The Feminine Mystique

Photograph from Paramount Pictures / Everett

“Fatal Attraction,” “Baby Boom,” and “The Princess Bride.”

By Pauline Kael, THE NEW YORKER, The Current Cinema October 19, 1987 Issue

October 11, 198

“Fatal Attraction” is just about the worst dating movie imaginable—a movie almost guaranteed to start sour, unresolvable arguments—but long lines of people curl around the block waiting to see it. At a New York publishing party, a dull but presentable corporate lawyer (Michael Douglas), a settled married man, exchanges glances with a bold-eyed, flirtatious woman (Glenn Close), a book editor. She’s wearing a Medusa hairdo—a mess of blond tendrils is brushed high off her forehead and floats around her face. She’s made up to get attention, yet she resents it: the lawyer’s plump pal (Stuart Pankin) tries a pleasantry on her, and she gives him a drop-dead stare. We see all the warning signals that the lawyer doesn’t, and when he runs into her again, on a weekend when his wife and six-year-old daughter are out of town, we sense the hysteria behind her insinuating repartee and the hot looks she fastens on him. She makes all the overtures; he’s not particularly eager, but she semi-transforms her frighteningness to sexiness, and he, being frightened, finds it sexy. She makes spending the night together seem casual and grown up—makes him feel he’d be a total wimp to say no—and he goes with her to her loft.

Like a femme fatale in a Cecil B. De Mille picture, she comes from hell: her loft is in the wholesale-meat district, where fires burn in the street. The director, Adrian (“Flashdance”) Lyne, puts on bravura demonstrations of frenetic passion. The two have sex, with her seated on the kitchen sink, and when she reaches for the faucet and splashes her hot face Lyne shoots it as if the water were wildly erotic. After more sex, they go to a Latin club for some (comically) supercharged dancing, then have sex in the elevator to the loft. By morning, the lawyer has had enough, but she pressures him, and he doesn’t find it easy to get clear of her. When the weekend is over and he’s determined to say goodbye and go back uptown, she stops him, temporarily, by slashing her wrists. In the weeks that follow, she hounds him at his office and his home, insisting that he can’t use her and then discard her. The picture is a skillfully made version of an old-fashioned cautionary movie: it’s a primer on the bad things that can happen if a man cheats on his wife.

Once the woman begins behaving as if she had a right to a share in the lawyer’s life, she becomes the dreaded lunatic of horror movies. But with a difference: she parrots the aggressively angry, self-righteous statements that have become commonplaces of feminist fiction, and they’re so inappropriate to the circumstances that they’re the proof she’s loco. They’re also Lyne’s and the scriptwriter James Dearden’s hostile version of feminism. (Dearden’s script is an expansion of the forty-two-minute film “Diversion,” which he wrote and directed in England in 1979.) Glenn Close expresses the feelings of many despairing people; she plays the woman as pitiable and deprived and biologically driven. But in the movie’s terms this doesn’t make the character sympathetic—it makes her more effectively scary, because the story is told from a repelled man’s point of view. Lyne and Dearden see her as mouthing a modern career woman’s jargon about wanting sex without responsibilities, and then turning into a vengeful hellion, all in the name of love. They see the man as ordinary, sane, hardworking—a man who loves his beautiful homebody wife (Anne Archer) and bright little daughter (Ellen Hamilton Latzen). He’s the opposite of a lech; he was a little tickled at being seduced. Yet the woman plays the “Madama Butterfly” music and doesn’t regard it ironically; alone in her stark loft, she really sees herself as having been mistreated. When she seeks revenge, she might be taking revenge on all men.

The horror subtext is the lawyer’s developing dread of the crazy feminist who attacks his masculine role as protector of his property and his family. It’s about men seeing feminists as witches, and, the way the facts are presented here, the woman is a witch. She terrorizes the lawyer and explains his fear of her by calling him a faggot. This shrewd film also touches on something deeper than men’s fear of feminism: their fear of women, their fear of women’s emotions, of women’s hanging on to them. “Fatal Attraction” doesn’t treat the dreaded passionate woman as a theme; she’s merely a monster in a monster flick. It’s directed so that by the time she’s wielding a knife (from that erotic kitchen) you’re ready to shriek at the sight of her. But the undercurrents of sexual antagonism—of a woman’s fury at a man who doesn’t value her passion, doesn’t honor it, and a man’s rage at a woman who won’t hold to the rules she has agreed to, a man’s rage against “female” irrationality—give the movie a controversial, morbid power that it doesn’t really earn.

It’s made with swank and precision, yet it’s gripping in an unpleasant, mechanical way. When we first hear that the little daughter wants a bunny rabbit, an alarm goes off in our heads. And after the lawyer buys the rabbit we wait to see what obscene thing the demon lady will do to it. Educated people may want to read more into “Fatal Attraction,” but basically it’s a gross-out slasher movie in a glossy format. (It has special touches, such as a copy of Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” next to the bed in the loft.) The violence that breaks loose doesn’t have anything to do with the characters who have been set up; it has to do with the formula they’re shoved into.

The picture has De Mille’s unbeatable box-office combination—an aura of sexiness and a moral message. We know that the lawyer isn’t going to chase after the blonde, because Lyne softens Anne Archer’s features and sexualizes every detail of the cozy marriage. And the movie is edited so that the audience is breathing right along with the husband as he watches his wife put on her extra-moist lipstick. There are also bits of contrast, like the pal’s making fun of himself, or the husband’s experiencing a surreal embarrassment, trying to carry the blonde from her sink to her bed and being hobbled by his pants and shorts, which are caught around his ankles. Lyne uses these moments to break into the dreamlike tension of the male erotic reveries of the soft nest at home and of the tempestuous, kinky sex in the loft. The husband loves his wife and prefers her in every way to the interloper, whose rapacity scares him even before she threatens his way of life, even before she sends him porno tapes full of hate. The movie has its sex in the dirty sink, but it’s pushing the deeper erotic satisfaction of the warm, sweet life at home. The key to its point of view is that dull, scared everyman husband. The woman was ready to go nuts; if it hadn’t been this ordinary guy she tried to destroy, it could have been another. She carries madness, disease, the unknown. This is a horror film based on the sanctity of the family—the dream family. It enforces conventional morality (in the era of aids) by piling on paranoiac fear. The family that kills together stays together, and the audience is hyped up to cheer the killing.

With “Baby Boom,” the writer-producer Nancy Meyers and the writer-director Charles Shyer prove themselves the monarchs of Yup. This movie is about the feminist as darling, and it rattles along cheerily and empty-headedly. Entrusted with the care of a baby girl, the career woman J.C. (Diane Keaton) loses the single-minded concentration that has made her a Manhattan management-consulting firm’s Tiger Lady. Her status diminished, she quits, moves to a farmhouse in Vermont, meets a calm, steadying Gary Cooperish veterinarian helpfully named Cooper (Sam Shepard), and starts a venture that turns her into the biggest employer in town. Soon she’s a tycoon, rejecting astronomic offers to sell out. She, her child, her lover, and her business are all booming. Meyers and Shyer aren’t moviemakers—they’re glorified sitcom writers. They yank laughs by having J.C. (Yale B.A., Harvard M.B.A.) struggle helplessly with the tabs on disposable diapers, and they keep cutting to the child for clever reactions, the way movies used to cut to the family dog.

