Ms. Doogan moved up the trail about ten feet. It was starting to get steep and the snow on either side of the trail to get higher. At the same time they could hear the sound of running water. “The glacier was here in 1898. What happened in 1898?”
Betty opened her mouth but Vanessa beat her to it. “The Klondike gold rush.”
“Very good, Vanessa,” Ms. Doogan said. “Have you been reading ahead in your history book?”
Vanessa gave her solemn nod.
“And you’re remembering what you read. Good job.”
Betty was much too mindful of the might and right of authority to do anything so lese-majeste as to pout, but Moira Lindbeck was close to dancing in the street. Ms. Doogan fixed her with a quelling eye, and led the way to the next signpost. “In 1914, the glacier was-”
“World War One!” shouted Laurie Manning, capering up and down in excitement. Laurie had yet to master middle-school cool. “World War One! World War One!”
There was a soldier or soldiers in Laurie’s future, Ms. Doogan thought with an inner sigh, but she smiled and said, “Yes, Laurie, World War One. Eric Kizzia, if you pinch Mary Lindbeck one more time, I’m going to pinch you myself, in the same place and just as hard. Knock it off.”
Eric tucked prudent hands into the pockets of his corduroy jacket and did his best to look as pure as the driven snow. His grin was impudent and dimpled and it was hard not to grin back. He’d had a crush on Mary Lindbeck since the second grade, only temporarily sidetracked by luscious upperclassman Tracy Drussell last year. Eric’s plan had been for Tracy to flunk until Eric made it into her class, but Tracy ’s family had moved to Anchorage instead, and in the interim Mary had grown breasts, which had effectively cut short Eric’s mourning for Tracy. It also made it difficult to keep his hands to himself. If he’d tried to hold her hand, Mary would have shoved him into the ditch with the wild rice. Ignoring her was not an option. A pinch had seemed a safe compromise.
Mary, whose awareness of the male sex had undergone a sea of change in the last year, left her nose in the air but let the corners of her mouth indent in a tiny smile. Eric saw it and it was enough. Moira Lindbeck saw it, too, and was struck dumb with terror.
Teenage hormones were bad enough, Ms. Doogan thought, as she led the class around a corner, hopping from dry spot to dry spot on the trail as they went. Teenage hormones and spring was a lethal combination. Add in a parent who had just been made aware of her child’s burgeoning sexuality and Ms. Doogan thought she felt the earth tremble a little beneath her feet, in either anticipation or apprehension, she could never decide. On the whole, she thought she might skip the planned lesson on the Romantic poets. They could do with rather less talk of young men and spring at Niniltna Public School at this time of year.
The trees opened up and the snow berms melted away and a small lake filled with icebergs dissolved into weird and wonderful shapes spread out before them. Between the bergs the lake was like a mirror, reflecting the bank and the trees and the bergs and the Quilak Mountains and the sky above. She dropped a curtsy. “My class, meet Grant Glacier. Grant Glacier, allow me to introduce the seventh and eighth grade classes of Niniltna Public School.”
This time the whole class rolled its eyes. She’d made them walk all the way up here, that was bad enough, but curtsying to glaciers? What next? Ms. Doogan was always doing weird stuff like that.
But she was kinda cool weird, Vanessa Cox thought. At least Ms. Doogan cared enough to get excited about what she was teaching. Vanessa shrugged out of her daypack to pull out her lunch. She sighed a little over the PB &J. Sometimes she thought it was the only sandwich Aunt Telma knew how to make. But there was also a cranberry-raspberry Snapple and a Ziploc bag full of Thin Mints, so lunch wasn’t a total loss.
Ms. Doogan paced up and down at the edge of the water, talking and gesturing with what looked like a tuna fish sandwich. Her students were sprawled on the bank facing her and the lake, eating and trying to look interested. Her light olive skin was already starting to tan in the spring sun, and her short bob of fine dark hair was beginning to frizz from proximity to the glacial lake. She looked like a poodle, Vanessa decided. Moriah, her best friend back in Ohio, had had a standard poodle, a huge black dog named Matisse. Matisse was interested in and excited about everything, especially after he’d eaten a sixty-ounce bag of Nesde’s semi-sweet chocolate chips Moriah’s mother had bought for Christmas fudge. Vanessa wondered if Ms. Doogan ate a lot of chocolate.
“Grant Glacier descends from what ice field?” Mrs. Doogan said. “Come on, guys, we talked about this in geology.”
Vanessa knew the answer, but her teeth were a prisoner of peanut butter and she couldn’t suck them clean in time to beat Betty Freedman to reply. “The Grant Ice Field.”
“Correct. The Grant Ice Field, like the largest glacier descending from it, also named for Ulysses S. Grant, the nineteenth president of the United States.”
“The eighteenth president,” Betty said.
“The eighteenth, then,” Ms. Doogan said amiably, “you got me, Betty. It was so named by a couple of Army lieutenants on a survey mission back in, oh, 1880, I guess it was, after the purchase anyway. They had served under Grant in the Civil War and they were probably hoping that if they named an ice field this big after their commander-in-chief that they’d get promoted.”
Betty looked suspicious. She hadn’t read that anywhere, and she doubted any information she had not seen laid out in columns in a textbook.
Grant Glacier was a wide ribbon of ice winding out of the Quilak Mountains, white higher up and black lower down with a blue layer sandwiched between the two. “Why’s it black lower down?” Peter Mike said.
“Who remembers what happened on March twenty-seventh, 1964?” Ms. Doogan said.
There was a blank silence.
“Come on,” she said, and sang, “ ‘Rock and roll is here to stay, it will never die’-come on, you guys, you know this. Unless you’ve been propping your eyes open with toothpicks in class.”
Johnny Morgan finally opened his mouth. “Earthquake.” Anything to keep Ms. Doogan from singing again. Sheryl Crow she wasn’t.
“That’s right, Johnny,” Ms. Doogan said, beaming, “the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964. Nine-point-two on the Rich-ter scale. One hundred and twenty-five people were killed, some by the resulting tsunami as far away as Oregon and even Hawaii. The biggest earthquake ever felt in the United States in recorded history. And, by the way, eight of the top ten biggest quakes in U.S. history have had their epicenters in Alaska. Little bit of trivia there for you.”
They knew better. Ms. Doogan’s trivia had a way of showing up on tests. Once more Johnny threw himself into the breach. “How’s that make the glacier black on the bottom?”
“That same quake caused the mountain right next to it to shake into pieces.”
“There is no mountain next to it,” Alan Totemoff said.
“Exactly,” Ms. Doogan said. “The resulting debris fell onto Grant Glacier, in a layer that was three feet thick.” She demonstrated with a hand at midthigh.
Even Betty Freedman was impressed.
Like any good performer, Ms. Doogan had them from that moment and she was quick to press her advantage. “The edge of a glacier is a case study in giving birth.”
Johnny thought of the baby moose and cringed inwardly.
“During the last ice age, glaciers advanced over much of the known land masses of the earth. They are now in recession. Look,” she said, pointing. “Glaciers leave rocks behind, every size from sand to boulder. What’s easiest to grow on rocks?
Come on, we were talking about this on the hike up.“
“Lichens,” Betty said.
“Mosses,” Vanessa said thickly, wrestling the peanut butter into submission.
“Very good. Yes, mosses and lichens, which begin the process of breaking down the rocks to form soil. Not much, at first, but some, enough for-what, to take root?”