Open Water

Yesterday a group of us shed our habituated, nonchalant attitudes and end-of-season ennui, giddily crowded the bow of a boat, and went on an Antarctic cruise.  The icebreaker needed to make another pass through the channel (read: empty its toilet tanks away from station), and for the first time in eight years they ferried some of us out with them.  There are glamorous jobs down here that involve flying helicopters to unique geographical formations and penguin colonies; the rest of us spend six months driving loaders on dusty roads to pick up trash, or treading the maze through the kitchen hundreds of thousands of times, looking forward to taking out the trash because it’s the only time you go outside.  In Shuttles, I’m pretty lucky to drive the seven miles out to the airfield every day, but I still qualify for this trip to the edge of the sea ice.

Actually, it took an hour to work our way out from the pier.

It was mercifully not windy, and the sun came out for a bit.  Sitting on deck and peering past the guardrail, we became tourists again, exclaiming as enormous chunks of blue-hued ice broke free and bobbed, lackadaisical seals lifted their heads to wonder at the commotion, and penguins toddled in the distance.  Chugging along in the channel, we were overtaken by a sensory novelty: the briny smell of saltwater.  Near the edge, where the ice thinned, we broke a new path.  The ice first cracked, then cleaved with satisfying low booms like distant thunder, then seawater rushed to fill the deep fissures.  The open water was black under the overcast sky, its calm immensity undisturbed (disappointingly for us) by whales.

The ice near the edge appeared to be five or six feet thick,

though softer/slushier on the bottom than further inland.

It was the icing on the cake, if you will, to the week, which included a job interview for Alaska, NASA movie night featuring Robert Redford robbing banks, ducking into the historic hut and seeing hundred-year-old dog biscuits, a doomed (for our team) but fun Canadian-themed trivia night, and the trifecta of hike+dinner+Flight of the Conchords with one of my favorite people.

Is it another kind of biscuit?