Glacier Glass

I was wiping down the bar when I saw her through the window. A woman, walking alone toward the glacier trail, holding something with both hands. Like it might break.

I put the rag down and watched her for a minute. Nobody carries anything like that up to the viewpoint unless it matters. Most guests grab a coffee, snap some photos of the ice, and leave. This was different.

I grabbed my jacket and went out after her.

The trail from the lodge to the Nigardsbreen viewpoint is maybe twenty minutes if you take it slow. She was taking it slow. I caught up to her about halfway, where the path gets rocky and you have to watch your feet.

"Hey, hi, sorry," I said. She turned around. She was Japanese, somewhere in her early thirties, with a heavy backpack and a small wooden box held against her chest. "I'm Kali. I own the lodge back there. Fjellhus."

"Oh," she said. "I'm Sakura. I'm staying at your lodge. Room four."

"Right, right, you checked in yesterday. I was doing inventory. Sorry I didn't introduce myself properly."

"It's okay. You were busy."

"Where are you headed? That's the glacier trail."

"Yes." She adjusted her grip on the box. "I know. That's where I'm going."

"You know the last stretch is steep? There's gravel and it ices over even in summer in places. People twist ankles up there all the time."

"I'll be careful."

"Can I carry something for you? Your pack, at least."

She shook her head. "Thank you, but no. The box stays with me. It has to."

"What's in it, if you don't mind me asking?"

"My grandmother," she said, plain as anything. "Her ashes. I'm supposed to scatter them at the glacier."

I stood there for a second. "Okay. Then I'm coming with you. Not to carry anything, just to make sure you don't fall off the side of a mountain. That's the offer."

She looked at me like she was deciding something. Then she nodded. "Okay. That would be good, actually. The trail guide said the same thing and I ignored it."

"Yeah, well, the trail guide knows the trail. Come on, there's a spot where the rocks shift. Step where I step."

We walked. She didn't talk much and I didn't push. I'm not great at silence, though, so after about five minutes I started pointing stuff out. The birch trees going yellow at the edges. The meltwater running milky green under the footbridge. That color you only get from glacier flour, rock ground down so fine it stays suspended in the water.

"That color," she said. "It doesn't look real."

"It's real. It's just rock dust. The glacier's been grinding this valley down for thousands of years."

"Thousands," she repeated. She looked at the water a long time. "My grandmother would have liked that. She thought everything should outlast her."

"Is that why here? The glacier?"

"It was on a list," Sakura said. "She made a list when she was young. Places she wanted to see. She never went anywhere, really. She had a shop in Tokyo, a wig shop, and she worked it for fifty years. Then she got sick, and she said, take me to one of them. Any of them. So I picked the one that looked the coldest and the farthest away."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything. We kept climbing.

The last stretch was the steep part, like I said. I went first and she followed, holding the box against her chest with one hand and the railing with the other. She was tougher than she looked. Most guests huff and quit at the halfway bench.

Then we were up top, on the rocky plateau with the steel rail, and the glacier was right there. Blue-white and cracked all over, like glass somebody dropped and never cleaned up. It always does something to me, even after three years of living here.

Sakura stood at the rail and didn't say anything for a while.

"This is it," she finally said. "This is where she wanted to be."

"You want me to give you some space?"

"Actually," she said, "would you stay? I have things to show you. If you don't mind."

"I don't mind."

She set the box on a flat rock. Then she opened her backpack and pulled out a stack of postcards, bound with a rubber band. Maybe twenty of them, soft at the corners like they'd been handled a lot.

"She wrote these," Sakura said. "Over fifty years. One for every place on her list. She wrote them to my grandfather, mostly, after he died she kept writing them anyway. To nobody. But she never sent a single one. Not one. She said it would be like admitting she'd been somewhere, and she hadn't."

"That's kind of sad."

"It is sad," Sakura agreed. "It's very sad. But she wasn't sad about it. She said the writing was the going, for her. She went everywhere on paper."

