Icefields (15 page)

The distant lights of the icefield chalet are the only signs of human presence. He can see the lamps along the promenade that give it the look of an ocean liner. The tall windows filled with light.

To study accurately the variations in temperature and flow rate, it was necessary to live on the glacier for several consecutive days.

When the temperature drops at dusk to below zero, all the streams on the glacier surface cease to flow. Everywhere the ice bristles up with glittering frost needles as the melted and now refreezing surface water dilatates. A garden of tiny ice flowers seems to be growing all around me.

17

Elspeth walks along the chalet promenade and sees the wink of Byrne's lamp across the valley. She imagines herself an astronomer, and the distant light a constellation of a single star: The Doctor.

18

Glacial ice is not a liquid, nor is it a solid. It flows like lava, like melting wax, like honey. Supple glass. Fluid stone.

To watch it flow, one must be patient. There are few changes that can be seen in the course of one day. But over time crevasses split open and others close. There are ice quakes that shift the terrain, unpredictable geysers of meltwater that carry away ice aiguilles and other landmarks. And of course the evidence of flow, acts of delicate, random precision: shards of rock are plucked by the ice from their strata, carried miles downstream, and left lying with fragments from another geological age.

19

He asks Lightning Bolt, the old man in the telegraph office, for messages from home.

—If there were any, Lightning Bolt mutters, glancing up over his pince-nez, you'd already have them.

There are days when Byrne sinks into a dull lethargy. At these times he goes to the hot spring pool.

He arrives there one morning out of the rain, shivering and pale.

—You're not sitting out there like this, Elspeth says.

Elspeth takes him inside, sits him down on a chair in the warm kitchen and brings in towels, a basin of hot water.

—This has happened to me at least once a year since the accident, he tells her. It's like a recurrence of the hypothermia.

—It's no wonder, she says. You tramp around in the mank all day.

—In the what?

—The mank. The wet. She shakes her head, tugs at his soaked shirtsleeve. This.

—It's a good word, he says. It sounds right.

—I'm surprised you've never heard it before.

He looks down at her hand, which she has kept on his sleeve, and then up into her quietly laughing eyes.

—And this is a hand, she says. You've got two.

—I. . . yes.

He nods and laughs, a short huff of breath. She hands him one of the towels.

—Thank you.

She sets the basin down at his feet and leaves the room.

20

During the next week he travels up and down the line, busy with a routine inspection of camp conditions. He
suspects cholera in two men and accompanies them to Edmonton on the train. Late one evening he returns to the chalet without seeing Elspeth, and the next morning he is back on the ice with his notebook.

Seracs. Massive, unstable pinnacles of ice often form in the icefall.

Here, as the glacier flows over a steep grade in the bedrock, internal stresses split and tear the ice. It buckles and heaves into a tortuous topography.

Byrne watches for three days as an architectural wonder is created. The glacier groans, cracks, thunders, and rears up a cathedral.

On the nunatak Byrne lies on his stomach and sketches in his notebook.

When the sun breaks through cloud, the cathedral fills with light. The warmer air hollows it into a more baroque, flamboyant shape. Spires, archways, gargoyles begin to flow. Waterfalls set festive ice bells ringing.

Then, slowly, the delicate balance that kept it aloft is undermined. Even as light glorifies it, the cathedral is diminished, begins almost imperceptibly to collapse. Sepulchral booms and crashes attest to hidden vaults and hollows, the shifting instability of the foundation.

No one can predict exactly when a serac will
give way and topple back into the landscape. The next morning Byrne climbs to the icefall's base to find that the cathedral is gone, swallowed up in its demesne.

Vanished,
he writes in his notebook.
It must have fallen quickly, in the night. But it made no sound.

He realizes it has been almost two weeks since he last saw her. Twelve days of the brief alpine summer. In another month he will be returning to England. He remembers the touch of her hand on his arm.

In the afternoon he hikes back down to the chalet. He is told by the desk clerk that she has been in Jasper for the past three days.

