Beyond The Ice Wall

BEYOND THE ICE WALL
8 September 2001


The heart does not easily give up its hope. Today I went down to the quay and stood a long time looking at the sea. Perhaps I will never again do that? Nor ever again dip a quill and write you, and though I know now you will never see these dozens of letters, or if you see them could you read or understand them. But I will not burden this last letter with my anguish.

I feel that you may still live and if so things may not be as I think them to be, and in spite of hardships I cannot imagine, perhaps you have found a way to be happy.

Of course I also went to the harbor today to see the captain himself. It was Vlamdimer Bjorinson this time. Though at first he was purposely direct and brief to my questions, he being as downcast as I that the voyage had once again caused much hardship and inconsolable disappointment again.

And once again meant nothing except more wasted months and effort out of his life and so many others. Abstractedly he mused in the uncertain moment , fragments of a poem by Omar Khayyam bestriding his conscious thought

The Bird Of Time has but a short ways to fly-
and Lo! The bird is on the wing.

Those glorious years before the abject calamity arrived were filled with such great joy and exhilaration and adventure. But now as it stands the mammoth mountain of ice is still there and any reconciliation or favorable outcome remains uncertain and far distant beyond the ice wall.

There being no way through, or past or beyond this recalcitrant obstacle presents us with a most maddening and perplexing dilemma. Try just once again, or no?

The most recent voyage being full of unrelenting mishap and disappointment as usual. This incessant pursuit becoming wretched and dismal to my mind, each year going just once more on the voyage to further confirm our perpetual agony. And once again the constant refrain, try just once again or no?

This July it was much colder than usual as they drew near the harsh and menacing coastline. The gazing captain once again being ever so far from and close to the magnificent land of his past felt inspired to yearn again for the land as it had been before so many years ago , green from end to end, advancing into snowy, misting summits, and about the harbor, the familiar yellow flowers everywhere on the rocks

But now only an ice island lay there, sun pale in the sky, an omnipresent and obscuring mist further inland covering the island with a special blanket of damp and clinging cold; desolate and foreboding as it has been for these interminable twenty years.

And on this voyage, in trying to approach too near the shore the captain had almost lost his ship, for at a certain spot there appeared for a quicksilver moment to be a break in the invincible ice wall but it proved to be just another exhilarating illusion.

Mysteriously at that same time in a flash of sunlight two seamen disappeared mysteriously overboard into the cold and swirling water, and both were not to be rescued from the frigid abyss.

One was Bilhelm a boy I knew very well, of course he had grown into a young man since I last saw him, but to me as I learned of his death a vision of him as a child played in vivid tableau across my tortured mind. Struck with a pang of intense sadness for a time was I, my thoughts then gradually returning to more current events.

You already know this is not the first time I have made this journey since the ice wall rose. It has fallen my turn three times before. I then saw something in his face, though he did not say it: I shall certainly not go again. Who was there behind the tenacious and unyielding ice wall ? This accounting includes his wife, all of his seven children, his only brother too
and many others that he loved were there, all behind the mountain of ice none could climb, negociate nor overcome, in spite of all exhausting and disappointing efforts to do so thus far.

Looking away from me, staring at the floor, and after a time he continued:

“ even though you were very small, but a small child, I know you remember me from the times I used to come trading in the summer, a long time before we lived there, but I was first always. It was my love of the place that- he broke off again as though the grief in him could not be surmounted; then he finished firmly; “ so many went there because I went.”

“From going there so many years, from the time I was a young man and eventually living there I know what the harbors were like and I know now that they are no more, and they are not likely to be ever again as they were. There would be no use to go there any longer to seek news.

We must assume that the settlements there are lost. I have told each one that asks the same.

Then he did not speak again, waiting for whatever I might say? “If you give up hope then I give up hope?” So heavy was his heart, as was my own.

I gathered my cloak about me, offered him my desolate thanks and afterwards stood a long while and looked across the sea. Will I then ever see home again? Tomorrow I go to Gretlin Alborg which is far upriver and into the forest to the west.

I will write here only goodbye alas but not goodbye forever It is not I alone who still think every day of you, as you perhaps exist there, out of reach beyond the ice wall.