Ice and the Sky Page #3

Year:
2015
140 Views


Steamed poulard of Bresse.

Roasted scallops,

Cromesqui shellfish.

Browned sweetbread,

truffled potatoes.

Tournedos Rossini, chateaubriand,

venison.

Rubinette apples, hare la Royale,

Burgundy wines.

Without realizing it,

I was starting to...

...do things I would

keep up all my life.

Charcot had snow,

so I studied the crystals.

At first in a basic way, to see

if I could find anything new.

Why were the summer snow squalls

finer than the winter ones?

Their thickness told

of snowy winters...

...or long periods with

no precipitation.

Crystals!

I realized that

no two were the same.

Each singular form

had its own story to tell.

Intact in their youth, they fill

out and are transformed...

...crushed beneath

the weight of fresh snow.

I imagined a journey that

I would later learn to measure...

...I watched them slide

imperceptibly towards the depths.

Ice is a river whose stillness

is but an appearance.

It takes a flake 50,000 years

to reach the coast...

...before settling on the ocean.

Split by the tides,

they become icebergs.

Warm seas push and

then melt them.

Once water, they set off

on a great ocean voyage.

Taken by the sun,

they become vapor...

...and return to the sky

to maybe fall here again...

...in a timescale that reduces

my existence to nothingness.

In the end, our year

went by quickly.

I keep the memory of the heady

and windless polar nights.

I've never seen as many stars

as I did in the Antarctic sky.

The memory of the Aurora Australis

still gives me goosebumps.

I endured the barely tolerable

extreme cold...

...to enjoy it for as

long as possible.

I remember our last

night at Charcot...

...ears instinctively lulled by

the familiar hum of our recorders.

I listened to them one last time,

with a sense of accomplishment.

For the first time in history...

...men had joined forces

to take the pulse of our planet...

...with no regard for

race or nationality.

We were among them,

as one with our colleagues...

...doing the same work as us

all over the Antarctic...

...in Tahiti, Venezuela

or Vladivostok.

We were relieved

a year after our arrival...

...in a critical

physical condition...

...suffering scurvy and

snow blindness.

But so happy to see new faces.

Farewell, Charcot.

A year later, the oncoming glacier

forced the base to be abandoned.

Crushed by the ice, it still

slides gently towards the coast.

I climbed aboard

with a single-minded...

...determination to return.

I was gripped by a strange virus:

a passion for the Antarctic.

This morning president

Ren Coty...

...welcomed members of the French

expedition to Adlie Land...

...men who have risked

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Luc Jacquet

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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