A Weddell seal half-heartedly lifts its head from the snow and lazily peers toward the out of place, octo-headed, rubber-bodied monster putt-putt-puttering by, rippling the otherwise still water on this morning that I suspect none of the eight souls on our raft could have identified as a Saturday.
Such constructs as calendars quickly fade from meaning in this other world we call Antarctica, a place where Ram Dass’s challenge to “Be Here Now” is accepted with hardly a thought, as simply as one might agree on the color of snow. Does winter come in any other colour? Where else could our thoughts possibly be?
We shut off the motor and drift past windows through ice and snow, to touches of a gray beyond, without form or measurable depth.
A solitude of ice, its acutely inclined striations knifing into the soul of this glacial castoff, each furrow emanating the lone escaping color—a deep kind of blue I imagine might have inspired Picasso to paint a man with a guitar or given Miles Davis a hue to match his musical mood.
A single silence holds us until a muted, distant rumble of some ice, some snow, released from the face of some ancient glacier, delivers another verse of the same mood, the same color, the same blue.
A Weddell seal lays his head back in the snow, closes his eyes, his dream of a drifting hexadecaclops wafting away like the final note from some far off, moody saxophone tangled up in a Bob Dylan song.
