Where the Ice Used to Start

Einar parks where he always parks and gets out and looks, which is the first thing he does every morning and has been since 2004, and the ice is not where it was in June. He knows this. He's not surprised. But there's a difference between knowing a thing and looking at it, and every morning he does the second part on purpose, because the tourists won't, and someone has to. The first summer, you could walk from the car park to the tongue of the glacier in eight minutes. He remembers that because he used to tell the groups "eight minutes, then we put on the crampons", and it was a good line, it made them feel close to something. Now it's forty. The path winds across a kilometre of grey moraine, boulders and silt and small hard plants that have colonised ground that was under ice when his daughter was born. There are marker posts along the way with years on them. 2004. 2010. 2015. 2020. The tourists photograph the posts. It's become the thing you photograph, more than the ice. This year there's a new sign at the start of the path. The park put it up in May. It has a photograph of the glacier from 1990, and the same view from this spring, and a paragraph in three languages that he hasn't read all the way through, because he knows what it says. He has a group of eleven today. Germans, a Canadian couple, a family from Singapore, a man on his own from Manchester who has the look of someone doing something he's promised someone he'd do. Einar gives the safety talk. Crampons, harness, stay on the rope, don't lick anything. They laugh at the last one. They always do. On the walk in, the Canadian woman falls into step with him. "How long have you done this?" "Twenty-two summers." "So you've seen it change." "I've seen it go." She's quiet for a bit. The path crunches. Then she says, "Does it make you sad? Sorry. That's a stupid question." "It's not stupid." He thinks about it, properly, because she's asked properly. "The first ten years, yes. Very. I'd come in spring and it would be another fifty metres back and I'd feel it here." He touches his chest. "Then something changed. I don't know what to call it. I stopped feeling like it was happening to me and started feeling like I was a witness. Somebody has to write down where it was. That's a job. You can do a job."

"Is that better?" "It's different. It lets me get up in the morning." At the ice they rope up and he leads them onto the tongue. It's blue in the cracks, the deep blue that people fly ten hours to see and that no photograph gets right. The Singaporean children, teenagers, are silent for the first time all morning. The man from Manchester takes out a small tin and Einar pretends not to see him scatter something into a meltwater channel and stand for a moment with his hand on the ice. Afterwards, on the walk back, the man catches up with him. "My wife wanted to see this. We had it planned. She didn't get to." "I'm sorry." "She'd have loved it. She'd have hated the sign." Einar nods. They walk. At the 2020 post the man stops and photographs it, like everyone, and then he photographs the ground between the post and the ice, the bare grey ground where nothing was, and Einar thinks that's the first person this season to take the right picture. He'll be back at seven tomorrow. He'll park and get out and look. It's a job.