Sauzanuat

Sauzaŋuat

Inupiaq term for pancake ice

Sauzaŋuat - ice that originates as siguaq or young thin ice which eventually breaks up into multiple pieces that continuously bump into each other round and round forming circular pieces shaped like dance drums.




Ice had been forming in clear, brittle sheets at the side of the flowing stream. She had spent some time happily marching through the shallows of the water, crunching the thin ice with her boots and watching it drift downstream. She wasn't climbing that day, just walking; she had waterproofs on and carried little gear. Somehow the fact she wasn't doing anything dangerous or physically demanding had made her feel like a young child again.

She came to a place where the stream flowed over a terrace of rock, from one level of moor down to another, and there a small pool had carved itself into the rock just beneath the rapids. The water fell less than a metre, and the stream was narrow enough to jump: but she remembered that stream and that pool because there in the circling water, caught beneath the splashing rapids, floated a frozen circle of foam.

The water was naturally soft and peaty, and a yellow-white foam sometimes formed in the mountain streams of that area, blown by the winds and caught in the reeds, but she had never seen it collected into a circle like that and frozen. She laughed when she saw it. She waded in and carefully picked it up. It was only a little greater in diameter than the distance between her outstretched thumb and little finger and a few centimetres thick, not as fragile as she had at first feared. The frothy bubbles had frozen in the cold air and almost freezing water, making what looked like a tiny model of a galaxy: a fairly common spiral galaxy, like this one, like hers. She held the light confection of air and water and suspended chemicals and turned it over in her hands, sniffing it, sticking her tongue out and licking it, looking at the dim winter sun through it, flicking her finger to see if it would ring. She watched her little rime galaxy start to melt, very slowly, and saw her own breath blow across it, a brief image of her warmth in the air.

Finally she put it back where she had found it, slowly revolving in the pool of water at the base of the small rapids.

The galaxy image had occurred to her then, and she thought at the time about the similarity of the forces which shaped both the little and the vast. She had thought, And which is really the most important? but then felt embarrassed to have thought such a thing.

Every now and again, though, she went back to that thought, and knew that each was exactly as important as the other. Then later she would go back to her second thoughts on the matter and feel embarrassed again.




The buzz of meaning and matter about her, the mountains' song of light, seemed to rise around her like a cauldron tide, drenching and engulfing. She felt herself as the speck she was: a mote, a tiny struggling imperfect chip of life, lost in the surrounding waste of light and space. She sensed the frozen force of the ice and snow around her, and felt consumed by the skin-burning chill of it. She felt the sun beat, and knew the crystals' fracturing and melting, knew the water as it dripped and slithered and became dark bubbles under ice and dewdrops on the icicles. She saw the fronded trickles, the tumbling streams and the cataracted rivers; she sensed the winding and unwinding loops as the river slowed and ox-bowed, calm, esturial... into lake, and sea, where vapour rose once more.

And she felt lost within it, dissolved within it, and for the first time in her young life was truly afraid, more frightened there and then than she had been when she'd fallen and broken her leg, during either the brief moments of falling, the stunning instant of impact and pain, or the long cold hours afterwards, crumpled in the snow and rocks, sheltering and shivering and trying not to cry. That was something she had long before prepared herself for; she knew what was happening, she had worked out the effects it might have and the ways she might react. It was a risk you took, something you understood. This was not, because now there was nothing to understand, and maybe nothing—including her —to understand it.

Help! Something wailed inside her. She listened, and could do nothing.

We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state.
We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect.
We are vapour, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.

(She could come out, she felt the sweat bead on her brow, sensed her hands create their own moulds in the crisp crunching snow, and knew there was a way out, knew she could come down... but with nothing, having found nothing, done nothing, understood nothing. She would stay, then, she would fight it out.)

The cycle began again, her thoughts looping, and she saw the water as it flowed down gorges and valleys, or collected lower in trees, or fell straight back to lakes and the sea. She saw it fall on meadowland and on the high marshes and the moors, and she fell with it, terrace to terrace, over small lips of rock, foaming and circling (she felt the moisture on her forehead start to freeze, chilling her, and knew the danger, wondered again whether to come out of the trance, wondered how long she had sat here, whether they were watching over her or not). She felt dizzy again, and grabbed deeper at the snow around her, her gloves pressuring the frozen flakes; and as she did that, she remembered.

She saw the pattern of frozen foam once more; she stood again beside that ledge on the moor's cold surface, by the tiny waterfall and the pool where she had found the lens of frothed ice. She remembered holding it in her hands, and recalled that it did not ring when she flicked it with her finger, that it tasted of water, no more, when she touched it with her tongue... and that her breath blew across it in a cloud, another swirling image in the air. And that was her.

That was what it meant. Something to hold onto.