While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change

while glaciers slept

WHILE GLACIERS SLEPT

Being Human in a Time of Climate Change

M Jackson

Foreword by Bill McKibben

Brattleboro, Vermont

© 2015 by M Jackson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author’s note: As this book spans many years and several continents, I have had to re-imagine events and conversations based on occasionally incomplete memories in my mind. I have tried to faithfully represent the spirit of those scenes within these pages. For legal and ethical reasons, certain names and episodes have been changed.

Printed in the United States of America

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Green Writers Press is a Vermont-based publisher whose mission is to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout, we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist organizations.

Giving voice to writers and artists who will make the world a better place Green Writers Press | Brattleboro, Vermont www.greenwriterspress.com

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2015936482

ISBN: 978-0-9960872-6-1

Photographs courtesy of: Colin Aiken, Kyle Dungan, David Estrada, Grant Jackson, M Jackson, Sarah Jackson, the Jackson Family Collection, Jon Marshall, Federico Pardo, and Elizabeth Ruff.

Author photograph by Annie Agnone.

Cover design by Ani Pendergast.

Book design by Dede Cummings and Ani Pendergast. Set in Bembo and Frutiger. Printed on demand and sustainably by Thomson Shore Printers.

THE BOOK INDUSTRY TREATISE ON ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE PUBLISHING SETS ATTAINABLE AND MEASURABLE GOALS FOR IMPROVING THE SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF THE BOOK INDUSTRY. IT WAS DEVELOPED OVER A FIVE-MONTH PERIOD WITH THE PERSPECTIVE AND PARTICIPATION OF PUBLISHERS, MILLS, PRINTERS, MERCHANTS, AND OTHERS.

This book is dedicated to Sarah and Grant, who keep my compass pointed home.

Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.

—HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL

But I don’t want to go among mad people, Alice remarked.

Oh, you can’t help that, said the Cat. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.

How do you know I’m mad? said Alice.

You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.

—LEWIS CARROLL

while glaciers slept

Foreword | Bill McKibben

I think our planet is slowly becoming disabled. Due to climate change, in natural processes that digest carbon, regulate temperature, keep the climate on an even keel, everything is off kilter. Undoubtedly, unquestionably, it has been shown with certainty: the way we live our lives is causing these systems to fail. —M JACKSON

THIS IS TRUE—AS TRUE AS IT IS POSSIBLE TO GET. There is a huge elephant always present in every room on our planet right now, the elephant of climate change. Nothing humans have ever done is so big, and nothing so big has ever been so thoroughly ignored.

And the reasons it’s been ignored, and the reasons we must ignore it no longer, are the reasons in this book. Not, ultimately, the prosaic and practical questions about sea level rise and increased risk of drought and ocean acidification. These things are all crucially important, but they’re not the core. At the core, somehow, is the question of whether the big brain was a good adaptation.

Or, more precisely, if it came attached to a big enough heart to get us out of the trouble we’re in. To get us out of the habit of staring at the shiny object nearest by, and to look instead at the mountain, the forest, my wife, your mother, our meaning. Those are the kinds of questions easiest to answer in the company of caribou and humpback, or of family and friends. The real company, not the virtual, pretend, screen-based company. We live in an abstracted, mediated world, and in that kind of world it seems possible that all that is real and beautiful might slip right by us—especially our home planet in all its buzzing, complex, cruel glory.

And so we fight. Sure we screw in the new lightbulb, but mostly we screw up our courage. Screw up our courage to well and truly love. That’s what this book is about, I think; I hope you read it in the spirit of openness it deserves, making yourself vulnerable to both hurt and joy. We may or may not be able to slow down climate change (I hope we are able, and so I devote my days to that task). But we are definitely able to witness the world, and ourselves on it, in these fragile and lovely moments. That’s our task, too.

—BILL MCKIBBEN

1

ON MY DESK TODAY SITS A LETTER I FOUND WRITTEN by my dad to my mom. A year ago, my brother, my sister, and I were sorting through the old desk at the farm. It was the first step, the first of packing up, cleaning out, choosing what was important and what wasn’t. We chose to start with the desk because it wasn’t their bedroom, it wasn’t the loft, it wasn’t the kitchen, it wasn’t all those other places where the fingerprints of our parents rained thick and deep. We thought, then, that the desk was full of business papers and insurance forms and bank statements. Neutral things. Not the things that really make up a person. But—

It also contained a letter. Buried under stacks of manila envelopes and plastic cases and paperclips and thumbtacks.

Undated, on yellowed paper, with no envelope: my dad’s distinctive engineering script. I saw the handwriting before I saw the letter, before I registered it for what it was. Each capital I looked like a J. There was a faint stamp on the upper left corner—perhaps this was a postcard sent through the mail. It read:

Dear Madam.

I declare my love for you, and wish to beg you to consider leaving your husband and running away with me to an enchanted deserted island. If you say no, I shall hurl myself over the Narrow’s Bridge.

I love you.

John

I’ve framed this letter, and it sits on my desk.

My parents are dead. They both had terminal cancers, and they passed away within two years of each other. I was twenty-six.

Those are the basics, but there is much more.

