Ice Loss
November 12, 2026 at 02:30PM
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Ravenna Koenig | Longreads | November 12, 2026 | 19 minutes (5,133 words)
In January, gravity was the only part of the physical world I recognized as I drove through Utqiaġvik for the first time. Day was one long night that slowly paled to powder blue, and turned pink before fading to black again. It was so cold the car tires squealed over the snow as if over Styrofoam. No part of Alaska lay farther north than this and the land was stark and flat: nothing to see in the distance, and no height to see the distance from.
I was there to learn about loss. For thousands of years, a collar of sea ice, in some places feet thick and miles long, had hugged this northern shore most of the year. It protected the coastline from erosion, and served as a platform from which Iñupiat hunters pursued bowhead whales and other marine mammals; had for over a thousand years. But the ice was getting thinner, forming later, melting earlier. I’d come to report on this and other ways the Arctic landscape was bending to a warming atmosphere.
I introduced myself to the mayor, whaling captains, wildlife biologists, the tribal government, and corporation heads. I said hi, I’m a journalist, I cover energy and environment, I just moved to Fairbanks, I’ll be coming up throughout the year. We talked about climate change, about the wild animals that ran like gold thread through the fabric of life there, about the oil that paid for almost everything: the roads, the fire department, the light and heat.
The plane had landed in darkness, and the town was full of first-story windows. But driving along the thin road that separated the plywood-sided buildings from the frozen sea, I pulled over, and climbed up a snow berm that obscured it from view.
The sight stilled me. The ice was snow-covered, unmoving, unending. Only snaking bands of rubble, left behind when motion stopped, distinguished it from the tundra.
I didn’t know then what it would teach me about my expectations of continuity and stillness. I didn’t know it would tell me something about how to face a disappearing world. And I didn’t know the choice I’d made to come see it—to seek meaning and adventure at this vanishing outer edge of the country—would lead to losses of other kinds, other kinds of painful education.
*Max and Owen are pseudonyms.
How long had Max* and I stood holding each other at the airport curb in Washington, DC? He’d surprised me with the gravity with which he’d said, I love you, deep, and how little he’d called or texted since.
My job in Alaska paid less than my producing gig at NPR in DC. It was supported by a grant and only guaranteed for a year, but I was 27 and bored of writing scripts for other people to read. I feared that if I held a posture of adulthood I didn’t like for too long, I’d get stuck that way.
This was 2018, and I wanted to cover climate change. Sometime between college and my first job, it began to feel like the life I’d been raised to expect was premised on a version of Earth that wouldn’t exist in my future. At parties when people casually mentioned they wanted kids, I stilled the conversation by asking how rich they thought they’d have to be to insulate themselves from the coming chaos.
I’d go through periods when I couldn’t bear to read a word about it, afraid of supercharging my anxiety. But a part of me thought that if I could help illustrate the problem where it had already urgently manifested, I might feel empowered instead of paralyzed.
It didn’t bother me to leave my friends and mentors. I thought I’d be back in a year and that my life would remain intact while I was away.
When Max finally found some time for a video chat, he was in the bathtub, and I was in the supply closet of my newsroom in Fairbanks. His black chest hair streamed flat against his skin. Holding his phone with one hand, he dunked and swiped the hair on his head into a chaotic shape with the other, then struck a pose to make me laugh.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you,” he said.
I’d met Max at work, two-and-a-half years earlier. He was mustachioed, handsome, playful, and intellectually hungry: always first to the punchline, always itching to debate, and delighted by nothing so much as conversational rapport. Like me, he’d grown up in a funky, arty, slightly unkempt place; and amid the crush of DC khakis and clean-cuts, his cowboy boots and cutoff jeans gave me a sense of cultural relief.
