The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

In Antarctic Light

~~ Four years later, on Livingston Island, a downy penguin chick with comically large feet that it would eventually grow into, waddled into a patch of sunshine and stumbled toward me as I sat on the rocky ground. For nine of us who’d set out from Argentina, this was the first landing of the trip, and a brutal, four-day sail across the Drake Passage had left most of us purpled with bruises and searching for our land legs. But on the island, the sun was shining, shimmering on the water and warming the rock- strewn landscape, so I’d found a quiet place to sit for a while, leaning back against my pack as my equilibrium recalibrated. The ball of fluff flapped its flippers awkwardly as if trying to propel itself forward. Someday, the gray down would give way to black and white waterproofed feathers and those clumsy flippers would turn into precision rudders in the water. But for now, they just threw the chick off balance. It stumbled onto its belly and squeaked before righting itself and continuing toward me. I scooted back slowly, trying to keep my distance, but it closed in again, and after a few of these cycles, I gave up, instead watching the catchlight in its eyes. “Well, hello there,” I said, delighted as the curious chick tilted its head inquisitively and examined my feet before hopping up onto one of my boots. ~~ The iceberg materialized in the distance, towers and peaks, arches and spires coming into view as we drew near. “Everyone comes down for the animals, but they come back for the ice.” I heard the words like they’d just been uttered beside me, but they’d been said nearly a decade earlier by a woman whose name I couldn’t recall but whose tight, amber curls and toothy grin still occupied a place in my memory. Regardless of the year or the vessel or the person standing

at my elbow, this moment, watching an iceberg grow on the horizon as we near, would never change. Early in the morning, while most of my tripmates slept, I stood alone on the deck as a feathery snow fell, and gazed out as dappled light escaped the clouds and danced across the water. The iceberg looked worn and smooth, gray and gothic. When we were as close to it as we dared get, the captain began to steer a wide arc. “Wait for it,” I said quietly to myself. Suddenly, the towering iceberg erupted in a cacophony of color and texture. The grays became saturated aquas, the smooth columns showed their undulating ripples. Arches rose from shallow cerulean pools while striped spires poked at the sky. This ancient ice, which had begun as snow in another millennium, came alive, bearing both the blueness of its age and the sculpted splendor of its life at sea. With icebergs, the angle of light is everything. ~~ What does it mean for a childhood fantasy to come true? ~~ My shoulders ached. The heavy pack that hung from them held my camera gear as I climbed the small mountain, careful to keep my distance from the nesting pairs of gentoo penguins. I’d given up on keeping my distance from their rust-colored guano, which, at times, seemed to coat the mountainside, thick, slippery, and odiferous. It was deep into the night, but at the height of the Antarctic summer, the sun still burned. My fellow expeditioners and I had largely scattered when we made land at Port Charcot on Booth Island. Philipp, a bearded mathematician and pianist from Oslo who also happened to be one of the more experienced mountaineers among us, set off on his own, his full form becoming a dot on a distant, crevasse- scarred mountain. I kept climbing. On the other side of the ridge above me, I knew, was an “iceberg graveyard,” a shallow

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