Permanence

Having hiked the Nugget Creek trail up the canyon south of Mendenhall Glacier earlier in the day, I turned to John Muir's Travels in Alaska last night after dinner. The poetry of the second paragraph drew me in immediately. What I had sat down to read fairly quickly (for I knew that I'd lap up every word) I met with slow progress. Each phrase called to my pen; scribbling ensued, yet my marginalia is neatly printed, developed, methodical--far from ordinary, even for this student and teacher of literature. Muir's style had tempered my anxiety to speed through the text. He writes that "to the mountaineer a sea voyage is a grand, inspiring, restful change;" the same could be said of an awe-imbued travel narrative for the fictionist (3).

Muir writes that we can see the ideal of permanence expressed in the "water hills and dales in eternal visible motion [or] rock waves" (3). The ocean's surface undulates, yet its motion is the very essence of its constancy--its dependability. Permanence, then, can be represented in the interconnectivity of the dynamic and static elements of nature. Glaciers, like Mendenhall, appear static but in fact suffer annual measurable decay.

I had not previously considered change coincident with permanence. In my experience, change has described abandonment: the world is irrevocably changed as it continues to lose the glacier. How does a melting glacier express permanence? The world does not lose the water; the molecules remain within the closed system of the Earth's climate. Seasonal change is a given. Permanence is not static at all, but rhythmic.

Mendenhall glacier will recede, though, at a faster rate than glaciers of past ice ages. Increased CO2 levels which increase at a rate which far excedes that of any of the past 650 million years threaten the permanence of the system. The climatological system which contains the ebb and flow of hot and cold extremes has been ruptured, altering systemic permanence itself. When change no longer occurs within consistent margins, the model is no longer dependable.

A "formless" free verse poem whose line length varies from eight to twelve syllables expresses permanence--reasonable, reliable fluctuation--and therefore adheres to a formal convention. Were a seventeen syllable line to break the poem's convention, the structural integrity would collapse, leading to metaphysical and actual losses of permanence. The poem would not be anthologized because of its instability--its lack of unity.

Our glacier has become a line of verse which is too short for its poem. Disunity abounds in the system; nature's anthology is in the process of being trimmed. The time of ascetic wonderment has passed. The moral imperative incumbent upon the non-permanent members of the world community--which is a permanent body as long as the global system is not imperiled--must act to preserve the observed order of the natural environment in order that we might sustain ourselves to enjoy permanence.

Individuals, communities, whole societies, peoples have come and gone innumerable times, yet humanity is not a permanent fixture on Earth. Neither is our glacier; nor the ocean, or even the mountains. Change is permanent. Fluidity is the sure foundation of the world. We must remember that as we continue to face new challenges, we must update the ways by which we approach the fragile permanence which we inhabit.

*John Muir, Travels in Alaska, 1915, San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988.