ISTOOD UNDER a cloudless sky near the peak of Mont Fort, staring at the glaciers of the Grand Combin, shining like starched sheets. Mont Fort, at Verbier, Switzerland, is one of the steepest ski runs in Europe. Most of the people who rode up on the tram went back down on it. My friend Ken and I had come to Europe to ski and escape ourselves. We were in our fifties, a shadowy decade. Looking down at the canton of Valais, I felt a combination of exhilaration and fear and simple awe. The world laid out, endless in its possibilities. The price, though, was a treacherous descent. It was late in the season and the moguls were large, rutted from spring thaws, and shiny with ice. A few skiers picked their way down carefully, making long, hesitant traverses across the hill.
We stood in that familiar lacuna, waiting for the right moment to go down, a moment when the path was clear, when courage was high. After several minutes, Ken launched himself. On the second turn, he crossed his skis and fell.
He slid quickly on the ice. Both skis blew off, then both poles. He hurtled down the steep hill headfirst, picking up speed, his helmeted head bouncing off the moguls. It occurred to me that he might not stop until the bottom, more than 300 metres below. There was a crevasse near the bottom, off to the side. It was marked with colourful racing poles to warn skiers away.
Beside me, near the tramline, were the remnants of a speed course that had been set up a month earlier. Speed skiing means simply getting into a tuck and going as fast as possible. The skis are 240 centimetres long, and specific aerodynamic helmets and clothing have been developed for this rarified sport. There are only about thirty courses in the world.
Speed skiing requires a very steep start and a long run out. The fastest anyone has ever gone on a pair of skis is 251.4 kilometres an hour, achieved by an Italian, Simone Origone. What is remarkable is that he reached that velocity in fifteen seconds, roughly as fast as the 690 horsepower Lamborghini Aventador—which gets to 250 km/h in 14.4 seconds. It was Origone who set the course record at Verbier with a speed of 219 km/h.
When I was young, speed was a visceral affirmation, an extension of my natural optimism (that I wouldn’t crash, that I would live forever), and part of my inchoate search for limits and meaning. But speed had become something else in middle age. I still sought it; as a way to prolong youth, perhaps. Yet skiing had become a balance between hope and fear—the hope that it would preserve me, that it would amplify my existence, and the fear that it might do the opposite.
Ken had managed to get himself turned around so that his feet were pointing downhill. People stopped to watch him, a Gore-Tex missile heading toward the crevasse. His boots sent up sprays of snow as he rocketed down. The late morning sun was brilliant. Had we waited another hour or so, the hill would have softened up.
Ken skied, he had told me, to take himself out of his own head, a head that was filled with screenplays, resentment, political rants, women, and, more than anything, himself. A head that struggled to contain an expansive ego that now flowed over the moguls 100 metres below.
The act of skiing is instinctive and ultimately solitary and at a certain age it provides welcome relief from our thoughts, our mortgages and disappointments. We were both aware that there wouldn’t be many more years of skiing like this. We could ski into old age, but it would be something else again.
Switzerland was having a nervous year. More than half of Verbier was closed, a brown ring around the bottom of the resort. While it was late April, this was still unusual. Swiss glaciers, like glaciers everywhere, were in retreat; they lost eighteen percent of their surface between 1985 and 2000. Seventy percent of them could be gone in the next three decades. The glaciers feed the Swiss river system, and half of the country’s power is hydroelectric. Low river levels will affect energy, transportation, and the many ingenious farms scattered through the valleys and crawling up the mountainside.
Swiss ski resorts have already felt the effects of glacial retreat. In 2005, Andermatt wrapped the disappearing Gurschen glacier in a protective foil made of polyester and polypropylene, designed to keep the sun off and the cold in. Mont Fort followed suit.
Standing at the top of Mont Fort in the perfect spring sun, the snow receding below me, Ken slowing down, I wondered if the sport would die before I did. Perhaps we would all go together.
