Tracy Arm is as beautiful as I remember it being, it still feels like being transported into Narnia. The icebergs (more properly called growlers) are a shade of blue that you simply don’t see anywhere else, and everything is so vast.
When I first started working on ships, places like Tracy Arm terrified me. I am a water girl, and being hemmed in by too much earth made me feel trapped; suffocated. I hadn’t learned yet how to adapt to that particular element, that would come in time, and would never be as strong as perhaps I would like. I remember sitting at my desk on the top deck, with a zen blend herbal tea in front of me, trying to will myself through the spiritual claustrophobia, while still being totally in awe of the beauty I was seeing.
But things change, people change…the awe though, that never went away.
Perhaps it’s because of my strange affiliation with Alaska, but it made sense that after I took my photos and got my proper dose of fresh air, today found me sitting in a corner in the library…thinking how true it is that as much as things change, and the railroad tracks shift, sometimes they never actually change at all.
Five and a half years of my life, 10 cruises, were all spent behind that one desk. This library was my baby, my pride and joy, I was good at it. You catch yourself thinking that if you dedicate such a huge part of your life – of yourself – to a place, or to a thing, that you must have left some kind of impression on it. Some small trace that you were there. But the truth is, we are all so transient, in the face of shifting tides and sliding glaciers…none of us leave more than a glancing mark on history. There is little of me left in the library any more, except for the labels on the books – those I can point to and say “yup, that was me, I did that.”
But the flagship herself? She remembers. Sitting there this afternoon, I found myself feeling oddly guilty. Sometimes I wonder if she thinks I abandoned her for greener pastures, if as soon as the going got tough, I got going. No one looks after her books now, and looking at those shelves, I felt badly about that. Perhaps that makes no sense to those of you who have never been at sea, but trust me, the ships have personality, and the flagship and I have had a love/hate relationship at best, but in the end we have taken good care of each other…
And today, I had to remind myself that I hadn’t let her down, any more than she had me. Instead, I’m just…taking care of her in a different way. I always have. I always will.
You can take the woman out of the library, but you can’t take the library out of the woman.
On my own journey down the railroad tracks, with my feet occasionally slipping off the tyes and the edges of my cuffs getting frayed on the sometimes sharp edges…I’ve discovered that while it may be true that some things never change…and that while we may not leave much of a mark on history, but history…history will always leave a mark on us.
Make of that what you will..
Maybe some things just change so slowly that our short lifetime is not enough to see it, yet we still feel it when we pause, still, listening, in tune with the things we love and have poured parts of our soul into.