“There’s only so much I can do,” she says. A way to shepherd the skeptical into new territory. She began to understand the essay as a venue for curiosity, for an adventure in form and function, for confronting this glacial lake, expanding every year, and how small - how powerless - she felt in the face of a warming planet. It’s beautiful.’ ”Īnd now, reading this genre her teacher called “creative nonfiction,” she began to sense the possibilities. “When I saw the glacier, it was just huge, and I thought, ‘This is a landscape that needs to be preserved.
But suddenly, climate change was knocking on the door, a direct threat to a landscape she’d grown to love. She wasn’t naïve she wasn’t blind to a warming planet. And in that period, hardly a blink of an eye in glacial time, she’d witnessed a new lake melt from Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe. She’d already spent a few summers in her ancestral homeland, climbing and guiding and forgetting - for just a few months - the “uncertain attempts at navigating a career and life and relationships,” she would later write. “The idea of being able to write your life, write your experiences, write other people’s experiences, do research, get out - I just found that so compelling,” says Peterson, PhD ’14.Īt the same time, she’d fallen in love with Norway. Perhaps, she began to realize, she hadn’t wandered so far after all. She feasted on the essay - the form itself - with a hunger previously unknown. But on a lark, she enrolled in a creative writing course. And when she tried again at Wheaton College, pursuing her master’s in 2004, the program folded.įor a moment, the path seemed to vanish altogether, overgrown with the brambles of academia. But the path quickly forked: The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire didn’t offer much in the way outdoor leadership, so she studied advertising instead. She would spend her life outdoors, hiking and climbing and unlocking the natural world for scores of curious campers. That was the plan, anyway, insofar as a high school senior can conceive of the future. 15, 2021īeth Peterson was supposed to be a wilderness guide. A wilderness guide at heart, Beth Peterson hikes along a lake formed from glacial melt near Turtagrø, Norway.
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