Columbia Glacier and the Endurance of Change
A beautiful old wooden boat plies through the cold clear waters of Prince William Sound thirty miles southwest of the town of Valdez. Summer mornings in Alaska can be balmy, short-sleeve weather, but out on the ocean traveling at 10 knots it is bone-chillingly cold. We are outfitted in mountaineering shells, gloves, and hats. I have my buff around my neck and it covers my ears, mouth, and nose and I am still cold – the captain calls out: “Hey, who is that ninja!” No one laughs.
Our binoculars are at the ready and our telephoto lenses are searching for avian subjects. We are birders on the lookout for birds, all the birds, twitching to the left and right to glimpse arctic species like Parakeet Auklet, Rhinoceros Auklet, and a glacier-loving alcid, the cryptically-clothed Kittlitz’s Murrelet. There is a Red-faced Cormorant sighting, which triggers excitement and high fives. We see most of our target birds and log them into our electronic checklists and into our digital memory cards, all those 1s and 0s that will form a record for as long as we can decode it.
I am on another mission too and have come unusually equipped: a 1930s medium format Zeiss box camera and a handful of rolls of my favorite film. The photographic subject matter is to be Columbia Glacier. Columbia is one of the largest tidewater glaciers in North America but also one of the fastest retreating major glaciers in the world. The old, salty captain yells out when there is nothing much to see but the fjord and the mountains and the sound: “In 1979, the terminus of the glacier was here!” We are miles away.
Near where Columbia Glacier began in 1979 – Zeiss Ikon Box-Tengor 6x9, Fujifilm Velvia 50
Spanish names dot the map of this part of Alaska: Valdez, Cordova, Gravina. After Columbus landed in the New World, Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull in 1493, the Inter caetera, which in turn led to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which divided up much of the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. The area that would become Alaska was nominally under the domain of the Crown of Castile – of course, the native people had no say – but no known Spanish explorer would visit for almost three hundred years.
In the 1790s, amid the fallout of the American Revolution, a Spanish naval officer and explorer named Salvador Fidalgo set out for the north from the Pacific Northwest, first visiting Vancouver Island and then sailing along the Alaskan coast. He erected wooden crosses and named waterways and settlements: Puerto Valdez, Puerto Cordova. Other placenames receded into history. Fidalgo called the Kenai Peninsula the far more cumbersome Puerto Revillagigedo. Far down the southeastern Alaskan coast, however, where the town of Ketchikan sits today, there is an island still called Revillagigedo, named in 1792 by a different Spanish explorer.
With almost no human development in sight, the area still appears much like it would have to Fidalgo. Whereas Hernando de Soto may have tramped his way through what is now downtown Dallas and Hernán Cortés through the expanses of present-day Mexico City, very little would surprise Fidalgo if he and his vessel were dropped into the sound today. Of course, the age of colonial explorers is long gone, and they are reduced to their names and their reputations, piles of dust and bones in some crypt in Mexico or Spain. Today, we are the explorers; three centuries from now, who will come to sail these waters? I hope that they will retain a notion of the numinous and allow the seals to laze upon the ice, to let the wild fjords continue in their natural state.
A Harbor Seal (left center) lazes on ice floes in front of Columbia Glacier, which fills the frame – Zeiss Ikon Box-Tengor 6x9, Fujifilm Velvia 50
The camera I am using is a Zeiss Ikon Box-Tengor Type 54/2; it was made sometime between 1933 and 1938 but one would not know its age from its appearance – the camera could be mistaken for new. Zeiss, along with Leica and Rollei, is one of Germany’s historic photographic companies, with a long, complicated past, as almost anything enduring 20th century Germany would have.
In a time of great upheaval and uncertainty, in the throes of the Nazi era, someone was hunched over a workstation, schematics askew on the table, and created this camera piece by piece by hand. When the Nazis took over, Zeiss employed Jewish workers at all levels of the company; by 1939, there was only one left, a man named Otto Eppenstein. He was a scientist and not a camera assembler, but when I use this camera I can picture the roll call on the factory floor, the gradual loss of people who used to be there, the eventual recession of the status quo. Little by little and then all at once.
The Box-Tengor’s thin leather exterior, chromed winding key, and curved glass viewfinders yield an intimate, tactile experience that no plastic, computerized camera can – the Box-Tengor has soul. For optics it uses a doublet design, two simple lenses cemented together in alignment, and though its images are not as sharp as a modern lens, its less clinical, soft renditions present the viewer with a sense of the not-quite-as-it-is. The lens is a Frontar, designed by a 19th century German optics company called Goerz. In 1926, approaching bankruptcy, Goerz was sold to Carl Zeiss and, over the following decades, Goerz receded and receded and is virtually unknown today.
The next time I visit, it is likely that Columbia Glacier will have changed even more and retreated farther inland. But I will have changed too and just about everything in the universe will have changed as well, by some degree or measure; this is not a lament. For conquistadors, Eppenstein, glaciers, Goerz, film cameras, film photographers, and everything else, at least one thing is true: entropy is unstoppable. But, for just a moment, for 1/60 of a second in a cold, peaceful, wonderfully bird-full North Star fjord, a shutter cycle joins incongruent histories together and commemorates them all.
Leaving Columbia Bay – Zeiss Ikon Box-Tengor 6x9, Fujifilm Velvia 50