The Imprint a Glacier Makes

July 5:  As I write, a raven is squawking loudly, its raucous KAW KAW KAW echoing through the thick green of alder and spruce outside our lodge room window. We have just returned from our eight hour cruise up Glacier Bay in a heated, two-deck catamaran. The Margerie Glacier at the tip of the bay may have been our destination, but the journey from Bartlett Cove, there and back again, was equally spectacular.

The sky began overcast but the weather was dry when we cast off at seven-thirty in the morning. Right away, we saw puffins floating on the surface of the water—those lovely black-bodied, white-faced birds with the large, curved orange beaks, sporting tassels at the top of their heads. Then there were hump back whales, breaching at a distance, spouting spray over thirty feet in the air. As the already gorgeous scenery grew more spectacular by the moment, we began spotting even more wildlife: Sea lions basking on rocks, and on Marble Island, a wide range of sea birds including Cormorants, Terns, Gulls, Puffins, and Common Murres that nested there. Further up the bay, a brown  (grizzly) bear walked along the rocks above an island shore. A white, fuzzy-bearded mountain goat stood so still between two patches of green on a rocky ledge that we thought he was stuffed, but then “she” moved, revealing a small baby goat lying at her feet.

After a few hours, we finally approached the glacier at the end of the “road,” so to speak. Having seen glaciers on National Geographic, we had expected to be bowled over by its massiveness towering above us, but surprisingly that wasn’t our first impression. A crystal blue and white wonder of nature, yes. More ice than we’ve seen in a lifetime, yes. But smaller in our view than what we expected. For safety, the boat stayed at least a half mile away, so getting an accurate perspective was challenging.

Emma, our park ranger for the day, told us it was a mile across and over 250 feet high. That’s really big, I thought, as we gazed at the sculptured beauty before us, half a mile away. “Imagine a twenty-five story office building a mile long,” Richard later said, as we tried to match the reality of what we saw with the meagerness of our perception. imagine the imprint this glacier has had on the vast landscape around it, Emma encouraged us to consider, including over sixty miles of bay created in the wake of the glacier’s retreat in only two hundred and fifty years—a relatively short period of time, geographically speaking.

Fact by fact, Emma tried to convey the enormity of the glaciers imprint upon us, but try as we might, our limited human sight simply could not grasp what intellectually, we were trying to understand.

And so, we stood on the upper deck, perhaps fifty strong, gazing in silence at the vast presence before us as it periodically cracked and groaned under its own weight. A minor piece of ice—at least it looked minor to us—broke or “calved” from the greater body and fell with a splash. We saw it before we heard it CRACK seconds later, proving that light travels faster than sound, and giving us a sense of the distance between it and us—but only a sense. None of it—not the facts, not the sight, not the sound, not even the wide angle lens of our camera—could give us the full measure of its presence in our midst.

On our way back to Glacier Bay Lodge, we saw two black wolves at the shoreline in two different sightings. One wolf lay next to a whale carcass that had washed ashore, as if those bones were all his. Emma had a gang of youth hanging around her most of the trip—budding junior rangers who were busy spotting wildlife and completing the activities in their ranger books while preparing for their “presentations” to the rest of us on the return back to the lodge. Near the end of our journey, Emma inducted around ten junior rangers, which had to be some kind of record. And then she went around handing out badges to the rest of us for our “enthusiasm” and “for asking good questions.” As we looked upon the seriousness of those youthful faces, we just knew these youngsters will be good stewards of the earth. They gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, the earth will survive the limits of our human understanding.

As our boat turned into Bartlett Cove at the end of our trip and right after the junior rangers had promised to honor and protect the environment and its wildlife, Emma invited us all to consider not only the imprint the glacier has made on the landscape, but also the imprint the glacier has made on us.

July 6^th: It’s now the day after our glacier tour and I’m still considering that imprint as we head back to Juneau on the ferry. And to find that imprint, I’ve decided that I need to go to a deeper place than what only my five senses allow. Here’s what I’m wondering now: If we rely only on our senses—only on what can be seen or heard or measured by our limited perceptions—might we be missing something really important? Might we be missing the enormity of something that could save our lives?