When I looked out the porthole this morning the first thing I saw was a small iceberg. Today we are in the Antarctic proper.
Our first landing was not long after breakfast, at a place called Cuverville Island. There were two possibilities – stay on the beach with the penguins, or go up a rather steep hill for a walk. I chose the latter. It was pretty cold, but the main issue was rain – it fell heavy and steady, making any materials not specifically engineered to repel it sodden and heavy.
We had not landed at our original target spot because the seas there were too rough, and instead we had landed down the coast a little bit. On the way from the ship to the shore in the Zodiac, we pushed our way through a field of floating ice, with the occasional room-size iceberg requiring us to detour around it. The landscape of the island was breath-taking. Glaciers run down from the mountains to the sea, and sometimes ice will fall in a crash to the water below, sending waves running in every direction. When a huge bit falls – which unfortunately didn’t happen today – it can cause a small tsunami. The ice and snow were sculpted and twisted with the wind and the countours of the landscape, and in places the ice was a bright, shining blue, one that seems impossible to properly capture with a camera, and not all that far off how I remember the sea sponge at Neruda’s house.
The second landing spot meant that we had to walk quite a long way to get to the bottom of the hill we were to climb, and it involved some doubling back when he found our way blocked by a nest of skewer birds. So when we got there I was already a bit tired. It emerged then we were short on time. The guide, who is in the low digits of his early twenties, kept talking about things like ‘the point of no return!’ and ‘we must move quickly!’ as if there was anything at all riding on us getting to the top of the hill. He was very confused on the difference between making himself look good and helping the tourists enjoy themselves. I would have cheerfully thrown him in a crevasse. The pace was very fast, and a lot of people turned back at various times, no-return point be damned. The path switch-backed up the mountainside, over and back, and I found it very hard going. If I had been able to take my time, I think I would have been fine. But as I laboured up it, watching the heels of the person on front of me and not looking up very often, I wondered what is the crazy impulse that means I seem to keep finding myself dealing with severe inclines despite repeatedly proving to myself I don’t like it and am not good at it.
Finally we were looking at one straight shot to the top. I managed it one step at a time, concentrating only on that. I would like to say that there was a feeling of euphoria at the top but my primary emotion was irritation at having being rushed up there for little good reason. Once I got over that and had a look around I felt better though. As I faced the path we came up the sea was behind me and the mountains on front. The tops of the mountains were lost in cloud, and the slopes themselves receded into mist. It is impossible to get a photograph that captures the subtlety of the light and shade, or at least impossible for me. Turning to sea, there were small pieces of ice no bigger than your hand, than pieces maybe the size of your head, then much larger pieces about the size of my head, and then on up to icebergs the size of houses and office blocks. Some of the bigger ones are carved and moulded by the wind and rain in Rorschach shapes. I saw an anchor and a plane and a raised fist, and in the minds of the others there must have been a thousand more.
Sometimes there will be a distant sound like a gunshot as the ice shifts under pressure, and the sound of the ice falling into the water is like a great waterfall that flows only for a moment, thunderous but definably liquid.
I was thinking to myself that this had been a wonderful day, one of those that will flash before my eyes in the event of a life-threatening predicament, when we got what I have sometimes heard called a helping of awesome sauce. At the top of one of the very steep sections that we had climbed up, one by one we sat down on the snow and slid down. There was a gentle slope for a few metres, then the slide disappeared over the edge. Some people went slowly and carefully. I swung myself into it and launched over the edge hard enough to lift off in a spray of ice, and laughed and laughed when I got to the bottom, pulling myself up and picking as much snow and ice from both inside and outside my clothes as I could. Later on we slid down another slope, and it was just as much fun the second time.
