How This Ends

Searching through my father’s past, in a world of uncertain future

It’s tempting to think of ice as fixed. It is frozen, after all, and what is that but the essence of fixity, as imagined by those who only know ice casually, who don’t intimately know the frozen, now rapidly unfreezing, North?

People who live amid ice know better. They know it to be mutable, by definition transitory, varied, fragile, always becoming or diminishing. Aggradation. Ablation. Those who live on the ice and snow have created lifeways that respond to the simplified seasons of warmer cold and very cold, the shifting periods of more snow in May and September on this semi-arid island, and the months when the days will lengthen, followed by the night taking over as they darken.

For those who do not know the snow, there have been expeditions, explorations, overlaid with the narrative frameworks that credit mostly white men with discovery and advancement, that cast the people who live with ice as guides, translators, apprentices to “civilization,” even though there were and are also explorers who are Indigenous people, Black men, Jewish men, women, likely trans and nonbinary people. Caught up and left behind in these travels were also children that the explorers sired or stole. In these sweeping narratives of conquest and enlightenment, little room is left for the essential and unglamorous work of maintaining tradition, birthing and nourishing babies, raising children, handing wisdom down. Will it surprise you to know that one site of such exploration — the great island Kalaallit Nunaat, also called Greenland — was all along already occupied, by a generations-long unbroken succession of Inuit people comprised primarily then and now of the Kalaallit, as well as the Inughuit and Tunumiit. A nation unto itself and probably the only one in the world where the physical boundaries of the whole land mass match up with the sovereignty of a majority-Indigenous population — 89 percent of Greenlanders are Inuit or Inuit-Danish.

Based on what I know, my father may have set foot on this island at the top of the world for the first time in 1941. He was twenty, a radio engineer in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He was stationed above the European theatre, possibly at a base called Blueie West, or at Thule Air Base. His job was to help steer supplies to the Northern front.

The story of Greenland’s strategic importance to Americans and Europeans, then as now, lies with its location: right between North America and Northern Europe, far closer to both than you might imagine (New York Ciy is 400 miles closer to Greenland than it is to Los Angeles). It made a fine stopover for planes to refuel, load cargo, make runs into and below the subarctic.

Greenland was under the Danish crown when the war began, then became neutral in 1940, after Denmark was seized by the Nazis. The US was asked to step in to keep it from falling into the hands of the Axis. In December 1941, when the US was pulled into the war, Greenland became a staging area for Allied forces.

My father would recite for us, years later, the privations of the Greenland winters, the card games and drinking and trash talking of the soldiers trying to withstand the duress of months in darkness and cold. Some men couldn’t stand it. They went mad and wandered away from the base, hallucinating. They did drastic things to be sent home — one, he recalled, shoved his fingertips into a fan so he’d be airlifted out on a medical discharge. Men were afflicted with frostbite, gangrene, chillblains, hypothermia, trench foot, or snow blindness (the latter from the relentless light bouncing off the ice).

And yet he was not so afflicted, or if so he never said. Rather, when he had the chance to go back a decade later, it seems he jumped at it.

In 1954, back he went, during the bright Arctic summer, in a civilian-military collaborative expedition sponsored by Southwest Research Labs, where my dad worked. The goal of the expedition was to study improvements in the technology then available for detecting crevasses: dangerous, largely invisible, cracks in the ice that occurred most frequently in the melting zone between the inland ice cap and the shore. Crevasses could go on for miles, underneath the crusting of snow, and they could go downward for miles, too.

Southwest Research was a progressive place founded by an eccentric millionaire, one of the many demonstrations by oil-rich Texans that they weren’t thick-necked hicks, or even if they were, that they could still buy the intellectual caché they believed the state deserved. (The Hunts and their vast art collections were another such example).

I have the Special Interim Report from that excursion, a tape-bound treatise with a smart, brilliant blue label on a background of darkest black, as crisp today as when it was printed sixty-six years ago. In carefully typed letters, its title reads,

SPECIAL INTERIM REPORT

RESEARCH ON

DETECTION OF HIDDEN CREVASSES IN GLACIER ICE

CONTRACT NO. DA-44–009-eng-2315.

