Non-Fiction
Glacial Erratic / Stephanie Krzywonos
Josefina Barrera Mascarenas with her daughters Flora Yolanda and Amanda in Medio Camino near Giffin Cantua Ranch, California, January 1964.
Lake
Mount Pisgah, a sand dune, watches Lake Michigan, a wide freshwater sea. I ascend the dune’s crest through a forest of beeches, maples, and oaks on a zig-zagging wooden staircase. Near the top, trees yield to wispy shrubs, pastel grasses, and a dayblue sky. An observation deck tops the summit; hands and wind have smoothed its wooden railings. I try to glimpse the other shore. I can't.
On the foredune, near the level beach below, spiky marram grass grows in patches; its underground rhizomatic web buffers the mountain of sand from water. Below the railing, the dune is a bare basin, a ‘blowout.’ Naked sand, the color of light brown sugar, slides towards the water. Too much traffic has killed the vegetation and now wind eats this dune. A neighboring beach designates dunes for human play; hills of finely ground quartz cushion running feet and tumbling bodies perfectly. But Mount Pisgah is off-limits to people. Instead, sand reed grass moves into the basin like platelets towards a wound. It was here, as a girl, that I learned from a sun-bleached placard how glaciers formed the lake.
*
The pictures on the placard only show the pale back of the glacier, its face burrowed into the ground, gouging the Earth. I know the lake is deep, but I don’t know what glaciers are. My dad explains the ice age, that all this was frozen, that glaciers are just ice. I stare at the shimmering water and try to fathom a heavy sky-sized mountain of ice, something blue and white and cold, but all I can imagine are sledding hills and remnants of plowed snow in parking lots that last long into Michigan’s spring. I ask if the glaciers are all gone and dad tells me glaciers live on mountains and congregate at the top and bottom of the Earth. That this lake and these dunes are a massive footprint the glacier left on the land as it headed north.
*
Glaciers, by definition, are always moving. In their abandoned homes, glacial ghosts are everywhere. During their wanderings north and south, they scratch rocks. Their graffiti—long striations. They mold hills, scatter ponds and lakes, carve fjords and valleys as they seek suitable habitats. Glaciers are migrants and great collectors of things, picking up earth, even slabs of bedrock, as they rove elsewhere. Their piles of debris—sand, gravel, boulders—are called moraines. Long Island, in New York, is a moraine.
Glaciers also leave subtle traces. A pebble, rock, or large boulder whose color, shape, and substance don’t resemble its surroundings—a non-native—is likely a glacial erratic. Erratics take their name from the Latin word errare, which means to wander, roam, ramble. Errare also means to make a mistake. Through erratics, glaciers speak. They say: You are entwined with us. They ask: Who is a glacier? And what or who is an erratic?
*
Flora Yolanda, my mother, is from California. She met my father, Stephen, a Pennsylvanian, at a pub in England, where they were stationed with the U.S. Air Force. I was raised in Michigan because my mother’s brother Ed married Perla, who lived in the same makeshift neighborhood for migrant farmworkers. One evening, in the fertile valley between California’s coast and mountains, my Tia Perla’s sister Gloria visited a new bar with her girlfriends and met Grimaldo, who was visiting from Michigan, a lush peninsula. They married and pulled Ed and Perla along to Michigan with them. After a scouting trip, as my family drove back to Pennsylvania to pack our things and move to a part of Michigan colonized by the Dutch, I kept scratching my neck—chickenpox. Moving, I thought, was an error.
*
I leave my classroom to use the bathroom and pause in an empty hallway to inspect my class’s artwork. I’m seven. We were each given an outline of a face and instructed to “color ourselves in.” I am one of three kids who scribbled dark hair and dark eyes. We are brown, surrounded by blues, hazels, and blondes. I sense difference, and the difference makes my stomach hurt.
My mom volunteers to translate English to Spanish for my schoolmates’ parents; she helps their relatives fill out paperwork and find jobs besides farm labor. Hearing Spanish spoken embarrasses me.