If there were justice in the world of entertainment, “Baby Boom” would be unwatchable. But Diane Keaton gives a smashing, glamorous performance that rides over many of the inanities. As soon as you see J.C. striding through the corridors of power, her suit cinched in by a broad belt, her body swinging and lurching forward, as if she were diving into the challenges of the day, you know that she finds success sexy. Her having all this drive is played for farce, and Keaton keeps you alert to every shade of pride and panic J.C. feels. J.C. is an ultra-feminine executive, a wide-eyed charmer, with a breathless ditziness that may remind you of Jean Arthur in “The More the Merrier.” She does funny, flighty things, and Keaton shows you the core of confusion that they come out of. She’s funniest when J.C. loses control, as in her scene with a Vermont plumber (Britt Leach) who tells her the well has gone dry: she expostulates, then collapses. Keaton is acting in a different range from the frequently inspired work she did in “Shoot the Moon,” “The Little Drummer Girl,” “Mrs. Soffel,” and “Crimes of the Heart.” Her J.C. is star acting, but she doesn’t treat it as hack work. J.C. gets a kick out of business success; it’s a form of conquest, and it satisfies her vanity—it’s like being the best student at school. But she also knows that it’s time to graduate and find out what else is out there.

The director Rob Reiner doesn’t have the craft to bring off the kinetic daredeviltry he tries for in “The Princess Bride,” and the movie is ungainly—you can almost see the chalk marks it’s not hitting. But it has a loose, likable slobbiness; it suggests a story that’s being made up as it goes along. The script, written in 1973 by William Goldman, and based on the 1973 novel that he wrote for his children (one daughter wanted it to be about princesses, the other wanted it to be about brides, hence the title), is set in the late Middle Ages, in the mythical kingdom of Florin. But it’s really set in the mythical past as we know it from the swashbuckling movies of the thirties, where people talk in a jumble of accents—the royalty in stage British, the poor people in Americanese, the clowns in vaudeville-Yiddish rhythms. Reiner doesn’t make a point of the anachronistic tone; he treats it lackadaisically, as if the characters just happened to be modern people in a fantasy world. Although the material was conceived for Goldman’s daughters, it seems to have turned into an affectionate composite parody of what he, as a boy, found exhilarating in adventure movies: the duels, the feats of strength, the rope climbing, the black-masked heroes, the swamps, the dungeons with medieval Rube Goldberg torture machines.

Photographed partly on locations in England and Ireland (Florin Castle is actually Haddon Hall, parts of which date back to the twelfth century), the movie has initial vistas so lovely they seem slightly unreal—sunnier than life. It begins with blond Buttercup (Robin Wright), said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and her true love and near-twin, the blond farm boy Westley (Cary Elwes). He goes out to seek his fortune, pledging to return, and is captured by pirates. The handsome, supercilious Crown Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon, a fine, regal villain, wry and mordant) selects her to be his bride, but before the ceremony she is abducted and taken to a ship by a trio of ruffians: Wallace Shawn as the Sicilian mastermind Vizzini, a little guy trying to act tough; and his two hirelings—Mandy Patinkin as the Spanish swordsman Inigo Montoya, and all seven feet five and five hundred and twenty-five pounds of the French-born wrestler André the Giant as the amiable Fezzik. These are the principal players, along with Christopher Guest in one of his peerless specialty acts, with his face clenched, as Humperdinck’s helper, the smarmy six-fingered sadist Count Rugen; the English comedian Mel Smith as the Albino; Margery Mason as the ancient woman who boos the royal family; and Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, in makeup that adds centuries to them, as the retired wizard Miracle Max and his nagging crone, Valerie. Offscreen, Crystal has explained that he wanted to “look like a cross between Casey Stengel and Dopey—a very old Dopey—and my grandmother.” He does look like a very old Dopey, and it’s an inspired way to look while doing a Mel Brooks turn. Carol Kane’s accent is soul-satisfyingly berserk (like the accent she used when she was partnering Andy Kaufman in “Taxi”); she suggests Madeline Kahn as Mrs. Dopey. The Crystal-Kane scenes are show-biz bliss, and they give the movie a lift that puts it all into perspective. It’s shtick softened by childlike infatuation. That’s not bad—it’s just gentler than what you’re used to. (It’s only bad when a tired routine from the past—like Peter Cook’s clergyman with a speech impediment—is lingered over sentimentally.)

“The Princess Bride” gets less lumpy as it moves along, partly because you adjust to André the Giant’s smiley, slow-spoken non-acting, and you get used to Patinkin’s mock-Spanish accent and can pick up more of what he’s saying. Patinkin is always on the verge of showing wit and finesse, but he doesn’t get there. (He did in “Yentl.”) Still, his duels, with their simulation of drawing-room badinage, have some of the best gags in the movie—particularly his match with Guest, in which he’s wounded and keeps regaining consciousness and saying the same lines over, like a busted phonograph. Reiner doesn’t waste his performers—he gives them enough chances to do what they can do. Robin Wright’s Buttercup isn’t a whole lot of fun (and the camera angles on her aren’t always flattering), but her timing is neat when she deliberately tumbles down a hill in pursuit of Westley, who by then is worth pursuing. With his rakish little sliver of a mustache, Cary Elwes is preposterously pretty, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in the thirties, and he has a flair for self-parody. When Westley (a perfect sappy name for a hero) is robbed of his strength and his head flops around on his neck, Elwes is a slapstick version of all the silly-ass Britishers you’ve ever tittered at. He’s funniest when he’s playing “mostly dead.” He lightens the movie, gives it a featherweight giddiness.

The story is set within a (too hearty and self-satisfied) framing device: Peter Falk, as a grandfather, has brought the heavily illustrated fairy-tale book “The Princess Bride,” which he remembers from his boyhood, to read to his ten-year-old grandson, who’s bedridden with flu. The grandfather plunks himself down in a chair facing the boy and starts to read. (At first, the boy, a child of the TV age, is reluctant to listen, but gradually he is caught up in the story, and by the end his bond with the grandfather is strengthened. That’s the moral of the movie.) If only it were that easy to read to a child. When you sit in a chair in comfort, the child can’t see the pictures (and follow the lines of print). So you prop yourself up on the bed, trying to see the words over and around the child’s bobbing head. (You have to turn the pages with the hand wound around his neck.) You also find yourself pepping things up: you transpose archaic or unfamiliar language into modern American, and into whatever innocuous slang phrases come to mind. It might have added to the fun if Falk, with his raucous, streetwise inflections, had been tied in with the characters’ vaudeville accents and incongruous remarks. The grandfather could have been the key to the flip-flops in tone. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 19, 1987, issue.

Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement, in 1991.

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The Great Electrician Shortage

Going green will depend on blue-collar workers. Can we train enough of them before time runs out?

By David Owen, THE NEW YORKER, Dept. of Energy

April 24, 2023

An electrical student at work during a class at W. F. Kaynor Technical High School, in Waterbury, Connecticut. The state has a network of dedicated public vocational schools, which might serve as a national model.Photographs by Eli Durst for The New Yorker

Two days before Christmas, rain and high winds knocked down power lines on our road, in a small town in northwestern Connecticut, and that night the temperature dropped to the single digits. I worried that the pipes in our baseboard hot-water radiators would freeze and burst, so at four in the morning I left my wife and our dog shivering in bed, groped my way down to the basement, and, with help from YouTube, attempted to drain the system. Here’s a home-improvement tip: if you think that someday you might need to perform an emergency maintenance chore, study it on a summer afternoon when you’re not wearing pajamas and a headlamp while trying to hold your cell phone and a bucket.

I did succeed in removing many gallons of water, but when the power came back, thirty hours after it had gone out, I couldn’t get the heat going again. I left messages for several plumbers. Pipes had frozen all over the Northeast, so I worried that none would call me back, but then one did: Marc LeMieux, who came over the day after Christmas and showed me what I’d been doing wrong. I was lucky to get him; he told me that in recent years he’d been so overwhelmed by other plumbing work that he’d stopped servicing heating systems. “There aren’t enough plumbers now, Dave,” he said. “What do you think it’s going to be like in ten years?”

