Like small children, we cling to the edges of the White Lady’s skirts, begging an audience, begging forgiveness for disturbing her.
In response, she greets us with icy fog and gusts of snow that form a thin slippery film on the promenade deck and bring frost to the edges of your hair and the tips of your eyelashes. With winds that cut through the layers of your down jacket and leather gloves and bite you to the bone even inside the ship.
Welcome to Antarctica.
When the fog lifts, there is nothing but a vast expanse of steel blue water broken consistently by icy white froth as the wind whips around us. And off in the distance, far far off, looming on the horizon, are the mountains. No, not mountains. Not in the traditional sense. These are white peaks, floating in the distance like great looming pieces of a giant forgotten sculpture; the icebergs are a consistent reminder of where we are. Huge and surreal, they dwarf the ship even when we are nowhere near them.
You understand suddenly, why the park rangers back in Alaska remind us that the ice we see in Glacier Bay, and Tracy Arm and even Hubbard Glacier, are not true ‘icebergs’ in the scientific sense of the term. Despite the fact that a ‘standard’ size calving off the Hubbard Glacier is the equivalent of a 20 story building crashing into the water. You see now why those tiny siblings are called bergy bits, or growlers…these, then, are the real icebergs. Huge towering edifices, calved not off a glacier, but off the ever changing face of the continent itself.
I look out at the great expanse of steel-grey outside my office window. Calm now, bereft of the decoration of white foam that graced it all afternoon. It crashes against the distant shore, where white ice blends with white cloud so that you cannot tell which is which. The horizon looks like a hill where a giant’s children might go sledding of a winter afternoon.
What looks to be land is not land. Were we to set foot there, we could be swallowed by the great cravasses in the ice, or lost in the ever present snow, without even a trace.
Big Dead Place…one of the books about this place is called.
Though there is life here, the title still seems apt.
In these waters, the ship operates with the bridge in Amber code at the least – red at the most – do not call unless it’s extremely important, no unnecessary personnel allowed, no social visits permitted. They have more important things to deal with than us or the guests. The dangers in these waters are not always visible.
You are here at my behest, and with my permission – Mother nature seems to say – do not forget that that permission can be revoked at a moment.