nonfiction by nina adel
In Memory of Language, Land, and Ice
I never got to see the world before it vanished.
On the small speck of the planet where I lived as a child in the company of my three sisters, two parents, and a cresting wave of people that washed over our home, I found a wheel to spin my dreams on. I squinted my eyes beyond the window glass toward the sky, envisioning the planet as a mix of swirling, melted crayons, as chunks and pools of textured color, of teal into orange into browning gold. This imagined earth beneath my eyelids kept me half-awake at night, its colors and shifting landscapes encircling my bed like a thin ice cloud of cold, lightning-fast in its movement.
I knew the words. Island, ice shelf, desert. Ocean, reef, crater. Prairie, cliff, plateau. Rainforest, cloud forest, bluff. I knew the people names, the names we used for the languages they spoke: Pashtun, Saami, Guarani. Maori, Gullah, Twa. I’d gaze for hours at their clothing in photographs. I’d make childish books filled with captioned drawings of each community of people living and working in their particular sort of home. My ink-marked fingers drew their bodies in textiles spun from fibrous plants, from fur shaved or gathered from their animals, their pets, their beasts of burden.
While I savored the hours spent imagining, my body pressed hard into the grooved vinyl runner on the stairs, I wanted to put my feet there, on the landforms and waterworks, amongst the people, listening to the languages, tracking the terrain. I wanted to know, with my own skin, how the world became. How the people arose. How words came to their lips and left again, spiraling toward each other. I wanted to know so much. From a conjured magic carpet cloaked in invisibility, following words from one end of a continent and moving slowly across toward the other end, I wondered, would you hear every human language flow directly and traceably out of the one before it and into its own? From that aerial vantage point, would each terrestrial color change dramatically from one spot to another, or would the transformation be slow, dripping, the degrees of change undetectable by the naked eye? And the aquatic palette, I wondered, is there a sudden line separating calm turquoise from grey waves? If water is transparent and translucent, is the shift in color real, sudden, tangible?
These were the silent questions of my childhood. However much I pondered these half-dreams in my bed each night, the asking and imagining were unclear in the morning. I sought the answers in my older sisters’ rooms, gazing at collections of globes and atlases and traveling maps. I traced the open fields on posters covering their walls with my fingertips, read their books of anthropology, fixed my thoughts on the influence of geography on human culture. My sisters sat around each other’s rooms atop piles of pillows, their hands grasping multi-hued pens, oily cray-pas and colored pencils. I joined them there in illustrating booklets depicting Poland, Argentina, Tibet. About the Haida people, or the Hopi. They designed their own social studies projects illuminating the worlds of their private thoughts.
If you could go anywhere, where would you go? I asked, huddled up against my sisters, prepared to adopt their dreams, to entwine them with my own, to privilege theirs over mine. Where will you go first? they asked each other over the top of my head, as if this were inevitable in their future lives.
We grew up learning languages other than our own, languages to lead us places navigable by speech. One of my sisters went to Mexico. I took a bus filled beyond capacity with people, chickens, bags of fruit and market animals and joined her there. I heard more languages than I’d expected. The seven languages of Oaxaca, the many dialects of Tarahumara people, of Michoacan. I spoke Spanish, but was surprised by Mixe, by Purepecha, by Chinanteca. Enchanted by the click of the tongue against the soft palate or its repetitive swish in the middle of the mouth while the faces of the speakers scarcely moved. I studied the sounds, practiced the gestures. When I spoke the words, I was a different human being; my thoughts were changed, conceived in tasks and visions from other people’s lives.
Returning home, I observed the color schemes and language maps, perceived within the bones of my face the nasal resonance of the first people spread out over all the continent: of Dinne, of Yupik, of Tsalagi, of Natick; heard how the indigenous drum chants of my region were different from those of the next region over, heard how music and language aided the flow between the two, traveling toward each other on the same air. All of this was close to home, just across North America. The rest of the world was too far from me then; too vast.
Come here, to me, wrote one sister in careful hand on a beautiful card depicting the expansive Russian landscape where she was a student. The picture showed a birch tree forest spreading on and on until there appeared a clearing, rendered in varied shades of white and gray and green. I rubbed the scratchy linen paper, wishing to feel the forest moss under my bare feet.
Another of my sisters called from South America. All you need is the ticket, you should come while you can. Who knows how long I’ll be staying, she wrote, and stayed for twenty years. There’s a beach an hour away from me in one direction, mountains in the other. She’d sent a little jack-in-the-box, an artisan-made jester from a provincial market in the south of Brazil. I hesitated and then didn’t go. Not to Russia. Not to Brazil.
I dreamed the difference between the waters called Atlantic and Pacific. If I travelled the islands of the Atlantic, of its Caribbean sea child, I thought, I would understand them. I had lived, by then, on the Atlantic coast further north, camped and swam along the Keys to the south. I felt that I could know these islands by water, through my senses, through immersion in the lilting waves, through aquatic collectivity.
