When Harry got in the car, she handed me an apple. “Do you know what makes a glacier different from regular ice?”

This was something I definitely should know, but I paused for a moment because I wasn’t sure I did. “A glacier is permanent.”

Harry beamed at me. “And it moves. That’s one of the criteria.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I looked it up last night. I think I must’ve learned it in like fourth grade, but I forgot.”

I laughed. “Me too.”

“It’s because of the weight they put on themselves. All of them are crawling all around the world.”

The Going-to-the-Sun Road wound up around the body of a mountain, looking down over a white river and a glacial lake and a valley that bled so richly green it looked like the earth’s opened artery. Harry kept rolling her window down and then closing it again, pressing her face to the gap and then the glass. “Why don’t you leave it open?” I asked.

“I don’t want Emily Dickinson to freeze.”

Her knees, her elbows, her sharp little chin, all of it squeezed against the glass like she wanted to hurl herself into the open mouth of the sky. I took the bends carefully, and mostly kept my eyes on the road. We pulled over at the first outlook, and Harry touched the inside of my wrist where my hand was on the steering wheel. I got out of the car, and came and stood at the side of the road with her, and looked over the edge of the world.

“Oh.” The sound came from somewhere deep in my stomach. The valley was as vivid as a place no people had ever been. And there were those spots where the trees gave way before the stone tops of the mountains, gray rock exposed like the earth’s wrists and clavicle, vulnerabilities that were not vulnerable. “God.” Harry leaned over, knocked the top of her head against my shoulder. It was the kind of beauty I didn’t even try to take pictures of, because I knew they wouldn’t matter.

“Just imagine how it’ll be when we get to the glaciers,” Harry said. “How many people get to see glaciers?”

“Probably fewer and fewer,” I said.

“Don’t say that.”

We got back in the car.

All the way up the mountain, Harry was quiet. When I turned my head to her, she was looking at me like I was part of the landscape, just in that brief moment. Like I was something too wide-open and heart-wrenchingly colorful to be photographed. Harry’s nose was red and her face was pale from the cold. I had a brief, obscene thought that I could fuck her for probably the last time I would ever fuck her on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. In her car, looking out over the green vertigo of the canyon.