I took the stack when she held it out. The top one had a hand-drawn glacier on it, badly, with blue crayon over the ink. I read it before I thought about it.

"'To Haru. Today the shop was quiet. I sold a wig to a bride whose hair fell out from the medicine, and she cried, and I told her she was beautiful and she believed me. That is the whole job, really, telling people the truth they can't see yet. I still want to see ice. Real ice, old and blue. Haru, I think if I ever touched something that old, I would stop being afraid of small things. Love, Michi.'"

I stopped. My voice cracked a little on the last line and I pretended it was the wind.

"That's the one for here," Sakura said quietly. "There's one for each place. Iceland. The Dolomites. A fjord in Greenland. She never got to any of them."

I handed the stack back and looked at the glacier. I don't know why it hit me the way it did. Maybe because I know about lists. I had one too, a mental one, all the things I was going to do with Katya before she went and did them with someone else, at our own anniversary party, right in front of the dessert table. Four years, gone, and I'd been moping around my own lodge for four months like a ghost.

Nobody's fault but hers, everybody said. Still hurt.

"You okay?" Sakura asked.

"Yeah. Sorry. That one just, it landed funny." I wiped my eye with my sleeve, quick, before she could make it a thing. "So what happens now? With the ashes."

"Now I do it." She picked up the box. It had a sliding lid. "I was told by a man at the consulate that it's allowed, scattering natural ashes in open wild land, as long as it's respectful and not right on the ice where people walk. So. Respectful."

"How do you want to do it?"

"There's wind up here." She looked around. "I want to open it and let the wind take it. I think she'd like the wind. She never had it. Tokyo air doesn't move much."

"Okay."

"Will you hold the postcards? Just while my hands are busy."

"Sure."

She took off the lid. I stood beside her, holding that soft stack of unsent paper, and she tipped the box out over the low parapet, gently, letting the wind do the work. The ashes went out in a gray-brown ribbon, over the rail, over the drop, out toward the ice. The wind gusted right then, like it had been waiting, and scattered them wide across the blue.

Sakura didn't cry. She just stood there with her empty hands open at her sides.

"There," she said. "Grandmother. You made it. Fifty years late, but you made it."

We stood there another few minutes. The wind kept coming up off the ice. I held the postcards against my chest so they wouldn't blow away, and I thought about a woman in Tokyo telling a bald bride she was beautiful, fifty years of that, and never once seeing a glacier.

"Thank you," Sakura said at last. "For walking with me."

"Any time. Literally. I live here."

She laughed, a small surprised laugh, like it came out before she checked it. "You live here. In this cold."

"I like the cold." I shrugged. "Do you want to get something hot at the lodge? I make terrible coffee but there's a fireplace."

"That sounds nice. Can I ask you something strange first?"

"Sure."

"Can we read the rest of the postcards? At the fire? I've read them all a hundred times but I think they sound different out here. Near one of the places."

I looked at her. This woman I'd known for an hour, who'd just finished the hardest trip of her life, asking me to sit by a fire and read her dead grandmother's mail.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'd like that a lot."

We headed down the trail. I went first, calling out the loose rocks.

Back at the lodge I got the fire going while Sakura hung her jacket by the door. The common room was empty. October was slow season and I had three other rooms booked and nobody in them yet. I put the kettle on and pulled out the good chair by the hearth, the one with the blanket Katya left behind that I kept meaning to throw out and never did, still by the hearth.

"Sitting here or there?" I asked.

"Here. Near the fire. Tokyo apartments don't have fireplaces. I've only seen them in movies."

"This one mostly just smokes. But it's real." I set down two mugs of tea. "Fair warning, it's grocery store tea. I'm not fancy."

"This is fine." She wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at the fire. "This is very fine."

"So your grandmother. She was a wig maker too?"

"Oh yes. Michi Wig Shop, Asakusa, fifty years. Her mother taught her, and her mother learned from a wig maker in the occupation years. It's a family line."

"That's wild. What kind of work did she do?"

