Travel Journals by Hilary Hopkins

Part 3 - In Which Ice Bears Inspect Our Ship

Yesterday vasty ice, from horizon to horizon, and we slicing aggressively through it. I hang off the bow, taking picture after picture.  Sometimes we ride over huge pieces, which we press down into the turquoise water.  The water is so deeply pigmented, it seems, that when you look straight down into it it appears black. But where the ice lies just under the surface, you can see the turquoise.  It is all like a giant and constantly changing kaleidoscope of white, turquoise, black.  As we plow into virgin pieces, cracks propagate faster than the eye can follow, and great polygonal slabs crash majestically into each other or over or under each other.  Clots of birds follow us excitedly, looking for food organisms disturbed and raised to the surface, for easy picking off, by our actions.  The sounds of our assault on the ice are alarming--crashing, thumping, ringing, scraping, abrading, booming.

At one point, under a mottled blue sky, somehow we are in a city of birds.  There are thousands and thousands of birds, perched in orderly rows on ice floes, lining through the air in neat strings, swimming in closely-packed rafts on the oily surface of the water, surrounded by constellations of icy bits and bergs.  Every chunk of ice is a bird perch.

A bear is sighted.  We can see the shore of land, but it is bound by a wide shelf of fast ice, and floating pack ice out beyond that, towards our ship--the ice we are smashing through.  This bear is on the fast ice.  He seems to be just walking along--a difficult enterprise for a human, on the ragged and tortured surface, but apparently nothing much for a bear with his dinner-plate sized paws comfortably padded with fur.  At one point along his way there is some open water, which is nothing to him.  He jumps into it with an enormous splash—even at this distance the splash appears enormous, which reminds us how very large indeed is the bear.  He swims through the icy water as effortlessly as he pads across the ice.

We watch this bear for a while, at a distance, and the captain moves the ship a bit to give a better look at him.

I could watch the bear for a long time.  I just like to see him moving around, lifting his head, looking around, looking down.  What is his world to him?  An information-laden array of smells and sounds, awarenesses of which we have no knowledge.  If you lived like the bear, though, you would begin to know like the bear.

We leave this bear and move farther along the icy edge of land.  I have just settled down in the lounge to read a bit when the call comes that other bears have been sighted.  I am fully suited up--I never go anywhere without my camera and the binoculars, and I have my coat and all my gear for being outside.  I instantly get up and rush outside, down and then up a couple flights of stairs, and position myself at the very front of the ship.  At the bow you can stand on some little shelves so as to give you an unobstructed view to the front.

I look carefully ahead.  There are two bears way off in the distance, a mother and cub, we are told.  More people begin to gather.  We all help each other to find the bears.

Mother Bear is busy exploring something in front of her.  Little Bear, who's nearly as big as Mom, pokes around nearby . Mother roots and pokes around, and suddenly stands up and Pounces! Pounces!  Twice she pounces, her great front feet lunging down on whatever it is. Then she digs and scratches at the ice.  Nothing is found, apparently, ad the two of them continue walking around and exploring.

By this time quite a few people are out on deck watching.  I still have my great place at the bow.

Suddenly Baby Bear appears to notice us for the first time--this very large black and red object on his horizon.  He looks across the ice at us.  Hey Ma, he says, what's that thing?  I wanna go see.  And off he trots, right towards us.  She looks up, looks at us too, and hastily trots off behind him.

This definitely gets everyone's attention on the ship.  The talking stops.  Cameras begin to click.  Around me, people mutter under their breath, They're coming this way ... they're still coming this way... !

The two bears trot steadily towards the ship, their black muzzles and small dark eyes clear and stark against their beautiful creamy fur.

On the ship all is silence, a hundred or more people in absolute silence.

I begin to take pictures when they are about a hundred feet away.  They come closer.

All at once I realize I HEAR them.  They growl and snort and bark in a continuous conversation. Now each bear fills my viewfinder at telephoto range.

I look at them in intimacy with my binoculars.  They are elegant beyond my ability to describe. Every fur in order.  Economical curves and connections of parts.  Long graceful neck, tiny round ears.  I see the black of her nipples just visible in her creamy fur.  The cub flicks out his black tongue,  I see it clearly.  They--and we-- are alert in every fiber.

The two bears inspect my side of the ship.  They come within twenty or thirty feet of the hull, talking to each other all the time.

Someone drops something on board, and the bears immediately back off, but then swing around the bow and look at the other side of the ship.

Finally, seemingly having decided that we are neither food nor enemy, the bears wheel around and trot off in the direction they came, and the rising fog swallows them up.

 

Now, this morning, it is all fog.  Our Expedition Leader is doubtless pretty distressed; we have tried various places for landings, even sent out a zodiac to inspect, but it is all fog.  I don't care, it's what it is and I am here, and everything that's here is here although we cannot see it.

 

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I can't understand how people can complain about the fog--these must be people who came only to check off something, rather than to BE here.

Anyhow, at length yesterday the decision was made to launch the fleet of zodiacs in the fog, in groups of three.  John and I were of course in the first zodiac, and off we went.  Within a minute or two at most the ship vanished completely.  Or perhaps we vanished completely.

For an hour or more we all explored the icy margins of a small island.  There were many birds, including the darling puffins, as well as eiders with chicks, and barnacle geese, a flock of four tiny red phalaropes busily hunting for stuff in the water, and the usual others.