We’d gotten to know each other within a group of five inseparable friends who worked together. But he was my best friend. His ambition and creativity inspired me; that he had chosen me to be closest to felt like an anointment. We hung out almost every single day. We were touchy—we held hands sitting under the magnolia tree outside his house; stood with our arms around each other at parties. Coworkers were constantly asking if we were a couple. We talked on the phone late at night from our respective beds about the origin of religious feeling and the nature of connection. We confided heartaches and family difficulties. I let him see me cry and at my worst in other ways: impatient, insecure, proud. I always felt he loved me anyway.
I was territorial about my intimacy with him, something I associated with romantic love, but I knew I wasn’t in love with him. When I imagined kissing him, I felt anxious and doubtful. It didn’t occur to me that perhaps there were more categories of feeling than “romantic” or “platonic”—that there might be more shades of love than anyone could name.
It didn’t occur to me that perhaps there were more categories of feeling than “romantic” or “platonic”—that there might be more shades of love than anyone could name.
I didn’t want to ask him how he felt about me: I feared coaxing a vulnerable admission out of him, only to have to tell him it was not returned.
And deep down, I wanted to preserve the option of returning it. I had not often been in love, and I longed for it more than almost anything. A part of me hoped the intensity of what I felt for him might eventually take that shape.
When our friendship was a little over a year old, he and I flew to the desert where he’d grown up. I rode on the back of his motorcycle, arms around his waist. Ate meals with his childhood friends. Talked over coffee with his mom in the thin light before he woke up.
I’d said yes so casually to sharing his boyhood bed on that trip, but one night he held me so closely I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, and the entire front of his body against the entire back of mine, and my heart beat so loudly it felt impossible he couldn’t hear it too, and I wondered, is this when I finally find out what he wants from me?
But in the end, he held me—nothing more. We fell asleep.
When we got back, if anything had changed, it was that I got used to my confusion.
Fairbanks was a scruffy, subarctic city bordered by forests of black spruce. It had a university and a military base. Most people who lived there were white. You could buy guns at Fred Meyer. Wolves, it was said, ran on the plowed roads when the snow got too high.
Every other month or so, I’d fly 500 miles north to Utqiaġvik, sleeping on a blow-up cot in the back of the local public radio station. Alaska was warming faster than any other state but the impacts were not distributed equally; rural communities like Utqiaġvik were more affected. These villages were off the road system—accessible only by air, or in some cases seasonally by water—so that fixing damaged infrastructure was harder and more costly. Residents relied more heavily on the land around them for their livelihoods, for the spiritual and cultural nutrition that traditional hunting and fishing provided, and for safe passage over frozen rivers, lagoons, and seas to places no roads led.
Life there offered a particular kind of wealth: a deep relationship to the land and its animals, tight kinship networks, and a traditional subsistence economy where people shared, gifted, and traded wild foods. But those things couldn’t pay to move a village threatened by erosion or thawing permafrost to a new location. When it came to cash wealth, many parts of rural Alaska were at a disadvantage.
Utqiaġvik, however, had oil money. More than 85 percent of the regional government’s revenue came from taxing oil and gas infrastructure.
I talked to people about oil development in their backyard; about the health and habits of the species that sustained them; and about the effects of climate change on the land, which often looped back to oil. How they needed oil profits to adapt to the consequences of the whole world burning it.
I talked to people about oil development in their backyard; about the health and habits of the species that sustained them; and about the effects of climate change on the land, which often looped back to oil. How they needed oil profits to adapt to the consequences of the whole world burning it.
Permafrost was warming all over the North Slope, threatening buildings, pipelines, roads. There were concerns about the Arctic ecosystem. Some hunters seemed confident in their ability to traverse the changing ice, but others told me it was becoming less predictable and more dangerous. As the coast’s ice protection dwindled, storm surges sent the ocean climbing onshore more often, claiming the land in violent fistfuls. Local officials said that this subtracting force would eventually best the berms and seawalls they put in its path.
Alaska’s governor Bill Walker had convened a climate change task force but flatly balked at cutting back oil exploration—it was the biggest economic driver in the state. He said they couldn’t move villages or pay for renewable energy projects without it.