He takes the train into town.

She is here somewhere, perhaps at the general store, or visiting friends. Searching for her, he begins on the outer streets, flanked by the railroad track on one side of the long, narrow town, and the dark bulk of Bear Hill on the other. He makes the brief circuit of Jasper three times, moving inward, stopping in to talk with Trask's son Jim at his father's gift shop, watching the doorway to see if she will stroll past. He halts at last in front of Father Buckler's unfinished stone church. The sun has almost set and its dusty golden light stretches into the valley from the corridor of the Miette River. The lamps are coming on along the street.

He continues his orbit of Jasper, moving outward again, a cold satellite glowing with secret fire.

She is here somewhere. He will meet her soon. She will look into his eyes and realize that he has finally seen her.

21

He checks his pocketwatch and realizes that the last train for the chalet will be leaving soon. If he misses it, he will be stuck in town for the night.

Hurrying back to the main street he catches sight of her, on the steps of the sloping lawn that fronts the warden's office. She is with an old couple, two small, frail-looking people. The old man has long, silky white hair that gleams like an unkempt halo in the lamplight.

Elspeth is pointing across the river, towards Signal Mountain, its peak caught in the fleeting amber of sunset. Standing close to her, the old man and woman listen to what she is saying and nod their heads. Byrne thinks of two seagulls, battered and dazed as if they had just flown through a storm, and now huddled under the shelter of a loving wing. The scene might be one for a sentimental painting, Byrne thinks.
Evening in Jasper.

Her parents. He recalls that recently she had
talked of them. She was hoping they might visit her. At that time, he had envisioned two tall, stern figures, disapproving in principle of the place their daughter had come to live, sourly listing off the inconveniences of the voyage the moment they stepped from the train. Plain, dour, undemonstrative folk.

And now he sees them laughing at something she has said, her father's hand in hers, her mother gazing up at her. A look of wonder at a daughter grown so tall and graceful and strong.

He hesitates. The bell on the station platform clangs. Elspeth glances across the street and sees him. She waves. Byrne nods and then turns abruptly, hurrying down the stone steps into the station.

22

As the chalet train pulls out of the station, someone taps him on the shoulder. He turns. Elspeth. He gets up and slides into the seat beside her.

—When I saw you, he says, I thought you were staying in town. I'm sorry. … I didn't want to miss the train.

—We were just saying goodbye. My parents are taking the eastbound in the morning.

She brushes back a stray lock of hair, a nervous gesture he has never seen before. He realizes she has
been struggling to keep back tears. For a moment he thinks his behaviour on the street is to blame, and then remembers the leave-taking she has just come from. Unlike him, she stays in Jasper every winter. It may be years before she sees her family again.

—You didn't have to worry about the train, she says. They wouldn't dare leave without me.

23

Byrne takes Elspeth up to the glacier. Snow has fallen for two days, dusting the lower glacier and even piling into drifts higher up, near the nunatak. They climb the lateral moraine to avoid crevasses and then strike out over the snow, roped together, Byrne hacking with his ice axe every few steps.

They come to an open space of level ice that Byrne cleared of snow the day before.

Byrne walks out carefully onto the bare ice surface, testing its strength after a morning of warm sun. He reaches a spot where a thin sheet of meltwater has accumulated on the ice. He steadies himself with the ice axe and leans his weight on one foot. The ice gives slightly, and he hears the chirrup of air bubbles. He steps back. A hairline crack has formed in the ice under his boot. He turns and treads carefully back to the snowbank. Elspeth has disappeared. Her boot
prints lead up the side of the snow dune.

—Elspeth?

—Over here. . . .

Her voice is muffled by snow and wind, so that he can only make out a few words.

—Snow angel. . . .

Byrne drops one of his skates.

—What?

He sees her hand waving from behind the wind-chiseled crest of the dune, and climbs to her. She smiles, gestures to the winged impression she has created in the deeper, drifted snow of the hollow.

