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Liprap's Lament - The Line
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Alaska Journal 7-13-2010
Swaying gently on the train to Fairbanks right now, so I'm stealing some writing time while Dan and the little guy are back in the dome car. Once again, we are in the "C" class and cannot go past the cafe car to the "Gold Star" oversized double-decker car. Not a problem, even despite a couple of queries from the little guy asking when we'd be in the "A" class. Not this trip.
Not many sights out the windows between Denali and Fairbanks - not like between Anchorage and Denali. On our way into Denali the other day, we passed a bright blue homestead close to the tracks, located in the tiny community of Sherman. The house had been whimsically painted that color with a big yellow "CITY HALL" on the outside - and, as it turned out, the owner of that house, Mary Lovel, was signing her second memoir at the bookstore in Denali. Also, we got on the train today to find that we have the same host that we had on the train on Sunday. We keep coming back into contact with the same people again and again and again...but of course, there are the ones we could live without.
Dan's biggest sources of frustration, aside from the little guy's behavior on occasion, have been other tourists, for the most part. Like some Chinese folks on the train to Denali who loudly and kind of rudely demanded and got an upgrade to Gold Star. Some guys on the same train who thought kids would stay quiet if they were taught to read; who wanted to prospect for gold, thinking it was easy money; and who thought there were no bugs in Alaska.
(Dan at dinner last night: "I haven't seen many mosquitoes at all here." Me: "I've seen a couple, but not like I thought I'd see." Dan: "Wait, there's one on your forehead.")
A few people on the bus back from the Eielson Center with strong Nu Yawk accents were also in that annoying number - they couldn't conceive of a trip without any shopping involved and they acted like they were entitled to see wildlife up close and personal while they were in the park (No guarantees there...really. We were lucky yesterday.). But the worst as far as we were both concerned was the cigar-smoking hiker at Exit Glacier. One whiff of that on the trail had us incredulous, curious, and, once we saw who was doing it, it had us running the other way from it. Ugh.
The thing that appalled me the most was hearing about an ATV tour that retraced the route the ill-fated Chris McCandless took to live in the abandoned bus in which he was found dead in the wilderness outside Healy, Alaska - a story told in Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild. My gut reaction was recoiling at the insensitivity of such a tour, and I wondered if his parents knew, what they thought of it.* The gist of the tour is, apparently, to discuss what McCandless did wrong...which seems to be a cottage industry here, judging from the loads of books available about surviving in the remote areas of the state. The books reinforce many truths and many myths about Alaska as a whole, I think...but then again, I'm judging most of those books by their covers having never cracked many of them open. From what I've seen of Alaska, though, one doesn't necessarily need extreme survival knowledge to live everywhere in the state.
We're coming up on Fairbanks. More to tell later.
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*Truth is, I haven't read Into The Wild in a long time, and I haven't seen the movie - but some current reading of mine gives a clue as to what McCandless' family might feel:
There is now a bronze memorial plaque in the abandoned junker bus where he died...on that washed-out road thirty miles from anywhere. It memorializes him as a beloved son. When his parents hiked in, or maybe four-wheeled or snow-mobiled in, to see for themselves where their boy died of starvation, they brought the plaque with them and installed it there in his memory. His mother left something else behind, too: a small suitcase of survival gear so this would not happen to another woman's son who for whatever reason may call that bus home or stumble on it during a wilderness trek. She put a first-aid kit, map, blankets, and a can of tuna fish in the suitcase. To the first person who needs it, that suitcase will be like a gift from God; the divine in her will meet the divine in a stranger.**
It's important to keep such lessons in mind. I hope the teachings from the ATVs are done with as much sensitivity.