Sometimes, when I leave the house for school in the mornings, I find the gift of a five-gallon bucket of whatever is ripe sitting on our doorstep. My favorites are buckets of blueberries, each little fruit a dusty dark blue. Once, I plunged my whole arm in. It came out sticky and coated in red juice.
*
Another teenager asks me if my family came here legally. The question baffles me. My grandparents, Josefina and Eduardo, came to the United States because the U.S. Government recruited Mexicans to work on American farms in the 1950s, offering green cards and sending buses to bring them. They migrated to the United States with their two young sons in a pick-up truck, which they lived in for a week, parked under an old and wide tree. My grandfather drove to work every day, leaving my grandmother and young uncles in the tree’s care. When the truck broke, he walked, departingbefore sunrise and returning after sunset. Eventually, they moved into a sod house in a settlement called Medio Camino—‘Half Way’—by its residents.
*
I’m twenty. After a crushing meeting with a psychiatrist—who assures me I’m not demon-possessed, but pills will help—I drive to the lake, as usual, for solace. The beach is empty except for a driftwood stump, smooth and naked of bark, upright and planted on the border between water and shore, its roots reaching into the sand. I stand on the stump, staring at the soothing horizon, where the lake mingles with the sky.
The glacier is gone, but it has marked me. I don’t know this yet, but in eight years I will follow glaciers geographically and they will carry me deep into the past.
Glacial Till
We live during Earth’s fifth major ice age, the Quaternary System, which began 2.6 million years ago, the same time the Pleistocene began. An ‘ice age’ means glaciers exist somewhere on Earth. Epochs without glaciers—when Earth’s poles and tops of mountains are ice-free—are called greenhouse periods.
Ice ages experience pulses of warmer and cooler weather. During cold pulses, ‘glacial periods,’ glaciers bloom. The last glacial period began about 115,000 years ago and was one of about twenty glacial periods that occurred during the Pleistocene. We live in a warm pulse, when glaciers wilt, an ‘interglacial period’ called the Holocene, which began almost 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. Graphs of glacial-interglacial cycles depicting temperature, carbon dioxide, and methane shifts look like a heartbeat.
*
During the Pleistocene, glaciers perched in Arizona’s mountains; runoff from their vigorous glacial streams created canyons. Alluvial fans of debris that spilled from canyons’ mouths are still there, in what is now the desert. Between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago, the glacial period ended and the last of the Arizonan glaciers died. The region dried and the modern Sonoran Desert ecosystem was born.
*
During a visit to Arizona, my mother wept at her mother Josefina’s kitchen table because she could not get pregnant after three years of trying. My grandmother’s neighbor, a traditional healer, walked by and heard my mother’s voice breaking through her tears. The neighbor walked into the Sonoran Desert, among the long-rooted mesquite trees and saguaro cacti, to gather plants for tea. A few weeks after my mother drank it, she became pregnant with me.
When I was three, I remember standing under the cutting board that pulled out from the counter in Granma Josie’s kitchen. As she rolled round tortillas above my head, white flour floated to the ground around me like snow.
Granma Josie grew up as the daughter of a single mother, a baker of large chewy tortillas in the border town of Nogales in the Sonoran Desert. She told me when she was born she had blisters on her cheeks from her mother’s pregnant belly being too close to a hot stove.
In my oldest family story from Mexico, two ancestors met by the River Sonora. She washed clothes in the river; he passed by on a horse and noticed her. I picture her in a simple dress and her thick black rope of hair tucked under her hat. Love was instant and she married him in his village that evening.
*
In 2008, archaeologist Jason De Leon began documenting debris the estimated half a million Latin American migrants per year leave in the Sonoran Desert on their journeys to the United States. Sun-bleached backpacks, food wrappers, water bottles, toilet paper, ragged t-shirts, empty cortisone cream tubes, packets of refried beans, cigarettes, and sun-dried children’s shoes dot the sand. Most of what he finds is considered trash. To Jason, the scraps are important, artifacts of a larger story. Sometimes he finds bones and human remains. Jason hopes more people will see this desert as sacred ground and the people who cross it as more than statistics.
