Glacial Thunder and a Wall of Ice
By the time we set sail, it was evening, and the sun set before we reached Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska beyond. As the water rolled gently and the few lights on shore faded over the horizon, Dad and I went exploring. Together we covered the ship top to bottom, bow to stern, and stopped to play a bit of ping-pong along the way. Eventually, Dad went searching for the best spots to watch the world go by (and no doubt take photos); I found the gym and library. The latter was a comfortable, quiet place to study — yes, even on vacation — and sparsely occupied (imagine that).
The next day didn’t so much dawn as slowly turn up the solar rheostat, gradually brightening the low clouds and mist. Occasional distant lights began to appear off the port side in the early morning darkness (I could see them from our terrace) as a sign our trip across the Gulf of Alaska was nearly complete. The billows of low cloud and fog merged the land and sky as we passed the village of Yakutat, but the mists began to clear, and the ceiling rose as the ship glided into the steely waters of Disenchantment Bay.
From a distance, the Hubbard Glacier appeared as a blue-white beach lapping the feet of the mountains at the head of the bay, but as we sailed closer it slowly gained mass while small bergs — some white, some blue, some black — increasingly stippled the water. We approached deliberately, awaiting our turn, while a Holland America ship cruised back and forth across the face of the glacier before it sailed between Haenke Island and Gilbert Point to our right.
As we glided towards the terminus of the glacier, where ice meets the sea, the thin line loomed into an escarpment. The face of the Hubbard Glacier is six hundred feet tall – 250 to 300 feet above the water and the rest below — and nine miles wide. The Glacier begins seventy-six miles east and 18300 feet up on the slopes of Mt. Logan, and is one of only a handful of North American glaciers still advancing. The ice at the face of the glacier is about four hundred years old.
We could not approach too closely: one half of a nautical mile is the limit and we didn’t venture that far due to shifting currents, the underwater foot of the glacier, and calving ice. Still, the wall rose above us and hid the rest of the glacier from view.
Pictures can provide a limited sense of the grandeur, the scale, and the magnificent power completely indifferent to our presence, but they cannot convey the sound of the ice. For a while, we drifted before the face of the glacier and the ship went silent. Like muted thunder lowered an octave almost to the limits of hearing, the ice boomed: long rolling glacial thunder. Not as loud as the peals of a looming storm, yet with a greater presence, somehow filling the miles-wide valley fully with its potency. Layered upon and interspersed between these contrabass chords were sharper, reverberating, cracks, scrapes, groans, hisses, and splashes as the ancient ice crushed and flowed its way to the water and shed frigid scales into the bay. No recording could do it justice; floating before that massive nine-mile wall of ice I felt as much as heard the voice of the glacier. Just as thunder overheard from your couch lacks the visceral impact of booming crashes experienced standing in the face of the storm, dark blue-green clouds roiling above, wind thrashing the trees, lashing the grass in rolling swells, and breaking across your face; The glacial sounds provided texture to the massive presence of the ice. Drifting in the vast stillness of that mountain girdled bay, dwarfed, facing that ancient and titanic wall, the waves of sound passed through me, used me; I became their medium and they resonated with the harmonics of my soul.
Not so Pacific
Unfortunately, our time in Disenchantment Bay was limited; The ship once again came to life and we retreated from Hubbard Glacier. The clouds lowered as we passed from Yakatut Bay into a more belligerent Gulf of Alaska. The sea rolled with swells tall enough to break in foam and spray, and occasionally hide the horizon as Dad and I watched from the stern. This was the only night during our voyage I couldn’t ignore that I was at sea. It was also the first night I discovered one of my unexpected onboard pleasures.
My bed in the sitting room of our suite stretched in front of the terrace doors. Since moving about the rolling ship was less a walk and more a game of pinball, I retired early with my chemistry and anatomy books. After a few hours, I set my texts aside, turned out the light, and watched the ocean roll outside the glass. Admittedly, my first thought was: “there must be very large fish out there.”
The lights of the ship threw a glow onto the ocean: not enough to see far into the deep darkness, but enough to reveal the complex patterns and rhythms of the waves limned with foam, mysterious and surreal, like an animated Rorschach. A few times I did see fish skimming the waves, attracted, I assume, by the lights of the ship. Mostly, I was able to let my mind wander, freeing it to search for meaning in the dim undulations. It was soothing and inexplicably captivating– the nautical equivalent of staring into the flames.