Gloomy Knob
A month-old mountain goat kid follows his mother across the ledges of Gloomy Knob’s 200 million-year-old marble and limestone, a fleeting tableau, gone the next minute as the pair climb higher, but the scene seems to capture the essence of our day in Glacier Bay National Park. Traveling up and down this beautiful, mountain-rimmed bay over the course of a long day, one is left with myriad memories, mental pictures and impressions that seem to best sort themselves into contrasts, opposing forces and balanced opposites. Beams of bright sunshine, stabbing down beneath the bellies of somber gray clouds. Gaily plumed puffins rest on the still water below rounded tock islands, and not far away thousands of tons of ice crashing down from the face of a glacier, crushing the sea into explosions of spray while the kittiwakes circle, crying. A mother sea otter cradles her pup on her belly and gently grooms it with her forepaws, which recalls an earlier scene of an eagle winging over our ship, a luckless chick clutched in its talons and a cloud of angry gulls in its wake. We are surrounded by deep valleys, ground down by the terrible weight and flow of ice, but surrounding them are the great peaks, bearing the glaciers on their shoulders, indomitable. The rocks are black, gray, green and white. The water is silver, milk and steel.
In all of this, we can see ourselves. It is a mirror of our own contrasts and contradictions. The things we’d like to be, the things we wish we weren’t, the weakness we have denied and the strength we never knew we had. Thoreau went to the wilderness because he wished to see clearly, today Glacier Bay granted that vision to us.
A month-old mountain goat kid follows his mother across the ledges of Gloomy Knob’s 200 million-year-old marble and limestone, a fleeting tableau, gone the next minute as the pair climb higher, but the scene seems to capture the essence of our day in Glacier Bay National Park. Traveling up and down this beautiful, mountain-rimmed bay over the course of a long day, one is left with myriad memories, mental pictures and impressions that seem to best sort themselves into contrasts, opposing forces and balanced opposites. Beams of bright sunshine, stabbing down beneath the bellies of somber gray clouds. Gaily plumed puffins rest on the still water below rounded tock islands, and not far away thousands of tons of ice crashing down from the face of a glacier, crushing the sea into explosions of spray while the kittiwakes circle, crying. A mother sea otter cradles her pup on her belly and gently grooms it with her forepaws, which recalls an earlier scene of an eagle winging over our ship, a luckless chick clutched in its talons and a cloud of angry gulls in its wake. We are surrounded by deep valleys, ground down by the terrible weight and flow of ice, but surrounding them are the great peaks, bearing the glaciers on their shoulders, indomitable. The rocks are black, gray, green and white. The water is silver, milk and steel.
In all of this, we can see ourselves. It is a mirror of our own contrasts and contradictions. The things we’d like to be, the things we wish we weren’t, the weakness we have denied and the strength we never knew we had. Thoreau went to the wilderness because he wished to see clearly, today Glacier Bay granted that vision to us.
