Global Warming Mis-Adventure: Fox Glacier

as ice transitions to water, as the seas warm

the unstable moraine, the gravel and rocks riven from the valley's walls that fall from the ice as it melts, that makes up the uppermost semi-solid surface, is constantly undermined both by the increasing glacier melt and denser rainfall, condensed from the vapors of warm carbonated oceans.

And so instead of how it was when Billy and I visited in 2003, as a quiet walk through rain forest
emerging into a mind-bending view of the face of the glacier, towering beautiful above its ground-out valley,

the rains
that have been pattering n the campervan roof, forcing the constant donning and un-donning of jackets, profoundly de-stabilized the sides of the valley into huge landslides in the days before we arrived, rendering the whole (apparently essential) task of getting the tourists within view of the glacier into a skull-crushing swarm of orange machinery, steel blades cutting into the vast curves of gravel the glacier left so subtly, back-hoes scooping, pirhouetting and releasing their jaws into dump-trucks like over grown child's toys, struggling to organize a glacier's death throes. In spite of all this Mad Max effort a huge swath of collapsed gravel still lies across the path. The great glacier looms far off, blocked by signs and the sheer impossibility of maintaining something so enduring as a road in such a deeply unstable situation, and I wonder if this isn't an echo of times to come. The real wonder is the sheer number of people who come here, to glimpse its demise - the swarm of sudden interest, vulture eyes. Will all of out natural wonders have such a last flash of interest, will they have to generate such fireworks?

I my orange jacket I felt like a clown at a funeral, feeling way too happy for the occasion. In the milky, ashy, roaring water draining away from the glacier we could actually see chunks of ice, floating away to the sea.

Once I learned to view it from inside the disaster, it was, really, quite funny, in a sad and spectacular kind of way.