Monday, February 23, 2009

Breaking the Ice


On Saturday I went to the coastal town of Pärnu and saw something that could only be described as incredible and yet even this word, as grand as it sounds fails miserably to describe the awe inspiring site that lay before me.

Looking out to the horizon the sea was completely frozen, the snow on the ground was so bright and blinding that I needed to wear sunglasses, yet if I removed my gloves my fingers would start to burn from cold within minutes.
We walked for two kilometers on what, within a few more weeks will be open seas once again and then drilled holes through the ice to go fishing.

Listening to crunch of snow under foot, the occasional cracking sound of the ice, the vast emptiness of the landscape is something that can’t be truly appreciated by watching it on television. This is something you need to experience for yourself, this is part of the reason I came here.

Yet inspite of my initial fears that the ground must surely give way underneath me as it was only ice after all, I saw the unbelievable site of a car driving, neigh speeding and spinning ahead of me.
Without a solitary marker on the landscape it would be frighteningly easy to lose direction and walk in circles and that is even without falling snow or attempting it after dusk. And that is another thing of note, the sun doesn’t slowly descend beyond the horizon, it drops like a stone and within moments that same horizon falls into darkness.

The drive home took less than two hours, but what I witnessed that day seemed like a million miles away.

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