Travel + Leisure
All in Good Time
Feb 2021
Peering through my camera lens, a finger on the shutter release, I held my breath as the sun ignited a turquoise sheen on a wall of ice. My husband, children, and I had taken a high-speed catamaran to the face of Johns Hopkins Glacier, which towers 250 feet above the waterline. Black-legged kittiwakes soared above, waiting, like the rest of us, for ice to crack and fracture into the ocean.
Our three-year-old, Logan, sat on my husband’s shoulders, clutching his hair for balance whenever the catamaran swayed. Six-year-old Riley wrapped herself around my leg. Fourteen-year-old Kyra and 11-year-old Ethan had already disappeared onto the upper deck, each armed with their own camera. With just two days in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park Preserve, I didn’t have time to kayak among the icebergs or dive to the depths of the ocean to see the marine snow drifting down. I only had enough time to fulfill a fraction of my mother’s dying wish.