Many skilled trades face similar shortages, and those shortages have environmental consequences. The Inflation Reduction Act includes billions in tax credits and direct funding for a long list of climate-friendly projects, but all of them depend on the availability of workers who can execute and maintain them. Last year, on Ezra Klein’s Times podcast, my colleague Bill McKibben said, “If you know a young person who wants to do something that’s going to help the world and wants to make a good living at the same time, tell them to go become an electrician.” This seems logical—you can’t electrify without electricians—but it doesn’t fully describe the need. My daughter and her husband hired an electrician to install an outlet next to their driveway, for their plug-in hybrid minivan, but the car, its network of charging stations, and the electric grid itself wouldn’t exist without welders, machinists, mechanics, carpenters, pipe fitters, and many others. In new construction, electric heat pumps are rapidly becoming the default option, for both heating and cooling, but on most installations the bulk of the work is done not by electricians but by heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (hvac) techs. Plumbers are indispensable, too. Changing weather patterns and rising sea levels threaten access to clean water in many parts of the country, and when water infrastructure fails entire communities suffer, as in the ongoing crises in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi. Plumbers also work on many energy-related projects, including the installation of ground-source heating-and-cooling systems. According to a recent report published by Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group, job openings in the construction industry averaged three hundred and ninety thousand a month in 2022, and the shortfall was made more ominous by the fact that roughly a quarter of existing workers are older than fifty-five.

One reason for the skilled-labor gap is that the work is real work. The electricians who restored power to the houses on our road spent Christmas Eve in bucket trucks, buffeted by winds so strong they made the screens on our porch hum like kazoos. LeMieux told me that he’s had apprentices who quit after a few months because they had decided the job was too wet, too messy, too cold, too dirty, too hot. A more significant factor may be that, for decades, employers, educators, politicians, and parents have argued that the only sure ticket to the good life in America is a college degree. People who graduate from college do earn more, on average, than people who don’t, but the statistics can be misleading. Many young people who start don’t finish, yet still take on tens of thousands in education loans—and those who do graduate often discover that the economic advantage of holding a degree can be negated, for years, by the cost of having acquired it.

Those who skip college frequently do better, and not just at first. “One of my guys came to me from the same trade school I went to,” LeMieux told me. “He had a couple of friends who went to college, and when they got out they were two hundred thousand dollars in debt and didn’t have jobs, and he was already making enough to buy a nice new vehicle and a house. I pay him a good hourly wage, he has health insurance and a 401(k), and he gets holidays, vacation time, and personal days. And he will always work—always.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual mean wage for plumbers and electricians is about sixty-three thousand dollars, or roughly the same as that for high-school teachers (who typically need not just college but also a master’s degree) and journalists.

At my house, LeMieux was able to restore two baseboard zones but not the one on the ground floor, which had indeed frozen. He told me that, even though I hadn’t drained it properly, I had possibly removed enough water so that the ice, when it did form, had had room to expand inside the pipes, rather than causing the copper to rupture—though we couldn’t be sure until things warmed up. A few days later, when the temperature had risen back to the mid-forties, I tried what I’d watched him do: I attached a hose to the purge valve on the ground-floor return line, next to the boiler, then goosed the manual water feed. Nothing happened at first, but then, suddenly, water and bits of ice were spewing from the far end of the hose. I e-mailed LeMieux to say the heat was on again, and he wrote back to tell me I was hired.

American public high schools began offering vocational training in a serious way a little more than a century ago. The main goal, usually, wasn’t to broaden the abilities of all students but to sequester certain unwelcome newcomers: kids who had grown up on farms, kids whose parents were immigrants, kids who weren’t white. Jeannie Oakes, a professor emerita at U.C.L.A., in her book “Keeping Track,” which was first published in 1985, describes trade-oriented high-school courses as “usually taught to fairly homogeneous groups of students seen as low achieving or low ability.” This is often still true, although the issue is moot in many school districts, in which budget cuts and a focus on college preparation have reduced or eliminated traditional vocational offerings.

A significant trend in recent years, at all levels of education, has been a growing emphasis on so-called stem instruction. The acronym stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—disciplines that, in the words of the U.S. Department of Education, impart “21st century career readiness and global competitiveness” (unlike the useless old humanities). I live about a hundred miles north of New York City. The stem curriculum at the regional public high school that serves my town includes career-oriented classes in agricultural sciences—this area is largely rural—but only a smattering in traditional trades. Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was heavily involved in the creation and passage of the I.R.A., told me, “I don’t feel we got enough about workforce development in the bill. We have to change the culture around the importance of these jobs, which are going to be linchpins in the clean-energy transition.”

My state has a network of dedicated public vocational schools, called the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System (ctecs), which might serve as a national model. It consists of seventeen diploma-granting high schools, two aviation-maintenance schools for adults, an after-school program for juniors and seniors enrolled at conventional high schools, and night classes for people of all ages who already work in trades. “Between eighty-five and ninety per cent of all apprentices in the state come from our district,” Pat Ciarleglio, who holds three trade licenses and is the head of apprenticeship education at ctecs, told me. “We even get electrical engineers who have done all their formalized university education but decide, Hey, I don’t want to sit behind a desk.” No other state has anything quite like the Connecticut system. It’s overseen not by local school boards but by a single, independent state agency, whose director is appointed by the governor. Funding for the schools comes directly from the state—there are no local budget meetings at which angry parents complain about Judy Blume books in the libraries.

I visited three of the schools in early March, beginning with Eli Whitney Technical High School, in Hamden. I crossed the campus with Brent McCartney—who worked as a union carpenter before he joined the system, first as an instructor and now as a consultant—to see a project financed by Connecticut’s electric utilities: the construction of a small house on an elevated site next to the school’s athletic fields. All the work was being done by students. The windows weren’t in yet, but most of the roof had been framed and the walls sheathed with panels that had integrated moisture and air barriers. “When they insulate, they’re going to do a really good job on some parts and a really bad job on others, using a variety of materials,” McCartney said. “Then they’ll use thermal-imaging equipment to do an energy audit, and they’ll come up with solutions for the problems they find.” Because the house is a teaching project, one class often disassembles something that another class recently assembled, then assembles it again.

The woodshop at Howell Cheney Technical High School.

A “high-efficiency home” being built at another ctecs school.

We were joined by seven plumbing students, who were returning from lunch. Victor Leduc, a junior, told me, “This is our e-house—also known as a high-efficiency home. We plan on installing a lot of appliances and fixtures that save energy and water.” He was wearing construction boots, kneepads, an orange hard hat, and a tool belt. “Buildings are an important cause of CO₂ emissions,” he continued. “I don’t think that’s something that many people look at, but homes like this cut that a lot.” The finished house will have solar thermal, solar electric, and geothermal systems, all installed by the students.

High schools in the ctecs system alternate academic and vocational classes, on a rotating schedule, roughly two weeks of each at a time. During the vocational segments, the student crews are able to work away from the campus, on jobs contracted with the school. That week, Leduc’s plumbing crew, in addition to working on the e-house, was renovating a bathroom for a nearby homeowner. (The consensus best part of that project so far: demolishing the existing fixtures.) “We charge about a fifth of what a contractor would, but the jobs take longer,” McCartney said. “Homeowners are sometimes hesitant, at first, when they see a school bus pull up with eighteen kids. But by the end they know all the kids’ names, and they’ve often fed them on numerous days.” Juniors and seniors can also leave school for paid part-time jobs, many of which become full-time after graduation.

McCartney and I walked down the hill to a paved open space, where electrical students were cutting lengths of metal conduit with hacksaws, then using hand tools called benders to create six-inch offsets. Inside the building, Aleena Rivera, a sophomore, presented her conduit to the instructor, who held it up to a steel junction box on the counter in front of him, next to a tape measure and a hardcover copy of the National Electrical Code. “Look at that,” he said. “That is beautiful.” She smiled. The shop is so large that students are able to repeatedly build and rebuild a two-story structure entirely inside it, with residential wood framing on the ground floor and commercial steel framing above. (Electricians need to know some carpentry, too.) They practice wiring both floors, each in accordance with the code for its construction type.

