beauty before terror

I had a great time in Stockholm for Easter.  Great city, great art, great scenery, great company (a friend came over from London).  Great long weekend.  Rather than fly back, I decided to take the overnight ferry back to Riga from Stockholm.  The way out of Stockholm, through many islands, with ice on the water, and a vibrant setting sun as the backdrop, offered me some amazingly beautiful scenes.

All this beauty came before the terror.  Sometime in the middle of the night, around 2am I guess, the ferry arrived at thick ice sheets in the mid-Baltic Sea.  Having bought a cheap ticket, I was in the very bottom of the ship, and perhaps right next to the hull.  The sound of ice crashing, groaning, booming, scraping, banging against the metal hull, quite frankly, terrified me.  It felt as though this bombardment of ice on the boat reverberated in my own body.  I don't scare easily, but this unfamiliar and unnatural sound caused my heart to race and my palms to sweat.  I had visions of the Titanic sinking, listened for the precise moment of the ice breaking through the hull and icy waters rushing in, and imagined how impossible it would be to get out when this happened, being at the very bottom of the boat.  After about an hour of this torture I started to calm down a little and realized that despite all the terrible gnashing of ice on the boat, the ship's alarm hadn't yet signaled so it must be ok.  I still couldn't sleep.  After another hour of continued icy assault, I gave up the pretense and hope of sleep, and climbed up to the main deck to watch the sun rise in the foggy white void.