This is a picture I’ve been obsessing over for the last little while as part of my annual city-bound-in-spring, stir-crazy spell. I was prompted by a friend of a friend to look over the pictures from my 2008 trip to the Yukon and I just keep going back to this one.
It’s a picture my mother took of me overlooking part of the Salmon Glacier.
In any case, this image really speaks to me and my optimistically fatalist way of seeing the human condition. I don’t know how my mom nailed such a perfectly composed shot, but I think I’ll cherish this one for a long time. If you’ll forgive my waxing long, I’ll tell you why…
Here I am, an isolated man looking out onto a landscape, itself a stream of events and forces much older than me, which have been moving along for millennia. Somehow the scene impels me to make my way through it, although I know that it could consume and forget me without any memory of my existence beyond the next winter.
In spite of the scene’s fearfulness, there’s hope in it too. Even if I’m consumed by this experience, there’s beauty in that. But if I manage to navigate this epic channel of rock and ice, there’s a crystalline patch of shining blue to greet me somewhere in the distance.
The world in this scene is both immanently and existentially threatening, but there’s so much promise in it.
People should spend more time looking at glaciers, I think.