I followed two juniors, Gabe Green and Thomas Yulo, to the second floor. “We were downstairs last year,” Yulo said. “So we replaced most of the wood studs down there.” Green was wearing a gray hoodie and Yulo a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, and each had the word “electrical” embroidered in yellow over the left breast and the boy’s name over the right. “When I came here, I was thinking about machining,” Yulo said. “But then I thought, Do I really want to be working inside all my life?” Green said, “I’ve got uncles and aunts in trades. My dad is a carpenter. He does ductwork and all of that, and my brother is a plumber, and my other brother does hvac. My father wants us to be, like, a whole family business.” They showed me their theory classroom, a large, bright space that opens off of the back of the shop. There were eighteen desktop computers and big stacks of books, mostly related to the electrical code. Yulo said, “A lot of kids nowadays, they’re not into all the textbooks, but when we get hands-on, now we can understand, and we’re more interested in what we’re learning about.” By the time they graduate, they’ll have logged seven hundred and twenty hours of theory, which is all the class work they need for their licenses.

Students I met at all three schools were aware of and interested in the environmental impact of the skills they were learning, but none of them, as far as I know, had applied to trade school because they were worried about climate change. Like Green and Yulo, they were following the example of family members who worked in similar trades, or they or their parents were alarmed by the cost of college, or the covid shutdown had soured them permanently on spending all day staring at a screen. But to create the kind of green workforce that Bill McKibben envisions you don’t need to turn anyone into a McKibbenite. One reason Republicans are unlikely to gut the I.R.A. is that its focus is on infrastructure and job creation, rather than on changing anyone’s mind about the causes of global warming.

Connecticut’s public-trade-school system is similarly resistant to ideological meddling, because the curriculum is tied directly to the regional job market. The I.R.A. has altered the incentives for many kinds of public and private investment, and the schools are nimble enough to respond quickly. Dr. Ellen Solek, the system’s executive director, told me, “Electric vehicles are coming out like crazy, but we don’t have enough charging stations, and we don’t have a preponderance of people trained in installing high-speed chargers. So guess where we’re going in our automotive programs?” Solek spent sixteen years as a music teacher and twelve as a middle-school principal, and ctecs is the third school district she’s headed as superintendent. “I remember when all the auto-body shops and home-economics shops in academic public schools were being shut down, back when I was teaching,” she said. “Why? Because technology was coming, and we needed computer labs instead. Now there’s been a one-eighty.”

My internist, my dermatologist, my gastroenterologist, my dentist, my veterinarian, and all four of the Navy pilots who flew fighter jets over this year’s Super Bowl are women. My lawyer is a man, but last spring—and I’m not saying that this proves anything about men generally—he was charged with first-degree manslaughter, after shooting someone in the parking lot of one of his firm’s offices. (He pleaded not guilty.) More women than men now go to college, and they have better grades and a higher graduation rate. Since 2014, they’ve also been more likely to go to law school, and since 2019 they’ve been more likely to go to medical school.

Men still dominate the heavy-duty skilled trades. The gender disparity partly reflects the physical nature of the work, but there’s a cultural element, too. Last year, my wife and I decided that we needed central air-conditioning, after surviving thirty-six New England summers without even a window unit, and we had a heat-pump system installed at our house. (That system has turned out to be surprisingly effective at heating the house, too, even when the outside temperature is far below freezing. Someday we’ll get rid of our oil-fired boiler, which we now use mainly as a backstop.) The crew that did the work was all men. Gary Pelletier, who owns the company, told me that female techs are a rarity in his field, but that he’s hired a couple in the past. “I had a customer once who complained that a woman had no business doing this,” he said. “But a lot of customers welcome it, and it’s an up-and-coming thing.”

Total enrollment in Connecticut’s public-trade-school system is about eleven thousand. Girls account for forty per cent of the total. They disproportionately choose fields such as culinary arts, hairdressing and cosmetology, graphic technology, guest-services management, and health, but their interest in traditionally male-dominated trades is growing, partly because demand from employers is high and rising. They now make up roughly a quarter of the carpentry students, a fifth of the electrical students, a third of the masonry students, and a sixth of the plumbing and heating students.

When I visited Howell Cheney Tech, in Manchester, another school in the system, Jousette Caraballo, the dean of students, pointed to two framed photographs on a wall in the main office. In each of them, a young woman was standing on a stepladder and working on the exposed interior of a jet engine, which appeared to be the size of a small house. “That’s me, a little over twenty years ago,” she said. “I grew up in the Bronx. I’d look up and see all these giant jumbo jets flying overhead and wonder, How are they staying up there?” In a conference room down the hall, a (male) culinary-arts instructor laid out a feast that students had prepared that morning: scones, pastries, coffee cake, double-chocolate brownies, muffins, quiche. Caraballo and I were joined by Hadley Gonzalez, a senior carpentry student. Last year, Gonzalez completed an eight-week paid internship at General Dynamics Electric Boat, the country’s leading manufacturer of submarines, based in Groton. Two weeks before the internship ended, the company offered her a full-time job. I asked her what a carpenter does on a submarine. “We do exterior work, interior work, soundproofing,” she said. “We build the scaffolding you need to get on top of the boats, and we make sure that everything is round and flat, so that it’s safe.” She apologized for sounding vague; some of the projects she worked on could be classified.

Gonzalez has long brown hair, which hangs past her waist, and she pulled it out of the way so that I could see the logo on the back of her hoodie: a Columbia-class nuclear submarine, an American flag, and a trident, encircled by a gold braid and the motto “The Future of Strategic Deterrence.” (It was a parting gift from her co-workers.) She told me that her interest in carpentry had come from her grandfather. “He was a truck driver, but we built a shed together and did a lot of little projects around the house,” she said. “I liked creating stuff with my hands.”

After breakfast, Gonzalez took me to Cheney’s carpentry facility. There were industrial-size saws, jointers, routers, planers, shapers, sanders, and other tools, plus many orderly stacks of lumber and an extensive built-in dust-collection system (which is maintained by electrical students). “This is my home, and I love it,” she said. “I don’t care what culinary says; carpentry has the best-smelling shop.” Her teacher was on his way out the door. He was taking fifteen juniors to work on a construction project at a nearby house. “We’re doing a deck with railings and a hip roof,” he said. “It’s a nice little job.” Gonzalez showed me something that she and her classmates had been working on inside the shop: an old, wooden, horse-drawn carriage, which they’re restoring for its owner. Several critical metal parts had been missing, so students in precision machining had fabricated replacements.

Precision machining at Kaynor.

Welding at Howell Cheney.

Stanley Black & Decker, the country’s largest tool manufacturer, is based in New Britain, less than twenty miles from the Cheney campus. The president of the company’s power-tool group is Allison Nicolaidis, who, like Hadley Gonzalez, was introduced to amateur tinkering by her grandfather. I asked her whether the country had enough skilled workers to fully implement the I.R.A. She said, “If you asked any of our folks who are running the kinds of large companies that tend to win those contracts, they would say no.” Last year, Stanley Black & Decker published a report, called the Makers Index, which estimated that there were six hundred and fifty thousand unfilled jobs in construction-related trades in the United States, and ten million worldwide.

Many formerly daunting jobs have been made more accessible by changes in technology. Some types of commercial construction now employ a form of prefabrication, called “manufacturization,” in which tasks that used to be done exclusively on-site are performed inside huge, climate-controlled spaces that are equipped like factories. “When you do that, you can use equipment that you could never have on a job site,” she said. “You can build a twenty-foot run of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, all on one big rack, then send it to the site on the back of a flatbed, with a tag that tells the installing crew where to plug it in.” Tools are evolving, too. “Think of something like an impact wrench, which is a high-powered fastening tool that you use to drive big bolts,” she said. “Twenty-five years ago, when I started, it was absolutely a corded tool, and it was as heavy as a bowling ball. Now it’s cordless, and it weighs a third as much.” These and other changes have been good for both men and women: lighter tools and less exposure to the elements make for fewer injuries and longer careers.

