There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold
And the arctic trails have their secret tales
that would make your blood run cold…
Two years, two years nearly to the day…since I last sailed into the Glacier Bay. After my time in Tracy Arm and Hubbard Glacier last season – and especially my time in Antarctica – I had thought that the place would have lost some of its effect on me. Sadly for me, it has not.
Glacier Bay is beautiful, it is actually something beyond beautiful. It’s a vast seascape of frozen wilderness, of snow fields and ice fields and towering crags of rock…it is majestic and grand and…completely overwhelming to a poor little water girl who finds that she cannot catch a glimpse of the open sea during her time here. It compresses above me, closing me in until I feel so small that I may as well be an atom on the head of a pin.
For hundreds of years this place has stood, virtually untouched by humanity, towering over the visitors who intrude on it each year, barely noticing when they arrive and noticing even less when they leave. We are water bugs to this land, barely worth registering on the ever-present scale of awareness.
The people crowd into the library on Glacier Bay day, sipping hot cocoa and enjoying the view, they talk and babble and ask too many questions. For my part, I throw myself headlong into my work, I erect an invisible barrier between myself and the outside world, I pause to reach for a hand that isn’t there, though I could have sworn it was just a second ago, before remembering that that was a different time. Only rarely do I glance out the window.
Because this place is stunningly beautiful…
But, just like two years ago, I find I am not so good at handling it…