Juneau By Whirlybird

In Juneau I rode out to a tiny airfield at the edge of the city, beside a stream which reeked of dead salmon. There I boarded a copter which flew me over the mountains and out to a remote glacier, entirely inaccessible to land vehicles. My boots were outfitted with a Gore-Tex slipover grip for walking on the ice with a minimal of slippage. Even with the grip a misstep could be treacherous.

The vivid blue color of the glacier is an illusion, I was told, because the ice absorbs every color except blue, which is reflected back at us. How this differs from any other material object we see, I don't quite understand, but who am I to raise questions?

We saw a waterfall in the ice and learned that moraines are ribbons of ground-up rock and debris carried along by the ice flow. The glacier's surface was fractured by many crevasses of indeterminable depth. The pilot dropped a rock down one of these shafts and we listened to the gradual decay into oblivion of its ricochets. He advised us not to fall in.

As the chopper took off from the glacier the pilot pumped music into our headphones for dramatic effect. This could've been a cheesy ploy had the tune not been the "From Russia With Love" theme, which at that moment felt oddly appropriate. Our breasts swelled with undeserved heroism.