Two hundred and fifty metres below me, Ken finally came to a stop. He lay motionless for more than a minute, then one arm rose and weakly waved, indicating he was alive, at least. His head wasn’t occupied with the messy details of his life now. He was mentally gauging the pain, tracking its source and intensity. Was anything broken? Had the helmet saved him from concussion? He had a bad back that was now much worse. He had knee issues, a sore wrist, a lifelong case of existential angst, and he travelled with a cache of celebrity-grade painkillers that would come in handy.
I started down, stopping to pick up his skis and poles, moving carefully on the ice, muscles straining, my head empty of conscious thought, reduced to a purely physical being, focused on survival.
I LEARNED to ski on a small hill perched inconveniently on the endless Canadian prairie. Mount Agassiz had a modest vertical of about 150 metres. It featured one T-bar and a rope tow that, in memory, ran off the flywheel of a tractor and was operated by a grumpy farmer who cursed us when we fell off or slid backward on the ice. The hill was a three-hour drive from Winnipeg and rarely seemed to be warmer than –20°F; we had to stop every half hour to warm up in the modest chalet. From the summit you could see conifers and low scrub and hardscrabble farmland that had been cultivated a century earlier by hopeful immigrants. My Scottish great-grandfather had tried to farm to the east, but finally gave up on that impossible land and moved to the city to become a minister in a particularly pessimistic branch of Calvinism (called, paradoxically, the Free Presbyterians).
Mount Agassiz took its name from Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, a nineteenth-century Swiss geologist who was the first to suggest that the Earth had experienced an ice age. He argued that this ice age had replaced the biblical deluge; that it wiped out all (sinful) life, which then began anew. Agassiz kept his faith and resisted Darwin’s evolutionary theory for his entire life. But the mountain named after him was formed during the Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers ploughed through Manitoba, leaving a few upturned hills that were gradual on the side where the ice was advancing and dropped off sharply where the ice had pulled down huge slabs of rock as it went by. Geologically, this glacial till plain was an unlikely spot for a ski resort.
When we were seventeen, a group of us drove 1,500 kilometres across the frozen plain to ski at Lake Louise in the Rocky Mountains. Going up the Olympic chairlift, staring back at the immense scale of the valley and the Slate Range that stretched beyond it, I saw not just the possibilities of the sport, but the possibilities of life. Chief among them was the concept of freedom. In part it was the post-adolescent freedom of being on the road, of being in another place, unsupervised. But the summit of Lake Louise invited a larger sense of freedom, a phenomenological escape that changed my sense of the physical world. And there was the simple joy of that speed, the harmless physics of the prairie given way to something else.
Our Banff trip was a collage of hard skiing and wasted nights. Our lack of success with the few girls we met was epic. We turned to adolescent stunts, locking one of our number out of the hotel room, naked. We drank beer in crowded taverns and wished we were dancing with girls and stayed until closing time, hoping for a miracle, and woke up at 7 A.M. and ate pancakes and caught the first lift up.
None of us returned to Mount Agassiz. It was irretrievably diminished by then, a fondly remembered childhood relic. The following year I moved to Calgary and started skiing seriously, getting out fifty days or more each year. But after six years, even the yawning scale of the Banff area became too familiar. It began to feel as finite as Mount Agassiz had.
In 1978, after graduating from university, I went to France to ski. In the Grenoble train station I met a man my age wearing a ski jacket who told me that Val d’Isère was the place to go; that’s where he was heading. He looked like Robert Redford and introduced himself as Bob. He had seen the Redford film Downhill Racer several times and had adopted the star’s mannerisms. Occasionally he’d act a scene from the movie without crediting it.
At the time, Downhill Racer was a touchstone for a certain kind of skier. Redford’s character, David Chappellet, was a perfect late-sixties anti-hero, handsome and aloof and a bit of a shit. The movie trailer had a voiceover that asked the quasiexistential question, “How far must a man go to get from where he’s at?” Downhill Racer was a gritty, European-looking film, and I wanted to be like Redford, though not as badly as my new friend Bob did.
