The above photo is a cave at Byon Glacier near Portage Glacier in southcentral Alaska/Photo taken by Adventures of Nicole. To the left is a photo of author Naomi Klouda with her granddaughter, Brooklynn Peterson.
By Naomi Klouda
You heart stopping glorious weeping glaciers are not a society to handle cruel deception. One played by Earth for its umpteenth time where crematorium and icetorium trade periodic roles in the atmosphere overlooking your toiling buttresses. Today, you soon to crunch boulder to rocks to sand to mud. Still not finished, you end life as the finest silts.
Finest silks in all the land.
During this moratorium between Earth's moon-beam cold and undoing heat, let's consider some of you individually for together you are an unidentified mob whose seats in the global auditorium leave few distinctions to those who don’t know you, you veracious vagrants, you bedazzled disappearing acts in the act of leaving us now.
We're told you are stamped neatly as snowflakes, no two glaciers alike. Your glacial serpentine curves upwards or sideways or around and round the poles you go in furrowed tracks or melded finely, sculpted by windy fingers and frozen howls.
Grand spectacles in the spectator hearts.
For are you not art?
No three alike, no four, except in the sense the ones in a Cul de Sac Glacier grouping at Denali who the godlike beings deigned you should be named for your suburban look-a-like.
Did naming you, I ask, help matters on Earth where you heedlessly tumble rumbling and thumbing like hitchhikers for a ride up or down the valleys of your youth?
No?
A glacier you shall be, by any name?
Antler Glacier, let's notice you, extinct now from your Juneau perch, transmogrified as trickling fine waterways via gravel bars and then rivulets and wakes in unnamed lakes where people ogle the remnants of your once glory there, there in the narcissistic waters reflecting only our greedy reflections, our two-legged repeating blame.
We barely knew your name before you disappeared, once distinct in the nomenclature of your kind by the bent broken tine upon your antler dissolved almost as soon as that one man saw you and gave you the name.
Antler Glacier: We mourn you.
Byron: The aquarium blue icetorium drips from the ceiling inside the cavernous sidearm of you. No one can satisfactorily explain the thrusts of glacial ice buttressed in nature's cathedral swaggering in sunken nobility on the stony mountainside's flank except by the random licking ticks of time shaping wind sculpting earth warming.
We're inside your cavernous heart, head back for the dripping arches feet planted on earth's gravel floor as you dissolve, traveling your last stop packing down the mountain to the inlet to the sea to be no more.
Byron, you exist in ruins of your former self. What have you done with your time on Earth besides carve out new rivers and lend your minerals to aquatic life and help breathe fresh oxygen and regulate Earth’s heat and allow your shoulders to be tramped enroute to Seward? Named for the poet Lord, fittingly, for you reigned your valley and mountain perch in the eras as part of a larger whole overlooking a broad land now filling – but oh! Not yet completed by your reincarnation as muddy, silty water.
We applaud you your piled stamina standing precariously in place.
Bering Glacier, you know who you are. Vitus Bering came north in 1741 aboard a ship where his log says he witnessed you sculpted “freaks of nature” went weeping bergy bits characteristic for the deformed destinations of what next?! an explorer would see if he glided past his own inlets into the mighty sea north. Then he saw you. You, dear lofty glacier. They couldn’t make out your whole, the biggest in North America as you continue to sprawl 126 miles length, delving miles into the planet. Firm footing and weight today, so monstrous your girth as to quake the earth, setting off tectonic plates as you sigh.
Those scientists interested in matters like you monitor via space cameras each burp or hiccup you satisfy in a quest forward or backward staged in the coldest of earth's environs. We would protect you, coddle you for pure future water supplies and untold nutrients seeping to the fishes in the deep blue sea.
We carry endless guilty desires as if witnessing over you can save you from dripping yourself to death.
Carroll. Dirt. Exit, Fredrick, Grewingk, Harriman. Irene, Jarvis, Knik, Lowell, Matanuska, Mendenhall, Nuka, Ogive, Portlock, Quintino Sella, Raven, Skilak, Tustumena. Tazalina, Unknown, Valerie, Waxell, Yalik. All stretch imagination to Z.
0nce named, do we know you better now?
The alphabet stretches galactically to twenty-six letters. We’ve barely time to conduct rollcall as I sit over my own dwindling candle remembering your bodacious glaciology while I try to recount your names for an unknowing bleacher-strewn audience guessing importance in the longevity and brevity of your mortality.
They hardly knew ye yet shall now.
Harvard Glacier/ Photo by Naomi Klouda
On a recent visit to Harvard Glacier outside Whittier in southcentral Alaska, the day held sweeping rains. By the time our boat made it to through College Fjord where Harvard is one of many glaciers named for universities, the sun came out. This is one of the only glaciers in Alaska that is advancing or growing. Harvard Glacier is an advancing tidewater glacier. It has been advancing at an average rate of nearly 66 feet (20 m) per year since 1931, while the adjacent Yale Glacier has retreated at approximately 164 feet (50 m) per year during the same period
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Lovely blog- I'm enjoying your ideas!
Interesting! This is a song someone could set to music. Well done.