—I haven't made one of these since I was a little girl. I'd forgotten how lovely they are.

He crouches beside her.

—Your turn, she says, her smile fading at his intense, misplaced gaze. He is looking past her at the shape her body has left in the snow.

—It's beautiful.

She flicks up a gloveful of snow that powders into his face.

—Oh. She puts a hand over her mouth. I didn't mean for that to happen.

He smiles, wipes at his eyes with his scarf.

—It feels. . . .

—Tell me.

—Like this.

He sinks beside her onto the snow. With her
lips she brushes away the snow on his eyelids, his forehead. He bends to her. They touch each other with their faces, their wrists, the only skin left bare in the cold.

—Are we going to skate?

—I don't think so.

24

—I like that, he says.

—What?

—The way you touch the page with your fingers as you read.

She puts down the paper cover copy of
Wuthering Heights.
She is sitting up on the bed, a blanket over her bare shoulders. He lies beside her. The latched door of the shelter rattles in the wind.

—I suppose I like the change in texture, when you pass from the type to the margin. The feel of the blank page around the words.

His mouth creases in amusement.

—You can feel that?

—Well, I imagine I can. Sometimes I think it's half the pleasure of reading.

He props himself up on one elbow.

—There's something I want you to see. Some of my notes.

—No. No more history. No more dates and little-known facts.

He slides from the bed, across to his worktable, and thumbs through his stack of notebooks.

—If you want to know what I'm really doing out here every day. …

—I think I do.

—Then read this.

—I'd rather hear it from you.

—It wouldn't come out right. I would simplify things too much. This will give you the uncertainty.

She takes the book he has opened, his finger pointing out the place where she should begin. These are the notes he made after his trip to Paris, when he shut himself up in his London flat, pacing, gazing out the window. Elspeth reads and he remembers the writing.

25

First the crevasse. Everything he could remember. The winged shape. And then notes from memory of the stories told him by Sara, by the settler Swift on the journey to Edmonton.

Notes that lead nowhere, that circle back on themselves. Notes taken while studying Sexsmith's memoir of his travels in the Rocky Mountains. Sexsmith's tales of hunting adventures, a bare mention
of the Stoney brothers and the young woman. Nothing about the map on her palm, just the observation that she was a sort of
good luck charm
for the brothers. And of the icefield, not one word. Sexsmith wrote of his decision to turn back, blaming it on fatigue and the grumbling of the men.

Notes that Byrne took as he read everything he could find on glaciers and the ice ages. The romantic Agassiz, John Tyndall the cool-headed Victorian, the methodical observations of the Vaux family.

He copied out Tyndall's quiet confessions:

I was soon upon the ice, once more alone, as I delight to be at times.

For Tyndall, a greater mystery than glacial dynamics was the human imagination. From
a few scattered observations
it had dared to reconstruct the prehistory of the world. Was imagination, he wondered, an energy
locked like latent heat in ancient inorganic nature?

Or rather,
Byrne wrote in his journal,
was it a power that overflowed from some unseen source, pressing inexorably forward to enclose and reshape the world?

And with that thought, a fact he had always known and yet ignored rose into the light of significance. Glaciers are rivers. Water.

He stood up, went over to the window of his study and opened it. The sky was a white roof from which rain dropped like melting snow. Leaning on the
sill in his shirtsleeves, he gazed down the wet ravine of the street, breathed in the damp ash odour of London air.

The basic paradox: frozen flow. Fragments embedded in the ice do not move, yet are ceaselessly in motion.

Below him, foot passengers and horses pulling carriages struggled through the slush. In the gutter a troupe of shouting children were building a wall of dirty snow.

As the ice flows downward from its site of accumulation, it descends into a warmer climatic zone and begins to melt. If the amount of summer melt exceeds the rate of advance, the glacier wastes away, recedes. To early European observers in the Alps it seemed that the more swiftly receding glaciers were actually crawling backwards up the mountain. In a single day and night, land previously buried would reappear.