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I wrote this last night after seeing the first real pack ice of my trip:
I had gone to sleep in the afternoon to rest before working stations at two am and when I lay down...

Arctic 2002: aboard the laurier

Trish
2004-01-08 21:49:56

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the ice no longer slid by mysterious, but boiled and tossed in tandem with the ship's pitch. Our nose would ride upwards on a floe, then break down, thrusting the ice below the surface and away, leaving swirling dark waters. The floe would then reappear in pieces on the sides of the ship, displacing more water in a turbulent motion. The size of the floes, with a thickness 1/10th the diameter, made them suitable for motion, rising up on their ends, then falling thundering down. In the low light of the fog, the scene was one of destructive solitude. Never before on this ship had I thought of it was small until that then in the winch room watching the ship battle the ice.

To my port side, the light from the kitchen portholes illuminated a small
fragment of the ice, which shone a bright glacial blue. All around, the ice
was dark and hidden, yet in this one area, it's fragile colour leapt up and
claimed attention. Compared to the vast movement and power around, that
slight colour seemed to reveal a hidden secret, a true picture of the life
within the ice.

Then, like an invisible line in the pack, we crossed into open water in a
matter of seconds. The pitch of the ship steadied to the gentle swell of
the water that gleamed dark in all directions. We had travelled through a
thin tongue of pack ice extending south from the massed bulk in the eastern
Beaufort Sea pressed up against Banks Island. We were out of the magic, and
I returned to bed.

Now, reading this description, I struggle to explain what I saw. Tonight
moved me more than any physical sight I've seen in all of my travels. It
was the organic and fluid motion of the pack, the large thick floes
appearing suddenly in the fog, the battle of the ship for passage. It was
my first experience of the sheer masses of ice in the Arctic. The energy
contained within the ice, the forces generated by it, all served to leave me
in awe. Perhaps in daylight such a picture would have given me a
breathtaking view over large distances, but I'm glad my first exposure to
ice came in the low light of evening fog. The true mysterious and hidden
nature of the ice, so unconquered and ill understood was dominant in the
landscape. We were just a small ship of humanity in such a vast foreign
landscape. I feel privileged and humbled by such a world as this.

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