Trough
14,000 years ago, as the planet re-warmed, the glacier that formed Lake Michigan—a lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet—began retreating, ‘ablating,’ northwards. The Laurentide covered most of northern North America for tens of thousands of years. For a long time, experts believed the Laurentide’s northward retreat opened an ice-free path—and humans arrived in North America. A closer inspection of glacial erratics revealed experts were wrong. The morphological dance of the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets caused ice-free corridors to repeatedly open and close, but no easy ice-free path correlates with when we believed humans first arrived in North America from Asia. Either humans came much earlier than originally thought or humans came via the coast or over ice. We don’t know. But we know humans and glaciers were migrating in the same place around the same time.
*
On an evening flight from Seattle to Anchorage, on my way to a job I took so I could see glaciers, the sun lowers itself into the Pacific as the plane departs. The further north we travel, the brighter the evening becomes. The plane traces the land’s curve along the Gulf of Alaska, the route humans took to enter North America. From the plane’s port-side oval window, I see them. I’m shocked by how many there are. The glacier-lined coast resembles cilia. The ice, like veins, bleeds into the sea.
*
My friend Jacob and I walk to the foot of Exit Glacier, a toe of the Harding Ice Field, a remnant of the Pleistocene. We picnic with wine, cheese, and bread from a grocery store. Giddily, we eat chunks of ice broken from the glacier. The ice crackles as it dissolves in our mouths; we inhale the released ancient air. Jacob scoops nearby sand and lets it fall through his fingers, over and over.
*
On a mute foggy morning, a few companions and I kayak through an Alaskan fjord to watch Aialik Glacier calve. We paddle through the fjord’s nave, leaving mossy trees behind for rock walls, soon inhabited by ice. The air chills. Shriveled ice floats past. Shy harbor seals stretch their necks and peer at us from icebergs, scanning for threat. Aialik appears, a soft cliff, bone white and faint cerulean blue. I stop paddling and undulate in the water, eating bread, and waiting for the crash of ice falling into the sea.
The elders of the Alutiiq people, indigenous to this place, say Aialik means something like ‘dangerous, fearful, surprising place to be respected and revered.’ One elder says Aialik can mean something akin to: ‘OH MY GOD!’ Other Alaskan elders say glaciers are willful, capricious, easily excited by human intemperance, but placated by quick-witted human responses. If people are not deferential in their presence, glaciers are known to swallow people. They also respond to human insolence with deluges of water.
Aialik’s roar echoes as it self-amputates into the bay. Through my body, through the kayak’s thin hull, I feel the bay respond with heavy rolls of water. The walls of the fjord quiet. It seems irreverent to keep eating. Something immense is present here besides the glacier.
*
The lodge I work at in Alaska has a sauna, a hewn log cabin, on the banks of the Kenai, a glacially-fed river. Its steaming, fragrant wood stove illuminates our faces in the dark. When we get too hot, we ease into the frigid river, careful to evade the current’s grip. The sharp temperature change awakens our skin.
The river’s water is a vivid and surprising creamy blue. My co-worker says glaciers grind the land and rocks beneath them into a powder so fine the particles suspend in water instead of sinking. ‘Rock flour,’ reflecting sunlight, creates bright blue water. When she tells me it’s possible to work in Antarctica, where most of the glaciers live, I know where I'm migrating next.
Desert
At their maximum, Pleistocene glaciers covered one-third of Earth’s surface. Now, they cover only ten to eleven percent. The ‘Snowball Earth’ theory says glaciers covered the entire planet (or left a band of slush at the equator) during three separate epochs. Glaciers can belong anywhere.
The third Snowball Earth ended 635 million years ago, a time before our oldest animal fossils, and the second Snowball Earth ended about 710 million years ago. Each lasted about 10 million years. But the first time Earth glistened as a white ball happened 2.2 billion years ago—half the age of the planet. Scientists link this epoch to the oxygenation of our atmosphere—the creation of the air we breathe. Some believe all three Snowball Earths paved the way for the Cambrian Explosion, the emergence of complex multicellular organisms. Before, the only life forms were protists, organisms that are neither animals nor plants nor fungi.