Ah, good times. However. When I got back down from the mountain I made a discovery that I will recount as lightly as I can, but has actually upset me quite a bit. My good camera was safely in my backpack for most of the time I was out, and for the parts where I was sliding down hills the backpack was cradled carefully in my arms. But the persistence and heaviness of the rain meant that a lot of water got in, much more than I would have thought possible. The camera got soaked. When I tried to test it, the mirror got stuck in position, where it remains still. And now the camera will not turn on. The screen remains blank. I believe it is, in the jargon of the industry, shagged. It has served me well since I bought it in India in 2005, and it’s just a thing, and things in the scheme of life are not important. But it’s yet _another_ thing sacrificed on the altar of this trip, with the associated expense of replacing it or the choice to go back to non-SLR photography. Sigh.
Anyway. From a photographic point of view all is not lost as I still have the compact Canon, which I can assure you I will be keeping dry as an old bone, so we shall say no more about it. We came back in from the landing and I had a shower and then lunch and then a sneaky snooze. Shortly after we were back out again, this at time at Neko Harbour on the Antarctic mainland proper. Inexplicably I found myself walking up another hill. I just don’t know what makes me do it. But this one turned out to be easy. At the top were views of the Antarctic landscape were of the sort you would imagine for yourself if asked to picture what such a thing would look like. Everyone was taking each other’s picture. There was much laughter. It was fun, but I wanted something a little more contemplative, so I followed some people further up the hill and the four of us sat in quiet for a while, looking out over the ice and the icebergs and the water and the land. This will be our only visit to the Antarctic mainland – everywhere else we stop is on one of the many islands.
A while later a guide arrived who had been clearly sent to get us, and we all dutifully trooped back down. It emerged we were not supposed to go up there. We may be officially given out to later in a gentle sort of way. But it was completely worth it to sit there in the quiet and the cold and the rain and just take it all in.
There was another slide to get back down to the bottom. This time I tucked my coat into my pants, gaining in utility what I lost in aesthetics. It was a steeper, longer ride, and I couldn’t see much of where I was going due to the clouds of ice that I was somehow causing to form around my head. It was bumpy, but not hard enough to bruise. Some people did it head first, which provided much comedic value when their face collided with a pile of snow. I was on one of the first Zodiacs back to the ship. I took off everything that was wet and retired to the library, where I write this now. In ten minutes our evening briefing starts, at which we will be told what we are doing tomorrow, and there will probably be a reminder that you should not wander off on your own. Dinner follows, and about nine or ten they usually show a film, which I have not yet attended given the allure of the mobile library. Later this evening we are dropping off some fresh water at a Chilean research station, as apparently they are running low.
As I write this, still in the library, there is large window to my right. About 400m away – maybe a drive and a wedge or a nine – is the coast of an island whose name I do not know yet. There is a glacier that comes down to the water’s edge from the mountains above. The water of the sea is grey; if you did not know water could be blue, you would never guess it from this view. It’s very calm, just rippling slightly. At the edges of the glacier, possibly 60m or 70m up from the water though it’s very hard to tell, the ice has fallen away over the aeons, forming the icebergs we have been sailing by and leaving a sheer cliff behind. On that cliff there are pure whites and dirty whites, sometimes changing to the electric blue I mentioned before where I can see straight into a crack or crevasse. In places the cliff leans out, where new icebergs will fall, sooner or later, landing with a mighty crash and splash and wave. Some icebergs are already floating in front of the cliff, close by site of their formation maybe, if they come from here. The snow of the icebergs seems whiter than the snow of the shaded cliffs behind, but at the top of the glacier the snow as of the same brilliant white as the glacier below.
Once in New York I saw a pencil drawing by da Vinci that he had done was he was about 15 and still an apprentice with Verocchio. It was of a blanket folded over a box; or was it of a blanket folded over the knees of a person? It’s strange how memory can store and reject. The point of the drawing was the folds of the cloth, how they affected light and shadow in such complex ways, and how they could be recreated on paper. It’s that kind of complexity that defines that shades of white and grey on the cliff opposite me now – the grey of a face angled slightly differently to the sun, the grey of an uneven area where an iceberg has fallen away, the grey of a split or crevasse, and in the smaller cracks just the faintest hint of the blue that in others is bright and strong.
This is a wondrous place. The gap between the words and the meaning behind the words is vast here. I am lucky, lucky to see it.
