Time is a strange thing–we left Iceland only 13 days ago but with such a treasure trove of wonders behind us, we all feel as if we have been on board since July. Time has also yanked us forward, for we lost an hour last night and another just after lunch today. They will probably turn up eventually, but who cares, when we pack whole lifetimes into each day? This morning was a classic Arctic dawn, calm sea, blue sky embroidered with lacy cirrus, a fleet of small icebergs drifting by and our faithful fulmars.
Turning into Bowdoin fjord, the usual plain Greenland landscape suddenly became into a geological art gallery. The rocks here are over 1,000 million years old, sedimentary marine deposits, sandstones mudstones, and carbonate beds laid down on the floor of a forgotten ocean. Despite this incredible age, they show no deformation, extraordinary given the caniptions our mantle has suffered over time. The weathering of these rocks has produced a painted landscape, ochre and olive, russet and rose, mauve and madder. From a pristine ice sheet behind the hills, a wide glacier flows down to the bay, launching a fleet of icebergs, each one manned by a crew of glaucous gulls sated with fish from the plankton-rich soup below the ice. On such a perfect day, we voted to stay here for the rest of the afternoon, and after landing intrepid long-distance walkers into the wilderness, we took to our Zodiacs and wandered among melting icebergs, butting through rafts of brash ice from the glacier. Kittiwakes darted down to snatch prey from the waters and we saw several gulls catch fish, probably the abundant polar cod, a sardine-sized species which thrives under ice floes and wherever ice melts. The glacier was set off perfectly against dark hills, and the bright sunshine sparkled off bergs and dazzled off still water. Switching off the engine and drifting in the silence we heard the sudden rush as an entire facet of the glacier collapsed, creating a huge wave that had the ice around us rearing and roaring. This is the High Arctic–blue sky, bare rock, and clean ice.
The walkers climbed steadily up a wide valley with all the colors of autumn, the grass and sedges tawny, the willows now crimson as the frosts bite. Following the stream uphill and past a lake, they reached an altitude where they could gaze down upon the glacier itself, a polar panorama as old as time. Time means nothing here…and everything. We have the time to focus on the simplicity and beauty of our surroundings without any distractions of duty or deadline, helping us sharpen both vision and insight. But it also wraps us up in the eternity of the landscape, where we can begin to imagine the concentration of an Inuit hunter, perched between feast and famine in this barren world, turning his gaze from moving clouds to ripples in the water, from footprints in the landscape to the cry of a gull.
An unforgiving university where the passmark was life itself.