I spent the whole season in Val d’Isère, living in the basement of a massive eighteenth-century stone house with Bob and a handful of expatriates. The scale of the resort was immense; we could ski to other villages, to Italy.
Going up a large tram one day, a man who turned out to be from Brooklyn recognized me as North American and said, “Want to take a walk on the wild side?” In an urban setting, this could mean a number of different, largely uncomfortable things. But here it meant he knew the secret location of some incredible powder-filled bowl. So I followed. We climbed and traversed for three hours from where the lift let us off, into Italy, sweating heavily and panting in the thin air.
We finally arrived at a massive, very steep, untouched bowl. We hurtled down, floating in the bottomless powder. The run took less than two minutes, but that speed and the ethereal sensation of moving through the light powder made it feel longer, a suspension of not just gravity, but time. A thrill. The sensation of weightlessness made me feel I had transcended my physical self.
The freedom, the possibilities of life that I’d first felt at Lake Louise were all magnified in Val d’Isère. Just over the mountain was the world conjured by my literary imagination: Paris and Spain and doomed love affairs with tragic Europeans.
In spring my peripatetic Calgary girlfriend flew over and the tenor of my expatriate life changed. We skied and argued, then left for Italy. We ended up in Greece, admitting finally that our relationship, which had been pretty much defined by break-ups, wasn’t working. She decided to fly home and I stayed in Athens. After she got in the taxi to the airport, I walked to the harbour and sat on the hard sand of a vast, empty industrial beach. On the horizon, a figure approached in the heat shimmer, a woman carrying something. It turned out to be a wooden box, filled with cigarettes, which she carried with the aid of a neck strap, the kind that cigarette girls in 1930s nightclubs used to have. She stood over me. “Cigarette?” she said in a heavy accent. She was perhaps forty, and her legs, which were at my eye level, had small bruises on them. I bought a package of Marlboros and sat on the deserted beach smoking, pondering the end of my relationship with my girlfriend, and what proved to be the effective end of my relationship with skiing for the next decade.
BACK IN CANADA, I moved east, where skiing withered amid the dwarfish hills of Ontario. I was trying to be a writer, and my world became almost exclusively urban. On those few occasions that I did get out skiing, I was reminded of Mount Agassiz and its limitations and the whole experience depressed me. Years went by without getting out on a hill.
In my thirties, I inched back to the sport, going to Quebec a few times. But by my forties, something else had changed. One March I drove to Jay Peak, Vermont, where a large thermometer at the top of the hill informed me it was 61°F. The snow was heavy and wet, and it was like skiing through peanut butter. A storm of tropical force that had been lurking on the other side of the mountain suddenly released a hard rain. Those of us who wanted to persevere were issued green garbage bags with armholes.
By fifty, both winter and myself were getting unreliable. I couldn’t count on snow, and I couldn’t count on my ability to negotiate some of the runs that had once thrilled me. Skiing claims to be our oldest sport (a 5,000-year-old ski was found in Sweden) and now it is showing its age. The sport and I appear to be going through some of the same issues: doubt, deterioration, financial worries, environmental dread. As I lose strength and stamina the glaciers retreat in solidarity, the snow dries up, the resorts dwindle. The number of U.S. ski resorts dropped from 727 in 1985 to 485 in 2008. Mount Agassiz closed in 2000, though I didn’t hear about it for another decade.
As the esteemed glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has warned us, glaciers are disappearing at an accelerating rate. Kilimanjaro—that Hemingwayesque symbol of mortality and loss—could vanish entirely within a decade. Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in the Alps are in retreat. “As a result of our inaction,” Thompson wrote in his 2010 article in the journal Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options, “we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.” Not coincidentally, these are the three options that late middle age offers.
