Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham

The entwining of spirituality and water intrigued me. I was very taken by the idea that glaciers and springs were the realm of living goddesses with the power to cleanse and give life--for I had recently started to catch myself wondering, while trudging through the landscapes of Patagonia, whether there might be something more, something beyond what I could see, touch and sense? In these icy wastelands I had at times felt close to some kind of vitality that was neither human nor born of the terrain--a playfulness in the breeze as it ushered clouds up and over the soaring peaks, or the momentary warmth from the sun as it rose to quell dark, cold shadows, or (occasionally) an almost animated presence lurking at the fringes of a glacier. These were fleeting moments, lasting a mere millisecond, but long enough to spark a sense that, just maybe, there was a higher being at work.

Glaciers, scientist Jemma Wadham explains, are really "ice rivers": masses of water that move, slowly but inexorably. Their "snouts" may melt and stay where they are, or, in the climate change era, retreat backward, but the ice itself is always moving forward, though it may seem to stand still even as you are standing on it. It's easy to see why glaciers, which seem so much larger than we can comprehend in time as well as space, might capture someone's imagination. Wadham's science-book-slash-memoir takes the reader from the Alps to Greenland to Patagonia to the Himalayas to Antarctica, detailing not only the different glaciers found there, but the kind of research that Wadham has done, measuring the flow of water through the glacier and looking for small microbial life that might leave deep beneath, at the bottom of glaciers.

I did find the glaciers fascinating. The book is also deeply personal to Wadham, who braids the stories of the glaciers with her own personal troubles, beginning with the death of her mother and continuing with a series of headaches and blackouts that culminate in emergency brain surgery. (The glossy inset photographs of glaciers also include a pretty gnarly pic of Wadham's neck and skull stapled back together.) I don't know if this kind of book started with H is for Hawk, but it certainly reminds me of it. Wadham even describes how, for a long time after the surgery, she was unable to write the kind of logical scientific prose required of a researcher, turning instead to creative writing of the sort that clearly produced this book. I could have used either a bit more of this autofiction or a bit less, but I don't want to nitpick; in the end, Ice Rivers manages to balance well the small life of one dedicated human and the larger life of the glaciers.