Nearly all of Connecticut’s trade apprentices come from ctecs, which has about eleven thousand students. The curriculum is a “fluid document” that evolves alongside policy changes and labor demand.

Gary Pelletier, whose company installed the heat pump at my house, said that representatives from Mitsubishi, which manufactured my unit, have assured him that demand will be strong, worldwide, for at least twenty-five years. “They told us that we should just be worrying about where our people are going to come from,” he said. (Last year, in the United States, heat pumps overtook gas furnaces in total sales; in Europe, installations were up almost forty per cent over 2021, partly as a result of efforts to reduce the importation of Russian natural gas.) Pelletier took me to see a big air-conditioning job that his crew had been working on, in a thirty-year-old house whose owners, like my wife and me, had decided that New England summers were now too hot. An apprentice, working in the garage, was sealing the joints on a new length of ductwork. The electrical subcontractor who had worked on my job was connecting something to the main service panel, in the basement. The owner of the house was typing at a computer on her dining-room table and trying to ignore the commotion all around her.

Andrew Cozza, who manages Pelletier’s installation department, was working in a room on the second floor which appeared to be either an on-site self-storage unit, now approaching capacity, or a home gym. Cozza is thirty-eight years old and has an impressive portfolio of tattoos. Like his boss, he went to Oliver Wolcott Tech, in Torrington, another ctecs school, but studied culinary arts. He joined the Marine Corps after graduation, and when his tour ended, four years later, he got a job in a factory. “I bought a house as soon as I got discharged,” he said. “One morning, I woke up to no heat, and when the service technician got it going again I was, like, Wow, that guy is my superhero.” He decided he would like to have a job like that, too, and so signed up for night classes at a private tech school, in Watertown, and fell in love with hvac. “It sounds crazy to say this, but my job doesn’t even seem like work to me,” he said. “The sky’s the limit right now. Once you’ve got your mechanic’s license, you can easily make six figures.”

Leah Stokes, the U.C. Santa Barbara professor, told me, “For a long time, we have valorized white-collar jobs and tech workers and the knowledge economy. We need a whole new group of people to think about going into the trades, including people whose families have had white-collar jobs.” One of my golf buddies is a pilot for American Airlines. He and his wife have a daughter who’s about to start graduate school, a daughter who’s about to start college, and a son, Sam, who, in addition to having a decent golf swing, is an apprentice at a local hvac company. Sam is twenty. He knew when he was in eighth grade that he didn’t want to go to college. He attended his town’s regular public high school, and, after graduation, went to work. He takes night classes at Henry Abbott Tech, another school in the ctecs system, accumulating theory credits toward his journeyperson’s license. He told me that his sister’s bachelor’s degree had cost his parents about two hundred thousand dollars, while the twenty credits he needs for his license will end up costing more like five thousand. (ctecs night-school students pay tuition.) Meanwhile, he’s installing heat pumps and getting paid.

My wife’s and my first house was built in the late seventeen-hundreds. It was a classic fixer-upper, and I spent thirty-five years fixing it up. As I visited Connecticut’s tech schools, I brooded that classes in carpentry, roofing, cabinetmaking, plumbing, electrical, and hvac would have been far more useful to me, in my life as I have lived it, than all those years of French. I felt a little better later, back in my office, when I realized that the most valuable parts of my actual education had really been vocational, too: writing for and editing school publications, beginning in grade school and continuing all the way through college. I paid much more attention to those activities than I did to any of my classes, and the practical experience I gained led directly to jobs in writing, book publishing, and journalism, both before and after graduation. So I guess my years of college prep (and college) weren’t completely wasted.

ctecs student crews are able to take jobs in the surrounding community. The consensus favorite aspect of a recent bathroom renovation: demolishing the existing fixtures.

Not that long ago, big-name tech companies made headlines by offering their employees extraordinary perks (along with lawyer-size starting salaries): free meals prepared by in-house chefs, months-long paid parental leave, on-site massages and dental care, dry cleaning, haircuts, valet parking, lounges filled with arcade games, all-day snack buffets. More recently, the main tech news has been about job cuts: twenty-one thousand at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, twelve thousand at Google, twenty-seven thousand at Amazon—as well as more than half of the entire workforce at Twitter, including a man with a disability who had to get into a public tweet fight with Elon Musk in order to confirm that he’d been fired. And let’s not even think about what’s happened to English majors.

Meanwhile, Electric Boat has announced that it expects to hire fifty-seven hundred new employees this year, and twenty thousand during the next decade; it’s even begun advertising job openings on TV. I recently attended a job fair at Cheney, organized by Jousette Caraballo. There were representatives from construction companies, aerospace manufacturers, trade unions, colleges, electrical contractors, the state apprenticeship council (“The other 4-year degree”), the military, Olive Garden. The director of a regional apprenticeship program of the Laborers’ International Union of North America told me that members of his union, at the end of their apprenticeships, earn more than fifty dollars an hour in wages and benefits. One of his challenges, he said, is overcoming the hesitation of parents who worry that “laborer” means “sweeper.”

A few days later, I had dinner with Marc LeMieux, my superhero at Christmas, and his wife, Jamie, at a crowded restaurant in Watertown, a few miles from the campus of W. F. Kaynor, another ctecs high school I visited. (We actually could have had lunch at Kaynor, in its hugely popular student-run dining room, if I’d thought to make a reservation far enough in advance.) “I always liked taking stuff apart and putting it back together,” Marc said. “The summer after eighth grade, my family’s water heater went out. I went downstairs with the plumber and watched him remove the old one and put in the new one, and I was like, I want to do that.” He graduated from Wolcott—as Pelletier did fourteen years later and Cozza six years after that—and got a job with a local plumber.

Jamie spent two years at a local university and two years at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, a trade college. She worked as an airbrush and layout artist at a department-store chain, then for thirty years in the printing industry. She still works as an artist, freelance, and also as a classroom assistant at Wolcott.

“And you married a plumber,” Marc said.

She and Marc have a daughter, who’s about to finish graduate school, in speech pathology, and a son, who’s in his second year at the New York School of Interior Design.

“We’re two working parents, and it’s still hard to afford,” Jamie said. “Some of the kids I’m with every day at Wolcott—even if they did want to go to college, there would be no way.” ♦

Students at Kaynor try on their blazers ahead of an upcoming competition in technical skills.

David Owen has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1991. He is the author of “Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World.”

The End of Ice

A camp on the Chhota Shigri Glacier, in India, where a group of scientists is trying to assess how rapidly it is melting. The Chinese side of the mountain range has been studied thoroughly, but, according to one scientist, “the other side of the Himalayas is a black hole.”Photograph by Simon Norfolk / Institute for The New Yorker

Exploring a Himalayan glacier.

By Dexter Filkins, THE NEW YORKER, A Reporter at Large April 4, 2016 Issue

March 28, 2016

The journey to the Chhota Shigri Glacier, in the Himalayan peaks of northern India, begins thousands of feet below, in New Delhi—a city of twenty-five million people, where smoke from diesel trucks and cow-dung fires dims the sky and where the temperature on a hot summer day can reach a hundred and fifteen degrees. The route passes through a churning sprawl of low-land cities, home to some fifty million people, until the Himalayas come into view: a steep wall rising above the plains, the product of a tectonic collision that began millions of years ago and is still under way. From there, the road snakes upward, past cows and trucks and three-wheeled taxis and every other kind of moving evidence of India’s economic transformation. If you turn around, you can see a great layer of smog, lying over northern India like a dirty shroud. In the mountains, the number of cars drops sharply—limited by government regulation, for fear of what the smog is doing to the ice. The road mostly lacks shoulders; on turns, you look into ravines a thousand feet deep. After the town of Manali, the air cools, and the road cuts through forests of spruce and cedar and fir.

