By Tom McAllister
Six weeks after an emergency cholecystectomy for an inflamed gallbladder, my wife LauraBeth was still in recovery as we embarked on an Alaskan cruise. She and I spent most evenings sipping on Maker’s Mark by a window in the Schooner lounge. I can’t say for sure that I saw whales, but now and then in the distance, I saw splashes and blurs of activity that I decided must have been whales. Every morning I hoped to see a humpback or a grey swimming alongside our boat, to make eye contact with one and feel some magic bond form between us (I’ve read so many books about whales, it only seems fair that I get to be friends with one). Our drinks were delivered by a young Filipino man who spoke enough English to take orders and to refer to us as honeymooners every time he saw us. There were actual honeymooners on the boat—at least one couple, younger than us, a handsome young guy with the look of a mid-market meteorologist, and his wife, who every day wore a different article of clothing bedazzled with Mrs. Padilla—but I suppose we still exuded an aura of young love, at least enough to have impressed this one waiter.
LauraBeth stood next to me on the deck the morning we navigated the Tracy Arm Fjord and paused to stare at the Sawyer Glacier. Because it is relatively easy for smaller cruise ships to access, thousands of people visit this glacier every year. Presented with an enormous wall of blue-tinted ice, you can’t help but feel a sense of true awe. It looks like a chunk of another planet that dropped onto ours, like it’s the property of a superior race. I closed my eyes and felt its presence hulking over me; the cold emanates from it and it seeps into your skin. It throbs with a power that dwarfs everything you’ve ever done or cared about. Without warning, pieces started crumbling into the water. First the chunks were small, but then a block of ice the size of my house cracked and separated and plunged into the fjord, displacing enough water to rock our ship.
Researchers estimate the glacier has retreated 2.3 kilometers over the past fifty years, and with each year it becomes harder for cruisers to visit. Though nobody onboard the boat says it, the prodigious wastefulness of the cruise ship itself is partly responsible for the rising temperatures that are melting the glacier. Tourism on this scale is not ecologically tenable. The glacier was dying because of me and I was taking pictures of it. I wasn’t quite as concerned about global warming then as I should have been. I thought of it as just one of many problems our country should consider addressing. I believed my token efforts at recycling and turning off my lights during the day and reusing plastic bags would make a difference beyond making me feel better about my complicity in the disaster. Now, as I read weekly stories about how global warming is an existential threat, not just to whales and caribou but to all human life, I understand that the key to survival isn’t in individual choices but in a radical restructuring of society (but does thinking like this absolve me of making those changes still? Am I just making excuses for not trying harder?). Now it all feels like it’s too late, especially because the TV news will not even use the words “global warming” for fear of upsetting viewers, and the people in charge of the country are the dumbest, most venal men in American history. The planet is dying and most people are finally aware of it, but still there is a President in America who says things about climate change like:
“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over.”
He’s always the college freshman who hasn’t done the homework but thinks he deserves an A just for showing up. When he speaks, it’s like watching an especially dumb goat try to learn English on the spot. Like they put a suit on America’s swollen liver and called it the President.
A few months after the cruise, we went with LauraBeth’s brothers to a Beerfest at the Philadelphia Zoo. This is the last time I saw Coldilocks, the female polar bear who had been transferred as a cub to Philly in 1981 and lived until 2018, euthanized at age 37, the oldest polar bear ever in captivity (given the planet’s defilement, she may well have been be the oldest polar bear most of us will ever see). She swam past us, oblivious to the decline of her species, unaware that my sister-in-law had just told us she was pregnant, indifferent to all of it. We drank sample cups of eleven kinds of beer and wandered around looking at the animals, and I read all the plaques I’d read a hundred times in my life, all the same facts about sloth bears and orangutans and naked mole rats. Without busloads of children to compete with, I could get right up against the fences and imagine that the animals and I were old friends. I started a conversation with an especially attentive hippo, who was more of a listener than a talker. He wiggled his ears as I told him about the time the monorail crashed when I was at the zoo. I had never been drunk in a zoo before, and it was one of the hottest nights of my life. By 10 PM, it was still over a hundred degrees, and when we got back to our house, we dragged our mattress downstairs to sleep on the living room floor. With a window AC unit blasting and two fans pointed at us, we still sweated through the night. Our corgis lay on either side of the mattress, alert and confused.
I turned on the TV hoping for some good news about the weather. The lead story was about a boy who had thrown acid on the face of a girl who had refused to date him. When I google it now, I turn up numerous stories about women being doused in acid by angry young men, but I can’t find the one from that night. When the weather came on, they told us it was hot, and only getting hotter. It would be always hotter forever, though they didn’t say it then.
This piece is part of a project in which the author is writing a short essay for every year he has been alive.
Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower's Handbook, as well as the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and co-host of the Book Fight! podcast. He lives in New Jersey and teaches at Temple University. Find him on Twitter @t_mcallister.