One human touch interferes with its official identity: my father has signed his last name, Wormser, up in the corner.

Data Are

My father considered himself a writer — also a sculptor, painter, and inventor — and given another kind of life, he might have become a writer of some standing. Instead, he chose the passion most likely to help him get his daily bread and raise a family: engineering.

In the 1950s, engineering of the type my father did — working with radio and eventually with cathode tubes, which led him to solid state electronics and television—was still possible for a man like him, someone with field experience but no bachelor’s degree. Electrical engineering was a young field, both in the discipline and in its practitioners, an open, experimental practice that rewarded the efforts of guys who mucked around and tried things. Computer electronics is not especially different even now, although credentialing can be more important than it was in my dad’s youth.

Beneath all this, and maybe from the same mindset of figuring out the most elegant solution to a problem, my father valued clear expression. Perhaps because he’d never finished college, he despised technological opacity and jargon. He wrote concisely and vividly, evoking the physical world — its sensations, its dynamics — whenever he could. He also wrote with care, with precision, so that anyone — his yet-unborn daughter, say — could understand the essential concepts.

I believe he once told me that he wrote or edited most of this report I have on my desk. It certainly was one of the things he was proudest of, in his career. I look for his wry, gentle, straightforward voice in its phrasing.

In the course of the study, it has become evident that detailed literature on crevasses is almost nonexistent and there are not any experts on crevasse detection.

Glaciers are composed almost entirely of snow which has persisted through one or more warm seasons and has undergone some metamorphosis.

There are at least three kinds of snow.

I hear my father’s voice in these phrases, his crisp enunciation, undermined slightly by a soft West Texas accent. It is the voice that read to me at night from the doorstopper classic Moby Dick or the subversive Animal Farm, books he judged friendly enough to a child’s sensibility yet worth his time as an adult. Over the years of missing him since he died in 1997, I have grown to love this report best of all because of this — of his voice in the pages — and not only his voice as a writer and reader, but as a scientist, though no institution ever bestowed recognition on him.

Decades before scientists would study climate change and the lexicon of ice with any seriousness (“it has become evident that detailed literature on crevasses is almost nonexistent”) my self-taught radio engineer dad painstakingly observed the ice of Greenland, with more than a hint of melancholy:

The annual accumulation from snowfall is approximately balanced in the long run by losses from wind transport of snow; evaporation directly from the solid state (sublimation); by melting of the terminus (“tongue”) portion; and by flow, sometimes via short valley-glaciers, to the region of melting or to the sea, where icebergs may break off and float away. All glaciers exhibit variations of size over periods, years, centuries, or millenia in length, due to continual changes of equilibrium between supply and wastage.

More than six pages, single-spaced, are devoted to explaining snow and ice. At page seven, the text breaks out into strings of formula, as if the author or authors are speaking in tongues, articulating the electrical conductivity of ice in terms both highly specific and overly abstract.

Some text accompanies this part, which I originally also ascribed to my father, until I spotted the error he despised and would never have committed:

There is not any theory, and there is very little data, on the conductivity of snow.

In his writing is a hand correction above the ‘is,’ a single verb: are.

Stereo Realist

In the 1950s, a camera called the Stereo Realist was all the rage. It was manufactured in only one place, the David White Company of Milwaukee (which still exists, although now it mostly makes surveying equipment). The Stereo Realist used slide film to make two photographs at once. Mounted for viewing, they created the sensation of looking at a scene with both eyes, restoring the immediacy of the subject.

My dad took a Stereo Realist with him to Greenland. He photographed from the moment the plane touched down at Thule — many slides early in the deck show the plane’s grimy wing and the tarmac. He photographed sea meeting sky, ice meeting sea, over and over, capturing the vivid turquoise palette and flat expanse of white. Most movingly, he photographed and was photographed by his team, young men who looked ever more tired as the excursion wore on, on the ice and in their bunks, with the light and composition sometimes Flemish, brooding, full of background clues and meanings: a beloved pipe, a snap-brim hat incongruously perched, a photograph of loved ones, a backpack slung aside.

