The day starts with quietude in Tracy Arm. Dull rumbles of the ship’s generators thrumming, polite but mumbled breakfast pleasantries. The silence starts to give way to the excitement of things to come. The bustle of gearing up, the assuredly unintentional slamming of doors as people move about the decks. The dulcet klaxon announcements disperse any vestiges of morning stupor, and things move into a slightly higher gear. Easily clambering through the mudroom and into the waiting Zodiac, gussied and garbed in a lifejacket so uniquely orange that it’s very existence screams of a legal requirement. And as accustomed to the comforts of the National Geographic Quest as we’ve become in the dozen plus hours we’ve been aboard, we zoom away. Eager outboard engines are let loose, careening down the fjord, dodging chunks of ice, edging ever closer to the promised destination, South Sawyer Glacier.
Visually it’s as if our eyes had never seen blue before. It feels as if one is discovering an entirely new color, a deep icy cerulean so vibrant it can be almost felt as it imprints into our minds. A glacier is a river of ice, flowing downhill as a result of snow accumulating and compressing, forcing the now solid water that can now be compacted no further into motion. It isn’t a gentle process, the weight of million or more snowflakes, pressing down, squeezing, turning slush into glass devoid of even bubbles. Finally all that pressure leaves the glacier no other alternative than to move, unable to withstand the unrelenting weight above, it begins to flow downhill. As it passes through the landscape it grabs and pushes rock, and like grit on sandpaper, is able to erode and carve the granitic valleys until it finds deliverance by meeting the welcoming salty ocean water. It is this moment that we have come to pay homage to. Watching the three hundred foot tall face as it periodically is releases sections from icy imprisonment. Not quietly, but with great circumstance, cracking booms that put thunder to shame. Frozen hunks the size of houses crashing down, down, down and making such a splash that overwhelm all sense of scale. Like a madman’s song there is no pattern to the beautiful destruction we witness, but there is an ethereal rhythm to what we’re seeing. The end of a cycle, a now negative feedback loop, taking place before our very eyes as we float before it, making loud memories in the hushed moments in-between these natural notes.
