Losing the Great One

By Nikki Stavile

To see Denali is to look a god in the face. Only one out of three visitors glimpse the great peak, and once you do, it is impossible to take your eyes off it. The Koyukon people call the mountain Deenaalee, from their verb meaning “to be long or tall.”  And so it is, a mountain in the most archetypal sense, alive in an ancient, prehistoric way, rising over twenty-thousand feet above sea level. Its craggy sides are draped in glaciers—Peters, Ruth, Harper, Muldrow and Kahiltna, the last of which is 44 miles long. Denali is not watching; it has not taken notice of you, a small mote of life on the sloping plains below, at all. What would it mean for Denali to stare back at you? It must be like locking eyes with a tiger—you, wondering if the creature will strike, if you will be too transfixed by its beauty to notice when it does.  

***

A friend of mine visited Denali National Park this past summer. Her awe at the landscapes and the mountain itself were matched by the twisting anxiety and guilt for taking a plane there. She told me that people in Alaska can see climate change happening. It is a brutal reality, a crisis here and now. Denali’s glaciers have shrunk in volume by eight percent in the past sixty years. In area, this is equivalent to nearly one thousand feet of ice calving off and melting away. The same fate has befallen Arctic summer sea ice; by 2016, the ice extent was fifty percent smaller than in 1980, and was nearly eighty percent thinner. Some models predicted that Alaska should have been ice free in the summer over ten years ago. Others claim that day will come a mere two years in the future. We know that it is happening. The question is merely when.

***

The oldest glacier ice in Alaska is estimated to be 30,000 years old. It is believed that Arctic ecosystems, young by deep time standards, originated in the Pliocene era, some 2.6 million years ago. What is it then, for a glacier to die in less than a century? Asphyxiation occurs in minutes. A bullet brings death at 1,700 miles per hour. For Denali’s glaciers, a demise this fast is equivalent to spontaneous combustion. Impossibly swift and incomprehensible. 

***

On Denali, the wind chill can bring temperatures down to -50°F, cold enough that coffee freezes as it is poured boiling hot out of the kettle. But these days, the polar vortex no longer remains over the Arctic. In February 2019, a sudden stratospheric warming event over Alaska drove the frigid air south and plunged the eastern U.S. into record lows. In Pittsburgh, the temperatures sank to -25°F, cold enough to cause frostbite on exposed skin in thirty minutes. Ice froze and refroze on the Allegheny River, the creaking noise like an old woman turning over in her sleep.

I had to go outside during those days. In a moment of curiosity, I took my gloves off. The cold pulled at my bare fingers, as if it were trying to peel the skin off and expose the bone. The next day, better bundled, the thermometer reading -17°F, I walked a mile over slick clear sidewalks, the sunlight a piercing glare. My breath crystallized in my windpipe. The hot tea in my thermos frosted over. Later, inside at my doctor’s appointment, the nurse told me the cold temperatures had stressed my heart.

I have not visited Denali, I told myself. But the mountain had visited me.

***

In December of 2019, I found myself a guest at a Caribbean destination wedding. The brides, living in Chicago, wanted a warm paradise for their special day, though the beaches are snow white. At U.S. Virgin Islands National Park, I snorkeled at Trunk Bay in turquoise waters, the color mimicking that ectoplasmic blue of glacial ice. Below me, the coral reef was near death, the coral a rusty mechanical brown, the fish picking at its remains. Reefs only thrive in shallow waters, with plenty of light, and a perfect pH balance. The rising sea levels, caused by Arctic glacial melt, are upsetting the equilibrium, chewing away at the reefs and the U.S. Virgin Islands themselves—to say nothing of the hurricanes.

Later in the week, most people in the wedding party went scuba diving. I snorkeled from the boat, and talked to the divemaster, who stood at the bow of our small craft, chain smoking.  His skin was sun beaten, his voice soft, as if it too had been smoothed by the ocean waves. He told me he wanted to stay in the islands for another year, but was hoping to have a job in Australia.

“I want to see the Great Barrier Reef before we kill it,” he said.

He was at least five years younger than me; with both of us under thirty, the warming world was the only one that we knew. I told him about a woman in her seventies I’d met who did not care about the fate of the planet, as she’d be dead before the worst of it. The divemaster cursed her and her generation’s negligence, then tossed his cigarette butts into the ocean.

***

To live in western society today, when global carbon dioxide levels top 400 ppm, is a fraught business. Those of us who acknowledge climate change exists are paralyzed by two questions: Who do we blame? And, are our own actions excusable?

Take travel for instance—is the wish to visit a beautiful ecosystem, to pay our respects before it perishes, enough to ignore the carbon emissions it will take to get there? If I were to make a pilgrimage to the Arctic, I would want to move like a glacier would move: imperceptibly slow and without fossil fuels. It can be done—this past year, two adventurers summited Denali after an 81 day journey from Utah, logging 3,530 miles by bike, 63 miles by foot and 37 miles by ski.

As the expenses for such a trip are insurmountable for me right now, I instead turn to the nature writing of the past—Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Bernd Henrich, among many others. I know that these books are fossils—the Alaska of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, for instance, no longer exists—but they are intriguing nonetheless. What is striking to me about all of these authors is how long they are able to remain in one place, both physically and mentally. They did not feel, or refused to acknowledge, that shrill modern demand to be everywhere at once. I know that climate change has been recognized since the 1950s, but all of these writers seem to have so much time. 

Not so today. I recently read Roy Scranton’s book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization. Far from being a comfort, the book is a small, bleak testament, claiming that the age we live in requires us to witness and embrace death of billions—human, animal, flora, fauna and ecosystem. We are too late. There is nothing we can do to save our planet. Instead, we must watch it, and our lives, morph into something unrecognizable.

***

I am having difficulty coming to terms with the idea that I am living in a graveyard. Maybe it is because I know that the world and its landscapes are impossibly old, but it is hard for me to imagine that they are aging in the way that humans age, where the gathering of years marks an inevitable decline. Wild spaces always seem young to me. They don’t die. They merely slip into something new. Or at least, they used to. I thought Denali, the Great One, would always be there for me. That someday I would walk along the mountain’s roots, over the quaggy tundra ground, hearing the gurgling calls of the ptarmigans. I know there is a difference between climate and weather. I know that even in a warming world, it is possible to have ice, snow, and subzero temperatures. But I worry that my body will forget what it means to be cold; that all of us will. I’ve never loved winter, yet I am now nostalgic for the winters of my childhood. Snow is a gift, I tell myself. Ice is a precious thing.

The first night of 2020, I watch the sun go down over the island of St. Thomas. It is eighty degrees, but I cannot help but think of the looming palisade of the Alaska Range, wreathed in glaciers and fog, the Arctic nights just now beginning to thin as the Northern Hemisphere turns towards the sun. Above me in the tropical sky is the dim specter of the Milky Way. The stars are as frigid as ghosts of snow.

Nikki Stavile grew up in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, but currently resides at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Hollins University, and her works have previously appeared in Coal Hill Review, Cleaver Magazine, and Artemis Journal. An avid backpacker and long distance runner, she is attempting a thru hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2020.

Banner photo: Denali National Park, by Alejandra Murphy Judy.