A few months ago, I followed that route with an international group of scientists who were travelling to Chhota Shigri to assess how rapidly it is melting. Six of us were pressed together in a van packed with scientific instruments, cold-weather gear, and enough provisions to last several days. My guides were two Indian scientists, Farooq Azam and Shyam Ranjan. Azam, a thirty-three-year-old former bodybuilding champion, has made more than twenty trips to Chhota Shigri. This time, he would be carrying out measurements for the National Institute of Hydrology, in Roorkee. Ranjan, a large, soft-spoken man who grew up in a village on the plains of North India, had never been on a Himalayan glacier. He was hoping to extract an ice core—a sample from deep inside the glacier, which would provide a detailed picture of the area’s past climate. It would be the first such sample to be taken from the Indian Himalayas.

There are a hundred and ninety-eight thousand glaciers in the world, and, while many of them have been studied extensively, the nine thousand in India remain mostly unexamined. On the Chinese side of the Himalayas, researchers have performed thorough surveys, but, according to one American scientist, “the other side of the Himalayas is a black hole.” The reasons are largely financial: India is a relatively poor country, and there are scant funds available for research. “To adequately study the Himalayan glaciers, we need thirty to forty times more money than we actually receive,” A. L. Ramanathan, a glaciologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who oversaw our expedition, told me.

Scientists from other countries have moved in to fill the void. Markus Engelhardt, a German, joined us in Manali, and a second vehicle carried a group of Norwegian glaciologists who were heading to a lake near Chhota Shigri to take samples of sediment dating back as far as twelve thousand years. For the Norwegians, the expedition amounted to a tutorial: they were hoping to teach the Indian scientists how to do similar experiments. “There’s a thirty-year lag in India,” Jostein Bakke, one of the Norwegians, said. “Without a firm understanding of the long-term dynamics of the climate, making predictions about it is like playing the lottery.”

In India, the lack of precise knowledge has caused confusion. Two years ago, an article in Current Science, an Indian publication, concluded that “most of the Himalayan glaciers are retreating.” Soon afterward, the Indian Space Research Organization found nearly the opposite, that eighty-seven per cent of them were stable. Some scientists expressed doubts about both studies, saying that data gathered only by satellites are not reliable for making such judgments. “You really can’t tell anything unless you see the glacier up close,” Azam said. “That’s why I come up here.”

For the people who live on the Indian subcontinent, the future of the high-mountain climate is of more than academic interest. The three great rivers that flow from the Indian Himalayas—the Ganges, the Indus, and the Brahmaputra—provide water for more than seven hundred million people in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and they power numerous hydroelectric plants. Already, villages in India and Pakistan are experiencing more frequent flooding from the melting ice; scientists are predicting even more.

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At thirteen thousand feet, our van arrived at a pass known as Rohtang La—“pile of corpses,” so called because of the many people who have frozen to death trying to get through. Winter was coming, and in a few days the pass would close for six months. The Norwegians had wanted to come earlier, but they received permission from the Indian government only at the last minute; for researchers hoping to work on India’s glaciers, the bureaucracy can be as big an obstacle as the lack of funding. “We do not want to get trapped on the other side for the winter,” Bakke said.

When we reached the top of Rohtang La, the horizon appeared: a line of mountains skidding downward half a mile to the valley floor. Zigzagging through switchbacks, we made our way down. A new landscape emerged; instead of forests and grassy hillsides, there were boulders, barren slopes, and expanses of scree. The only signs of human habitation were fallow, neatly marked farm plots that crept up the valley walls at improbable angles.

Near the valley floor, we veered onto a rocky trail that tracked an icy river called the Chandra. Our van halted and a group of men appeared: Nepali porters, who led us to an outcropping on the river’s edge. Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.

Once we had arrived at the other side, we made our way across a rock-strewn field to get to our base camp, elevation twelve thousand six hundred and thirty-one feet. The sun was setting and whatever warmth was left vanished. In a few minutes, it was dark, and the stars came out, forming a dome of light so bright you could almost read a book.

Annual expeditions to Chhota Shigri began only fourteen years ago, so relatively little is known about its climatic history. Chhota Shigri and the other glaciers of the eastern Himalayas are unusual, in that, unlike the majority of the world’s glaciers, which get most of their snow from winter storms, they get much of theirs from the summer monsoons, which tend to insulate them from more rapid melting. (Most of the glaciers of the Karakoram Mountains, in Pakistan, are not receding at all; it’s one of the few places in the world where this is the case.)

The data are also limited by the uneven quality of the expeditions. Glaciologists can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research trips, but Azam and Ranjan had only a few thousand dollars to buy equipment and to pay porters. Some glacial expeditions extract ice cores using cranes and ferry them home by helicopter. The Indian scientists would transport their cores in dry ice, using a portable cooler, of the kind you might use to chill beer for a picnic, driving them by car back to Ranjan’s laboratory, in New Delhi—a sixteen-hour trip. Some of the experiments that they planned to perform on Chhota Shigri seemed comically rudimentary. In one, to measure the volume of meltwater flowing out of the glacier, a graduate assistant would toss a wooden block into the water and time its float downstream.

In the morning, the sun rose over the mountains, but for hours the high-walled valley remained shaded and bitterly cold. Unlike glaciers in other parts of the world—Greenland, say, or the Alps—many of those in the Himalayas lie at the bottom of narrow valleys that get only a few hours of direct sunlight each day. As a result, they are melting more slowly than they would on flatter ground. It was not until 8:20 a.m. that the sun shone on our camp; by midafternoon the valley was in shadow again.

Markus Engelhardt’s first task was to check the camp’s weather monitor, which had been planted four months earlier, and recorded temperature, solar radiation, and barometric pressure. There was an array of similar instruments installed throughout the camp; one of them, a five-foot-tall aluminum thistle with a crown of flaps, looked like something you might find in a Santa Fe sculpture garden. Engelhardt had two other weather stations on the glacier, and he was eager to download their data, which would allow him to construct a precise record of fluctuations in the local climate. As he watched information scroll across the screen of his laptop, Engelhardt, who had been stoic during our long ascent, could barely contain his enthusiasm. “I want to go back to the office right now and start studying the data,” he said.

The team set out into the valley, following a stream that was flowing from the glacier. There were nine of us, including three graduate assistants who’d come with Azam and Ranjan. I had imagined a smooth carpet of ice that led to the top of the glacier. Instead, there was a rough track of boulders, a destructive path that marked Chhota Shigri’s retreat. Thousands of years ago, as the glacier moved forward, debris from the valley walls was torn loose by the advancing ice and tumbled onto its face, creating a craggy obstacle course.

Azam had not visited since 2013, when he was completing a doctorate at the University of Grenoble, in France. (His thesis topic: the effect of the climate on Chhota Shigri and the surrounding glaciers.) Like many of the glaciologists I encountered, Azam entered the field not because he was drawn to science but because he loved the outdoors. Born in the plains state of Uttar Pradesh, he grew up seeing the Himalayas on television and dreamt of going there. In college, he took a sensible path, studying chemistry, but he was also athletically inclined; he won several bodybuilding titles, including Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru University. After he finished a master’s degree in chemistry, his teachers urged him to go into medical research. But, he said, “I was being pulled by some invisible force.”

That same year, he had signed up for a mountaineering course offered by the Indian Army, which took place on the Dokriani Glacier, near the Chinese border. During the course, Azam noticed a series of bamboo rods protruding from the snow: ablation stakes, basic instruments of glaciology. “Until then, I didn’t realize you could work on a glacier,” he told me. Not long afterward, he went to Grenoble, where he spent the next three years studying ice, making field trips to India every summer. “When I am in the mountains, on the glacier, I feel close to myself—I’m far from everybody, there’s no technology, and I can think,” Azam said. “Only recently has the science become more important to me.”