While trolling a bunch of Alaska-based blogs last night, I found this one that is a must-listen despite its dating to the time of charter boat captain William Kruse's suicide at this time last month. What is also fact is that the implications on the individual and collective psyches of Gulf coast residents will be quite damaging for possibly longer than the oil will be in the Gulf waters. On slowly making my way through The Spill, a book of personal accounts of those involved in the Exxon Valdez disaster, I am sadly reminded of how little things have changed in 21 years. And even with the residents of Prince William Sound taking matters into their own hands despite Exxon and saying, "Screw this, we'll pick it all up in 5 gallon buckets if we have to," there will be many more years of eviscerating emotional disasters to come:
On Thursday, May 20th 1993, Bob Van Brocklin left a suicide letter.
“The stress from Exxon which brought about my financial stress, was too much to deal with alone. The end should be good and maybe my spirit will live. I have a lot of fear right now, but faith is all that is left. I wish I could have done more good for others but I guess my time is up.”
He was the former mayor of Cordova, Alaska. He shot himself.
He sat in Cordova High School on the 28th of March 1989, four days after the spill. Don Cornett had been sent by Exxon to talk to local fishermen and families.
Mr. Cornett lied to Mayor Van Brocklin and everyone else that day.
....Domestic violence, bankruptcy, alcoholism, and collective depression washed up for years following the Exxon Valdez crisis. Twenty one years later, the herring fishery in Cordova is still decimated – genetic lines of fish erased.
This is only the beginning. Being a fisherman isn’t what you do, it’s who you are – the Gulf of Mexico or Prince William Sound is just geography. The toughest fishermen can’t win; they drown in court. The erosion of identity is invisible compared to the black wake of an environmental oil disaster. My father told me suicide was a permanent answer to a temporary problem. The BP disaster isn’t temporary though. There is no end in sight.
Take care of each other.
Indeed. It is all we have left.
_______________________
I'm proud to announce, in close proximity to the anniversary of 8/29/2005, an anthology representative of the hope many local writers and bloggers kept alive in those trying times after the storm and the Federal Flood is being published. Details of the reading are below:
Gallatin & Toulouse Press announces the publication of A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans. This collection combines the vivid post-Katrina experiences captured by the best New Orleans bloggers with the work of traditional writers from the same period, cataloging some of the best-written and most powerful reactions of the people who experienced Katrina.
The book launch reading will be Thursday, Aug. 26 at 7 pm, upstairs at Mimi's in the Marigny. Open to the public.
Proceeds from the book will be donated to Hana Morris.
We are the ones the people like the lady driving the shuttle bus to the Denali Princess were warned about.
We aren't signed up for a cruise, and so we're not folded into any package tour deals...and even if we decide to sign up for something involving a guide, it's not going to be a deluxe operation.
What do we do? We stay in the lodge on our own reservation, and we call up the National Park Service and reserve space on an early morning shuttle bus to the Eielson Center located three-quarters of the way into Denali Park. We get ourselves up at the crack of an Alaskan summer's nearly endless dawn to get on that shuttle bus. And so it goes.
The shuttle to Denali's Wilderness Center had us stopping for a moose mother and her baby. We switched over to the Eielson bus, driven by a fellow who was initially a reticent sort - but he loosened up a little as we went along. It was a fantastically sunny day that caused us all to shed our jackets after our first bathroom stop. We passed over braided rivers, drunken forests, and on to the mountainous tundra. It was when we were making our way just past Polychrome Overlook when things took a whole 'nother turn.
We'd made it past most of the hairy, cliffhanging turns of the overlook (also nicknamed "Poison Point", as in "one drop'll kill you") despite the gasps of the girl sitting behind me. The tiny, moving dots of grizzly bears had been spotted across the valley - and it was then that the driver discovered the bus' left front tire was flat. Twenty minutes of waiting ensued for us until we could hitch a ride on another Eielson shuttle going our way. We may have gotten another set of wheels to our destination, but we'd also gotten a new driver who was condescending and not a little misanthropic in her tone. Thank goodness we were only going another 19 miles or so...those miles passed quickly despite stops for a wolf sighting and a caribou and calf in the road approaching the shuttle.
