Drake Passage
Moody. The top of the Drake is always moody and temperamental. Giant birds, the albatross, ride the roiling air like California surfers if their breakers were endless. Gray sky over a gray sea sounds depressing, but this gray is alive. There is a personality, subtle and strong. It’s the top of the Drake. The air is significantly warmer this morning, the warmest since we first entered the Southern Ocean a week ago. There is a fresh breeze from the east, just enough wind to keep the big birds happy and aloft. The east is a strange direction for wind here, a good sign I guess since we are riding a crest of high pressure and there is little swell, just some old stuff that rocks us and a wind chop that softly slaps at the hull, almost tenderly, nice, very nice. Now, in the distance, a darker shape, dark yet still gray, Cape Horn, a border monument to the realm of the Homo sapiens. So now what? The party’s over and I feel like the last one to leave, a bit tired but not ready to go home.
Sometimes I do not really understand where I have been until I am leaving. Sure, who would not like giant icebergs with cracks of pure blue light, snow covered mountains soaring overhead, thousands and thousands of terminally cute penguins forever marching, calling, flapping, nipping, pooping, lazy seals basking on fast ice, whales, hungry, insatiable, huge and forever feeding on vast schools of krill. But Antarctica is more than that. It is skies without aircraft, horizons without antennae; it is calm, protected waters without marinas, traffic lights, strip malls or police cruisers. Antarctica is bigger than wilderness. It is a continent, which through some miracle has been left whole after an initial ravaging. A miracle, yes, that for once we stopped treating nature as some sort of spoils of war, at least for now. A continent owed by no nation, corporation or people.
When I go home I will remember all the Antarcticans, the gentoo, the shag, the tabular iceberg, the frost shattered rock, the orange lichen, the crabeater, the humpback and even the little red sea star and the limpet. And they will make me smile. And they will make my heart ache. But I will worry too. I will worry that there are no miracles.
Moody. The top of the Drake is always moody and temperamental. Giant birds, the albatross, ride the roiling air like California surfers if their breakers were endless. Gray sky over a gray sea sounds depressing, but this gray is alive. There is a personality, subtle and strong. It’s the top of the Drake. The air is significantly warmer this morning, the warmest since we first entered the Southern Ocean a week ago. There is a fresh breeze from the east, just enough wind to keep the big birds happy and aloft. The east is a strange direction for wind here, a good sign I guess since we are riding a crest of high pressure and there is little swell, just some old stuff that rocks us and a wind chop that softly slaps at the hull, almost tenderly, nice, very nice. Now, in the distance, a darker shape, dark yet still gray, Cape Horn, a border monument to the realm of the Homo sapiens. So now what? The party’s over and I feel like the last one to leave, a bit tired but not ready to go home.
Sometimes I do not really understand where I have been until I am leaving. Sure, who would not like giant icebergs with cracks of pure blue light, snow covered mountains soaring overhead, thousands and thousands of terminally cute penguins forever marching, calling, flapping, nipping, pooping, lazy seals basking on fast ice, whales, hungry, insatiable, huge and forever feeding on vast schools of krill. But Antarctica is more than that. It is skies without aircraft, horizons without antennae; it is calm, protected waters without marinas, traffic lights, strip malls or police cruisers. Antarctica is bigger than wilderness. It is a continent, which through some miracle has been left whole after an initial ravaging. A miracle, yes, that for once we stopped treating nature as some sort of spoils of war, at least for now. A continent owed by no nation, corporation or people.
When I go home I will remember all the Antarcticans, the gentoo, the shag, the tabular iceberg, the frost shattered rock, the orange lichen, the crabeater, the humpback and even the little red sea star and the limpet. And they will make me smile. And they will make my heart ache. But I will worry too. I will worry that there are no miracles.
