Where Words Fall Short

Have you ever stood in an ancient forest, drifted on the open ocean far from land, or stood before a vast desert and found yourself lost for words?

Have you returned home from a magical wilderness experience only to realise your photos and videos barely scratch the surface? You try to describe the place to friends, fumble for language, and eventually surrender with, “You just have to go yourself.”

For fourteen years I’ve had the rare privilege of making a seasonal migration south to the frozen continent. The continent that helps regulate Earth’s climate. The only continent without Indigenous people. The only continent governed by a hopeful and collaborative treaty. The continent early philosophers knew as terra incognita. The continent named as the opposite — the anti — of the Arctic.

And once again, as I migrate home to Tasmania and review the hundreds of images — still and moving — that I’ve captured, I find myself questioning the words I’ll use when the inevitable question comes: “How was it?”

When guests arrive aboard the vessel that becomes our platform for exploring the iced waterways of the Antarctic Peninsula, they often ask me, in different ways, to describe what they are about to see. I tell them, “It’s not what you will see — it’s how you will feel that matters.” They look bemused. I continue, “In five days’ time, you’ll face the same dilemma I’ve faced for fourteen years: your words and images won’t do it justice. Then you’ll need to find the words.  So, good luck.”

And so it is. Five days later — after watching penguins feed chicks on the nest, witnessing colossal icebergs fracture and drift away, seeing the immense blows of whales break the surface of glassy water studded with ice jewels and standing before peaks thrust from the sea, clad in ice and glaciers that stretch the limits of comprehension — it all comes back to a feeling.

And the challenge is that connection resists explanation. Just as philosophers have tried for millennia to explain love, travelers — and now ambassadors — to this great continent, attempt to explain Antarctica. Yet it is this deep, felt connection that matters most, because we protect what we come to know, and we come to know places first through feeling.

The beauty lies in the trying, even when one cannot describe the indescribable.

You’ll just have to go yourself.