Travel, Photography

Finding Permanence in Impermanence at the LeConte Glacier, Alaska

A Flow of Water Frozen in Time

The engine strained, fighting against the current. The smell of gasoline tinted with traces of granite and moss bit at the back of my throat. I braced myself against the railing of the flat-bottomed boat, trying to level the image in my viewfinder, but knowing the effort was futile.

The force of the water tumbling down the cliffs, bouncing over boulders and rushing into the sea coalesced into a thunderous roar, a deafening demonstration of nature’s ferocity. She bit at my skin with icy teeth. She clutched at the very breath in my throat, screaming from the wild bowels of her belly.

Captain Mark managed to keep control of his vessel, steering us this way and that, trying to position us in the best spot for a photograph. A man sculpted of this icy realm, he seemed to be more a part of the rawness here than of the world of civilization.

We were on our way to the LeConte Glacier, at the very mouth of the fjord.

He’d maneuvered over the four-foot shallows, entangling us with splinters of driftwood and tangles of kelp only once in the half-hour we’d skimmed across the bay. But now, the depth of the fjord, etched from the foot of a glacier, dropped to four-hundred feet. Mounds of granite, like the toes of the very earth, gripped the shoreline. Life sprung from every nook and cranny.

After fighting the flow of the waterfall for a few minutes, he backed us out for a wider view. The water glinted emerald green, but bore the milky look of glacial minerals. Arms of fog undulated through the spruce, hemlock, and cedar.

The tenacity of life here allows a sense of hope, fosters a connection to the permanence of impermanence.

I’d heard about icebergs glowing in the rain, but I had not yet witnessed it.

As we ventured further into the fjord, headed to the LeConte Glacier, we began to dodge hunks of blue ice here and there. It was like magic, like Tinkerbell had tapped her wand and said, “This one — glow!”

Then the Harbor Seals began to appear, resting with their babies on flat hunks of ice, taking refuge from the Orcas, who find young seals to be a delicacy.

Blinding rain pelted my bare face. I tried to shelter my camera with my jacket, but would find myself using a blow-dryer on it when we were back on the boat.

That camera ended up having to be refurbished once I got back home. But, it was worth it. I couldn’t imagine not having images to remember the pure, ecstatic, connection to the vastness I had felt that day. The sense of it lives in my very soul every time I see these images again.

Soon, those few icebergs multiplied into a field of jagged obstacles. Captain Mark dodged them with surprising adeptness. All around us, ribbons of freezing water cascaded down the slopes and plummeted into the sea.

And then, out of the breath of the fog, the mother of all of these icebergs, the LeConte Glacier, emerged. A flow of water frozen in time, mixed with hunks of earth and ancient life, she loomed above us, inert, and yet, somehow, alive.

Captain Mark pulled the little boat closer to the glacier than I think most of the passengers were comfortable with. Glaciers “calve,” or disintegrate into an exploding waterfall of ice and rock. You don’t want to be too close to them when they do. A thin line of safety divided us from the “what-ifs” that you could not help but ponder in such a remote location.

But these are the moments, the ones where you are on the edge of fear, where you have pushed beyond the boundary of the known, that stay with you all of your life.

Times like these are what flicker through my mind when I am on the precipice of sleep in the wee hours of the morning. To have never tasted a slice of fear or a dollop of the unknown, to me, would mean living a life of unfulfilled discontent.

The icy rain pelted me. My hair dripped with frozen slush. My fingers had gone numb because I could not operate the camera with my gloves on. And I wanted this moment to never end.

But eventually, we had to return to where we had come from. Captain Mark turned the boat around and we sluiced past striations of time encapsulated in ice.

The vastness of Alaska, the sense of timelessness within time, the taste of the wild — these flavors linger on within me. I may be just a brief flicker of consciousness in this world, but, somehow, I feel that being altered by these experiences somehow affects the very consciousness of the universe. And this knowledge gives meaning to my life.

The Wild Places

What, really, gives meaning to life?

In the end, we surrender to nature. And I hope to go with peace in my heart.

But, and I truly believe this — if we are here as her eyes and ears and as vessels for her growth

if she learns from us —

from when our fingertips touch a dewdrop for the first time, or when we breathe the air exhaled from a glacier, or we watch a fern unfurl, delicate whorl upon delicate whorl —

we can never stop.

We need to hunger in our hearts unceasingly for meaning, for those gossamer threads which we can almost see but will never fully comprehend.

We need to touch the wild places in nature and in the essence of our beings.

Without that quest, there would no reason

to be.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

Thank you to Anne Bonfert for the Globetrotters “Waterfalls” prompt.

I also really enjoyed Anne Bonfert’s “Glaciers in the Clouds” article:

And Ian Hanson’s photography is just gorgeous in:

I also really liked Purbita Chakraborty’s story about Niagara Falls, a place near to where I was born:

Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter 2024. All rights reserved.