Ranjan, who is thirty-one, spent years examining glaciers as a graduate student in Switzerland, but he had never been to one in India, where the terrain is much more rugged. On the trail, in his heavy clothes—layers of thermal underwear and fleece and a down jacket—he cut a husky figure. As we started off, he worried that he was not fit enough to complete the expedition. “I am not sure that I can do this,” he said. He moved slowly, panting heavily. The porters practically skipped across the rocky ground as they carried several hundred pounds of our equipment, as well as dozens of eggs.

At higher elevations, the valley deepened; the walls rose a thousand feet on either side, in layers of colored sediment, each representing a different mineral and a different epoch. The landscape was desolate, but occasionally there was a surprise: a golden eagle, a butterfly with orange wings. A solitary black crow followed us the length of the glacier.

Rounding a bend in the stream, we arrived at the glacier’s snout, a cave of ice with water rushing from the entrance. Behind it, Chhota Shigri spread upward into the peaks, a vast shoehorn of snow and ice covered with sharp-edged boulders, most of them the size of a car. The glaciers of the Himalayas are scattered with geological debris, which, along with the lack of direct sunlight, slows melting. Yet, since Azam’s last visit, two years earlier, Chhota Shigri’s snout had receded more than sixty feet. At its largest, the glacier sat almost atop the Chandra, slowly filling it with frigid meltwater; now it is barely visible from the banks. “It’s going very fast,” Azam said, standing on a ridge above it. The shrinking snout had left behind enormous hunks of what glaciologists call “dead ice,” which were melting on the glacier’s trail. A single glance belied the reports that India’s glaciers are stable. After this, all the activity would consist of taking small, precise measurements, to find out exactly what was changing and how much.

The opening of Chhota Shigri’s snout was five feet high, large enough for us to enter. Pressing ourselves against the interior walls and shimmying along the narrow banks of the rushing water, we worked our way into a vaulting palace of ice, where ten-foot-long icicles hung from the ceiling like giant fishhooks. Underneath the roar, you could hear the drip of melting ice. In the walls and the ceiling, water and earth streamed behind sheets of clear ice, the sediment tinting the walls orange and pale green. Air bubbled in the water, trapped when the glacier’s ice froze around it, more than two hundred and fifty years ago. “It could collapse at any moment,” Azam said. “When we come back next year, it will be gone.”

On one of Azam’s early trips to Chhota Shigri, in 2008, he and a French scientist, accompanied by a porter, trekked to the head of the glacier. When they started back, the next day, Azam fell behind the others. Then the sun went down and the temperature dropped. There was no moon, and the way through the boulders disappeared in the darkness. Alone and disoriented, Azam tripped and fell into the glacial stream. On his knees, he crawled alongside the water—his only clear path—wondering if he would survive. Several hours later, another member of the team found him not far from the base camp, shivering and numb, and helped him make his way back. At the camp, the French scientist apologized for leaving him behind. Azam, worried that his legs were frostbitten, dunked them in a barrel of steaming water. “What I learned was nature is always stronger,” he said.

For many glaciologists, the scientific work that they perform on glaciers consumes less time and effort than surviving the journey. There is the cold to consider—temperatures in Antarctica reach seventy degrees below zero—along with steep treks through thin mountain air, and gusts of wind powerful enough to sweep researchers from mountains, not to mention rock slides, marauding polar bears, deep crevasses, and lightning strikes. “Logistics is about ninety per cent of your work,” said Aaron Putnam, a glaciologist at the University of Maine who has done field work in Bhutan, Mongolia, western China, and the Beagle Islands, at the tip of South America. “The science can seem almost incidental.”

Glaciology is a diffuse field, encompassing meteorologists, geologists, and physicists. While some researchers spend most of their time in the lab, looking at satellite imagery and readouts from remote sensors, many collect their data in far more challenging environments. Mike Kaplan, a Columbia University geologist who studies glacial and polar ice, has fallen head first between boulders in Patagonia and watched a polar bear destroy his camp in northern Canada. Once, on an expedition to Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, Kaplan drifted out to sea when the engine on his Zodiac boat wouldn’t start. “I’ve never been so miserable in my life,” Kaplan told me. “You’re just so cold and so uncomfortable. But you’ve got work to do, so you have to do it.”

Lonnie Thompson, a sixty-seven-year-old glaciologist at Ohio State University, has completed sixty-one expeditions to glaciers around the world, conducting research in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the mountains of East Africa, among other places. He’s fallen into crevasses in the Andes, and endured seventy-mile-per-hour winds atop a twenty-thousand-foot Peruvian peak, where a pair of Italian climbers were blown to their deaths. A few years ago, he began to have heart trouble, and, rather than retire, he got a transplant. “I may be sixty-seven, but my heart is twenty-five,” he said. Last summer, Thompson led a team of sixty to the Guliya Glacier, in Tibet, elevation twenty-two thousand feet; seven tons of equipment had to be hauled in on foot. “There I was, it’s minus thirty-five in my tent, ” Thompson said. “It’s not for everybody.” But he was able to retrieve samples of ice that was a half million years old. The trip had its pleasures, too. At night, the Tibetan sky was so dark and so clear that Thompson was able to see other galaxies. “I went into geology because I didn’t want to sit behind a desk,” he said. “I didn’t even know what glaciology was. But I’m a tough dude. I can suffer.”

Until the last decade or so, glaciology was an obscure field; today it’s being flooded with new students. Like many of the recent recruits, Thompson is propelled by the knowledge that the focus of his career is rapidly vanishing. The ice cores that he’s collecting make up an archive of the Earth’s weather over the past millennia. But the glacial ice is disappearing, and so is the archive itself. “We are trying to document the history of climate,” Thompson said. “If it’s not done now, it will never be done.” Two of the six ice fields he had visited on Mt. Kilimanjaro are gone. By his estimate, the glaciers in New Guinea will disappear in twenty years. “We’re on a salvage mission,” he said.

Azam had come to Chhota Shigri to measure three things: the mass of the glacier, its thickness, and the speed with which it was moving downhill. Glacial melt is calculated in “mass balance,” a measure of how much ice has been gained or lost. According to surveys conducted by Azam and ten other scientists, Chhota Shigri’s mass has declined significantly since 2002, losing more than twenty feet across its surface. The glacier has shrunk in fits and starts; its greatest reductions have occurred in years in which the monsoon faltered, depriving the glacier of much of its snowfall. Recently, India’s monsoons have become more sporadic, for reasons that many scientists ascribe to the world’s changing climate.

Azam usually begins his expeditions by extracting a snow core, which indicates how much fresh snow has accumulated since the last measurement. In 2012, he climbed to seventeen thousand feet to extract a snow core. In a video he took of the operation, he and his assistant stood in a driving snowstorm, rotating the aluminum handle of a tool that looks much like a gigantic corkscrew. The tool pulled loose a foot-long cylinder, which Azam carefully weighed on a digital scale. While he completed the measurement, two porters stood by, unfazed, as snow piled up on their jackets and hats. Finally, Azam said, laughing, “So, for today, it’s enough.” At the completion of each season’s snow core, Azam marks the spot using a G.P.S. device and then places a small beacon—a “reco tablet”—on the snow’s surface and marks it with blue powder. When he returns, he locates the beacon with an electronic detector and drills down until he finds the blue powder. “This is the most amazing exercise on the whole glacier,” he told me. “I feel like a detective.”

One afternoon, we clambered onto the glacier, following a steep path that was covered in snow. The air got thinner, and it was harder to keep going. We were walking in the “ablation zone,” the part of the glacier where melting exceeds accumulation; it typically comprises the lower third of a glacier. After several minutes, we came to a bamboo stick poking out of the glacier; this was Ablation Stake 12, one in a network of poles planted across the surface. The stake, buried deep in the ice, had been installed years before, with a steam drill. Azam opened his pack and pulled out his G.P.S. device and a tape measure. “At last I can get to work,” he said.