The climate change threats that had seemed massive but amorphous and general when I sat at my desk in DC felt more sharply defined and increasingly personal as I sat on land that was changing under the feet of those I talked to. And the answers seemed more elusive; it was difficult to imagine a global solution to climate change that left this remote region solvent.
Weeks before I’d left, I laid down on my bed amid scattered boxes and bubble wrap and started to cry. Max laid down next to me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, stroking my hair.
“I’m afraid that when I move, we’re not going to be friends anymore,” I said. It wasn’t what I meant.
As my departure had gotten closer, I began to fear for our relationship. Specifically, that the intimacy I so cherished with him would be diluted . . . or that someone would step into the gap between us. I couldn’t bring myself to speak this fear aloud, aware that wanting nothing to change after initiating change was unfair.
We faced each other on my bed. We stared into each other’s eyes.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said.
“But I know how bad you are at staying in touch,” I said.
Friendship over distance to Max, I knew, was a cup that could sit on a shelf a long time without losing its shape or the eventual joy of using it again. To me, it was a plant that needed tending to stay alive.
“I’m going to make a really big effort to communicate in the way you need,” Max said. “And besides—I have faith we’re not going to live in different cities forever. This is just temporary.”
But almost the moment I touched down in Alaska, our friendship became painfully asymmetrical. His texts were short, more answered than initiated. Whenever I asked if he was free to chat, he was headed to a hot spring, camping in the desert, at dinner with friends.
One month like that became three, then five.
When I made noises of pique, he told me it was just a busy time, and I let myself be reassured. I believed the intensity of our connection guaranteed its staying power.
In May, I finally went out on the ice. It was so central to the changes that were happening on the North Slope, and I wanted to see it for myself.
A local wildlife biologist took me. He was a white guy who’d been studying bowhead whales in Utqiaġvik for almost 40 years. Hunters had taught him how to manage the ice’s risks as he conducted whale censuses from its edge.
We were on a snowmobile named “Sweet Thang,” the biologist in front, me behind. The ice stretched out before us, as motionless as the first time I’d seen it. But by now I knew better. It was a patchwork of constituent pieces sewn together temporarily by cold, current, and wind.
When those forces pushed toward shore, they pressed ice into ice, crumbling it seaward and skyward, fusing it together and sometimes anchoring parts of it to the seafloor. But when they pulled hard enough offshore, those seams could unstitch, and immense pieces could float out to sea.
These dangers were hard to feel, even underfoot. As with so many other things in life, the invisible possibility of upheaval didn’t seem as real as the stillness I saw everywhere I looked.
Those who negotiated this ice developed expertise over many years to help them stay safe amid the great powers that churned it. They had to know, in intimate detail, the wind and ocean. They had to understand how the ice grew over the season, how it moved and anchored, so they’d know which parts were most secure. But nowhere was fully protected. Ice always required risk.
At the ice’s edge, the biologist stopped the snow machine, and we got off and walked north to where only a few yards of tumbled blue talus lay between us and an expanse of silver water.
When I saw it, I didn’t know if the pressure in my chest was elation or panic.
Unlike the ice, the sea was visibly in motion. Wind patterned its surface. Small chunks of white inched past on the lazy current. All at once, I could picture the ice moving, catastrophically, beneath me. I could feel that my wholeness depended on a margin of luck. That my life was shaped to an almost intolerable degree by forces outside my control. That, like everyone, I spent my days in a state of willful forgetfulness of this fact.
The biologist stood glassing the distance with his binoculars. For seals, polars bears, warnings in the blue and white. Spellbound, I watched the wind rough the water until he said it was time to go.
Until that point, I’d believed that growing up was primarily a project of gain. I believed that as I came to know more about myself and the world, my experience would be one of building.
No one told me that, forever, things come together and break apart. That my life would be as much about what left my grasp as what I collected. That my interior would become lush with absences. Previous selves. Possible ones. Desires that flickered out. My street in that city, at that time. The look and smell of a particular season in a place that was dear to me. People who left this life, or just mine.
