Heat wave
So its getting pretty hot in the Val de Bagnes this weekend.. the temperature on the display opposite my house is reading 34 degrees C. I am fantasising about ice and swimming and they have temporarily shut off the water system.. I assume this is to fulfil some kind of task over by the river where they are working on the railway? Ugh, anyway, I have realized after the last three pieces I have completed recently I am obsessed with ice. I love the hints of colour and the mystery of it to name a few reasons. Ancient frozen rivers and floating ice caps seem to be attracting my attention much more than the mountains are at the moment. Maybe I’m just overheating, or I’m mad because the more we get into summer the more I think of cold.
The very fact that the ice seems to be alive more at the moment than I had noticed before is surely the more noticeable and local affect of climate change for us right now. Living here and seeing how the Glacier de Tortin alone has receded and moved in the last 10 years is scary. This blog post could go on for much longer about how important it is to pay attention to this and how to do whatever we can do protect our environment by starting with ones own household, but luckily for you this one isn’t about climate change.
This blog post is about how precious our ice is. As facinating and beautiful it is, it’s also our lifeline to fresh water. I suppose I feel in someway it needs celebrated. My sister in law recently made a trip to Svalbård to explore an unknown territory to her. I can understand the draw to such an amazingly peaceful and untouched place, but the sense of being in such isolation place with a polar climate must have felt like a seriously exciting experience, (or hell to some!) Like a different planet. There is definitely something magnificently alien about seeing pictures of monster sized bits of ice… in the sea.. the shapes, that colour, the way the light bounces off of them. I just hope I have done justice to my first homage to this phenomenon.