Glaciers by Alexis Smith Page A

a cooperative household in Seattle, with three other families, several cats, and a blind Labrador retriever named Little John. Isabel’s father was a musician who had dropped out of music school. He worked odd jobs and gave the occasional guitar lesson. Isabel’s mother stayed home with Agnes, cooking and gardening with the other women in the household. With one child,
the family might have gone on like this. Isabel was born on Valentine’s Day 1979, and within a month her parents decided to go back to where they had grown up, where her father could get a good-paying job on the North Slope.
    Isabel doesn’t actually remember, but she imagines the voyage now, twenty-eight years later.
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    The ferry from Seattle was crowded with other families, not Alaskan families but the kind of loose-minded travelers who pointed and photographed without really seeing.
    Like other great creatures before them, the glaciers were dying, and their death, so distant and unimaginable, was a spectacle not to be missed. The ferry slowed where a massive glacier met the ocean; a long, low cracking announced the rupture of ice from glacier; then came the slow lunge of the ice into the sea. This is calving —when part of a glacier breaks
free and becomes an iceberg—a kind of birth. The calving sent waves, rocking the ferry. Hands gripped railings and feet separated on gridded steel. There were shouts of appreciation and fear, but nothing like grief, not even ordinary sadness.
    North of Juneau, the boat lingered near some rocks. A voice announced that below, starboard, was the wreck of the Princess Sophia , sunk in a storm just before the armistice. A gale whipped the ship over some rocks and tore her open like a can of salmon. All aboard died in the oily, frigid water. Only the captain’s wolfhound, which made the dark, impossible swim to shore, survived. He shivered and howled among the rocks until rescuers carried him away. Only a few yards of mast were visible above water after the ship went down, and the wind and waves had driven the bodies of passengers and crew miles along the coastline.
    The travelers, pondering this tragedy, lined the rails to peer into the water. Somewhere beneath
them, they contemplated, were the disintegrating remains of a boat not so different from the one they were on. What did they expect to see in that water? Their own wavering reflections stared gravely back at them.
    Isabel’s family sat in the commissary during the viewing of the Princess Sophia , eating sandwiches with no lettuce.
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    Only a few grainy photographs remain to tell the tale. In the first, she is dressed in hand-knit blue wool. The smallest living thing, even smaller than the gulls. Her father holds her, his back against the railing, her mother and Agnes to the left. Behind them: deep dark water and stony sky. The porpoises that sometimes surfaced are not surfacing. The whales that sometimes arched smoothly over the waves are not worrying the water’s fractal plaintiveness. Other photographs are notable for what is
absent: her mother, who was the photographer, only appears at the beginning of this story, for the family portrait, then disappears.
    The steaming boat eventually harbored. There were long hours on land in a car, north, then south again, down the peninsula to Soldotna, named (some said) after the Russian word soldat for soldier. A small city on the Kenai River known for its salmon and halibut fishing, and as a gas and bathroom break on the way to Homer.
    Outside town was the homestead of her father’s grandmother, Agnes, her sister’s namesake, who had died the previous summer. Three rooms with a woodstove and running well water. A small garden with raspberries and a weedy patch of Sitka strawberries. An acre of woods. Her mother made the beds with felted-wool and down blankets. The cast-iron pans and chipped china came with the house. Her father hung a rope swing for her
sister from the tallest