Buenos Aires is a long ways from Vancouver, even at the
speed of a state-of-the-art Boeing 777. Including connections, the air portion
of the journey took approximately 24 hours to cover the 12,300 km we traveled.
But the starkness of this snow and
ice bound continent presents itself, as it always has to all who get caught in
its unforgiving stare; powerful, uninviting, even threatening to those of us
who become spellbound at the abruptness of its jagged peaks and towering
icebergs that stab the grey-blue frigid water.
Add to that more than three full days of steaming southward 2700
km on board the Celebrity Eclipse from the capital of Argentina to our first
port of call, the city of Ushuaia, labelled “the end of the world”; the
distance seems immense. Still, it is more than 1000 km to Antarctica.
Far from land, during the full days at sea, the
South Atlantic Ocean offered no points of reference, except perhaps the stars
that struggled to be noticed during the few, short hours of night.
Increasingly, as we journeyed southward, we were replacing the familiar with
the unknown, and in the process experiencing a deep and overwhelming sense of
the vastness of distance, time and space.
While the passage has been smooth to date, and the weather almost warm despite patches of rain and a little snow, there seems to be a shared sense
that the waves may not continue to be limited to 10-foot rollers. And the
increasingly sharp bite of the wind on deck seems to foreshadow a colder
climate would soon be upon us. Indeed, it is the uncertainty, the mystery and
the adventure that seems to have drawn many of the other passengers to this most
southern of all itineraries, a far different crowd from those occupying the
sizzling beaches of the Caribbean.
Why travel all this way when the scenery, weather and water
are all so severe, so unwelcoming, so far from the familiar? Maybe because such a place; the coldest,
driest, most isolated place on earth, where simply surviving for more than a
short time defies our pride, scorns our self-sufficiency, and reduces our self-proclaimed
conquests into short-lived tales of arrogance.
Rounding Cape Horn lighthouse, I can only imagine the
incredible fear and feeling of disconnection from the rest of the world felt by
the mariners of 200 years ago, or now the Chilean lighthouse-keeper and his family. The waves in the Drake Passage jostle among themselves as if to rub shoulders in a vain attempt to get warmer. Standing on deck 15, far above the grey-cold
sea, I feel the icy wind cutting into my down-lined jacket. As it reaches through the layers and touches my
skin I have images in my head of sailors of old clambering over icy decks,
while fighting bare-handed with frozen lines and heavy, clumsy sails in an
attempt to keep the ship from being caught and crushed by the relentless ice. Such a mental picture seems light-years away
from the comfort of our luxury cruise-liner.
Life today is a long way from where it once was, just as
Antarctica is a great distance from Canada’s West Coast. But, at times, I feel lost, abandoned without
bearings, snow-blind in a white-out, left to be swallowed by the vastness; my
own Antarctica. Thank you to those who
courageously give hope when all seems hopeless, who choose to challenge the
formidable, and lead those of us who are sometimes lost in the immensity of
living to a place of purpose and peace.
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