Girl in Ice(8)

People still hunted and fished to survive: caribou, musk ox, seal, polar bear, and narwhal. These hunters were so skilled they could read the attributes of polar bears, or “ice bears,” by their footprints: not only their age—but whether they were starving. The culture teemed with myths, but as usual, the language told me more than any single fact. It even betrayed a wry sense of humor: the island with a name that meant “not enough moss to wipe your ass with”; the first known term for missionaries: “he who talks too much.” Taimagiakaman referred to the “great necessity”: that of having to take the lives of animals to feed people and their dogs. The word in Inuktun for climate change translates to “a friend acting strangely”—what a personal and beautiful way of describing a relationship to the natural world.

The legendary plethora of words for snow is no myth, but the number of words for ice—topping 170—taught me more. There were words for dense, old ice: ice that was safe for a hunter and his sled and dogs to cross; words for grease ice, water in its earliest stage of freezing, which won’t support a person but will allow seals to break through and breathe. Dozens of other terms specified various ice floes by shape and size, even by movement: were they rolling, swept along by the current, or stuck among their brethren? There was even a word for a crack in the ice opening and closing due to ocean movement beneath. Perhaps inspired by the necessity of knowing what kind of ice you were dealing with, there were a dozen words for fear, because the reality was that even seasoned hunters could die in a flash if the ice gave way and were often found frozen clinging to the edge of a floe. Among these flavors of fear were words for being at sea in a puny sealskin kayak as a storm barrels down, the fear of calamitous violence as when facing death, a fear so powerful one cannot move to defend oneself, and a fear of someone who must be avoided at all costs. I could certainly have added a few varieties of my own.

The words that stopped me cold, though, were nuna unganartoq, which meant “an overwhelming affection and spiritual attachment to the land and nature.” Something as simple as the warm feel of a rock face baking in the sun, to an emotion as ineffable as the sense of infinity when witnessing a heart-stoppingly beautiful vista. A sensation of being no less a part of the land than a stone, a sprig of moss, or driftwood plying the waves. Nuna unganartoq was something I had never experienced, but I knew where I’d seen those words before.

It was how Andy had signed all his letters.

When we were eight or so, we had a fight and I ran to our mother to tell her how much I hated my brother. She said, Well, he doesn’t hate you. She pulled a box of photos down from a high closet shelf, dug around until she found what she was looking for: an in vitro scan of the two of us curled up against each other. I was busy saying, Yeah, so what, until she pointed out that, even in the womb, his arm was draped protectively around my shoulders.

But in life—in grown-up, real life—who protected whom?



* * *



THE LAST TIME I’d seen him, just over a year ago, I’d been working late correcting summer-session papers in my office, my green banker’s lamp the lone light on campus at nine at night. In a swirl of whiskey-smelling air—no knock—Andy barreled in, plopping down across from me in the chair my students used to dispute their grades or garner advice, usually some thinly veiled version of I want to change majors.

Even drunk and distraught, Andy was so much more handsome than I would ever be beautiful. Burly and strong, but with an athlete’s grace. A solid six-footer, he had hair that grew wavy and thick, a rich auburn; mine was thin and fine like wispy smoke. His features were well defined, expressive: full lips, aquiline nose, deep-set, haunted eyes; without makeup I was washed-out, thin-lipped, snub-nosed, and tiny-eyed. So why did I feel like I was looking at myself when I looked at him? Why, after spending the day together, was some part of me taken aback to glance in the mirror and see myself? At the time, I didn’t understand it. The sensation felt oddly out-of-body, disturbing and sad at the same time. Was it because he—at his best—possessed so many of the qualities I could only dream of?

That evening he wore baggy khaki shorts I recognized from high school days and a filthy cotton madras shirt, one sleeve partially torn off. His skin glistened, as if he’d been running. The tang of Andy sweat, Andy panic, filled the tight space. Eyes red-rimmed and wild, he perched on the edge of the seat, leaning so far toward me he had to rest his elbows on my desk for balance. No air remained in the room.

He said, “Am I interrupting anything?”

It was the manic Andy who’d come to see me that night; it put me on guard and exhausted me. “What’s up?”

“You know it’s over, right?”

I exhaled and began to pack up my papers for the night.

“We’ve passed the tipping point. It’s already too late.”

“Please, Andy—” It’s not that I wasn’t freaked out about what was happening to the planet—I was—but I’d heard this rant countless times, and there was no stopping him once he started.

“It doesn’t matter anymore, Val. How much I talk about it, how much I lecture to my students, how much research I do, how many papers I write, presentations I give, how much I yammer on social media. It doesn’t matter how much anyone talks about it. Game over. It’s useless. This world, this beautiful world…” He dropped his head as if its weight was too much to bear. Stared at the rug, until he lifted his gaze, refocusing his unblinking eyes on mine. “Millions upon millions of animals are going to die, understand? Are dying. Each of them, big and small, in agony. Slow deaths. Starvation, thirst, disease, heat stroke. It’s happening now. Musk oxen breaking their legs crashing through melting permafrost. Polar bears drowning as they swim for sea ice that’s no longer there. Already ptarmigan eggshells are so thin they burst before the chick is ready to be born. Countless sea creatures—whales, shark, dolphins, octopuses, turtles, fish by the billions, Val—they’ll wash up on beaches, dead. Thousand-year floods will be yearly, catastrophic. Hurricanes like no one’s ever seen before, can even comprehend. And for us?” He shook his head. “Climate refugees in the millions, maybe billions. Water wars. Worldwide crop failure, starvation, more pandemics. Oceans will be acidic cesspools….” He looked up at me imploringly, as if there were anything his one-minute-older sister could conjure to comfort him. Finding nothing, he leaned back in the chair and gazed out my window with an expression of vague disgust. Slipped a can of Red Bull from his roomy shorts pocket and gunned it down with a shaky hand, forehead awash in sweat. “You want to know the real reason it’s hopeless?”