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Terminal Ice (Cont.)

IN RECENT TIMES I did a lot of reading about icebergs, some of it at the library of a western university where the air outdoors was so full of smoke from forest fires that people were going around in gas masks. To the old question of whether we will end in fire or ice, the answer now seems to be: both. Fire's photogenic, media-friendly qualities may cause us sometimes to overlook its counterpart and to forget the spectacular entrance ice made onto the modern apocalyptic scene just 90 years ago. Ice plus the Titanic spawned nightmares of disaster that never seem to fade. There was a song people used to sing about the Titanic, part of which went:

It was on her maiden trip
When an iceberg hit the ship...

Of course, the iceberg didn't hit the ship, but the other way around. So forcefully did the iceberg enter our consciousness, however, we assume it must have meant to. Looming unannounced from the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912, it crashed the swells' high-society ball, discomfiting Mrs. Astor, leaving its calling card in the form of a cascade of ice on the starboard well deck, slitting the hull fatally 20 feet below the waterline, and then disappearing into the night. In an instant this "Shape of Ice," as the poet Thomas Hardy called it, had become more famous than all the celebrities on board. In its dreadful individuality, it had become The Iceberg.

An inflatable toy version of it is sitting on my desk. It came with a Titanic bath toy some friends gave my children a while ago. The inflatable iceberg is roughly pyramidal, with three peaks—two of them small, and a larger one in the middle. Whoever designed the toy must have seen the widely published photograph supposedly showing The Iceberg, or perhaps saw a cinematic iceberg based on the photo. Hours after the sinking, observers on a German ship reported an iceberg of this shape near the scene, and one of them took the famous photo. Two weeks later, another transatlantic steamer said it saw a different-looking iceberg surrounded by deck chairs, cushions, and other debris in a location where The Iceberg could have drifted. As is the case with many suspects, no positive identification could ever be made.

Northern Hemisphere icebergs like The Iceberg melt quickly once they drift down into the Atlantic, with its warming Gulf Stream. Almost certainly, within a few weeks of shaking up the world, The Iceberg had disappeared. Its ephemerality has only increased its fame; solid matter for just a few historic moments, it continues indefinitely in imaginary realms—for example, as a spooky cameo in the top-grossing movie of all time. The message of The Iceberg, common wisdom has it, concerns the inscrutability of our fate and the vanity of human pride. But when I meditate on ice and icebergs, I wonder if The Iceberg's message might have been simpler than that. Maybe the news The Iceberg bore was more ancient, powerful, planetary, and climatic. Maybe The Iceberg's real message wasn't about us, but about ice.

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