Esteemed Reader

by Jason Stern, June 25, 2008

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

The inside of a glacier is quiet. Nevertheless I listened for a sound, having always harbored the suspicion that glaciers are alive. I deduced this from the fact that like all sentient beings, they eat and excrete—everything in their path, and digested bits of detritus, respectively. So once inside the hollowed tunnels of the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in the Alps, I tried to get very still to hear the inner organs of the glacier working.

Unfortunately there was French muzak and a photographer hawking instant prints of tourists sitting next to his St. Bernard in a small studio carved out of the glacial ice. In between offers he would blow on his hands and stomp his feet, for it was cold in the glacier, though surreally warm enough for T-shirts outside. With the flow of tourists speaking French, and my little son saying, “Daddy, it’s cold, I want to go out of here,” I couldn’t make out the sound of the glacier breathing.

There was also the noisy waterfall one was required to run through at the entrance of the “grotto.” Yes, the glacier is melting. It’s shrunken by half in 20 years—the blink of an eye in the life of a glacier—which suggests that if the glacier is alive, it is dying fast. The analogy of melted glacier spilling down the mountain like tears for the glacier’s own imminent demise was too obvious to miss.