Antarctica
How was Antarctica? What was Antarctica like? The inevitable questions awaiting me from every person I knew on my return home from The White Continent. Simple questions with an even simpler, yet complex answer. I don’t know.
I could go on and on about the trip and what it was like. I could tell you how I flew over the Drake Passage and spent 10 days on the 120’ sailboat Elsi with an amazing group of photographers and crew. About how we were blessed with the most amazing and photographic Antarctic weather, some days with beautiful blue skies and warmth leaving us to shoot on deck in just a shirt, while other days were moody and when we were lucky, snowy. About the shades of blue that outnumbered even all the penguins in Antarctica. I could tell you how penguins porpoise through the water as commonplace as squirrels climb trees, how the 437th “whale tail” is just as exciting (well, almost) as the first, and how seals seem to sleep on icebergs all day, just as lazy as my dog.
If you want me to go on, I could also tell you how we sailed past icebergs bigger than houses. And saw glaciers, that frankly I’m not sure I can call them glaciers, because their size was endless and at that point they must just be, land? And towering peaks seemingly reaching for the heavens wrapped in their blankets of clouds. How we entered the twilight zone for 10 days where time didn’t matter, where the best shooting happened between 10pm and 4am. Stay up for 30 hours straight? Sleep from 6 to 8am, then again from 3 to 5pm, and stay up another 24 hours? Just another day (because I never knew what day it actually was). The action just never stopped, not even while sleeping as we sailed overnight through ice patches with chunks of ice bouncing off the hull like a pinball and the impact threatening to throw me from my bunk.
How was Antarctica, what was Antarctica like? Here is where I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe the taste of the fifth ocean as wave after wave envelopes you. The hilarity of a perfectly-timed “arite!”, the melodic tune of “dinghy up, dinghy down, dinghy up, dinghy down”, the burn of the rope on your palms from raising the sails for the third day in a row. I don’t know how to describe the brotherhood of the night shift, the constant trills of penguins (no matter how far from land we were), or the light that dances across the ocean night and day. Or how to describe the stillness of floating in a glacial bay surrounded by icebergs and mountains, of the crisp Antarctic wind on your face, the freedom of 10 days with no internet where your world exists in a 300’ radius, or the connection with one of the most preserved and pristine environments our planet has left.
I once heard that you don’t travel to see; that you travel to feel. And if someone were to ask me to describe Antarctica, I’d say “Antarctica is a feeling.” A feeling of eternity, of insignificance, of connection, of liberation, and so much more.
