| T
H E S V A L B A R D D
I S P A T C H E S photos and story © 2001 Doug Plummer no use without authorization |
||
|
|
||
|
We have anchored in a fiord after motoring all
"night". Outside my portal is a tidewater glacier. The ice glows a ghostly blue.
Luminous low clouds graze the mountaintops. The zodiac bumps through a 4 foot chop, towards the incandescent glacier. We pass through bergy-bits, fragments of the glacier. An ocean with ice cubes. The water is a dirty blue-gray, silty from the meltwater. The passage is rough and I am anxious and the situation is unfamiliar. Then the stark differentness of the place punches through my discomfort. I feel very far from home, in another world.
|
 |
|
|
||
|
It is a sublimely austere, beautiful world. On the sand towards the glacier, round chunks of drift ice litter the shore, like white jewels. The sun peeks through a thick gray sky, above the blue-white glacier and the brown mountains. Soon I am alone with the scene, and I spend time with the ice, just being here. I resist the urge to shoot away, to occupy my mind with photographic concerns. I want to be in the place first, and we have the luxury of several hours on this beach. Slowly the photographs emerge. I work carefully and consciously. | |
|
|
||
| The land looks barren at first. Sand, gray rocks, brown heaps of mountains hard against the beach. But I walk uphill just a few yards and there is a brilliant purple clump. And another, and another, a carpet of purple saxifrage. I sit down to examine it. The diminutive five-petalled flowers grow in a clump of contrasting brilliant green. And the rocks underneath me are clothed in a patchwork of fluorescent orange lichen. |  |
|
|
|
||
|
||
| The splash of waves on the sand is less here, and I hear cries from the cliffs, thin high calls, and I realize it is a huge multitude of sound. Above me a vast city of birdlife on the steep cliff. Glassing the sky I see great flocks of Fulmar, stiff-winged seabirds, and groups of smaller birds, Thick-Billed Murres most likely. | A Parasitic Jaeger swoops near me and settles on a rock 30 yards away, then leaves. When I scan the fjord I see, camouflaged in the floating ice, small groups of white and black ducks, Common Eider. There is no bird here with a color other than black, brown or white. |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Dispatch: One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine | |||
| Sign The Guestbook | |||
