I’m sitting with a McCarthy geologist high up on a mountain slope, in a meadow cleared by an avalanche run, looking out at the Copper River basin and the peaks of the Wrangell and Chugach Mountains. The Chugach, farther away, are blue-toned by distance. The Wrangells are closer and loom larger. From the right vantage point, we could also see the St. Elias range in Canada, not too many miles away. Most of the peaks are icy and craggy. Huge ice falls spill down off the peaks. Glaciers wind through them and spread thickly through the valley. To me, nothing looks or feels more stable, more immovable or immutable than mountain ranges. Where oceans and rivers teach me about flow and tidal motions, mountains always make me think of stability and what the mystics and contemplatives and yogis call “being grounded.” Permanence. Strength.
The geologist begs to differ. “This whole ecosystem,” he tells me, “is an ecosystem of disequilibrium. In fact, it’s an ecosystem of disintegration.”
He gestures out to the miles of silt-covered glaciers spread out in the valley beneath where we’re sitting. From here, they look like huge piles of gravel, static and still. But they’re not. “They’re moving,” he reminds me.
A glacier is, by definition, a moving mass of ice. If we were patient enough to sit here all day, we might actually be able to see them move. The glaciers we’re looking down on move forward by more than a foot each day. True, from this vantage point, high up in the mountains, it’d be nearly impossible to notice such a small change. But down on the glaciers’ surfaces, glaciologists track and measure the movement carefully, and down there, it’s noticeable.
“Even the mountains are moving,” the geologist explains. “These glaciers that flow down through the mountains are slowly but steadily moving the mountains along with them.” He points out the huge boulders—called glacial erratics—that are scattered along the mountain slopes and near the edge of the glaciers and tells me they were carried by the glacier from higher up the mountain and deposited down lower as the glacier receded. And the silt that covers the glaciers is rock dust from the glacier’s gradual mining process as it passes along the mountain’s rocky slopes. It’s evidence that the mountains are being ground up and carried away. They’re being broken. They’re falling apart.
“This space that looks stable and solid, it isn’t,” he tells me, leaning in closer for emphasis. “Everything living here is in a situation of instability.”
We both sit for a moment. It’s warm up here on the sunny, south-facing slope on which we’re perched. Thankfully, it’s a breezy day so the mosquitoes are held at bay. Scrub willow, cow parsnip, fire weed and horsetail, a prehistoric plant that is reputedly the oldest plant on earth, rustle in the breeze. The air is scattered with bird song.
“And when you go deeper,” he says, “the mountains are actually formed by disintegration. These mountains are, in large part, formed by fossils—by the petrified bodies of dinosaurs and other creatures that used to be alive.”
He unzips his backpack and takes a drink from the glass jar he totes his water around in. “These mountains are full of death,” he says, then swallows some more water.
At his home, his window sills are lined with the fossils he and his wife and daughters have found while hiking up on these slopes and down in the valley. Fossils with the fine, clear markings of spiraled sea shells—an undeniable reminder of the totally different ecosystem and landscape and lives that used to inhabit this valley.
And then he says the one, simple truth I’ve spent the last few years—in the Arctic and in the desert, in my relationships and in my faith, in my despair and my hopefulness—trying to accept:
“Everything is in flux. You can’t count on anything to stay the same.”
