Monday, January 17, 2005
I haven't had much to say lately. It's not so much that I've run out of things to say as that I've run out of say for them.
In 1996, Dara & I took a vacation to Alaska's Kenai Peninsula with her parents. On a wildlife/glacier watching boat, one half-day, we saw a humpback and her calf breach; we saw an orca carcass and the thousand seagulls on it eating it. Towards the end, we rode up a fjord to get close to a glacier's front. Every once and a while, you'd hear a large crack and a piece of the glacier--an iceberg, really--would calve off. Around 1/2 of a mile away, we heard a crack, took a picture, we were close enough to see small variations and ridges on the calving iceberg, and the cracking just didn't stop, the entire face of the glacier calved off, and sent a huge swell--30 to 40 feet, higher than the boat deck, easily--our way. The captain told everyone to get belowdeck, and turned prow into the swell quickly enough. The feeling of watching that swell approach was wordless. Not exhilarating, not frightening, awesome in a participatory way, in that space between awesome and awful which is the same. We didn't go belowdeck, of course, and the riding feeling of it lifting us and passing beneath us was awesome too.
In 1996, Dara & I took a vacation to Alaska's Kenai Peninsula with her parents. On a wildlife/glacier watching boat, one half-day, we saw a humpback and her calf breach; we saw an orca carcass and the thousand seagulls on it eating it. Towards the end, we rode up a fjord to get close to a glacier's front. Every once and a while, you'd hear a large crack and a piece of the glacier--an iceberg, really--would calve off. Around 1/2 of a mile away, we heard a crack, took a picture, we were close enough to see small variations and ridges on the calving iceberg, and the cracking just didn't stop, the entire face of the glacier calved off, and sent a huge swell--30 to 40 feet, higher than the boat deck, easily--our way. The captain told everyone to get belowdeck, and turned prow into the swell quickly enough. The feeling of watching that swell approach was wordless. Not exhilarating, not frightening, awesome in a participatory way, in that space between awesome and awful which is the same. We didn't go belowdeck, of course, and the riding feeling of it lifting us and passing beneath us was awesome too.