LOUIS AGASSIZ was the first glaciologist, before the word was coined, his reputation made with the publication in 1840 of his two-volume Études sur les glaciers. He described the landscape transformed by glacial activity as if it were a woman’s body, with a breathless and detailed pensée on the striations and valleys, the rounding and hollows, the cruel results of time and friction. Agassiz wasn’t a brilliant scientist; he mostly synthesized what was already out there, including the work of colleagues who were uncredited. He was an adept promoter, a quality that flowered after he moved from Switzerland to the U.S. and embraced marketing as a faith. Although his fame didn’t last, he became one of the best-known scientists in the world.
The mid-nineteenth century was the golden age of glaciers, and Agassiz’s work spurred a taste for both exploration and research. Glaciers were mysterious, holding ancient secrets, and the Industrial Revolution had yet to begin its carbonspewing assault in earnest. And they’d seized the imagination of English Romantic poets, who saw in them a spiritual grandeur, an expression of the sublime.
Agassiz’s reputation climbed quickly and brightly but then quietly subsided in middle age. He refused to embrace Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories, and held to the increasingly discredited idea that species remained identical throughout history. Agassiz also adhered to Catastrophism, a school of thought advocated by his former teacher, the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Catastrophism stipulated that the earth’s timeline was short, and defined by violent events that produced severe climate change and resulted in extinctions. Cuvier was careful never to link his theory to religion—none of his papers refers to Noah and the Flood. But Agassiz made the link, viewing glaciation as the event that did the Flood’s—God’s—work, equal parts geology and miracle. Scientifically, he was left behind.
Before the end of the century, Agassiz’s ideas were replaced by the prosaically named theories of Uniformitarianism and Gradualism, which posited that geologic change occurs slowly over long periods of time.
But Agassiz may have the last laugh, now that Catastrophism has come back under another name—climate change. At the time he published his seminal study of glaciers, the Columbia Icefield that is located at the northern border of Banff National Park was roughly twice the size it is now. In geologic terms, 187 years is a blink. But the glacier has retreated 1.5 kilometres since then.
The implications are profound, and not just for tourists and hikers. The Columbia Icefield is actually a collection of thirty glaciers, and the meltwater from them feeds three oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arctic. It is the hydroponic apex of North America, the kingpin of continental glaciers. It is no exaggeration to call its retreat a catastrophe.
Glaciers don’t melt at arithmetic rates. As they become smaller and their bulk provides less defense against the warming climate, and as more detritus is exposed and its darker hue attracts more sun, they melt at something that is closer to a geometric rate. Like certain people, one day they are suddenly old. You saw them only a year ago. And now, in the glare of the supermarket, there they are, the face subtly collapsing, a blurriness, a weight in the eyes that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps it had always been there, but you just hadn’t noticed it.
THE YEAR I turned fifty, a scattered group of old friends reconnected via email and decided to return to Banff to ski. We came from Winnipeg, from Vancouver, San Francisco, Hong Kong. I flew out from Toronto. I hadn’t seen some of them in thirty years. We caught up, reminisced. We recalled making fake IDs by photocopying a paper version of a classmate’s birth certificate and using Wite-Out to eliminate his name. We made multiple copies of the blank version, typed in various whimsical aliases, soaked the paper in tea to age it, put them in a dryer, then ironed creases into them. With these small masterpieces we were able to get into the Voyageur Tavern and see a 300-pound stripper named U.C. Moore wrap her giant panties around a friend’s head, scaring all of us.
There were missing friends too. A suicide, and the usual complement of tragedy, medical issues, alcoholism, divorce, and debt.
I was long married, the father of two, in reasonable shape. I had a touch of plantar fasciitis, a small arthritic spur on my hip, and an ongoing bout of existential nausea. “Something has happened to me,” Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Nausea; “It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything obvious. It installed itself cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little awkward. . . I was able to persuade myself that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was a false alarm. And now it has started blossoming.”
