Prose, Nature, Spirituality

The Breath of the Glacier

Finding awe in the wildness of Alaska

Rhythmic as a beating heart, the paddle lifts and dips, and we fly across that mirror, where the clouds drift through the boundary between earth and heaven, each stroke bringing us closer to the juncture where you almost can’t distinguish which is water, and which is air.

Silver threads of light ribbon across a sea of glass. The moist breath of early-morning fog drapes the backs of our necks. We paddle, hard, into the current. The tide is out, revealing the foot of the glacier, its granite talons gripping the roots of the very earth.

Chunks of blackened ice, remnants of the terrain which has been scraped away and carried here, inch by inch, stand silhouetted on the shore. And twin mountains stare at their own reflections.

The force of the water rushing out from the tongue of ice defies the illusion of calmness at the surface of the water. Beneath my insulated gear, I begin to sweat. But to remove a layer I would have to take off my life jacket. And I know if I tipped in the process, I would not last long in the forty-degree water.

Our little group of kayakers is alone in the vastness. A small terror clutches at my heart. I look back at the boat which has carried us here, to Lamplugh Glacier, in Glacier Bay, Alaska, and it looks so insignificant against the backdrop of peaks.

Where the sun hits the massive wall of ice we are paddling to, it has melted the thousand-year-old solid hunk of frozen water and rock. All around me, I hear the dripping of tiny rivulets and also the roar of a nearby tumbled waterfall plummeting into the gravel and boulders below.

The glacier pulls at you. It breathes. It seems alive somehow. It creaks and groans and occasionally pops off like a rifle, slicing the stillness of the air.

Paddling in synch with my husband, I notice our breaths beginning to meld with one another’s and with the rhythmic splash of water sluicing from the tips of our oars.

The smell of steel and the resin of the pines clinging to the granite cliffs all around us swirls in the flanges of my nostrils. And the air tastes of the minerals long trapped in the glacier’s frozen heart.

Sea ice breaks the surface of the mirror, here and there. It looks delicate, almost like blown glass. And I suppose it is, at least the part you see above the water. But beneath the slick of silver, those broken remnants of the mother glacier extend far into the depths. Like capsules of time, they were frozen in another era and then released, freed, birthed into this time and place, given new life and ever-changing forms.

It makes me think about the impermanence of our own lives, of our tendency to cling to what we see, without really probing to glimpse what lies below the surface, or on the other side of the mirror.

Illusions, they are all around us. They are us. And we are them.

I look to the sky. Fragments of blue now float amongst the wisps of clouds, although the fog still clings to the flanks of the mountains.

The vastness engulfs me. It brings me to a place of borders, a place of simplicity, a place beyond words. And I feel myself melting, changing, like the sea ice. A jolt of electricity frissons through me, starting just below my sternum and ending in the diffuse silence, the endless rippling water and the eternal skies.

Those silver threads of light upon the water trickle past me, both binding me to this place, and weaving me into the tapestry of something much bigger than myself.

I taste the breath of the glacier. And I feel her pulse within me.

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 “Spiritual Sites” prompt:

I also enjoyed Jillian Amatt - Artistic Voyages’s article about exploring an ancient mosque during lockdown times:

And Anne Bonfert’s story about the “Spirit of Africa” really touched me:

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