All stories have so much more.

My mom was married to someone else when she met my dad. But at the time the letter was written my parents were married. I know this because my dad is humorously threatening to jump off the Narrows Bridge in Puget Sound. My parents moved to Washington State several years into their relationship, years after Mom had divorced her previous husband and began to build a life with my dad. They’d lived all over the map, traveling north and south in bell-bottomed jeans along twisty roads in unreliable vehicles, searching always for a place to believe could be home.

And then, lifetimes before they found their real home, they settled for a couple of years underneath the Narrows Bridge in Washington State on a small scrap of land called Salmon Beach. From the deck of their tiny house on stilts they could look out across the water and see the boat traffic under the bridge and the car traffic over it. The bridge was part of their daily viewscape, part of their daily conversation, just like today, at the farm that eventually became their home, the view of Mt. Rainier or the surrounding fields is part of the daily fabric of our lives.

The letter was probably a note of whimsy, a single moment between two people that holds details long lost now. But at its core it was a reminder from my dad to my mother that he loved her. He loved her right through her death, and certainly through his.

Everything I knew and trusted in this world changed when my parents became terminally ill. The foundation of the surrounding landscape, the regularity of the weather, the creep of the sun’s light over the spinning planet—all these and more shifted simultaneously by incremental and astronomical degrees. And even though I told myself the worst would not happen, even though I denied it until the very last moment, even though I made plans for after and said goodbye, I did not believe until it happened.

This story, however, is not just about death—their deaths, that moment when cancer outbalanced life in their bodies—nor is it about sadness, or irretrievable loss. Rather, this is a story that contains such multitudes. Here is the story of two people facing unknown futures and their daughter’s trying to recognize again a landscape and lifescape transformed. And here also is the story of all of us and our single and shared experiences as human people across this planet in the midst of the greatest of changes.

In 2007, when I was twenty-five, I lived in Africa, up in the far northwestern corner of Zambia, serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. This was two years before my mother died. I resided in a small, mud-bricked, grass-thatched hut perched on a ridge above a wide, shallow valley. Threading along the floor of the valley was a narrow stream bordered by thick grasses and sedges. Most evenings, I walked the forty-minute footpath down the valley floor and along the stream until I reached an opening in the grasses along the bank. There, I’d slip through the vegetation and slide down the red clay to the water’s edge. A large rock nosed up through the water and reeds. I always placed my soap, shampoo, and clothes across its gray face: my built-in river table.

I discovered the stream several months after moving into my hut. My discovery was jubilant. Previously, water collection involved digging a hole in the mud-swamp, waiting for the water to seep into it, dunking a bucket into the hole, and then carrying the buckets up the hill to my hut. A round trip for one bucket took half an hour. Every time I had wanted to take a bath, I needed three buckets of water.

Water was the first way I connected with the Kaonde villagers I lived with. The Kaonde are a tribe of Zambian people living across the North-Western Province of the country. Those Kaonde who lived in the rural area where I was assigned as a Peace Corps Volunteer practiced rain-fed agriculture: they were dependent on the mercurial skies to nourish their crops of maize, pumpkins, and greens. If it did not rain, many Kaonde farmers in my area—men, women, and children—hand-watered crops with heavy buckets that were carried on heads and shoulders and hips and backs and walked up and down and up and down the many, many rows in the fields.

Increasingly, the farmers spoke of changes in the rain. They told stories of various years, when the rainy season arrived at unusual times, and heavier, or lighter, or just different. So much rain, so quickly, so soon, destroyed the tender shoots of maize and flooded the fields, resulting in even more ample breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. And then, unpredictably, the rainy season would end, like someone jammed a cork straight into the cloudy heavens, right when the maize or pumpkins or greens needed that last burst of water, it was withheld, and the buckets came out. The Kaonde didn’t have the language for climate change.

During the dry season, I spent hours each day hauling water, balancing old, yellow buckets against my chest and waddling up the path to my hut, visions of laundry and dishes and baths crowding each step I took. Village women, my friends at any other point in the day, would shriek and laugh because I did not have the neck strength to balance forty-five pounds of water on my head.

Finding a small bathing area in the stream where I could submerge my body changed the quality of my life in Zambia.

I spent long evenings just floating, weightless, feeling the soft tendrils of currents whispering over my tired muscles. My hair and the watery weeds would mingle, twining, and my body would dissolve layer by layer into the murky water. After a few months, it felt like the only place I could really think was in that stream with my head half-submerged. Watching the clouds billow overhead, I could fill my eyes with the sensory overload of primary colors. The ground was red, the vegetation green, the sky blue, the clouds white. Bright yellow weaver birds danced and chirped, threading nests together on tiny reeds bent over the water.

Once, I floated past my bathing station and downstream. I drifted along on my back, twisting my fingers in the reeds as they floated past. I have no sense of how long I meandered, gently bobbing, before my head lightly bumped into a downed acacia. Even though the tree had almost snapped over, it still carried on with its tree business, alive and well in the Zambian evening.

I remember rising out of the water and looking around. I was surprised to sight a small pond the stream fed. I’d floated a lot farther downstream than I’d ever hiked before. Finally, I was in a place where I could actually swim.

