(un)frozen: THE THREE STATES THAT MATTER

by Tamara Enz

The following piece is an excerpt from an upcoming autobiographical nonfiction book about seeing life through the lens of the natural world.

At the north end of North America, where the Arctic Ocean meets the Alaskan tundra, lies an island 4 miles long, 30 meters wide, and 3 meters at the highest point. Hapless seabirds called black guillemots colonized the island 50 years ago, adopting abandoned 1950s military refuse—sheets of plywood and 55-gallon drums—for nest sites. As the summer pack ice retreats farther offshore, it takes along its life-giving nutrients and the fish they support. Without that food source within flight distance from the nests, the colony also fades, as birds can no longer feed their chicks.

When I arrived on Cooper Island in May 2000, Boss Man had been doing seabird research there for 25 years. He stumbled upon this black guillemot colony in the early 1970s while doing government bird surveys related to fossil fuel exploration and development. This colony was unique because guillemots weren’t known to nest this far north, and the western Alaskan population never leaves the Arctic. The birds move into the Bering Strait for winter and continue feeding along the ice pack edge. These guillemots are entirely reliant on annual cycles of Arctic Ocean ice formation and movement. Boss Man, the determined force behind these years of research, hired me, an itinerant biologist, to follow the guillemots through the summer season. I was alone on Cooper Island for three months.

1 June 2000

It is 0º C and 05:30 in the morning. Far above the Arctic Circle, the sun rose for the last time this spring on the 10th of May. Awake since midnight, I have consumed all the hot liquids I can tolerate and am considering switching to scotch. So what if it’s early morning?

2 July

When I sat up in my sleeping bag this morning and looked out, I could see an ice push on the north shore, a low wall forming on the horizon. Looking back, you might expect living alone on an Arctic Ocean island would heighten senses and turn me into a light sleeper. Hearing a boat approaching the island or a bear nearing the tent would be a good survival skill, after all. Instead, I awoke to find the Arctic Ocean had moved thousands of tons of ice to within a hundred meters of where I slept soundly.

I jumped up and went to check it out. Massive ice slabs one, two meters thick were pushed ten meters or more up the beach, piled on top of each other, but it was quiet and there was no discernible movement on the beach or among the slabs.

Returning to camp for my camera, I decided I must eat. As I reheated dinner leftovers (my usual breakfast), I thought I could see the ice changing—but it was nearly imperceptible, and despite the size of the blocks, there was nearly no sound. With nothing but the sky against which to measure the change, there was no perspective at all. What I did see was mostly in slow motion. Each block, lifted by the pressure of ice behind it, reached the angle of repose. Then it fell, slid, tumbled down to the beach, slowly, almost lingering on the slabs below, resisting gravity. Occasionally, a block high on the pile was shoved quickly from behind and nearly launched from height, slamming into the sand.

When I returned to the ice wall fifteen minutes later, a new pile of slabs had crashed onto the spot where I had been standing, obliterating my tracks. What I thought was stable and solid had shifted, collided, collapsed without me seeing or hearing it. One of those incidents of fate—if I hadn’t stopped to eat, I would have been climbing all over that ice taking photos, as I had a hundred times before and since on boulders. A temporary lull in the force behind the push made the ice seem stable, unmoving, inviting me to explore. The subtle subtext of gaslighting objectified, each block another manipulation, each slight repositioning destabilizing me. If I had been among those blocks when they started moving again, I would not have gotten out. Dropped between slabs and crushed or tumbled off one side into the ocean or the other side onto the beach from height.

I have this, perhaps unfounded, expectation that I will live to be 96, and I’ve been in many situations where the clear thought I’m not going to die today has formed in my mind. The converse of It’s a good day to die, my thought brought a measure of trust. Whatever happened, I would live through it. So it was again today.

Since then, the spot I first went to seems most active. The wall of slabs, probably eight meters high, runs the length of North Beach and is impressively still building—jumbled blocks a meter thick and 2 or 3 meters square mixed with sheets of thinner ice in larger slabs. In blues of a vivid, ethereal quality and greens of the cold ocean, ice monoliths stand for 10 minutes before spinning, sliding, crumbling under the unforgiving pressure behind them.