That summer, in my little cabin on the edge of Fairbanks, the air outside my windows thickened with green. A nearby stand of birch trees sang in the slightest wind. I ate dinners on my porch in the late light.
The beauty and bigness of Alaska moved me, and some days my job brought me into contact with fascinating or inspiring things: an immersive summer science program for high school girls on a local glacier; the intricate relatedness of water, land, and atmosphere; stories of how Alaska Native people had fought for and won political power on the state and federal levels.
No one told me that, forever, things come together and break apart. That my life would be as much about what left my grasp as what I collected.
But I was sad a lot. I’d been right that cataloging the dissolution of one reality into another felt like an active way of engaging the climate crisis. But my anxiety about the future wasn’t diminishing because of it. It had just developed a more specific dimension, attuned to these effects in this place.
While I wasn’t personally affected by erosion or increased hunting risks, reporting is relational—the more I listened, the more I cared.
And scientists were finding that what was happening in the Arctic might ripple across the globe. White ice reflects sunlight; dark water absorbs it. The more ice melts, the more dark water replaces it, the more of the sun’s warmth gets trapped in the Arctic Ocean—warming the air above it. Though it’s a debated area of science, some researchers think that might lead to impacts elsewhere. In the coming years, that would grow to include increased wildfire risk in the West where I’d grown up and where my family still lived.
I tried to compartmentalize: to focus on the questions I needed to ask to do my job, and wall off what the answers made me feel. But I found I didn’t know how to cherish the world and also contemplate, almost daily, its slow undoing.
Max, meanwhile, had become a wound. What hurt more than how little I heard from him was his reluctance to make a plan to see me. We’d drafted a few ideas before I’d left, but when I tried to make them concrete, his responses were delayed and noncommittal. He went other places, saw other people, did other things.
“What would we do if I came to visit you in Alaska?” he asked. I imagined him at Meow Wolf, or Sundance, or one of the other shiny bauble locales he liked to scoot around to. “I want to make sure it’s going to be worth it.”
I heard, and couldn’t seem to hear, that seeing me was not enough.
I did my best to forge new relationships. I joined a hockey team. Attended happy hours. Went to Quaker meetings. Dated a pilot, a carpenter, and a welder. I found a lot of people to do things with—curl, bikepack, snowboard, ski—but few I could really talk to. Certainly none I could imagine talking with in old age about things that made life feel exciting, illuminated, entertaining, meaningful—which is how I always pictured me and Max.
In October in Utqiaġvik, a whaling crew moved around the shining black arc of an enormous bowhead, cutting it into small pieces with long knives. Waves crashed brown on the gravel beach; snow flew horizontally on a needling wind.
I stood on the outskirts of their work for an hour, talking with a whaling captain’s wife.
“It gives us a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose,” the captain’s wife told me. “Have you ever seen The Hunt for Red October? I know it sounds silly, but when they’re in the submarine getting chased by Russians, and Sean Connery is shouting ‘man your stations!’—that’s what whaling is to us. In the chaos of life, our loved ones dying, whaling is manning our stations.”
Her brother had died when she was in high school, she told me. One of her sons, the previous year.
“Whenever we suffered a loss, my mom always said we should go hunting. Back to basics, back to the thing we know,” she said.
But people also died whaling. I asked her if the peril ever felt too big. She told me that she’d once put a similar question to a senior whaling captain: “If it’s dangerous, why do we do it?”
“He didn’t have a good answer,” she said, “I don’t either.”
Can any of us look directly at the risk love demands?
Each of us is born into inevitable grief, just being human. We pretend that all the light and richness we know isn’t massively contingent, but sooner or later, loss instructs us that it is. And then we have to find a way to move our feet from bed to floor, to become ambulatory again in a world of possible devastation that is suddenly real to us.
Is ecological grief the same or different? With every part per million of carbon we put into the atmosphere, the possibility of loss in our lifetimes on an enormous scale—the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we live on—gets more possible. My generation and the generations after are inheriting a baseline of global catastrophe that grows inverse to age, unless everything changes as it never has.