One of my favorite photographs of my father shows him holding in his hand some vegetation he has found, moss or fungus. His teeth gently clench a dark wood apple pipe, unlit. His face is bright and handsome, not the face I ever truly knew in person but the one I loved in pictures, glimpsing the vibrant before-life of him, when he was young and still free. It was the year before his marriage.

I’ve been looking at the slides with my son, my dad’s grandchild, whom he never met nor even ever knew would be in the world. Noah and I whiled away a few hours of this beginning of the second year of COVID-19 peering into the viewfinder I got on eBay, identifying what we can of the cold part of the world my father recorded.

It is a distinctly eerie and moving thing to see back nearly seventy years in three dimensions, in full color. Only one of us can see at a time, then pass it on to the other. At first, I vetted the photos, remembering vaguely how to find the ones I considered the best. Gradually, a change took place, and soon it was Noah leading, going through slides I hadn’t bothered with, crying out at a particular find, passing it along to me. We used everything we could see in each picture to assemble their stories, contexts we could only guess at, relationships, times of day (hard to do in the Arctic North). Soon thereafter, Noah began to reorganize the photos, which had been in their same order for decades. I moved to stop him, and then had a strange revelation.

These were not only my slides anymore; they were more Noah’s than mine, in a way. Just as they no longer belong to my father, but merely are of him, so they are destined for Noah.

Human occupancy in North Greenland presents special problems.

The Loud Reports of Fresh Crevasses

We were driving somewhere together recently, talking about this essay and the more extended essay I am warming up to write, when the conversation veered to our own present affairs: to the state of the world, the precarious nature of the world’s ice and seas, to a world post-pandemic or everlastingly pandemic, and my son’s justifiable anxiety about the future.

“You know, when I was exactly your age, it was the Nuclear Terror era,” I said. “No one knew when or how it would end. Many men in charge of the codes were egotistical, self-serving, untrustworthy. I remember feeling just as you did.”

“I wonder if every generation has this,” my son said. “Do you think your father felt this way, too?”

This had never occurred to me before, but I instantly knew that he must have felt this way, too. He was about Noah’s age when he left his tour in Greenland, on or about 1943. The war was still going on, and he was enlisted until 1945, though he came back to the States to serve in the reserves. Born between the two world wars, his early life was overshadowed by the catastrophic losses of World War I, the 1918 influenza epidemic, and the Great Depression, which forced his family inland from Laredo to live with relatives and seek jobs in the city. By the time he went to his own war — a young Jewish man who knew something, but not yet the worst, of what the Nazis were doing — he must indeed have wondered whether, and where, it would all end.

“Yes,” I said. “He must have felt it was all falling apart. He must have wondered if he would grow old. Like I did. Like you.”

Fresh crevasses have been seen to open overnight in firn to the width of a knife-blade or pencil, accompanied by loud reports…Few persons have intentionally explored crevasses, and old, wide crevasses are often partially bridges at several places below the surface.

I’ve taken pages of notes so far, pondered the connection between his time and mine. In 1954, when my father was sent to figure out how to detect crevasses, the greatest threat to solve for was what ice could do to us, how the thin cracks caused by expansion and contraction could hide beneath the snow until they yawned open and swallowed us whole.

Now the severest threat is us, and what we have done to the ice, how our machines and large-scale operations have injured the very seasons, altered the very rhythms of the sea, and rendered everything we thought so permanent and immutable suddenly ever more fragile.

This small essay is part of a series I'll be sharing on LinkedIn in the coming months, on the theme of "reknitting." My decision to publish them here is the result of my work this year as part of Megan Macedo’s Writing Challenge. My aim is to bring together my chosen work as a writer with my observations as a communications professional--out loud! In public! Follow more of my work at Medium.