Terminus: Carrie Glacier by Catherine Ruth

Honoring a Glacier

The following is a poem by Catherine Ruth, in honor of Carrie Glacier. It was created as part of the Terminus glacier project.

 

 

NPS/B. Baccus

Phase Changes

I.

She was chopping wood
when he first saw her—

was it love in an instant
decisive as an axe?

Or did it evolve slowly
like a stand of trees

into something stately
and serene?

He set her name
on a mountain

the tallest one in a range
of shale and basalt teeth

that pierce the clouds
that roll in off the Pacific

low and steady as drumbeats
Did he think of how we would speak

her name while tracing
the contours of a map

the lines he drew
from a land he had just seen—

This is his pen, indelible,
precise, setting down

summit, basin, glacier, ridge—
these are the clouds

that shroud the peak
the snow that blurs

the frontiers of rock and ice
the trunk she cleaved

the smoke that settled
in the trees

one cold night
in the damp heart of the Sol Duc

 

II.

How long did it take
for these mountains

to rise from the sea?
How long was this

a wordless place?
Ice sheets receding,

and in their wake,
grasslands, copses,

glaciers settling in their beds—
is this a relic then?

This glacier undulates
standing waves

frozen in place
in sinuous organic shapes

convex, concave—
some contours smooth

with untouched snow
others gritty, striated

firn coalescing into ice
that flows below

and surface fractures
and melts and refreezes

and swells into every
permutation of air and water

molecules slipping out of order
bubbles long trapped

in blue limbo
ancient spheres

of atmosphere
joining the sky again

as runoff descends
until all that remains

is negative space—
the amphitheater of a cirque

an audience of wind
an open-ended question



III.

Water is the universal
language

cold comfort
the rain that falls on us

the river water we filter
that courses down

from the glacier
it will always be somewhere—

matter is conserved
there is no nothing

and where water flows
life follows—

this forest is a plenum
prehistoric ferns

firs dripping with moss and lichen
mist that fills the places

where the sun cannot reach
robins sing for rain

and we share the water
and the air

take in oxygen
exhale carbon for the trees

some atoms stay here
absorbed into something larger—

and we carry a bit of this glacier in us
so do the beetles in the bog

the river rocks rolling
under light-footed deer

salmon weaving through
the Elwha again

silver crescents in the current
hook-mouthed, hump-backed, terminal—

a return to the beginning
at the very end

 

IV.

Is there a barren zone just outside
the margins of existence

empty bedrock
air weighty with absence—

or does everthing slide
headlong immediately

into being something else?
A terminus

but less precise, more amorphous—
the chossy selvedge of a moraine

the silty estuary veins.
Here it is a question of degrees—

the water returns as rain
the meager snowpacks cannot last

the glacier thaws
under summer sun

and thins and splits
into three from one—

it's unclear when
this land is both alive

and a graveyard
a site of active excavation

bleached snow remains
like a trochlea of bone

a fragment of shell
cradled in depressions left

from weighty things
since gone

a jewel-hued tarn forms
land-locked, glowing from within—

the suspended sediment settles
when glacial movement ceases—

the water grows stagnant
the light extinguishes



V.

A Beechcraft 18 crashed
right after takeoff

and Fairchild joined Carrie
in the Bailey Range

Some maps confuse the glaciers—
grief is a land without borders

it moves under
the weight of itself

a process occurring both suddenly
and constantly—

the perimeter of loss
is always changing

loss inherent in the words
of treaty, cession—

loss that can't be bound
by the warp and weft

of degrees on a map
loss that looms

that precludes words—
loss of habitat, species,

the glacier itself—
this is less an elegy

than a single thread
in a tapestry of gray and green

of old growth forests
and overcast dawns

the ocean heartbeat
the salmon's path

the rolling flight of a Stellar's Jay
the flame of a columbine

unfurling on the ridgeline—
everything transient

and in motion
the air

slowly
the very ground

beneath us
this glacial coda

this ever-expanding cloud
of exhaled breath

 

 

Meet the artist: Catherine Ruth

Catherine Ruth has a background in science, and this often serves as an entry point into her poems. A mossy and water-logged Pacific Northwest childhood instilled in her a love for wild places, and the Olympic Peninsula in particular. Her work contemplates how natural processes can act as backdrops, conduits, for emotional ones, and perpetually forms and tests hypotheses generated from careful observation of the environment.

You can see more from Catherine here (https://www.optionalpoetry.com)

 

More about Carrie Glacier

The Carrie Glacier is perched above the Elwha Valley, directly across from the site of the (now destroyed) Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center. Carrie is the most obvious and easily observed glacier in Olympic National Park. This former valley glacier has shown dramatic retreat with remaining sections now isolated from each other.

 

More Please

Learn more about Olympic's glaciers and our changing climate here.

Discover more from the Terminus glacier project here.