The stream in which I bathed daily was about five feet across, with large, soft, marshy shoulders crowding into the water and reducing the actual reach of the stream to about three feet. Here, this new pond was long and narrow, about fifteen feet across, but felt to me wide, opulent. The water was clear—surprisingly so. I stroked out into the middle of the pond and dived down. It was deep. Such luxury made me love the rainy season, the time of plentiful water.

I hit bottom and guessed it to be about fifteen feet down. It was muddy and grassy. Rotating my body so I was sitting on the bottom of the lake, I remember looking up at the surface. My long hair waved in and out of my sight. The blues and whites and greens blended. I opened my mouth and large, perfectly clear and round bubbles escaped. I followed their journey as they twirled and danced, floating skyward. As soon as they hit the surface, they broke and disappeared.

I remember when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth report in 2007. It took six years to produce, and its tone was solemn, almost in awe of its own verdict. In language as clear as day, it stated to anyone who would read it: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

Act now, urged the thousands of people from across the planet who authored the report.

The we of the report was all-encompassing. It was not a message to the developing world, or to Europe, or to America. Rather, it pointedly said that this is humanity’s challenge. Either reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, or humanity begins to become undone on this planet. Climatic changes could arrive in the form of island nations submerged, a forty- to sixty-foot sea level rise, reductions in crop yields by 50 percent, mass species extinction, widespread glacier and ice cap recession.

The time for doubt has passed, stated Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, after the report was released. Slowing or even reversing the existing trends of global warming is the defining challenge of our ages. If there is no action before 2012, that’s too late.

Climatic changes surround us completely. They seep into all aspects of the human and more-than-human world, invading society, knowledge, existence, trust. Every person today is experiencing these changes, and the culminating range of those experiences is shaped and whispered and narrated and decorated with phrases like climate change, global warming, climate disruption, and it doesn’t snow like it used to.

It all seems so difficult to imagine, to surmount. But climate change’s heart is small. It beats to the pulse of escalating greenhouse gas emissions, to widespread inaction and fear, to your and my being unable to imagine a future differently.

People say they can always find me by the sound of my bracelets clanking.

I wear silver bracelets in multitudes. Some live permanently on my right arm; others come out for particular reasons or occasions, in moments of triumph or success, in times of remembrance and sadness.

My bracelets are my personal conservation effort, my re-wilding of the landscape around my wrists. They are glacial remnants of the last ice age, they are refugia, and they are now the most immediate connection I have with my mother.

I have one bracelet that is always with me, though it is not worn or displayed often. It has three large, turquoise stones lined up oval-to-oval, with eight smaller stones orbiting. On its surface are constellations of nicks and dents, evidence of late evenings and sunshine, car doors slamming, arms crossed and tucked, movements and acts. It has been worn down, like a body.

When I hold this bracelet, heavy in my hand, it is suffused with warmth. There are whispers that accompany it, spectral inhabitants outside my peripheral vision, rattling, jangling. This bracelet has history—and company. Three smaller, silver bracelets clatter around it, a chatty family wearing away over time. When I wear them together, stacked on my wrist, my arm feels lighter, more supported.

I polish them in the morning and brood over each separately, clutching and holding, examining: I perch on the edge of a rickety bathtub and inspect how the silver survived the night.

There are others, too, additional bracelets, some wide, some not, one a rope of twisted silver, another crested with green turquoise. There is only one bracelet of the bunch that is truly mine: I bought it in Alaska years ago, when I first started working with glaciers, before I wore any bracelets. It reminded me then of my mother, of her bracelets singing on her arm as she tended the vegetable gardens back on our small family farm—far, far away from the ice field I worked on in Alaska.

All the others that I wear are from my mother. Over the years she gave me specific bracelets to mark specific events in my life. It was after she died, however, that I inherited the entire row of jangles she wore continuously, day after day, until her body wore down to dust. After her death, I removed them from the plastic hospital bag, held them, polished them, mourned them, and stacked them in a row on my wrist. They cinched down, clanking and clattering and acclimating to their new landscape, their new home. Their ends bit softly into my flesh, marking vague bruises reminiscent of my mother’s purpura.

In her last years, my mother started wearing the huge turquoise bracelet every day. It became a permanent fixture on her right wrist. She wore it to access the strength and hope imbued in its soft center. She was given the bracelet as a young woman by my great-great-aunt Dot.

I have never felt the full pull of my ancestry, the need to know my blood. Until recently, I have been content with knowing my immediate family, which is small and easily countable on one hand. But of late, as I wade through the confusions of loss and death and heartbreak and that hand’s countable fingers get twisted into a rather small fist, I find my daily strength replenished by the silver clanking on my arm. I am wearing the mycelial traces of the powerful women in my family, their lives and hopes and strengths and experiences overseen by clanking half-moons of witness, small, silver bracelets passed down generation by generation.

I remember, once, in Zambia, before I found my pond, I set off walking on a dusty afternoon. I went because I wanted to feel like I was actually doing something. I was listless and tired and focused on the giant sore mysteriously growing on my thigh, and I thought about the Rick Bass book I