*
Through a window, on my fifth migration to Antarctica, I watch chunks of glaciers laze their way north through the sea. Then open water disappears. Beyond firm cliffs of ice, snow unfurls as far as I can see, and my world becomes an orb of ice. The only visible landmasses are nunatuks—the tops of ‘lonely mountains’—emerging from ice. The sun watches glaciers as they slide around these elderly peaks.
*
It’s June, winter in Antarctica. I’m in the dark in the desert with the glaciers. After the sun abandoned us in April, the sky rippled towards complete darkness. When civil twilight disappeared in May, my world—everyone and everything—ended at the edge of the research station’s floodlights. Tonight, I'm rummaging through a Mormon-run genealogy website exploring my father’s family tree. I trace roots for thousands of years. Born in Hungary, died in New Jersey. Born in France, died in Quebec. Born in first-century Jerusalem, died in Britain. Ancient names read like obscure flora: Cerwyn, Dunvallo, Numa, Withemir, Boudicca, Waldrada. Penardin of the Druids. Vandalar of the Osogoths. Laodice of Syria. Born in China. Born in Norway. Born in Sparta. Accuracy aside, the net of their names, their years, and their places cradles me in the dark.
In a few days, my mom will receive her 23andMe DNA test results. Blended with our known Yaqui and Portuguese ancestry is Ashkenazi Jew. I have never contemplated Jewish people seeking a new life in Mexico.
Mountain
Five glaciers remain in Mexico. Three of them—Pecho (‘chest’), Panza (‘belly’), and Suroriental—live on Iztaccíhuatl, ‘sleeping woman,’ a dormant volcano, and Mexico's third-highest peak. The other two—El Norte and Noroeste—live on Citlaltépetl, ‘star mountain,’ also a volcano, Mexico’s tallest mountain, and the continent’s third-highest peak.
On air-conditioned buses, I watch Iztaccíhuatl and Citlaltépetl in the distance. Their ice-tipped peaks, the color of bright white clouds, look stark against the sky. Even though these Mexican glaciers are surrounded by recent snowfall, they are starving. The air is too warm for them to sufficiently feed. The surrounding arid landscape offers no escape route.
Hugo Delgado, a glaciologist who has spent his career studying Mexico’s glaciers, estimates all five will be extinct by 2050. Empty volcanic slopes and stones “scattered like bones” will be all that's left.
*
On this trip to Mexico—my first as an adult—I didn’t journey to see glaciers, but to visit different migrants, the eastern monarch butterflies in their winter home.
Around 20,000 years ago, the Laurentide reached its maximum southern point. As it retreated, the butterflies expanded their migration northwards, as far as Canada. No individual monarch makes the round-trip journey; it takes at least three generations to complete the migration. The butterflies know how to get to a forest in Mexico they haven’t been to. How long the butterflies have been migrating is a mystery.
My partner Nathan and I are in Mariposa Monarca Santuario El Rosario, ascending a small mountain forested with Oyamel pines with our guide, an old woman with a chestnut horse named Estrella. My paltry Spanish embarrasses me, but we manage to communicate. Dead butterflies and parts of dead butterflies sprinkle the path like petals. As we climb higher, the clusters of rusty scales on conifers grow thicker. Orange wings bloom overhead. The movement of butterflybodies sounds like soft rain. It feels right to be here.
Not all monarchs migrate, but nearly all these butterflies will disperse northward. Their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be the ones to seek refuge in these trees. Some will be born in Canada, north of Lake Superior, a glacial footprint deeper than Lake Michigan. As they pump their wings, flying thousands of miles to this forest, the migrants will make an erratic turn, navigating around a mountain that no longer exists. Some scientists believe the mountain may have been one of the highest in North America, now gone for millennia. All that’s left of the mountain is the butterflies’ flight path. Memory, deep in the flesh, can outlast even a stone.