Arctic Diaries: Sick at Sea

But not seasick, at least.

According to the doctor’s estimate, over 50% of the ship now has COVID. Myself - probably - included. There was no storm, though!

Yesterday, my lovely roommate came into our room to find me in bed, under the covers. She asked how I was feeling. Fine, I said. Just resting and warming up. I was a little chilled from being out on deck. My roommate did not look convinced. I looked down, considered the evidence. I was wearing a thermal long-sleeved shirt, fleece, and down jacket. Under the covers. And still cold.

By the evening, I felt capable of acknowledging that I was - am - sick.  I don’t feel terrible - not nearly as bad as I felt during my previous bouts of COVID. But I don’t feel great.

I brought other just-in-case medicines, but nothing for COVID. I figured that was the one thing the on-ship doctor would be equipped to treat.  But the doctor has no tests and says she is saving her meager supply of throat drops for the most severe cases.

(As I’m typing this, I keep getting distracted by the crinkling sounds coming from the artist sitting just in front of me. She is wearing what appears to be a wig cap and white paint on the lower half of her face and is currently wrapping a pair of boots in tinfoil.)

We spent yesterday cruising along a glacier called Brasvellbreen, in the north of the archipelago. I haven’t had a chance to go up to the bridge to confirm it, but someone told me that the ship was charting these waters - that the stretch we were traveling through was uncharted because until recently, it was ice.

It is the third longest ice cap in the world, after Greenland and Antarctica. One of the guides shared what I’m sure was interesting information about it during the all-boat meeting in the bar, but I had a hard time paying attention due to worries about sickness and the everybody in one room of it all.

In the early evening, the ship drew close enough to the glacier to allow for particularly striking views of the ice and waterfalls. Everybody gathered at the bow of the ship to look and take photos.  It was extraordinary.

Dinner was an outdoor barbecue on the helicopter landing pad. This was, I suppose, good on the limiting-covid-spread front, but maybe less good on the sick-people-in-the-freezing-cold front.  I wore as many layers as I could - e.g., on top: thermal long sleeved shirt, fleece, down puffer, bigger fleece, waterproof shell. The artist next to me ate dinner with gloves on.

After dinner, the picnic tables were moved away and a dance party began. I came out mid-way through and stayed for several songs.

It was impossible to register the joy of the moment - the pleasure and abandon on the faces and in the bodies of so many people - without also absorbing the ice cap backdrop and the absurdity of it all. One person told me that she’d seen the glacier calving a few times since the dance party began.

I felt healthier in the bracing cold than I did indoors, though I was aware that the feeling might be misleading and short-lived.

Did I join for Britney Spears’s “Oops I Did it Again?” I did. “Iceberg allusion!” I called out when we reached the spoken interlude with the Titanic reference (“I thought the old lady dropped it in the ocean in the end,” Britney says, upon receipt of a diamond from a man she doesn’t love.)

But the artist next to me couldn’t hear what I was saying over the music.

There was a polar bear sighting this morning - this one in the water, barely 50 meters away from a Zodiac with three people in it, two artists and a guide. They were in the middle of towing two icebergs that they had tied ropes around (part of an artist’s project) when the guide noticed the bear in the water, on the hunt for seals. Fortunately, the bear hadn’t seen them yet. They were able to untie the icebergs and motor off to a safe distance.

I am having an impossible time trying to process any of this. It feels beyond the realm of reality as I know it. The location. The glaciers. The virus. The extremes.

Last night had end-of-trip energy (the glacier photos, the dance party), but we have five more nights to go. Anything could happen.