Abashiri
I aspire to end up glacier-frozen,
or in a grizzly’s gut, following
in the lapsed family tradition.
Going back ten thousand years,
I mean. I’m thinking about this
while eating wasabi peas beneath
a woolly mammoth in a museum
in northern Japan.
The burly pachyderm,
found in a ten-mile plank of ice,
is now a resin of chemicals,
instead of a giant lung
of fresh-chewed ferns.
I’m thinking about becoming
a glacier entrepreneur,
cutting glaciers out of Greenland
and rigging them in South Beach
for ice-age mojitos, glaciers
in Sãu Paolo for air conditioning,
glaciers for the next big Dubai
figure skating complex where
Korean teenagers can land
triple axels on a LEED-certified
organic surface.
Since we can’t hurl spears
or love each other beneath
wads of furs, we’ll glacier out
Singapore to host the winter Olympics,
recycling meltoff into bottled water
and using profits to support
a cooperative of vegan
climate-change activists
making artisan kombucha
from ferns found in mammoth stomachs.
Glacier off tops of mountains
and glacier them back on,
glacier oceans back to cooler temps,
glacier my Pleistocene instincts
to my paleo diet and write an app
that tracks the eskering in real time.
Popping another pea,
I look up, part-orphan,
part-ambition, considering
the noiseless shaggy requiem.
It doesn’t look back.
Uggianaqtuq
And so the polar bear became a Patagonia campaign, a Sierra Club calendar photo, a YouTube video on which so many clicked the sad emoji. A victory for branding but not ultimately for the bear. The endless drift of extinction. Can you imagine your world literally melting away? My Inuit friends in Alaska had a word: Uggianaqtuq, “to behave strangely”—of the weather, how the dispersing cloud foretells a storm that comes in minutes instead of a day, the way spring is born again and again with melting, thawing, melting, thawing. The polar bear and I are born again as globalized citizens. The great white gods refugee their way south as the brown and black people head north, and the white people argue over what to do. Once a god of the mysterious barren north, you’re now a disoriented beggar seeing trees for the first time. Cruise ships. Exxon waits in the wings. Who could care as you wander a highway in Newfoundland, far from your beloved ice? I’m thinking about booking a luxury cruise through the Northwest Passage, to see it all before it’s gone. I’m hoping to see a polar bear, but not too close.
Walled Garden
These people are protecting bison and sage grouse
and grassland ecosystems. Non-profiting up patchworks
of land for this land trust or that park or that owl.
Lobbying to keep this forest roadless or to protect those
wolves, or save someone’s children from digital depression.
These people are demanding to delist those grizzlies,
to sell off that wildlife refuge, to buy those mining rights.
They are swinging hammers of money and protest to make
more money to not lose money to keep family together.
They are killing wolves to keep cattle, to hold values.
These people are crowded on benches, on their iPhones,
waiting for Old Faithful to erupt on the hour, killing time
watching David Attenborough shows in the walled garden
that is Netflix, in the walled garden that is Yellowstone,
in the walled garden that is the United States.
They are entering passwords to check the price of wolf
t-shirts on Amazon Prime compared to the park gift shop.
They are taking pictures, taking videos, measuring steps,
posting all of it to a cloud that knows them better
than they know themselves. These people are hunched
and sunburned in the desert as they hide from Border Patrol
who find them with satellites, as javelina grunt past them
as GPS-tracked grizzlies grunt across Yellowstone’s
park boundary, one minute protected, the next not,
migrating toward extinction, that burned-down church
that is all wall and no garden. I’m swiping through bear
and wolf pictures on my phone, a clumsy civilized effort
to give wild oxygen to my choked biology, and wondering
if we love things more when they’re scarce, especially when
there’s this foreground filter bubble of distraction, not in the
bison or sage grouse but burrowing inside people who are staving
off boredom and trolling but mostly working hard to keep their corner
of the garden growing while the weather gets more intense.
A strange recipe: two parts mammal gland instincts
with one part binge-clicking and one part culture, and you get
the only creatures who actually cultivate gardens even as
we destroy them, even as constantly refreshing this or that app
walls off our own interior gardens, all of which are complicated
responses to the knowledge of the garden that we originally
came from and are mostly failing to find our way back to.
Smokey
The bear coughs the bristlecone smoke like the rest of us,
but isn’t allowed into the visitors’ center for AC and free Kool-Aid.
No one said it was easy being an icon, a t-shirt, an ad campaign.
And what can I learn from the bear? He wears a GPS ear tag
and I an iPhone as I sit alone for two days in smoky Yosemite,
an abandoned husband with a burning heart. Half Dome
is more Beijing smog than Ansel Adams gelatin print wilderness.
Across the Sierras the Smokey signs feel useless. Endless helicopters
drop dispersant. The bear and I see extinction out of the corners
of our eyes. The annual fires roaring across the West are extinction
and administration’s selling off public lands is extinction,
the last grizzly in the Sierras was once extinction, the cougar
crossing the highway a protest of extinction. The story ends
with the real Smokey sleeping out his days in D.C.’s National Zoo,
dreaming of sagebrush while retirees eat wieners and point.
A boy grows up, his head dreaming on a teddy bear. Without realizing it,
his life is a shrine to bears. Bears in Alaska. Bears in Hokkaido.
Bears in the Andes. Bears in Quebec. Bears that don’t promise
self-actualization or a good 401K or freedom from cancer.
Bears that knock around the soul without permission.
Bears that ruin a marriage. The boy becomes a man who wants
to love women, but they will never smell like bears. People are people
but bears are a secret howling ladder to a world of smoky caves.
Even as I try not to think about bears, Smokey ambles slowly away,
his fur wet with my dreams. I have no right to bring him back to life.
Ian Ramsey is a writer, educator, and wilderness athlete based in Maine, where he directs the Kauffmann Program for Environmental Writing and Wilderness Exploration. His work has appeared in High Desert Journal, Deep Wild, and other publications. These poems are from his new book Hackable Animal, published in April 2023 by Wayfarer Books. For more information, visit www.ianramsey.net.
Read Ian Ramsey’s “Open Letter to America,” also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header image by aleks1949, courtesy Shutterstock.
