Fractions Of
The bottom of the the black zodiac scraped over the bits of what used to be icebergs, sometimes threading through the propeller, sometimes bumping along the bottom of the boat.
The distance between me and lethally cold water was a matter of feet or inches, depending on whether it was my feet or my head at risk. Lethal also existed in the cracks on the snow settled atop of the existing glaciers.
Our guide reminded us that glacier tops are mottled, dirty, cracked, uneven. All the words you use to describe something not particularly desirable, certainly not objectively beautiful.
But it was.
They were, both the glaciers and the cracks, because they showed so much of what’s underneath.
Those cracks made a rift through the purity to show the reality.
The pure wouldn’t exist without the real.
The real was the foundation.
Pure doesn’t stay real for more than a few winter months and those cracks don’t follow lovely lines. It was work to squint and find the symmetry or the pleasing bits of asymmetry.
It didn’t take long to figure out that within the white snow and black rock and blue water, were thousands of chromatic variations.
Because the rest of the colors were removed, the subtleties of what was left were painted in neon.
Even the purity of a place like Antarctica is diminishing at a rapid rate, partially because of people like me coming to visit.
Pure can’t last when a hundred people walk up and down the same path, even if made of snow to be covered again during the next storm.
Pure isn’t real but it’s breathtaking for what it is: transitory.
It exists only within these fractions of minutes during a fraction of a life that’s the merest fraction of the age of the Earth.
The Earth that exists under the water, under the boat, under my feet.
