged into collective memory before ablating into myth, and eventually forgotten.
The day boat picks us up by the cairn where it left us, five days earlier. We crack open celebratory beers. As we speed back toward Bartlett Cove, I wonder which words we will carry home with us.
And what will remain in the years to come for them to describe.