The Gate to the Ice Wall

gen alpha youth guided to the melting antarctic by visions of elsa

My whole life I’ve had visions of ice. My earliest memory is laying on the floor in my bedroom in my family’s five bedroom house on the outskirts of Duluth. I held my iPad by the blue plastic-handled case my parents put it in, and on the iPad screen Elsa cast ice spells from her hands to save Arendelle. At the climax of Frozen 2, Elsa created an impassable wall of ice to stop floodwaters from submerging her home city. Something deep in my brain told me I should never forget this moment, that this image of water stopped by elemental ice magic mattered beyond plot. It mattered like a prophecy.

At that young age, when my parents took the iPad away, I didn’t play with plastic toys. I’d look out my second floor bedroom window at Minnesota winter in the same way I looked at the iPad screen. Outside was less flashy than the screen, but more real. I loved watching the snow come down during storms, loved seeing blizzard winds push the snow into hills against the walls of our house. I loved watching the snow sit still on cold sunny days, glistening in the sun, no footprints ever touching it. I loved watching the snow melt on sunny days in strange uneven patterns, turning icy and hard as it was compacted by the melting but the world itself becoming warmer. I didn't like the warmth but I knew it was softer than the cold. 

When I closed my eyes at night I’d dream Frozen and Minnesota all mixed together. Powerful ice spells shooting out of my hands to defeat my enemies. Snow and ice swirling in the wind and settling and freezing over, melting down in warm snaps, and then freezing again. Walls of ice as tall as skyscrapers. Snow falling from the sky at night, black against white, hostile and inhuman.

I was the youngest son of four children so my parents took the iPad away from me less than they should have, out of exhaustion from raising my three older sisters. That made me the way that I am. But being the youngest made me the way I am in other ways too. When we’d go sledding on Minnesota’s gentle snowy hills, my three sisters would push me down the hills on the sled, and carry me up the hill. When we’d go skating they made sure I didn’t fall. 

I’d watched the Frozen films a lot as a child with my sisters, because they liked it and knew I’d like it. They liked it on different terms than me, as a princess story, but that was fine. The castle in the cold mountains Elsa builds in the first Frozen seemed to my young mind the safest place in the world. My suburban house was of course very safe, but this was a different sort of safety. I loved the crystalline ice walls carved in ornate patterns, built by Elsa for Elsa. The ice castle was safe in a way that gave her strength. 

When I learned how to steer the iPad to YouTube, YouTube’s algorithm steered me to other videos of Elsa, made by artists other than Disney. The videos were strange, sometimes erotic, sometimes violent, but always in a way that appealed to children. These videos played with Elsa’s brand recognition, and lacked the art of the Disney Frozen films. Elsa’s own ethereal white beauty was there, but not the ethereal white beauty of the ice. They reaffirmed in my young brain the primal importance of Elsa, and I found it hard to look away.

---

Winter is only one of four seasons. My life has always been hard in the other three. I never gave up outside of winter, but I think that was out of fear of the icy vision. Fully embracing it would have meant going further north, to Canada or Alaska, but I was young and couldn’t do that just yet. I was just lethargic, more likely to spend time laying in bed or on my iPad or in VR. In my extended hours of sleep during summer and spring I still dreamed of snow. I still watched Frozen, and still watched videos of Elsa on YouTube.

I loved winter a lot so it made me really sad that every year the winters were shorter. I was young so time moved slowly, and I paid so much attention to winter. I could see all the subtle ways the seasons changed from year-to-year. The snow fell differently and melted differently, and at different frequencies. Minnesota was one of the few American states with true deep winter, and even here it was fading. I knew what the first winters of my childhood felt like, and those were the closest to the true elemental winter, and it had to be preserved.

---

On my tenth birthday, I decided that in my second decade of life I would watch the Frozen films less often. I had to move beyond Elsa. I followed the ice in different directions. 

On winter weekends I’d sneak out of our big house and walk through the snowy landscape of the Duluth suburbs. It wasn’t too hard to sneak out; my sisters were starting college or going through high school, and my parents were constantly pulled between them and their own interests. It was easy enough for me to not be noticed. Most often I’d go outside on Sundays, while my dad watched the Vikings play football. I knew how to dress responsibly for the cold from my parents, and I always did.  

