Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE FACE OF THE HANGING GLACIER
Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
WHERE MY PARTY FOREGATHERED WITH HARMON’S ON THE SHORE OF THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIER
Whether Jim’s “tobaccanalian libation” had anything to do with it or not, this time luck was with us. The sharp blast kicked Jim’s rock up on one ear, where it teetered for a second or two indecisively before rolling over sidewise and coming down kerplump on a huge twenty-ton cube of basalt that no one would have thought of moving with a barrel of giant. It wasn’t so much what the little rock did as the way it did it. The big block gave a sort of a quiver, much as a man awakening from a doze would stretch his arms and yawn, and when it quivered a lot of loose stuff slipped away from beneath and just let it go. It lumbered along at an easy roll for a bit, and then increased its speed and started jumping. Its first jump was no more than a nervous little hop that served to hurdle it clear of a length of flat ledge that reached out to stop its downward progress. A second later it had hit its stride, so that when it struck the water there had been nothing but rarefied air trying to stop it for two hundred feet. Down it went, pushing a column of compressed aqua pura ahead of it and sucking a big black hole along in its wake. It was when that column of compressed water spouted up again and tried to chase its tail down the hole it had come out of that things began to happen, for it found something like a dozen fat icebergs crowding in and trying to insinuate their translucent bulks into the same opening. And of course they made a tremendous fuss about it. When an iceberg found that it couldn’t get in standing up, it forthwith lay down on its side, or even rolled over on its back; which didn’t help it in the least after all, for the very good reason that all the other icebergs were adopting the same tactics. And so Roos, who was cranking steadily all the time, got his “Birth of an Iceberg” picture after all.
When the bergs ceased butting their heads off against each other Roos shot me in the scenes where I registered “consternation,” “relief” and “awed wonder,” and our hard-striven-for Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture was complete. There was just a bit of a hitch at the “awed wonder” fade-out, though, but that was Roos’ fault in trying to introduce a “human touch” by trying to make Gordon’s dog perch up beside me on the crest of a hatchet-edged rock. The pup sat quietly wagging his tail until the moment came for me to lift up mine eyes unto the hills and increase the tenseness of my “awed wonder” registration. Then the altitude began to affect his nerves and he started doing figure “8’s” back and forth between my precariously planted feet. As a natural consequence, when Roos started in on his “fade-out” I was seesawing my arms wildly to maintain my balance, talking volubly, and registering—well, what would a temperamental movie star be registering while in the act of telling a dog and a man what he thought of them for their joint responsibility in all but pitching him off a twenty-foot-high rock into a vortex of tumbling icebergs? Again (unless this part of the film has been discreetly cut in the studio before exhibition) I beg the indulgence of lip-readers.
The lake was deeply shadowed before we were finally at liberty to take up again the sartorics of “Lohengrin”; but it was not that fact, nor yet the not entirely prohibitive difficulty of making shining armour out of tin cans, that nipped that classic conception in the bud. Rather it was the astonishing unstable-mindedness displayed by the bergs when impinged upon from without. Of the hundred or more hunks of floating ice within a five-hundred-yard radius of the point where our artificial berg had hit the water, only a half dozen or so of the broadest and flattest continued to expose the same profiles they had presented before the big splash. Most of the others had turned over and over repeatedly, and one, which seemed to “hang” in almost perfect balance, continued slowly revolving like a patent churn. “Lohengrin’s Barge,” half a mile distant from the heart of the “birth splash” and lapped by but the lightest of expiring waves, was rolling drunkenly to port and starboard as though in the trough of the seas of a typhoon. It looked ready to turn turtle at a touch, and there were too many angular projections on it—especially about the “swans”—to make even a man who aspired to grand opera care to court lightly the experience of tangling himself up in the wreck.