The route we are walking and the way we are walking it reminds me: there are no perfect circles. We're deviants and eccentrics, but so is the universe we inhabit, and I'm beginning to think that's where we've learned our odd ways. In the early 1900s the Yugoslavian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch updated an old astronomical theory of climate change that linked the onset of an ice age to the periodic changes in Earth's orbit around the sun. Precession, obliquity, and eccentricity: these are what's known as the Milankovitch cycles. Earth is a blue bulb impaled on a stick wobbling around in the galaxy. It spins in the universe en brochette, and every hundred thousand years or so, it corrects its orbit to one that resembles a halo. All this, astronomers say, directly affects our weather, making it hotter or cooling us down.
The tilt of Earth's axis of rotation is “deranged,” they say. I'd call it being a victim of seduction. The electromagnetic-field lines shooting from Earth's hot core lure the axial tilt into aberrant behavior: the straight spine gets bent and the tilt wavers. Ironically, the most deviant behavior—when the rotation swings most widely—brings on climate stability. Winters might be colder, but the summers are hot, so there's more snow and ice melt and no new ice caps can form.
The smaller the degree of tilt, the more extreme the weather. Winters colder, and summers are mild. High-altitude snow-fields don't melt, and glaciers grow big. “Sounds like politics,” Gary complains.
Weather problems start even farther out in space. Earth throws itself at the sun, then makes a hasty retreat. When Earth's orbit around the sun is most constricted, Earth heats up (fewer solar particles to get in the way). But farther out in space, star birth induces the spread of ice, whereas a calm universe sends climate toward warming. Crossing through the spiral arm of a galaxy can stir up cosmic-ray flux, resulting in global cloud cover. Temperatures drop and ice ages begin.
Gary trots ahead and I lag behind. In the distance a two-armed glacier embraces a purple mountain, one white arm on each side. Is the clasp tightening? I wonder. No, it couldn't be. Somewhere in the world, tailpipe emissions are added to the harm from smokestacks, and these swim air and water currents, so that even if we spun though a flux density of volcanic smoke or solar particles, the Earth would only get hotter. A closed circle can be censorious, a dead-ender: trapped greenhouse gases go around and around.
I drain my water jug. Despite my half-assed olfactory powers, I can sense water pushing against a moraine wall a few miles ahead. I'm thirsty, but it will take an hour to get there. Clouds stream over continuously but give no rain. The sky is hard and marbled.
Gary is alternately aloof and passionate, but these days more often aloof. I climb over the split trunk of a lenga tree. Its flesh is the color of cinnamon and burnt orange. So many of my friends have died recently, or are dying, that at times walking this circuit is like being handed from ghost to ghost. Dying is a way of completing a circle. I'm hungry; I'm climbing over bodies; I walk on.
Somewhere along the trail, utterly tired, I stop to lay my pack down and pull out the map. Nothing on it makes sense. Perhaps it is a guide for the perplexed and will lead me somewhere new. Maybe not. I look up. A broken branch, old and mossy, has hung its forked arms around the living trunk of a young tree. The trunk squeaks as it grinds against the aging arms of its lover. Tree love. An arboreal song.
Condors leap from cliffs. They're not suicidal, merely going to visit another mountain range. When a condor jumps and flaps its wings, the pressurized air slams against the mountains, wiping mist off, pushing a boat-shaped shadow over our heads. Every brush of a wing has repercussions. A piece of ice calves, a bow wave pulls across a lake; a stone is turned and a river changes course; a dust mote rises into a cloud and comes down as snow; a tree dies and the global climate changes.
It's a lip of dirt and rock, and we're climbing it. On the other side is the anticipated lake. We skid down a steep trail, take off our boots and jackets at the bottom, and lie prostrate in the sun. Laughter wakes us. It's the Brits. One of them is diabetic and the others are joking about the proper procedure if he goes into a coma. “Do we give the shot in his ass or his arm? Do we put a pill under his tongue? And which pill?” The more savage the teasing, the louder the laughter. They are school chums who have known one another most of their lives. For the first time the winds have stopped and the sun is shining. Jokes about mortality fly through the air. Our own and the planet's. I smile without bothering to open my eyes. It's like dying, this healing warmth, this laughter.