Standing at Stake 12, Azam measured how much of the stick was poking above the snow: about thirty inches. Then he used the G.P.S. device to determine the stick’s precise location. He was hoping to learn two things. The first was how much snow had been lost since 2013, when he was last on Chhota Shigri. It’s a simple calculation: if there’s more snow against the stakes than there was in 2013, then the glacier grew; if not, it shrank. “This seems like a normal amount of melt, but I won’t know until I get back to the lab,” he said.

The second measurement was the glacier’s thickness. On a previous visit, Azam’s colleagues, using ground-penetrating radar, had charted the base of the glacier, where the ice meets the earth. Now, by measuring the elevation at various points, he could calculate the glacier’s thickness. The data from this trip would take Azam months to sort out. But in previous years the patterns were clear. In 2009, the ice near Stake 12 was four hundred and twenty feet thick. In 2013, it had thinned to three hundred and ninety feet.

Ranjan was far behind us now, moving slowly but waving every so often to signal that he was O.K. At Ablation Stake 11, Azam took another measurement, gauging how much the stake had moved down the glacier. When snow accumulates on the surface of a glacier, its weight pushes the ice forward and down. Using the G.P.S. beacon, Azam calculated the location; since 2013, Stake 11 had moved about a hundred feet down the glacier. “All these measurements show us that the glacier is shrinking,” he said. Indeed, most of the other omens were not good: the Indian monsoon season in 2015 was among the driest in decades, and Chhota Shigri appears to have received less snow.

The center line of the glacier, known as the medial moraine, was strewn with boulders that had tumbled and drifted down from the peak. Around many of them, the snow had melted away, leaving them perched like giant mushrooms on stems of snow. Stopping at one boulder, marked with red paint, Azam lay the G.P.S. device on top and calculated its location and elevation to find the speed of the glacier’s flow.

As we trudged up the glacier, Azam stopped using his instruments and simply looked around, searching for clues to how Chhota Shigri was changing. His vision was uncanny; he spotted a pile of boulders that appeared to be of a different mineral than the ones around them. “You see those? They are not from here,” Azam said. They had originated high up on the glacier and moved all the way down. At one point, we stopped, and Azam gestured to where one of the glacier’s main tributaries jutted off. “It seems to be detaching itself from the main glacier,” he said. “That’s because the glacier is thinning.”

Continuing on, we heard a noise that sounded like a whirlpool. It was coming from a deep gash in the surface, more than a hundred feet long, into which ice was falling and disappearing: a moulin, a hole connected to a river system inside the glacier. The moulin seemed to have no bottom, but we could hear the water rushing perhaps a hundred feet below. “Don’t stand too close,” Azam said. “The ground around it is not stable.” The moulin was not the only hole in the ice; we had ventured into an area of crevasses, many of them hidden by snow. We had to weave back and forth across the surface to avoid them. Azam went back to check on Ranjan, who was stopping frequently to catch his breath. “I will be O.K.,” Ranjan said, staring down at the snow. “I think.”

The sun was setting behind the peaks as we arrived at the high camp, at nearly sixteen thousand feet, and the horizon glowed deep orange. The porters had set up tents, and were donning headlamps to help prepare the equipment for the next day’s ice core. The temperature was dropping fast, into the teens. We ducked inside the main tent and found the rest of the team huddled in the dark around a stove, drinking cups of salty broth. Ranjan arrived just after the sun went down. “I am so happy to have made it!” he said. The camp was just a handful of tents on the glacier’s slope, connected by a little stairway carved into the snow. The porters had made a dinner of lentils and chapati, but we were too nauseated from the altitude to eat more than a few bites. That night, we slept in a ragged tent with no tarp, its doors flapping open, directly atop the ice, nine hundred and fifty feet thick.

The sun was remarkably strong when it shone on us; even though we were freezing, our faces were burned dry and pink. A pool of melting ice had formed around a boulder, and a porter crouched and filled his bucket for cooking. At breakfast—tea and more chapati—everyone was frigid but in high spirits. “Did you see the stars last night?” Ranjan asked. “You could see the whole Milky Way.”

After breakfast, Ranjan set about collecting the ice core. From the start, nothing seemed to work right. His gear consisted of a large drill, with an engine the size of an outboard motor, and the drill bit, a clear, sharpened tube that could be driven into the ice. The plan was to drill down about forty feet, where a trove of molecular evidence was preserved in what they expected to be century-old ice. Glaciers are uniquely sensitive recorders of changes in climate, and their ice contains indications of past temperature, precipitation, and volcanic activity, as well as the effects of greenhouse gases. “If we can connect what has happened on the glacier to what is happening in the climate, then we should be able to predict what is going to happen,” Ranjan said. The glaciers may already be melting, but knowing their precise state will, he hopes, allow him to understand what it will take to save them.

With Ranjan looking on, one of the Nepali porters started the motor and another pushed the drill into the ice. Ranjan exclaimed with delight—and then the engine stalled. The porter started it again, but the drill could go no deeper than a few feet before stalling. A couple of Ranjan’s assistants extracted snow samples, each the size of a rice cake, from the drill bit.

One of the difficulties of taking cores is that the drill bit can melt the ice, causing samples of different ages to mix. Several of the scientists I talked to said that an ice core should be taken from a higher elevation, where the colder temperatures protect the ice from the friction of the drill. I wondered if Ranjan had chosen the lower altitude because he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to climb higher. He told me that the problem was the drill. “I think we need a bigger engine,” he said.

Later in the day, Ranjan tried again, lower on the glacier, where the snow was not as hard. This time, he was able to drill down about twelve feet, to ice that was some twenty-five years old. It wasn’t nearly as much as he’d hoped for; scientists in Antarctica have taken ice cores from more than a mile below the surface. But it was better than nothing. The samples went into the beer cooler. (Miraculously, they made the long drive to New Delhi intact.) “I’ve learned a lot from this,” Ranjan said. “And I’m coming back.”

On the last day of the expedition, two of the graduate assistants decided to hike up another fifteen hundred feet to take samples of the ice there. Azam, standing a thousand yards away, could see that they had wandered into an area riven by crevasses. “You’re going the wrong way!” he shouted, but they couldn’t hear. They made it as far as sixteen thousand seven hundred feet when a faint, high-pitched cry rose up. When the group turned, they saw the head of Teg Bahadur, one of the porters, peeking out over the edge of a crevasse. The team’s gear, including the G.P.S. device, had sailed down into the crevasse and disappeared. One of the graduate students poked the snow around Bahadur and it collapsed, revealing the crevasse’s multicolored walls and its seemingly bottomless depth. Bahadur, perched on a shelf, trembled in silence. “I’ve never been married,” he said, mournfully. Digging their boots into the snow, the rest of the team managed to pull him to safety. But, despite several descents by one of the students, the gear was lost.

“We compromised—he can base-jump all he wants, as long as he does it at home.”

The day before, I had stood with Azam as he prepared for another ascent. Tethered to a lone porter, he planned to climb to seventeen thousand feet and examine the ablation stakes planted there. In the coming year, Azam and other scientists plan to publish a number of papers based on research performed in the region, in the hope of filling the gap in knowledge. There is still little money in India for this kind of work, but the government seems to be slowly coming to appreciate its importance. In the weeks before the recent climate talks in Paris, some Indian politicians insisted that they should not have to restrict their country’s energy consumption to fix a problem that was mostly not of their making. Ahead of the conference, though, India agreed to significant reforms, including greater efforts in the Himalayas, and afterward the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced that “climate justice has won.”

I asked Azam what he thought would happen to Chhota Shigri, whether it could survive global warming. “I am not going to save this glacier,” he said. “I am just going to find out what is happening.”

He turned and looked up at the peak in front of him. “Once I do that, the next step will be to decide what has to be done. But these things don’t depend on science. They depend on politics.” ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified when the tectonic collision that formed the Himalayas began.

Published in the print edition of the April 4, 2016, issue.

Dexter Filkins is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Forever War,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.