Cold Blue Glacier

A jagged blue wall of ice. A delicious crack, like thunder or fireworks, when the glacier calves and chunks of ice splash into the lake. Quite spectacular.

My favorite Spanish-English mistranslation from a sign today noted that the glacier’s discoverer was a “highly steamed investigator.”

Travel. One thing about travel, is that most of what’s familiar is gone–food, a favorite chair, the dog, currency, the car–and replaced with the unfamiliar every day. I try to pack light, which means I wear the same things over and over. My jean have a yellow splotch where I dropped an avocado I was wrenching open with my fingernails. My bag yields gray and black, black and gray. My swimsuit stays crammed at the bottom for warmer days later in the trip. And when I carry my backpack to a bus station, I remember I’ve put some stones inside. Stones, I might say, that I’m not willing to give up. Beautiful flat black rocks that stack into a perfect cairn. Stones that will take me back to Patagonia.