Rain…feel it on my finger tips
Hear it on my window pane
We always joke that it rains 364 days out of the year in Alaska. The truth is that that’s only really a half-joke. It is always raining up here. And the weather has not been co-operating with us this cruise, Juneau was horribly overcast and freezing cold this week – as I sat with Alasse (who is on board my old ship with Hunt for only a few weeks, but at least long enough to have some long overdue catch-up time) in the shore-side pizzeria it almost seemed that the rain and the occasional gusts of wind drowned out the sound of the high-school string quartet that was earnestly playing outside in the scant shelter of the covered hallway.
The only creatures content in this weather would be mermaids…
Or ducks….
Or possibly fish…though I don’t know if fish have the remotest awareness of whether or not its raining…
They say this is good glacier viewing weather, but honestly I prefer to see the glaciers in the sunlight when they seem to glow a bright majestic blue – I know that the rangers say that the ice looks bluer in overcast weather, but to me it has always appeared greyer. It’s the kind of weather where you want to do nothing except curl up in a blanket with a cup of something warm. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing these days, even when I’m not saddled with IPM. It would appear that the seasons I’ve spent in warmer climates have robbed me of my ability to deal with “Canadian” weather – something that amuses my family back home to no end I’m sure.
Life on board has settled down somewhat, our new management team is in place and has made the inevitable changes that come with any new management team, but for the most part the days continue to trundle along in a pretty much unchanging manner. People think I’m kidding, but Alaska is very very much like Groundhog Day – the days blend into one another and you have a tendency to forget things like actual dates and days of the week. Instead your mind runs along the lines of port day, sea day, port day, glacier day, port day, sea day, port day ad infinitum until suddenly it’s time for you to go home!
For today, we continue to slide along through water that could be made of glass. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t here every week, but the glaciers up here are shifting every cruise – they’re never really the same twice. There is a huge patch of pure white on the face of the Lampoon Blue, which shows where a massive calving must have taken place not too long ago as the ice hasn’t had time to discolour. I can’t help but think that if that was this morning then the ship that sailed up here before us must have had one heck-of-a-show. The ranger crackles over the PA to announce wildlife sightings, causing everyone to run to the window with binoculars and cameras – perhaps not realizing that because of the sheer size of the area the wildlife on shore will look like nothing more than jelly-bean size specks on the distant shoreline.
The Marjorie Glacier is the most likely to calve while we’re in sight of it, it’s been – apparently – particularly active this season – technically they aren’t icebergs at all, they’re bergy-bits, (and yes that is the real technical term), but if it’s ice and it floats you may as well call them icebergs. No matter what you call them, the sound when they fall is still amazing.
It’s shameful really, with all this beauty around me I find I seldom look out the window on Glacier Bay day anymore. I still have work to do, and even though the crowds in my office (because we have the biggest windows on the ship) prevent me from doing much in the way of shelving and facing, I often take the opportunity to catch up on any admin work that needs doing. Or , since I can’t really fix the shelves because of the crowds, I often use the time to read, or to write. Glacier Bay and I have a rough relationship, we always have, and I find turning my gaze from the windows means I can also turn my memory from the past.
But it is beautiful here. I still hold that places like this are completely necessary to the world – not only for the obvious ecological and environmental reasons – but for the state of humanity as a whole. Places like this remind us that we are small, that there are things in the world that are so much bigger than the rest of us, and we all came from the wilderness at one point or another. We are animals, just as much as the bears and wolves and grizzlies that we grab our cameras to capture…sometimes, I think we need to be reminded of that.
As over-quoted and cheesy as I know it is, Disney had it right when they wrote Colours of the Wind
And we are all connected to each other, in a circle in a hoop that never ends.