Fairweather Gods

Ihave been a speck under a glacier’s foot—and only a moment later, a god—and the next moment, a mouse between a god’s paws. But my sister? Although mostly hidden to me, her journey dwarfs mine like my cloth-shelled kayak is dwarfed by the submersible Alvin, which fell farther than light can, into a never-before-seen world of chemosynthetic life, changing our understanding of our origins and ourselves. Diving into a new world, do you hope to encounter it fully, let it rub along every pore? But does human nature encase us like an astronaut’s suit, compelling us to see everything through some bubble of home? Glacier Bay, Alaska: two paddles and one cloth-and-wood double kayak rest by the water. My husband and I are the only humans, horizon to horizon. How foolish. I had pictured beaming from the bubble of my kayak as nature frolicked around me. I hadn’t imagined combat-crawling, legs dragging behind me, sun-warmed stones bruising my breasts, urging myself: lower. I hadn’t wondered if a naked cobble beach could provide cover. Pierre crawls ahead up the long, bare slope toward looming Mcbride Glacier. My foot, in a too-big rubber boot, slips, sending a stone skittering. Pierre pivots his head, cheek to stone, and frowns, a finger across his lips. When we’ve belly-wormed to the crest, I wriggle up beside him. Here my fingers are surprised by sand, crumbly and warm. We can rise up on our elbows into a river of ice-edged wind and a view of water and glacier. Or we can sink down into a nearsighted world measured in inches, silent, redolent of sun-baked dirt. Out of nowhere, buzzing blares into our faces. An enormous insect side-lurches, slip-streams. A tiny helicopter in ultra-fuzzy fur strikes the soil beside my face. A solitary bumblebee. The biggest I have ever seen: thumb-sized, radish-sized. Legs churning the soft sand, she bumbles into a hole. Stone quiet descends again. How the heck could a bee survive here? Upper Glacier Bay is a landscape inching up out of the ocean, still rebounding from the weight of skyscraper-thick ice that stripped this world down to bedrock, then ironed the bedrock smooth. An epoch as