How do we orient ourselves toward a future like that? How do we form wants, wishes, attachments when the future in which they’d be fulfilled is so uncertain, so full of anticipated loss?
I offered to meet Max in his hometown for the holidays. My text sat without reply for 27 days.
To my memory, I did not ask anyone in Utqiaġvik directly about climate grief. About whether they felt the symptoms of solastalgia, a mental health risk the state of Alaska had identified that year as a sense of loss experienced as a result of unwanted environmental changes. The feeling of home disappearing while you’re still there.
I tiptoed around it. Like when I stood at the shoreline with a whaler in his 50s, asking about the changes he’d observed in the ice over his lifetime, and he told me what a refuge the ice was for him, how it was the place he went to pray, and find himself, and heal from all the things that went on in the world, and I asked: “Do you ever worry that future generations won’t get that?”
He laughed, and when he spoke his voice was light but firm. “You know what, I’m not going to worry about it right now!” he said. “It’s not in my thoughts. I’m not going to worry. They’re going to do fine. We have to be positive.”
But in another coastal town further south, where the ice season had also shrunk, Inupiaq writer Laureli Ivanoff did write about it, in the opinion pages of The New York Times.
“The indigenous experience is one of loss,” she wrote. “My community, like others around the world, has lost a lot: Language. Ceremonies. Dances. Songs. Ways of connecting to the earth, and to one another. We lost ways of nourishing ourselves.”
For Ivanoff, the ice kept alive the custom of hunting bearded seals, or ugruk, which sustained more than just the bodies of her friends and relatives. It was “a life-giving act of intentional decolonization, our way of keeping alive a simple custom that’s become sacred.”
She wrote that she wanted her infant son to have access to this tradition. That it would be “[h]is way of grounding himself, connecting to the Inupiat who hunted the waters of the Norton Sound of millenniums. His way of knowing where he comes from.”
“My son, not yet crawling, may never harvest an ugruk for his family,” Ivanoff wrote. “His experience is already one of loss.”
As fall turned to winter in Fairbanks, light fell away from the days in clumps. Mosaics of ice patterned my windows.
My job had gotten six more months of funding. My editor told me she was working to make it permanent.
I was sinking into depression. Even so, I told myself I could live as I was living for another year, two, more. My tastes, I realized, were too changed to go back to DC.
Max had taken a new job in New York City. He had a girlfriend, his first since I’d known him. We didn’t talk often, but when we did, he barely mentioned her and I barely asked. I couldn’t admit to myself that what I’d feared would happen had.
I strung up cheery Christmas lights in my kitchen. I tried to find comfort in the intermittent calls I got from other friends. At night, I danced by myself in my cabin, swinging on the ladder to my bedroom loft as if it were a partner. My loneliness got lonelier. My depression more depressed.
It was hard for me to untangle what had to do with Max, and what had to do with the burden of reporting on climate change. Sometimes they felt very mixed together—I’d start crying about Max, and end up crying about the world, its species, our future. Other times, Max was clearly the more acute grief, which seemed both wrong and also predictable. His absence was more visible in my minutes, hours, days, than the slow-moving, and almost incomprehensibly huge, disaster of climate change.
When the world tips into catastrophe for you and no one else, it can feel bigger than the threat of the world ending altogether.
“I don’t get it,” Max said, “why don’t you get mad at Owen* for not calling like you get mad at me?”
I felt suddenly alone in my reality. I had always seen my relationship with Max as singular—as having no analogue among other friendships. I thought he saw it that way too.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
In my memory, he backed off. But I began to wonder if our singular closeness was something I made up. Or misinterpreted.
When the world tips into catastrophe for you and no one else, it can feel bigger than the threat of the world ending altogether.
He was often misinterpreted when we lived in DC—usually by women who wanted to date him. Once, long after our other friends had left a gathering at my apartment and I had gone to bed, he stayed up until 2 a.m. talking on the couch with my roommate, who woke up the next day giddy with a crush on him that I strongly suspected was not returned.