This confronting of existence alights at some point, a quiet argument that we carry within us. Where is this all headed? The answer too obvious to state out loud.
Skiing was a perfect, if temporary distraction. The act of negotiating a steep hill requires concentration. And unlike many other sports, it doesn’t force you into the unpalatable head of your opponent. It is pure experience.
Both Sunshine and Lake Louise had expanded dramatically since I’d last visited, twenty years earlier. The forty-fiveminute wait at the Olympic chairlift was gone; the high-speed lifts eliminated line-ups. The frequent breakdowns that had left us swaying in bitter crosswinds for nervous lengths of time were also mercifully gone. We were still good skiers, among the better skiers on the hill, but that was because everyone under the age of forty was on a snowboard. We were part of an evolutionary slow fade.
At lunch the next day, my friend Martin checked his phone constantly for news of pending interest-rate hikes. His nickname was Captain Leverage, I was told, due to his heroic relationship with debt. He had stayed in Winnipeg and when his father died he’d taken over the family manufacturing business. I remembered his taciturn father washing his Cadillac in the driveway, his beautiful mother pouring vodka over Tang crystals in the kitchen.
Neale was the only one on a snowboard, though it wasn’t a nod to hipness or progress. He’d had a leg injury that made skiing painful, but somehow allowed for boarding. He had aged very little, and was married to his high school sweetheart, the woman he’d been dating when I left Winnipeg thirty-three years earlier. His life seemed miraculously intact, though this was an illusion. There had been two previous marriages, three kids, and two divorces.
I spent time with Paul, my closest adolescent friend, who was now a successful developer in Vancouver. In the mornings, as he drove the rented SUV up to the mountain, he would phone his father, who was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, talking to him in cheerful, repetitive tones.
Paul and I recalled a summer night out at the lake when he was behind the wheel of his mother’s Thunderbird, an otherwise responsible boy, heading for law school, racing wildly on the Number One highway in the dead of night. Trying to pass a white Grand Prix on a blind hill, that reckless teenage faith. The memory still brought an unsettling frisson of mortality.
All of our worlds held secrets now. Certainly that had been true of an absent friend who had killed himself by driving a jet boat into a bridge support on the Red River. He had managed to keep his world contained until that last desperate act. This anarchy lies in many of us, I suspect; not necessarily suicidal ideation, but the anarchy of a mind overburdened by disappointment and doubt, or simply time. The hill had been a testing ground for us when we were young, a release of pent-up energies. It was more relief now, the visceral experience of skiing displacing other thoughts and worries. Another kind of freedom.
IN 2004, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica drilled to a depth of 3,270 metres, providing a geologic record that goes back 800,000 years. The methane and CO2 that are trapped in bubbles in the ice provide a record of carbon emissions that stretches back to the mid-Pleistocene epoch. During glacial periods, CO2 concentrations varied between 180-190 parts per million by volume (ppmv). During warmer phases, that figure rose to roughly 280. After the Industrial Revolution, CO2 concentrations showed a spike. Then, from 1975 to 2005, emissions increased seventy percent. The current concentration of CO2 is 391 ppmv, the highest in eight hundred millennia. If this trend continues, the sport of skiing may erode at a rate that is faster than the glaciers.
Switzerland noted a 3.7 percent decline in skier visits in 2012. At Whistler, the 2001 figure of 2.3 million skiers dropped to 1.7 in 2009. The 2011/2012 season in the U.S. started with the weakest snowfall in twenty years, which prompted a 15.7 percent decline in skiers from the previous year.
Snow conditions are increasingly unpredictable, though partly mitigated by sophisticated snow-making machines. But the unreliability of snow means that there are fewer advance bookings, as skiers wait to see where the snow is. And this creates problems for resort owners. The recent economic downturn has taken a toll as well; uncertainty, in all its forms, particularly plagues the ski industry, which needs both snow and prosperity to survive.
