I saw a glacier for the first time yesterday. It was amazing, huge, cold, many thousands of years old at the core. There was a beautiful blue pattern running through the white ice, the really old ice is blue, and I read somewhere that it’s so hard if you tried break it with a sledge hammer you’d break your arm.
In the dip between two slopes there was a river of ice that once poured toward the sea but it has not moved for millennia. It spread out as it neared the water until it was as wide as a football field and probably many times as deep. We knew we were getting close to the glacier because we could see pieces of it floating past the boat in the channel, melting and headed out to sea. The closer we got the more chunks of glacier there were. They break off and drift away as it melts. The water is cold now and getting colder, but it’s not cold enough.
The irony of how I arrived at the glacier juxtaposed against the fate of the glacier is not lost on me. After the ship took the detour through the Sarmiento Channel - a long detour - to see the glacier, turned full circle slowly so that everyone could see it clearly even if they didn’t want to walk up on deck, and set a crew into the water to film and photograph the glacier, all the while serving drinks on the helipad, they fished a chunk of it out of the water and put it on the deck for people to take pictures of, touch, even taste if they wanted to. It was a piece with blue ice in the middle. I didn’t go to that part even though I really wanted to touch the blue ice, to feel it against my skin. But I didn’t because it seemed, in a way I can’t explain, icky to poke it and ham next to it for pictures.
A ship like this uses a lot of energy to get this far and not just to move the boat. It takes energy to make fresh water and to heat it, to cook and clean up after so many people, to wash our clothes and flush our toilets and chill our beer. I cringe a little every time I see someone using three pool towels to dry off after the sauna or throwing away plates full of food. There is so much waste and the trash has to go somewhere. They don’t throw it in the sea, but it has to go somewhere...
As an American I have lived in a country where for very little money I can buy oranges from Brazil, lotions from Italy, wine from Australia and lamb from New Zealand. I never gave a thought to how much energy it took to get that stuff to my table. How much to keep it at just the right temperature, ship, truck it, store it. I drove a Mercedes spending many miles a week just to run errands and eat at the restaurants I liked best or shop at my favorite stores.
Living in Buenos Aires has taught me that I can live more simply and do more to minimize my impact than just recycling. I used to use the excuse that I couldn’t manage without my car or that I couldn’t cook without all those well traveled ingredients. Now I know I can. I can use public transportation, I can buy local and organic, I can walk, ride my bike and compost. I have even learned to recycle at home, using things more than once and finding uses for ‘used up’ things. I am still learning about how to have the least impact on the planet and live a quality life. A survey of 99 people would likely find 33 who think I’m obsessed over nothing, 33 who think I’m doing a great job and 33 who think I could do more. I have to decide what matters to me and how to live in a way that I can live with. I find I think about it often.
I am glad I got to see that glacier before it is all gone. It is much smaller than it was a few years ago if the ice in the channel is any indication. No picture can express, really, how magnificent it is when you see it up close, when you feel it in the hard, biting cold air that edges out from it, when you hear it crackle as it breaks a little at a time. I have seen some beautiful and wonderful things on this trip, but the glacier is the thing that has moved me most, and given me the most to think about.
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