In my childhood, I’d often read Pitcairn’s Island or Mutiny on the Bounty before bed. I read in awe of marine fluorescence, pausing at passages of cooking, hearing in my mind the scenes of lilting Tahitian spoken flowingly from vowel to vowel, softly stopping on a t, or an f, gliding over an l. I saw the consonants as trees, the vowels a hammock. I read until my eyelids drooped, until I dropped the flashlight and the book slipped to my chest.
Yet when I’d turned twenty-eight, I still had no ties to the Pacific. No memory. No Pacific island earth had ever touched my feet. I might visit those islands someday, but my flesh could never absorb what I’d read through the paper of the page. This only made me want them more.
Huahine is less populous than Mo’orea, we’d said as girls. Let’s go there.
The six essential trees of French Polynesia are breadfruit, banana, coconut, lime, papaya and mango.
All Polynesian languages share the words motu, tapa, kava, ariki. The phonemes k and ng are replaced with a glottal stop in Ta’aha and Maupiti.
I’d learned the meaning of glottal stop in my adult life, yet I hadn’t found a connection, remained a follower of the Atlantic, a stranger to the Pacific. A stranger to the reefs, an imaginer of teeth. The biting teeth of great whites and tiger sharks; of hammerheads, lemons and black tips. Beings I feared irrationally, despite the data I consumed: You are statistically more likely to be hit by an 18-wheeler. To swallow a latex balloon. To fall from a ladder. Statistically more likely to die by homelessness. By bees. By falling icicles, or falling televisions. By sand. By rolling from your bunk. More likely any of these than shark teeth.
My twenties nearly gone, I still had not touched the Pacific, but did not give up hope. I could go, it could happen yet. Held up against the universe, our planet was not so large. A trip just halfway around might lie ahead for me. Even when the dead patches began to appear in the world’s oceans, when large areas of magical waters previously replete with life began to lose oxygen and the plankton all died off, I thought I would still go there someday, still have the chance to see the colorful underwater life of a Pacific island shoreline, an offshore reef through the glass bottom of a boat, an overwater sleeping hut in the night. I thought we could come back from the brink of peril and—perhaps by keeping our distance for a time, by discarding nothing into the aquatic tides, by living lightly on the surface layers of earth—we could see the bleached corals bloom again, see the Pacific palm fronds and beloved redwoods reach upward, worlds apart, into the same sky. We could let the land and ocean heal.
On a flight to Japan, my plane descended unexpectedly for refueling in Anchorage, Alaska. Looking through the tightly sealed windows, I’d imagined myself tumbling out onto the deep, soaring mountains of snow. I’d been enchanted by the way the peaked, jutting masses rushed right to the edge of the cold, gray bay, then stopped abruptly, startled. I could not look away as my dreams of Pacific waters froze, cracking into stained glass patterns of frost.
And so it was that I busied myself with ice. I distracted myself from desire for the turquoise Pacific with new dreams of an ice lodging far away to the north, amongst the caribou. Every inch of the lodging was made of ice. Crystal lights lit the frosted entryway, beckoning to me as I walked through the faintly periwinkle passages. It became this ice I craved then, and I spent new nights pretending that I slept on a solid block of ice covered in fur blankets, while caribou breath against a prism of snow and blew open a window upon the solid whiteness. I conjured for myself a coldness impenetrable by any language. I numbed myself to what I was losing, what was already gone. What I’d never had and always longed to be.
The cost of a trip to such a remote and distant land was beyond my means. I had a family by then, a family with pressing needs, yet perhaps there was still time to chase after what was fading from the universe. I thought I’d be able to go and show my children, during their lifetimes, how cold could be desirable. Even when I began to hear of the irreversible melt of the polar regions, I thought I would still, before my end, see the limitless expanse of an natural Arctic community; that together we would watch the silver foxes disappear over the hill to safety, the chubby seal pups secured by their mothers beyond the reach of predators.
I did not realize then that I and all that I knew, that any of us knew, would be swept away in the great undoing; that the Atlantic and Pacific would rush towards each other again, long lost cousins from the warm and ancient Permian ocean; that the sleep-inducing freeze of the northern, ice-blocked seas would join and embrace those waters and be warmed in their mingling; that my sisters, my children and I, and all the languages of our cherished globe, would become as insignificant as the kelp and plankton whose ominous disappearance could not, in any case, have warned us soon enough of what would come to be.
There is an emptied planet spinning around a flaming sun, awash in brine; an orb lit with swirling pools of color, of teal into orange into browning gold. There is still water.
An MFA graduate of Hamline University, Nina Adel recently won the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2020 Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction and has been published in Door is a Jar, Moria, Sweet Tree Review, matchbook, Selcouth Station, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, The Tennessean, among others, and is a Glimmer Train honorable mention recipient. A musician and once primarily a singer-songwriter, she lives in the heart of Nashville alongside her two children and teaches writing at a local college. She’s also the manager and instructor for the Immigrants Write program at The Porch Writer's Collective. Find out more on her website ninaadel.com and follow her on Instagram and Twitter @writethinkspeak.