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I finally took my kid to see the glacier I grew up on, and it's gone
I hiked my daughter up to where the toe of the ice used to sit at Mount Rainier in 30 minutes instead of the 3 hours it took me as a kid, because there's no ice left to walk around. Part of me was glad she never knew what I lost, which feels like the worst thing I've ever thought, and I don't know what to do with that.
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matthewdixon2d ago
That line about being glad she never knew what you lost hit me hard. I read a piece in High Country News last year about a guy in Glacier National Park who brought his kids to see the last named glacier in the park, and he said almost the same thing, that their normal is already broken and they won't even know it. There's a term for it, shifting baseline syndrome, where each generation just accepts the messed up state of things as how it's always been. Your kid doesn't know what's missing, which is a strange kind of mercy and a sad one at the same time.
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