Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit Page B

way too close, and hear what sounded like the amplified cracking of automatic gunfire. Then a great 200-foot-high block of ice would separate from the glacier and fall, slowly it seemed, into the sea with a roar that echoed against the mountains for a full minute. And afterward, maybe five minutes later, a small ripple of a wave would roll past my kayak. So I figured I could maybe move in a little closer.
    I avoided the icebergs, big as mansions, and made my way through a watery field of bergy bits, smaller slabs of ice that pretty much covered the surface of the sea. There was a strange sound all around, a crackling, like static electricity, and it was getting louder as I paddled toward the foot of the glacier before me. It took a while to understand that the bergy bits themselves were doing the crackling, in the manner of an ice cube dropped into a glass of water.
    There were harbor seals basking in the sun on the larger slabs of ice, and some of them dropped into the water, disappeared for a time, and then surfaced near my kayak. They had heads like wet Labrador retrievers—that same friendly curiosity—and one came close enough for me to touch with my paddle, had I wanted to. He tilted his head in a quizzical manner, dove, and then surfaced again, on the other side of the kayak. I thought he wanted to play tag and paddled toward him, at which point my kayak was rocked by a sound so loud it could actually be felt.
    I looked up to see a block of ice the size of a twenty-story building falling in my direction. Time slowed, as it does in these situations, and I had the leisure to appreciate fully what an enormous horse’s ass I was. Eventually, about a month later it seemed, the ice thundered into the sea far in front of my kayak. It threw up a wave that rolled toward me in a ten-foot-high crest, topped by pieces of ice ranging in size from fist toFord. I paddled forward to take the wave at a run so that it wouldn’t crest over me. My kayak rolled easily over the top and slipped down the back side. The last rumble of the calving was echoing off White Thunder Ridge, and I could hear the bergy bits snapping all around. Some insane person was beating a drum hysterically inside my chest.
    Which, I think, is when Paul—who was quite a ways behind me—snapped the picture that someone thought might sell beer.
    The weather held for a week, and we paddled back down the inlet toward Bartlett Cove, a trip that is a time-lapse lesson in plant succession. Two hundred years ago, Captain George Vancouver mapped what was then Glacier Bay: a five-mile inlet capped by a 300-foot-high wall of ice. Over the past two centuries, since the end of the Little Ice Age, that immense glacier has retreated almost sixty-five miles, and the land it exposed is all barren rock and sterile gravel.
    But the planet is modest, and she quickly clothes herself with life. Even under White Thunder Ridge, on land that had been exposed perhaps a few decades earlier, we found “black crust,” an algal nap that retains water and stabilizes silt so that eventually mosses grow. They in turn support hardy pioneers like fireweed and dryas. These plants are plentiful a few miles from the retreating glaciers. Farther down the inlet, alders drop nitrogen-rich leaves, building a soil that enables spruce to take hold and eventually shade out the alders. At Bartlett Cove, which was under 200 feet of ice 200 years ago, there is a hemlock and spruce rainforest.
    Down inlet from the alder breaks we thought we saw a kayaker, far out ahead of us, his paddle dipping from side to side. This was the first human being we’d seen in a couple of weeks, and we called out to him. The kayaker failed to respond,probably, we decided later, because he turned out to be a bull moose. It was his antlers swaying from side to side as he swam that had looked like a kayak paddle.
    Paul, had he known he was going to sell a photo to a Canadian beer company, might have