A Dollop of Winter

how silent ice is
forming--
waiting for night to return




In the late seventies, we spent a winter in the arctic in Kivalina, Alaska. Check it out on the map, it's on the Chukchi Sea about halfway between Kotzebue and Point Hope. Other than the Inupiat culture and the truly fantastic Aurora Borealis, what most fascinated me that year was ice--its myriad varieties. I think everyone has heard that the Inuit and Yupik languages possess more than a hundred words for snow, but the same must be true for ice. I can't give you the names in Inupiat but some of the terms for ice I know are grease (yep!), pancake, shuga, frazil, and nilas. All of these describe new sea ice.

And yes though "grease" sounds truly icky, it's what the roaming sea really looks like when it starts to be slowed by ice. We lived just a few hundred feet from the ocean (in front) and on our left a channel connected the Chukchi with a huge lagoon. In November, the water by the channel opening and in the channel itself slowed first, transforming into a black oily mass. What happened was that small particles of sea ice had frozen and were slowly connecting with other ones. It's an amazing process considering the currents and winds. Pancake ice looks like white round circles of ice--curled on the outer edges from bumping into each other. Think little bumper cars of ice that finally all get stuck together. I can't remember how long the process took, but I think the whole channel froze solid in only two weeks.

After that the sea itself froze. Of course, this took a lot longer. And the color of the ice and water also changed often. Not until January did I notice that everywhere in view the sea was totally frozen. But it did not appear as a flat plane of ice often seen in lakes. The immense currents and winds caused it to freeze into ridges and hills. In some places it looked like a statuary garden. Some of the ridges were 20 or 30 feet high.

In February, I took one long walk on the sea ice. Something not very sensible when you consider the stories I'd read about the sea ice breaking free and stranding people upon bergs that were whisked away toward the pole, toward Greenland. Luckily for me everything held firm and I had an extremely magical hike. Just the colors were breathtaking: white, blue, turquoise, lavender, pale green. Also the statues glimmered in refracted light. I hiked nearly all the way to a smoky surprise world, that I later learned was called a polynya (a small section of sea water kept open by the currents). A fog hung over this clear water. I didn't get close.

Since that time, I have always appreciated ice, how it transforms liquid into solid, how it is carved, how it changes our view of the everyday.