I walked through frozen suburbs covered in the soft white snow that made everything beautiful. I walked through pine forests, I walked on frozen lakes. I didn’t write anything down, or have routes, but I had places I would visit often. I liked to go to the cemetery and imagine the bodies buried deep in the frozen ground, totally unextractable. I liked to wipe the snow off the graves. 

I still imagined myself with magical ice powers, the ability to shoot ice out of my hands, or even just freeze things at will. Sometimes I’d hold an icicle in my hand like it was a dagger.

Walking through the cold alone was different than looking at the cold on the iPad screen or through a window, but sort of the same. I was alone, the same way I was alone on the computer. I still felt like a passive observer of the cold, rather than a part of it. I’d take pictures of the snow on my phone, and post it in groupchats online with people I’d never meet. I don’t know if they knew how young I was. I’d talk with them about how the world was growing warmer, how these winters were different from the winters of my childhood, and how the shorter winters made me sad. We talked about climate science and I learned a lot.

---

When I was seventeen I didn’t go to college. Instead I went to Antarctica. A program called Environmental Lessons in Saving Antarctica, or ELSA, was seeking youth with a passion for climate research interested in one year on the Antarctic continent at a research facility. I wanted to work in climate science, and I still felt the call of the ice, so I really wanted a spot. It was a very competitive program, but I worked hard on my application and was accepted.

There were three others admitted to the ELSA program, and all of them were also seventeen years old. We met at the Santiago airport, flew together to Puntas Arenas in the south of Chile, then drove to the bottom of the Tierra Del Fuego in Argentina where a boat to Antarctica would be waiting for us. The first member was waiting for me at the Santiago airport when I arrived. He was from Nova Scotia. The second one came in on a flight an hour or so later, from and he was Yakutsk in Siberia. The last one was on the same plane as him, just a few minutes behind. She was from northern Sweden, and her blonde hair was braided back like Elsa’s. 

After our brief introductions in the Santiago airport, we were separated across the plane for our next flight, but we had lots of time to talk in the van as we drove south. Conversation in the van was really good, even with the two that were second language English. We had a lot in common. Immediately we found it strange that we were all from somewhere cold, and not only that, but we all really loved the cold, and the snow and the ice.

As the conversation progressed, we talked a little bit about what got us interested in Antarctica and in climate science. We talked about Ernest Shackleton, and then about the 2027 Club Penguin reboot, and then Hoth from Star Wars. All of us three boys were flirting with the girl from Sweden, but that was obvious to all of us and no one felt threatened by it. We were good friends by the time we got on the boat to Antarctica. No one mentioned Frozen once, but its absence felt even more pronounced, like we were all afraid to admit something vulnerable to each other that we knew we shared. We would admit everything else first. 

---

When our boat reached Antarctica, there wasn't a continent with a research facility at all. There was just a solid wall of ice, four hundred feet tall, solid and smooth. The four of us stopped talking when we saw it, and just watched. The wall appeared to be melting, but we had no idea what that meant anymore. The boat’s captain steered us along the wall until we came to a gate. At the front of the gate were four ice platforms, each with a circle in their center. He cut the engine on the boat, and tried to explain something to us in Spanish, but none of us understood him, and what we needed to do was clear. 

We plunged into the cold Antarctic waters but the cold water felt like nothing at all. We each swam towards a different platform and pulled ourselves out of the water to stand on it. On each platform were glyphs carved into the ice, arranged in the fractal patterns of a snowflake. We crouched down in unison and put our hands in the center of the glyphs. Blue light exploded out of the platforms, but not the kind of blue light that comes from an iPad. This blue light was rich and royal. The ice gate slowly descended into the water.

As the gate went down, I looked at my hands to see if I could shoot ice out of them now. I couldn’t, but I felt an entirely different sort of wintry power pouring out of me, and though I wasn’t yet sure how it worked, it was so real and so beyond all my fantasies.