Zodiac cruising is not the best way to see things and certainly not the best way to take pictures.  I struggled to make pictures of the ice--that endlessly beautiful ice!

So, it was nice to get out into the cold, and see the rocky icy shore up close, and we were just all heading back to the ship, when the word spread--a bear on shore.  And there he was, quite near the shore, heading away from us at a rapid lumber, a very, very large Polar Bear.  Really really large, he was.  Within a moment he disappeared over the crest of a small rise, and was not seen again, and indeed not seen at all by people in some of the zodiacs.  Very sobering. Quite right what the staff are saying: you never know when a bear will appear.  It would have been terrifying if this bear had been encountered when we were on land.  Apparently on the trip before ours, this happened.  Everybody was on shore doing walks and so on, and a bear was spotted.  Fortunately people were able to get to the zodiacs and leave without a closer encounter.

At the end of the day, after dinner, the sky was clear, and we moved slowly through a marvelous field of icebergs (15 feet above water), bergy bits, growlers, and brash ice

There's something dark ahead.  We slow to a creep and move gently towards it; it's a bearded seal, a huge floppy-looking animal.  Through the binoculars I see his big childlike eyes and rounded muzzle, his beard of vibrissae.  He sits there for a long time watching us and we watching him.  Eventually it's a bit too much for him and in he slides, into that cold turquoise black water, and disappears.

Things disappear a lot around here--the land, the lead through the ice, the animals, the people.

 

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Today again we are searching for a place to land.  There is monstrous ice, apparently quite unusual for this time of year and these places.  Many people are out on deck watching as the ship forces her way through the ice.  Although we have heard about how the hull is ice-strengthened, how thick and strong it is, I am still uneasy about this.  It is just impossible to describe this in words--how vicious the sounds, how strong the ice, how thick and blue, how two foot thick slabs of ice, smashed by our hull, pile up on or are subducted under other slabs, and the wash from this piles up against other slabs, and the blue water rushes over them.  The birds follow us, the gray, white and black kittiwakes wheel and hover and dive and pick at the water to get the tidbits we stir up from below.

With each impact the ship shudders and booms.  Ice grinds past the hull.  Tearing and crunching noises mingle with the clear whistles and chitters of the birds.

Amazingly, we spot a sailboat of some kind in the ice.  I can't imagine such hubris.  Just as the Ice Bear rules in Svalbard, the Ice rules out here, and you would be exceptionally stupid not to attend to that.

We push our way carefully into a fjord, and it's decided to make a landing there.  Kayaking is out of the question since there is so much ice in the water.  We sign up for the "long walk."

As soon as we come on shore and put our PFD's in the big orange bag, I look up to the massive bird cliff in front of us.  We know it's a bird cliff because the slopes below it are brilliant green from the birdy fertilizer.

I scan the green, and am astonished to see some kind of large animal there, or perhaps two, in the steep meadow.  It's dark brown, large, and moves like nothing so much as a big cat.  I try to make it a reindeer--what the hell else is brown??  It moves so like a cat!  I rush over to Karen the naturalist, Karen, there's some animals up there!  She looks, and lo!  It's an Arctic fox. My search pattern for this animal is of course for white--wrong season.  Also for something quite small, and moving more, oh, fockily.

I'm so happy--my totem animal appearing to me.  Everybody else is excited to see him, as this is the one mammal we have not seen. The naturalists have a little trouble getting everybody away from fox-watching and onto their walks.  As we in our group head up the hill, I smell that pungent foxy odor.

Our guide cheerily leads about 25 of us up the hillside--about a fifty degree angle.  But the footing is beautiful, extravagantly lush grass and moss, cushioning our feet and giving good purchase.

On a triangle of lookout points around the scene are stationed staff members with guns and binoculars.

We keep climbing up and I am proud of some of these folks who look pretty citified but who are game to climb up this alarmingly steep place.  Finally we all sit down in the grass, like a deep green feather­bed, and our guide talks a bit, and we look down upon the beach, and little knots of walkers, the zodiacs, the ship offshore in water spangled with icy bits.  

The birds scream and call and whirl above us like black fireworks shot off from their massive stone home.

Climbing down, I get just a few minutes more or less by myself--precious time--and find two more kinds of wildflowers to photograph, springing brightly against the green.

"The torment of places of which you can never be a part,"

Just after dinner, fin whales are spotted, and many go out on deck to try to see them.  We get some good views, as they spout and roll, spout and roll, several times in succession before diving.  The sensuous curve of their spines is swoonful.

And now this trip--how I dislike that word, like "creativity", an ugly word for a wonderful thing-­"trip"--and "journey" is pretentious.

Anyhow, we have come to the end of our--our looking at the Ice.  All here is dictated and arranged by the Ice.  Human affairs, animal affairs, plant affairs.  The ice moves freely but organisms do not.  They didn't in the past, and we don't now.

I thought, in the beginning, that I would be thinking about how Antarctica and the Arctic are the same, and how they are different.  I'm not sure I have any conclusions or even any beginnings of insights into this.  But they really feel different.  They look different.  They don't really seem much the same, but I am not yet sure why.

The Ice Bear.  The Ice.  I won't ever call him anything else, and I will never look at him in a zoo again, never again.  I saw him just going, across the ice, across the water, across the land, without hindrance and without stay.  Not in my world at all, but Prince of the Ice.