When he confirmed this, and I suggested it had been insensitive to send a signal of romantic interest through the intimacy and duration of their exchange, he waved me off.
“I don’t want to go through life constrained by a fear of ‘sending signals,’” he said, “it was an interesting conversation!”
At the time, I thought I was on the inside of something those women were on the outside of.
Now, I replayed my memories over and over, frame by frame, doubting my assumptions about what he had felt, intended, wanted. I began to ask what sort of blindness I suffered from. I felt more and more unsafe with myself.
It’s a common enough metaphor: physical upheaval to convey emotional. Earthquakes. Violent, spinning columns of air. Rough seas. Still, it filled me with cathartic recognition when I lay in bed at night, my eyes closed, my bed cold, imagining myself at the edge of a silver ocean, the specter of white on every side—ice that looked secure as far my blinkered vision could see but wasn’t connected to anything at all.
I had chosen ambiguity, thinking it would protect our friendship. No forced clarity, no hurt feelings, no loss. But all I’d chosen, actually, was to make my loss ambiguous. I was going through a breakup, but what was breaking up was ill-defined, blurry, and boundaryless. I didn’t feel I had a right to the word. And Max seemed unwilling to admit that anything was lost or done. His voice—written and spoken—was kind and bright, his tone a shield held up against my sadness. It’s hard to mourn something you’re being told isn’t gone.
Finally, I told him that everything felt different and I didn’t know why. I said I didn’t know if I could do it anymore.
“Nothing’s changed for me,” he said gently on the phone. “You’re still one of my closest friends. I love you as much as I ever have.”
He said he thought the trouble we were having came down to the difference in how we interpreted silence between people—that I took it as evidence of something wrong, he as evidence nothing was.
Ultimately, they couldn’t find the money to keep my job. It would end in June —a year-and-a-half after I’d arrived. I cried for three days.
I didn’t know what to do next: I didn’t know if I wanted another job in climate reporting, or even another job in journalism, so much of which is absorbing darkness. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of disorientation and grief—in my relationships, in my career, as a young person on a globe hurtling towards a stygian future.
I went to Utqiaġvik once more for spring whaling. I went out on the ice again, this time with a whaling captain and his crew. I sat with them for hours, watching the horizon for the geysers of mist that signaled bowheads venting their colossal breath in the distance.
I was cowering in a new awareness of the small and big unravelings my life would contain. The things I couldn’t know. The things I’d fail at. The things I’d lose. All of my little human drama in the foreground, while behind it, the Earth ailed, and I mourned that too.
The whaling captain told me that the ice now required more vigilance. But despite the danger, and the further danger that might come, his crew’s waiting had no tenseness in it. They kidded around and told stories. They laughed in the clear bath of the midday light, eating fish eggs and Red Vines that snapped in the cold.
Sometimes I still find myself at the airport curb with Max on the day I left, the spill of his atoms hot and close against the spill of mine. I feel again how tightly I held him, how much I wanted that arrangement of matter to stay exactly as it was, how much I rebelled against the idea that it couldn’t.
I never saw him again.
That August when the blackberries ripened on the island in the Pacific Northwest where I grew up, my mom and I went picking along the roadside, like when I was a kid. For hours, I lived in the solace of their beautiful smell, moving my ladder meter by meter through the blonde, crackling grass.
The following year, at the end of blackberry season, the most intense wildfire smoke we’d ever seen blanketed the fields and winding roads. I didn’t leave my parents’ house for a week. I got a pounding headache that lasted days. Outside, smoke mixed with sweet in the warm air.
When it cleared, I went to the beach, and dove into the freezing water. I lay on the rocks, watching the stiff madrona leaves nod together in the wind, the silver flicks of jumping fish, the geometric sprawl of barnacles. I walked miles of rocky sand, touching everything.
I know I have lost almost nothing. I know I will have to learn all this again.
Ravenna Koenig is the West Coast Editor for NPR. She lives in Seattle.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/11/12/ice-loss-ravenna-koenig/
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