October 14th, Sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E

The bell rings on deck, that means there's something to see.  "Ayeaah," says the captain, usually a man of few words, "seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass.  I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North."

Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck.  The bears don't seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious.  We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it's probably been there for months.

"Ooohhh..." someone says, "it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film."  "Hey," someone else has a bright idea, "let's put those binoculars over a camera lens, see what kind of effect comes out."

We watch the bears eating and playing for hours.  It's impossible to pull our eyes away.  The raw reality of nature holds us transfixed.  A couple of us remember Werner Herzog's line in Grizzly Man, where the great director announces, coldly, "People think nature is beautiful, but I do not agree.  To me it is nothing but a realm of cruelty, survival, and the relentless search for food."  With his beautiful documentaries Herzog shows that notion is just a pose, for he loves nature and has truly succeeded in revealing it in art, cutting far beyond the clichés and the preset stories of the wild we are all so used to.

Sure, I could tell you them all:  the sea was rough, the cameras and computers were pitching to the floor.  Wine glasses were breaking, milk spilled onto the floor.  Waves from the sea sprayed us head to toe in the tiny zodiac as we made rough we landings on shore.  The light is indescribable, the snowy peaks stretched into the distance forever.  The immense loneliness zeros straight in on the sublime, where the land is great because we are so small.

I tell you those things and all of them are true.  But we are artists, not tourists, so it should not be enough to be impressed by walruses and polar bears.  But we all love the polar bears!  Their bloody faces smile as they chew on rancid whale meat.  You don't become an artist by denying any tourist instincts. We all want to see and love the world.

Just as artists in the Age of Exploration were the only ones to offer up images grand and graphic enough to show people back home what the far reaches of the globe can offer, today we must cut through a world saturated with images and stories to see if there can still be a fresh way of expressing one's experiences on the journey, careening through the sea and back and forth from the frozen, empty land.