Hello friends, reporting in after our first 24 hours. We made it to Midway!
What hit me first when we landed was the incredible color of the lagoon that surrounds the island—a brilliant shade of impossibly luminescent turquoise, ringed by the deep sapphire blue of the Pacific all around. The color is so strong that it tints the clouds overhead a bizarre shade of blue-green, which if photographed would just look like a bad Photoshop job.
Yesterday evening the sky over the island was filled with more than a million petrels—gorgeous seabirds that wheel and dive like bats. It was an astonishing sight, especially as the evening gave way to a star-filled sky. We took a nighttime walk on the beach under the brightest view of the Milky Way that I have ever seen.
This morning I took off early by bike with camera gear on my back, and explored an abandoned World War II runway littered with the decaying carcasses of albatrosses—virtually all of their bellies filled with plastic junk. Talking and reading about it from home was one thing, but seeing it here in person carries a much different feeling. I made my first photograph, and felt myself sink one increment into the profound story that this island has to tell.
~cj
