red hoodie striding over a miniature Himalayan range, a papery fringe of diaper sticking out from the waistband of his pants. I hung close, shadowing him, ready to catch him if he slipped. When he attained a summit he would hold his arms up and flash a big look-at-me grin, and when the descent was too steep I’d hoist him down.
It was getting late. To make it home by dinner, I ended up having to jog two miles, pushing his stroller along the bike path, ten-speeds whooshing by us, bells chiming, and our long shadows stretching out toward the West Side Highway. When I paused to catch my breath, Bruno would shout to me, “Faster!” and winded as I was, wearing the wrong shoes, I granted him his wish.
Such are the disappointments and the pleasures of travel, I thought now, as the Louis steamed north, stemming the Labrador Current.
Then, in Davis Strait, the icebergs doubled, tripled, multiplied. The first time we drew close to a big one, we all hurried out onto the decks with our cameras. Now I understood the rhapsodies I’d read in the journals of explorers. Now we’d attained the proper proximity, the proper scale. The iceberg was as close as the container ship Bruno and I had passed in New York Harbor, and as colossal. Its walls were palisades of ice. Its summit towered over the Louis’s bridge. You could imagine how small you’d feel walking around atop it. You could almost imagine what it would taste like. This was our first close encounter. There were more to come.
In Baffin Bay we entered an iceberg armada. They were every where—north, south, east, west, northwest, north by northwest. Supernumeraries and off-duty coasties alike spent most of the day out on the bow or up on the bridge, snapping photographs and exchanging exclamations of awe. Paleochemist Robie Macdonald, whose sense of humor tended toward the corny, told me that scientists had proposed an international standard unit to quantify the beauty of natural wonders such as these—a millihelen. Get it? I didn’t. “One millihelen is equivalent to a face beautiful enough to launch one ship.”
Not even those photographs taken by professionals like the Snapper, armed with zoom lenses the size of telescopes, do icebergs justice. Photographs fail to convey the grandeur of icebergs, but they also fail to convey how mutable they are. An iceberg that looks like a mesa in the distance as you approach transforms into something architectural, with melt-carved towers and wind-sculpted outcroppings suggestive of angels—as European explorers noted—or birds. Explorers, in their journals, grasping for comparisons with which to familiarize the strange, likened icebergs to cathedrals as well as angels. But icebergs lack the symmetries and patterns of a church. They exhibit form, but organic form, form sculpted by the subtle force of the coincident, form verging on the chaotic. Every change in angle is a revelation. The light drapes differently. The shapes shift. The colors turn from white to turquoise to blue. In some there were grottoes or canyons or isthmuses terminating in a peak that seemed about to break off. From the big ones, cataracts of meltwater gushed into the sea. It occurred to me, admiring those waterfalls, that before my eyes the past was dissolving into the present. Those melting molecules of H2O now gushing from an iceberg, joining the currents of Baffin Bay, hundreds or even thousands or possibly tens of thousands of years ago fell as snow on the mountains of Ellesmere or Greenland. Were you to drink a glass of that meltwater, you might well be degusting the climate of the Iron Age. You would be quaffing centuries.34
I found myself wishing that Eddy Carmack, who knows this place as well as or better than anyone, were here to help me solve the riddles written in water and ice; to help me see the microscale, and the mesoscale, and the megascale. Dante had imagined the innermost circle of Hell as an Arctic landscape, and clearly this place wasn’t as hellish as benighted Europeans formerly believed, but I did find myself thinking that, like Dante’s pilgrim, I could use a guide, a Virgil, like those I’d met on previous trips—Ebbesmeyer, Pallister, Moore, Henry Tong, Willa France, Amy Bower.
In Carmack’s absence I relied on those scientists who were aboard, especially Robie Macdonald, who taught me this: there’s another way that icebergs are time capsules; frozen into the ice are sediments scoured from glacial moraines. As the icebergs melt, those sediments sink to