"All kinds. Theater. Some film, small studios. Mostly, well, medical clients. Women losing hair to treatment. She was proud of that work. She said a wig is not hair, it's a costume for courage." Sakura smiled at her tea. "I make lace-front pieces mostly. Studio work now, in Tokyo. Films, some theater."

"I did hair before this. Salon in Bergen, four years. Not wigs, but I did a few pieces for a cancer center near us. Volunteered, sort of."

"You did?" She put the mug down and leaned forward. "Then you know. The fitting matters more than the hair. Did you find that?"

"Absolutely. The hair is the easy part. Sitting with a scared woman for two hours while she decides if she can look in a mirror, that's the job."

"Yes. Yes exactly. Grandmother said the same thing. She said anyone can sell hair. Few people can sell the mirror back to someone." She laughed. "Sorry. I could talk about this all night."

"Please do. Nobody here talks craft with me. My guests talk about the sauna and whether the wifi reaches the sauna."

"It doesn't?"

"It does, which is worse."

She laughed again, that surprised little laugh. I liked it. I noticed I was doing a thing where I leaned toward her when she laughed and I made myself stop.

"Okay," I said. "You've seen the glacier. Big day. But I'm going to make you an offer anyway."

"An offer?"

"There's an ice cave. Lower on the glacier tongue, maybe an hour's hike north of the main trail. Blue all the way through. Old ice, compressed, the kind that eats the red light and gives you back blue. It opens up in late season like this and it's safe if you go in the morning before the sun works on it."

"You want to take me to an ice cave."

"I want to challenge you to an ice cave. There's a difference. You've done the easy twenty-minute walk. Your grandmother's list deserves better than the viewpoint everyone gets off the tour bus."

She looked at me over her mug. "That sounded competitive."

"It's a little competitive. I've been alone up here too long and I need somebody to beat at something and you're the only guest I have."

"You want to beat me. At hiking."

"At reading ice. I'll teach you to read the glacier and we'll see who's better at it. Loser makes breakfast."

"You're already the cook here."

"Then the stakes are that the winner doesn't have to hear the loser complain about breakfast."

She thought about it, all serious, like it was a business deal. "If I win, you tell me why you looked sad at the viewpoint."

"That's a terrible stake."

"It's a good stake. If you win, I'll read you my favorite postcard, the Greenland one, and I've never read it to anyone."

"That's a good stake."

"So. Tomorrow, early?"

"Sunrise-ish. Wear the boots by the door, the ones I lent you. The last bit is steep."

"Okay." She put out her hand, very formal. "Challenge accepted."

I shook it. Her hand was small and warm from the mug. I noticed that too. I was noticing a lot.

---

Morning came gray and still. We left at seven with packs, ropes I didn't plan to need but carried anyway, and a thermos. The trail north was rougher than the main one, old moraine and loose stone, and Sakura was better on it than I expected.

"You're quick," I said.

"In Tokyo I walk everywhere. Twenty thousand steps a day. Also I did a documentary shoot in Hokkaido, winter, three weeks in snow."

"See, this is why I needed a challenge. You people keep being competent."

"You people."

"Craft people. Artist hands. You should be clumsy."

"I'll be clumsy later to make you feel better."

The cave mouth showed up around nine, a dark slot at the base of the tongue where the meltwater had carved in over the years. Inside it opened up. The light came through the ice in a way I never got tired of, like the whole wall was a lamp.

"Okay," Sakura said. She had stopped walking. "Okay."

"Told you."

"It's blue. It's blue all the way down."

"Old ice squeezes the air out. No bubbles, so it eats everything but the blue. Some of this ice is hundreds of years old. Maybe more."

She walked to the far wall slowly, like she was afraid of waking it up. She reached out and laid her palm flat against it.

"Cold?"

"No. I mean yes, it's cold, but." She kept her hand there. "It doesn't feel cold. It feels old. Is that a strange thing to say?"

"Not strange. I've thought the same thing and never