Patagonia. Part 3: Cerulean
They kept telling us that the ice wasn't really blue. They told us that the light played tricks on our eyes, making the ice look blue, but that in actuality, it was just plain ice. I can't help but huff and roll my eyes just thinking about it. The ice was blue. Look at the picture. If something "looks blue" it is blue. Not to turn my final installment in this travelogue into a physics lesson, but the color of anything is determined by how light plays off its surface. The glaciers are blue. They're beyond blue.
Cerulean. It's the best way to translate celeste, the word the Argentineans use to describe the color of the heavens, the color on their flag. It's the elusive color of water be it in the air, in the sea, or frozen scraping down a mountain. You can't hold anything this color, you can't drink anything this color, you can't breathe anything this color, but you do. It's the color of water.
Because of the low cloud cover, I couldn't see the glacier's distant mountain source. All I saw was a white hazy sky out of which blurred the near-static torrent of ice, white and blue as the sky, solid chunks of the heavens pressed into a field, massive, sublime beyond sublime. If I could, I'd wish to know nothing about the science of glaciers, about the precipitation levels, expanding water molecules, or geology. I'd wish to have seen the glacier with purer eyes and to have recognized it for what it is: the dying sky creeping down from the mountains to melt into lakes, seep into the soil, and disappear into the sea.
I could do the research to find out for sure, but until I do, I can only imaagine what primitive peoples would think of this glorious natural phenomenon. A mystery, massive, still, indifferent to time by our measurements, it makes a sound. Somewhere among the endless crags of the glacier, minor tectonic movements will break house-sized masses of ice, resounding thunderously throughout the valley it has carved out of the mountains. Sometimes, you'll get to see the ice break off, making its final push off into the lake.
Here's where the song comes in. After the quick hike over the surface of Perito Moreno we boarded the tour boat for a final look at the glacier. I was soaked and frozen with mist but I emerged from the cabin to catch as wide a view possible. M83 provided the soundtrack again. This song, "Kelly" (right-click and "save target as" if you're on windows or option-click if you're on a Mac) captures a bit of the same slow Godly tempo that I found so moving in "Slowly" which provided the soundtrack to the first Patagonia entry. The watery vocals filled my ears, and the beats helped keep me warm as I bobbed my head, watching the cliffs of ice pass by.
Then, at 1 minute and 48 seconds into the song, the guitar comes in. As far as I've wanted to remember it, this is exaclty what happened: the drawn out entrance of the guitar in "Kelly" perfectly matched a deceptively slow rift in the glacier wall. When a several-ton piece of ice breaks, it does it in slow motion. The guitar's long crescendo sang the slow catastrophe of the ice wall. A new iceberg born of thunder, ice dust, and waves.
It looked like God.
—December 9 2004