Dating A Glacier

By Karen Ackland

Although several glaciers remain in the park, their surface area is shrinking, and scientists estimate they will be gone entirely by the year 2030.

Elizabeth glances around at her fellow vacationers listening to the park ranger. Her husband is nodding thoughtfully. The bald man to her left mutters about the destruction of natural resources by corporate interests and the woman in front of him worries how the glacier got so dirty. Only Elizabeth is gratified to hear of the glacier’s demise. Years ago she’d dated a glacier, an experience that left her susceptible to cold.

Glacial ice advances, then retreats.

Her glacier was handsome in a rugged, big boned way. His presence loomed. In his company she felt swept along, proud to be the woman by his side. She longed to crawl beneath his pale blue skin and set up housekeeping, but he warned her off. “Don’t expect me to stick around,” he insisted, as if citing a fact of nature. “I’m not the type.” Although publicly she voiced concern about holes in the ozone, in private she thought a little global warming would prove a good thing.

The glacier’s friends and former lovers urged restraint. “We adore him, of course,” these warnings invariably began. “But he’ll never commit.”

But others, watching her accompany the glacier month after month, complemented her longevity. Elizabeth grew confident she could cohabitate with glaciers.

Once a mass of compressed ice reaches a critical thickness, it begins to deform and move.

Elizabeth didn’t notice the glacier slipping away, until one morning she woke and found him gone. Left alone, Elizabeth had trouble getting warm. She wore turtleneck sweaters, summer and winter, and kept the heat turned high. A brittle iciness marked her conversations along with a general numbness in her extremities.

We’re left to admire the past work of glaciers in carving the mountains we see around us.

Eventually, she turned her back on geology. Only then did she meet her husband, a man who enjoys the warmth of the marriage bed.

Next year Elizabeth plans to insist on a tropical vacation. These sculpted mountains are too beautiful. Listening as the ranger describes cirques and hanging valleys, it takes all of her will power, and the hand of her youngest child, to keep from running toward the distant moraine. “Do you remember me?” she wants to cry. “Do you still remember me?”