Dreams of Rising Waters

THERE WAS A TIME before this, but not the one we remember. That one is as real as our imagined futures, as starkly different from the now we made as the now we had intended, then.

So, now: smoke-choked throats and burning eyes, as predictable each season as the snows had been, once. Bands of pale dust crumble into sandy-bowled reservoirs. The land is drier than it ever was, even before we flooded it. Fewer birdsongs, if we’d ever noticed them before. We wonder where the birds went, thinking, hoping, they’ve discovered new migratory patterns that we haven’t. Except we know that thousands or millions of them have simply died. The rock still feels the same, though, cool or hot to the touch, depending on the weather. We are all always depending on the weather. The susurrous scrape of rubber on granite, a soft yielding as the shoe grips. Slips, occasionally. As we all do. To go up, you have to give in.

A summit still has that open-air feeling that’s like nothing else; it never matters how high (or low) it actually is. We ease our bodies over awkward bulges or out of rippling cracks and into sky. Soon–if we don’t succeed in blocking out the sun with clouds of reflective aerosols, a manufactured perennial gloaming layered over manufactured perennial suffering–it may be the only feeling we can still remember from before. That open sky, a sense of “above-ness.” Everything else has changed.

It wasn’t intentional. We throw our hands up and say, Sorry, we never meant to do this. We only wanted to grow grain for our families, to harness a little bit of the river to mill it, and later, to pull a little bit of ore from the earth for our satellites and our solar panels, to remove the tops of just a few anonymous mountains. We only wanted the power to flip the zeroes to ones fast enough. We only wanted to be richer.

Slipping over glacial polish and jamming soft skin against granite, I imagine I’m touching time before this time. Some say the solution to all this is our past. Some days, I feel like fast-running water over stone, a waterfall flowing backward. Other days, I’m a trembling, uncertain trickle. These days, I see myself reflected in the empty reservoirs.

I don’t want to go back to the land. I grew up on frenetic cartoons and fake marshmallows in breakfast cereals; I built an academic career on movies and cyborgs. We look, guilty, at our well-heeled boots, wax poetic about the feeling of our hands in dirt, but I don’t want to till the soil. The digital is like dreaming, intangible yet inextricably material: heat radiating from our bodies or server stacks. We once were wind-carved, exposed to the elements. It was hard, then, harder than skyscrapers or computer chassis. Will we be glad to have somewhere to retreat to when the waters rise?

I cup my ears at the summit and listen to the wind. It sounds like many voices, too many to make out what’s being said. But the primal scripts are all the same.

–Mailee Hung, June Lake, California

[This story originally appeared in The Climbing Life section of Alpinist 76, which is now available on newsstands and in our online store. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up Alpinist 76 for all the goodness!–Ed.]