I had come a long way to see Glacier Bay National Park in the only way I knew I could: From the deck of a cruise ship.

I could never touch a glacier this way, of course; could not even chill my fingers in the icy waters. But you have to compromise sometimes, and I was willing to concede the tactile for the visual and – I was to discover – the aural. 

But first the national park service had to commandeer the boat. I watched them swarm on in the morning as our ship neared the bay. They came out in a craft dwarfed by our cruiser, handed bag after bag of goods up on the deck, and then scaled the ladders themselves. Educational pirates in full commando mode.

They shuttered the ship shops, darkened the casino, turned the forward lounge into a headquarters and effectively announced that we were no longer on a pleasure cruise: The m/s Zaandam had become a floating NPS visitors’ center, and we were going to learn something, dammit.

This was fine with me. There is only so much pleasure cruising I can stand – only so many buffet meals I can eat without feeling fat, only so many song-and-dance shows I can watch without feeling awkward.

But not all my fellow passengers were in a learning mood. As the ranger narrated our trip through the bay – and not in a smoothly trained cadence, but with a twang that betrayed his Missouri-by-way-of-Texas roots – I could hear some folks grumble. A guy at the rail, a bone fide Alaskan hovering over his camera, said he flat-out hated it: “Why don’t they just shut up and let us be amazed?”

Still, I liked knowing that it was at this point in the bay that the retreating ice once amazed 19^th-century naturalist John Muir. That those bumps on the shore are sea lions. That the glacier over there is known as Reid and this one coming up is Margerie.

It was at vibrant blue Margerie that our ship lingered, waiting for the calving ice that cannot be guaranteed but is certainly expected. Four times we saw it and, more impressively, heard it: A thunder that seemed to echo back into the glacier itself, as if the tightly packed crystals of ice were vibrating from the shock.

Certainly the folks around me, having gotten what they came for, seemed to become more accepting of the intermittent narration that continued on into the next inlet. Even the weather seemed to cheer up and turned Alaska-balmy as we moved, passing from the frigid glacial breath – blowing silt down the dirty brown Grand Pacific glacier – to the relative calm of silver-gray Johns Hopkins.

Maybe we all finally relaxed. Most of us went into Glacier Bay with one goal: To see and hear the ice fall. But there was no guarantee it would happen. And until it did, we were a little tense: What if we had come all this way and only saw ice the color of Windex? I mean, that’s cool, but everyone back home was going to ask if we saw any calving. We expected to experienced nature as spectacle.

So once it happened, I could stand back, take a breath, and finally marvel at where I was. I could regain the stillness that, at heart, I most desire in our natural parks. After all, I was sailing through a mountain range – which is the unobvious truth of Glacier Bay – hovering on a surface of water between snowy peaks, a long way up and a long way down and a long way from home.