There is a point in middle age when you feel that there is still time to right the ship, that whatever you have neglected—health, teeth (a particularly sore and expensive point), partners, finances, children—can be dealt with by a concerted push. If we just cut out carbs, buy flowers, start putting money aside today; if we sit down and have that conversation about drugs with our teenagers, all will be well. Climatically, this is the moment that many people feel we are at: if we install solar panels, buy a Prius, rein in our consumption. But there are scientists who feel we have passed that point; regardless of our best efforts, we’ve already done too much damage, and it will all come crashing down.
THE WORLD’S glaciers are disappearing, but they contain only about four percent of global ice cover. It is the polar ice sheets that pose the biggest risk. In 2006, the legendary Northwest Passage—impetus for three centuries of exploration—was free of ice for the first time in recorded history. In 2007, an apocalyptic year for ice, satellite photographs showed that twentyfour percent of arctic ice had disappeared in the previous twelve months.
This left 4.17 million square kilometres of polar ice, a record low that only held until 2012, when a new low of 3.32 million square kilometres was announced. In the 1980s, the sea ice covered an area roughly the size of the U.S.; now it is half that.
As the polar ice melts, water seeps to the bottom of the ice sheet where it acts as a lubricant, helping large pieces to slide into the sea. In 2010 an ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off Petermann Glacier in Greenland, where temperatures are currently rising at 2°C per decade.
If all the polar and glacial ice melted, the seas would rise by sixty-four metres, according to Lonnie Thompson. The oceans would actually go higher than that due to thermal expansion: as the water heats, it takes up more space. Hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities would be vulnerable. Perhaps we can avoid, or at least forestall, some version of this disaster. But the political record is one of obfuscation, weaselling, and environmental summits that yield hopeful mantras and little action.
The Gradualism of the nineteenth century may be behind us. Climate can change on a dime, more or less. The Catastrophic lurks. Exhibit A for this theory is Ötzi, the Tyrolean ice man, whose frozen body was discovered in the Eastern Alps north of Bolzano, Italy, in 1991 after it was exposed by a melting glacier. His body had been in the ice for 5,200 years. He’d been shot in the back with an arrow, and had managed to escape his enemies, only to bleed to death. Within days of his death, there was a “climate event” that was large enough to cover and preserve him for fifty-two centuries. Otherwise, he would have begun decaying or would have been eaten by scavengers. Evidence suggests that the climate event wasn’t local. The isotopes in the water molecules that compose the remaining ice on Mount Kilimanjaro also show a decrease from the same time period, indicating colder temperatures. A very sudden and prolonged cold snap seems to have begun in the Middle East, 5,200 years ago.
Ötzi was forty-five, relatively old in the Copper Age. It is thought that he might have been a shepherd. Because his corpse was the best-preserved example of primitive man, it has become one of the most minutely studied in history. His lungs were blackened by campfires. He showed degeneration of knee and ankle joints, and had tattoos that may have been related to pain relief treatments. He was lactose intolerant, and may have been suffering from Lyme disease. The arrowhead that killed him was still lodged in his back. Perhaps he was a skier. Whatever else he was, Ötzi was a middle-aged man with health issues, trying to survive in a hostile environment.
As Ötzi sat on the mountain, bleeding out, what was he thinking? Perhaps he was thinking about his beautiful mate and their golden children, or maybe he was thinking about the cruelty of this world, the difficulties of finding food, of avoiding enemies and predators. Or he was looking at the stars trying to divine man’s purpose. Maybe all he thought about was the pain of that arrow in his back, the coldness in his limbs. Whatever he was thinking, while he was thinking it, everything changed. The earth suddenly got much colder. It snowed for days, temperatures plummeted, and he was buried along with his dreams of love and survival.
We dream of those things still. As we age, perhaps more so. We descend, becoming increasingly conscious of the speed, of the blur in our periphery, those events just out of reach.