the snout

The ice walks downhill at the speed of a fingernail. Nobody believes this until they have stood at the bottom of it for thirty years, which was my father’s tenure and is now most of mine.

What goes in at the top comes out at the bottom. Not soon. The mountain is patient and it is exact. A glove dropped into a crevasse above the icefall in the year I was born would arrive at the snout about now, carried down the whole length inside the blue, and the ice would lay it on the gravel as carefully as you would set down something asleep.

So we walk the terminus in the melt season. Not for the ice. For what the ice is finished with. It comes out in the order it went in, more or less, which means the snout is a calendar you can hold — here is the decade of canvas packs, here is the decade of nylon, here is a tin of film that developed into a slope nobody could name, because the slope had moved.

People think the mountain takes things. It does not take. It receives, and it keeps the receipt, and one day it returns the item to the desk with the receipt still attached. A boot with the lace still tied. A logbook gone soft but legible, the navigator’s hand pressing through forty years to say the weather, the weather, the weather. A wedding ring that fit no one we could find, so it is in the drawer in the office with the others, each in its own small envelope, waiting for a hand that knew it.

The hardest part is not the cold. It is the arithmetic. When someone goes in at the top — and they do, the ice is honest but it is not safe — you can tell the family, more or less, the year. Not the day. The ice will not be hurried and it cannot be slowed, and there is no appeal, and so the only kindness is true: he is coming. He is on his way down. He has been on his way down the whole time you were learning to live without him.

They come back for it. The good ones come every melt season and stand at the snout where the meltwater runs milk-grey over the stones, and they do not ask me whether it will be this year, because I told them once that I cannot know and they believed me. They just stand. And the ice, which owes them, pays in the only currency it has, which is itself — a finger’s width a day, blue going to grey going to water, until the day it sets him down on the gravel, exactly, and steps back, the way you step back from a thing you have carried a very long way and would not, for anything, have dropped.