Resurrection Bay

trying.”

He laughed at that and then climbed to the top of the moraine with me. “Have they found the bodies?” Rav asked.

“They wouldn’t still be digging if they’d found them.”

Rav is what you might call my off-season boyfriend. During the summer, we hate each other, mostly because he’s jealous of the summer boys I date, and I’m jealous of the summer girls who are always hanging around him. Then the summer people go, we make up, and it’s back to old times.

Rav is short for Raven, which he hates, and Carnegie is a name his parents made up because they were musicians and had once dreamed of playing in Carnegie Hall. When it didn’t work out, they’d settled for stealing the name. People think he’s part Tlingit because of his dark hair, but he’s not. I am, though, on my mother’s side. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt a connection to the ice.

“They’re never gonna find them,” Rav said as we watched the bulldozer haul away another heaping shovelful of ice. “The glacier moves forward faster than they can take the ice away.”

“It’s so sad,” I said.

“They were stupid,” said Rav. “Tempt fate, and guess what? Sometimes it gives into temptation. Starburst?”

He handed me the piece of candy, and I took it. This year a Starburst was the signal that we had made up.

We stood there for a while talking about the new school year and how tenth grade wasn’t much different from ninth grade. As we turned to go, I felt a chill that penetrated deep. The breath of the glacier made my neck hairs stand on end, and there was a rumbling in the earth.

“Did you hear that?”

Rav shook his head, maybe because it wasn’t a sound at all, it was a feeling—that vibration in my bones. I looked to the glacier just in time to see a hunk of ice the size of an eighteen-wheeler break free from the face and begin a long, slow plunge.

The workmen ran for cover, but the bulldozer driver was caught in his cab. He kicked at the door in a panic until it finally swung open, and he leaped out just in time. The massive chunk of blue ice hit the bulldozer, completely burying it.

“No way!” said Rav.

The workmen, now a safe distance away, peeled off their hard hats, scratched their heads, and counted their blessings.

Then I noticed something that no one else had seen yet. I had to focus all my attention to make sure it wasn’t just my imagination.

Rav must have noticed the look on my face.

“What is it?”

“The glacier. It’s moving.”

“Glaciers are always moving,” he pointed out.

“No,” I said. “This glacier is really moving.”

And then he saw it, too. The glacier was pushing forward. Another chunk of ice fell, then another, then another. It was coming toward us. Not at the speed of an avalanche, of course—maybe just an inch or two per second—but for a glacier that’s lightning fast.

Now that bone-deep feeling was stronger than ever, and I knew that Rav felt it, too, because he looked almost as pale as the cloudy sky.

Then something dawned on me, like a secret whispered in my ear—but it didn’t come through words. It came in that bone-feeling shinnying up my arms and legs, vibrating in my joints.

The glacier wants something.

It wants something, and it’s coming to get it….

Glaciers are just like rivers. Watch a glacier in time-lapse, and you’ll see it surging forward, digging into the earth, dragging hundred-ton boulders along with it. Glaciers are forces of nature as powerful as floods or hurricanes. They just do their devastating business much more slowly. Most of the time.

There was no scientific explanation as to why Exit Glacier decided to surge forward as suddenly, and as powerfully, as it did. That first day they calculated that it was moving at a speed of fifteen inches per minute. That might not seem fast, but when a wall of ice a quarter of a mile wide decides to move like that, it takes out everything in its path: trees, buildings, bridges. Everything. In a single day it had pushed forward nearly half a mile and had ripped out a major highway on its relentless push toward Resurrection Bay. And we all knew there was only one way it could get to the bay:

Straight through Seward.

If the glacier kept on moving, it would reach the city in three days and completely destroy it, pushing everything that couldn’t move out of its way into the sea.

I made dinner that night since Dad was off on an emergency run, flying geologists down from Anchorage.

“If I climb up on the roof, d’ya think I might be able to see the glacier from here?” Sammy asked me.

“No, but if you climb up on the roof, you’ll fall off and break your neck, and I’ll get to have your room.”

He threw a pea from his dinner plate at me but said nothing more about it. I’m not sure whether he was more worried about breaking his neck or me getting his room.

It was strange how the next day things went on as usual—at least at first. We had school that day, and although everyone talked about the glacier, we all went about our business, from class to class. It was surreal, as if the glacier’s approach was some alternate reality.

When I got home, though, reality hit. Dad had spent the day flying a team of experts over the glacier, so he knew more about this “phenomenon” than anyone else in town… and he was packing up all our belongings in his pickup truck.

You have to understand, this was more than just an evacuation for us, because to Dad, his home was very much his castle. See, after Mom died, Dad fixed up the house. He patched the roof, and painted the porch, and put up a white picket fence around the yard so that our house was the envy of Seward. It looked like the model of hometown America—but with one problem. Our household was one member short. Still, Dad kept up the house, the yard, and that perfect picket fence religiously, like they were the only things keeping us together. But the truth was, he was the only thing keeping us together.

So you can imagine that seeing him packing up things in that prepanic kind of way made me feel like the world was coming apart all over again.

“There’s not much room,” he told Sammy and me. “Just take the things you really care about.”

He tried to comfort us by telling us that Seward wouldn’t be hit for two more days, but debris was already being shaken loose from the mountains and landing on the road to Anchorage. If that road got taken out, the only ways out of Seward would be by sea and sky—and there simply weren’t enough boats or helicopters to rescue everyone. After the initial numbness, people were beginning to leave town any way they could.

We couldn’t go yet, though; Dad needed to fly the geologists around, so that night he took our overpacked pickup, and we all went to stay with Rav and his dad, since they lived on higher ground that was out of the glacier’s path. Our fathers were good friends because they had found a common misery: dead wives. My mom died giving birth to Sammy. She was Tlingit, and one of her brothers had said it was punishment for marrying my dad, who’s not. Because of that, Dad won’t have anything to do with that side of the family anymore. Rav lost his mom just a couple of years ago. She was an ecologically conscious woman, always trying to save nature—but nature didn’t save her. She wrapped her Prius around a tree one rainy night.

“When I can drive,” Rav had once told me, “I’m gonna get a car with a huge Hemi engine and guzzle gas like there’s no tomorrow, because nature deserves to suffer.”

Rav’s got issues.

Late that evening, while Sammy slept and Dad drank away his sorrows with Mr. Carnegie, Rav and I sat on his porch. Even from this far away you could feel the glacier churning up the earth and hear the fracturing of ice and the ominous falling of trees.

“Do you think you’ll leave Seward for good?” Rav asked me. “It would suck if you left for good.”