I spent a long time standing on the edge watching cracks form in an upright slab. Slowly they spread and grew, large chunks slid or tumbled into the water, the splash moving across the open pool. Some blocks fell onto others, crumbling into a million pieces. The wind takes most of the sound away, but when I stood close enough, I could hear the pieces falling. The more solid ice doesn’t sound real; the looser, granular ice sounds like melting snow. Now and then a massive rumble broke free when two slabs collided, or a big piece fell hard onto another. I wonder how far it will move.

My tracks from earlier this morning have been plowed away. In some places the wall is 10 to 15 meters high. I can’t see the ocean past the wall. The two old 500-gallon fuel tanks to the east have been moved. One was pushed about 2 meters deeper into the sand. The other slid over the surface probably 3 meters; I can’t even tell its original position anymore. The guillemots who made their homes underneath those tanks… if they were in there, there is no way out now. The wall is the length of the island, and with the sun striking from the northeast, it fairly glows against the sand and dark, cloudy sky, an immobile, impenetrable fortress against the sea.

What force can move ice like this? Thousands of tons of ice driven over and into the sand with no apparent effort. There is no tide to speak of, no storm surge. The wind is strong but from the wrong direction today, and it doesn’t seem enough to do this. Maybe enough to pile up on the windward side of the bay, but not to pile-drive it 15 or more meters from the water’s edge into the sand banks. Truly awesome power.

Yet again, I feel as insignificant as I am in this wild world. No matter what strength or power I think I have, it’s brushed aside seeing something this awe-inspiring. I know that I can only stand against so much force before I give way, whether it’s an ice push or the pressure to be something I'm not. I feel like I was blindsided by the conspiring forces of life, the expectations for women—get a job, settle down, have kids—and my choices to settle with and for a man that came together to pile-drive me headfirst into the sand. If it was the ice blocks that took me out, so be it. Natural selection at work. But to see the travel, adventure, and unconfined life that I want as insignificant, to leave my dreams unnoticed? No. No, that will take many more and bigger blocks.

4 July

Today I feel like I am on an island in the Arctic Ocean. The temperature is relatively mild, but the fog is thick, the air heavy, damp, cold, and raw. The ice wall is the limit of my world to the north. The fog filled in the lagoon and the east and west ends of the island.

I keep thinking the weather will get better, but it doesn’t. Working through the night, I sleep during the mild afternoons and hardly see them. When the wind stops, life is good, even when the temperature is low and it’s cloudy. The wind switched around to the northeast and the air coming off the pack ice is wintery. Any air movement, even a light wind, is debilitating as it draws heat from my body even through the multiple insulating clothing layers.

The massive pile of ice debris once made up a flat, even surface across miles of open water. Flat and even, of course, in the mind’s eye, and at a distance. Now this enormous sheet has splintered into millions of crystalline shards. As the days wear on since its arrival on the north shore, I continue to be impressed by the quantities of sand and gravel that it moved, the short-lived scars gouged in the beach, and the ocean sounds it displaced. After the day of rain, the blocks are somewhat diminished, and after the southwest wind, they are darkened by the flying sand and grit embedded in their windward surfaces. Still, they line the island like a row of guards watching, blocking the view beyond their shoulders. When I climb up on top of them, I can see the area of open ocean is greater, and floes drift by at a distance. Long-tailed ducks raft, gathering in large flocks on the floe edges. Guillemots and loons dive among the blocks and at the edge of the push. Terns hover and dive, hover and dive.

Through all of this, the thing I see repeatedly is that mysterious, ethereal color. The color I named the aquamarine of the imagination. Surely, there is no real color like this. It is so intense it almost glows, and when seen in deep crevices, blocks in a pile with a deep hole and light between them, it fairly jumps out of the blocks and into the air around you. This indescribable color against a sky so gray it is almost violet, the bruised color of dark clouds on bright sunless days. The time and motion of these colors and textures make for an incredible, in the true sense of the word not credible, waking dream.

Tamara Enz writes to connect people to the wild world.