Timeless. Our lives have become timeless. Has it really been only one day since we last wrote or many, many more? Or has it simply been many rolled up into one? One loses one’s sense of time in a place where the sun barely dips below the horizon before it bounces back up again.
Occasionally one’s sense of place is confounded too. “Where are we?” The horizon and sea were one differing only in the shade of gray. We could have been in the Southern Ocean at waking time today. Wind whistled through the railings on the decks and waves danced riotously everywhere. The bow dipped and rose rhythmically. There was a sensation of disconnect even when the first bird sailed by. That familiar fulmar silhouette was clear, yet was a southern or a northern one? The answer rapidly reverberated when a flying football, black on the back and white on the bottom appeared. Oh, an Alcid, we had to be in the north. Hmmm… thick-billed murre or Brünnich’s guillemot? Now the dilemma was east versus west. Being impatient by this point, we consulted the electronic chart. Lancaster Sound in Nunavut was the answer and thus the western hemisphere so thick-billed murre it is (although no matter which name we call it by, it is the very same species east or west).
The wind was from the south and west roaring up Prince Regent Inlet to rock us in our beds but soon it lost its fierceness as we found the lee of the land. There was time to sit and stare into the mist imagining the creaking of wooden boats of old or to daydream about what those sailors felt on a day when land was not in sight and these waters were still very much unknown.
With the afternoon came the sight of land and sprinkles of sunshine too. Was this another day or simply scene two of the same? Ice was our goal and ice we found while some of our colleagues researched the care and storage of lettuce and such (possibly to continue the salad theme started by our airline pilot of almost a week ago). As we gazed upon the impressive stores in the hold of our comfortable ship our minds once again could wander to those days of yore when not only were the provisions tasteless and sparse in the best of times they were pretty much absent in the worst.
With ice came bears and they really were our goal. The king of the north, the polar bear prowls this northern realm. South of Cornwallis Island in Barrow Strait we encountered our first ursine family. A sow and yearling cub peered from behind chunks of snow on a floe in the pack. Deciding they were uncertain of what they had seen they swam away tracing a wake behind, a trail for us to follow far off into the distance. Not far away another creamy dot was found. Back and forth it paced, sniffing the ice and inhaling the air on a hunt for its favorite snack of seal. And then they were gone and so was the ice.
Sunlight streams across the crumbled sea as we head north in search of more ice, more bears and more of whatever it is we find.
