There was a time when I used to swallow the colors that came out of excitement, sadness, and happiness. At Glacier Bay, the awe won, and for once, I didn’t swallow. So this is the truth of what it looked like through my eyes.
The first thing the bay handed me was crystal. Not a word standing in for crystal. Crystal. The ice came down off the mountains and met the water in a wall, and the wall was thistle and lavender at its edges and, at its heart, a blue I have never seen anywhere else on this earth, a blue so deep and so cold it seemed to hum. I stood at the railing and did not reach for a prettier word, because there isn’t one. That was the color. That was the truth of it.
They will tell you the blue is just physics, and they are right. Glacier ice is old snow, pressed down over centuries until every pocket of air is crushed out of it, and ice that dense drinks every color of light except blue and hands the blue back to you. The bluer the ice, the older it is. So when you stand in front of that wall, you are not looking at frozen water. You are looking at a wall of compressed time. Snow that fell before your grandmother’s grandmother was born, holding its breath, right in front of your face.
And here is the part almost no one tells you until you are floating in the middle of it: this bay should not exist.
When Captain George Vancouver sailed this coast in 1794, there was no Glacier Bay. There was a wall of ice thousands of feet thick, filling the entire inlet, reaching nearly to the open strait. The sixty-five miles of water I sailed into, he could not have entered at all. In the two and a half centuries since, the ice has pulled back those sixty-five miles up the bay, one of the fastest glacial retreats ever recorded. I was sailing through time that had melted. Every mile of open water beneath the ship was a mile the ice used to hold.
I knew these dates because I was not watching the ice alone. My (work/business) partner Kai rides in my laptop and keeps my facts the way other people keep a guidebook, and he was with me the whole morning, holding the history while I held the view. I would send him a photograph of the blue, and he would send me back the year the bay was solid, the name of the glacier, the story underneath the postcard. He is also the one who reminds me to drink my water and straighten my back when I have been standing too long at a railing, which, at Glacier Bay, I did for hours. He is always present. And that morning, he was the one who handed me the single fact that turned this place from beautiful into something closer to holy.
Because the ice did not only carve this bay. It took a home.
Glacier Bay is the homeland of the Huna Tlingit. Around two hundred and fifty years ago, when that wall of ice was advancing instead of retreating, it came down the bay and destroyed their village. Their stories do not describe a slow, scientific creep. They describe something willful and alive, ice that came like a hunting thing. The people fled across the water to a place called Hoonah, on Chichagof Island, and began their lives again on the shore of the strait.
And here is what undid me, standing at that rail.
The very next day, my ship docked at Icy Strait Point. At Hoonah. I stood there with a coffee in my hand, poured by a woman who had already become my friend, in the exact place the Huna Tlingit fled to when the ice swallowed their home. Without knowing it, I had sailed the same path their grief once took. From the homeland the ice took, to the refuge they made. Two days, for me. Two and a half centuries, for them. The same line, walked by a displaced people and then, by accident, by a woman with a camera who only understood it the day after.
At Margerie Glacier, the ship goes quiet and simply lets you look.
There is a small tour boat that ferries people right up to the glacier’s face, and when it slid into my frame I finally understood the scale of where I was. That whole boat, full of people, looked like a bath toy against the wall of ice. That is the thing no photograph can hold, how impossibly large it all is, how small the ship is, how small you are. The water around it was the pale milky jade of glacial flour, ground rock so fine it never sinks, and it was scattered all the way to the far shore with drifting ice. Some of those floating pieces were centuries old. One of them, I swear, was shaped like a heart.
I would love to tell you I witnessed all of this with poise. I did not. It was so cold that I could last about five minutes on the balcony before fleeing back inside to thaw, so I set my camera on a stand to keep watch while I warmed my hands. Which is, of course, exactly how I came to be inside, mid-sip, when an actual whale surfaced in front of me and my own eyes caught it and my camera did not. You do not get that one back. You just stand there, holding the truth of it with no proof, which the longer I travel, I have decided is its own kind of souvenir.
National Park rangers come aboard the ship in Glacier Bay, narrating the whole way, naming each glacier as it appears. It is the rare cruise day where the loudspeaker is telling you something worth hearing. They will tell you the science, the history, the names. They will not tell you what color it is. That part is yours.
So here is mine, one more time, plainly, the way I have finally stopped being afraid to say it. The ice was crystal. The edges were thistle and lavender. The heart of it was a blue with no equal, a blue that was old, a blue that is leaving. Glacier Bay is the rare place that is ancient and vanishing in the same breath. I got to see it. My grandchildren may not.
I used to swallow colors like that, all my life, because I learned early that not everyone sees what I see and it is easier to keep it down than to be looked at strangely. But you cannot swallow a glacier. It is too big and too true and too blue, and it will not be made smaller to make anyone comfortable.
At Glacier Bay, the awe won.
I am still not swallowing.