A quick attempt to hike to the outwash plain in the shadow of Mount McKinley/Denali led to a frustrated little guy, as he'd wanted to throw rocks into the river there just as he'd done at the Toklat River rest stop earlier in our trip. We turned him back to the environmentally friendly Eielson Center by convincing him that at least he'd seen a ground squirrel on the trail. Don't judge us - it helped get him on the shuttle out of the park.
Maybe it was the fact that the bus was going in a different direction, or the way our third, very sweet grandma of a driver was edging a tad closer to the steep drops of Polychrome than the first driver we had, or, probably, I was just paying more attention to the road now that I'd seen a lot of wildlife, but I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn't start gasping like the girl behind me had been doing on the trip into the park. The way down was indeed quite long - a film we saw when we got back to the Wilderness Center let us know Polychrome had been that way since the 1920's, when it had scared visitors so badly, some of them preferred to walk up rather than drive up that stretch of road. Thankfully, we passed through it without incident.
So we weren't a part of any of those fancy, overpriced package deals. Big deal. We still got to see caribou, ground squirrels, ptarmigan, moose, snowshoe hares, a fox, a wolf, and miniscule moving specks of bear and of Dall sheep on a gorgeous day that revealed the peaks of Denali to us, which is more than most park visitors get to see.
Who are we? We are "independents". And that's the way we like it.
______________________
All the pictures of our Denali jaunt can be found here. Click on the photo above to see a larger view.
Ah, the traveling family - we drive, we take a train, take some pictures, take in the sights...and then, when all is said and done at the end of each day away from home, we're all in our reserved-for-the-night beds watching Discovery Channel shows. Last night, it was Dirty Jobs; tonight, it's MythBusters. Now Dan wants to try to light up powdered non-dairy creamer as a direct result. Must keep him away from that stuff - which won't be too much of a problem, as he drinks his coffee black.
Yesterday - a drive and a trek to Exit Glacier, an icy finger on the Kenai Peninsula, where a gray, rainy day still yielded an incredible look at the bluer-than-blue veins in the glacier's receding mass. There was also a sighting of moose poop along the trail.
We went further south to Seward and saw a lot at the aquarium there. However, a large Steller sea lion, some harbor seals, a preserved giant squid, and lots of Arctic waterfowl couldn't quite erase the memory of the terrible all-beef hot dog we'd ordered for the little guy to have for lunch. We should have ordered three reindeer dogs and passed one of those off to him as a beef dog. Just a spectacularly bad food item. That abortive attempt at lunch was remedied by a great dinner at Jack Sprat's in Girdwood on the way back to Anchorage (What I didn't know until later was that this place was also in Girdwood, its claim to New Orleans fame being that Dutch Morial loved the food - but we didn't come to Alaska to eat Cajun cooking). A quick hotel switch after a look at the cost of the Sarah Palin coloring book ($12! Ummm, no thanks) ended our day.
Today - an exit from the new hotel room was accelerated by the fact that there was only decaf coffee available in it. We were headed for an early morning rendezvous with an Alaska Railroad train to Denali National Park. The ride was quite smooth, the conductor's Scots accent was quite strong, and, despite some more gray weather, the sights out the train's windows were well worth the trip.
Where we've ended up is the Denali Princess Lodge, across the way from another Schlock Street that Dan is convinced was imported from a similar strip outside of Yellowstone National Park. Tomorrow is another early morning as we kick off a tour of Denali Park. Dan is incredulous that a hotel like the Denali Princess doesn't have the Travel Channel on its TVs. I hope that the little guy and Dan don't catch cold from being in and out of the hot tubs that are all the way at the other end of the lodge complex. Ahhh, our traveling family...
I'm sorry, folks, but every time I've been seeing the Rising Tide tweets warning everybody that the cost of the conference goes up on August 1st, I've had this song in my head:
So, if you don't want the biggest earworm in your life plaguing your brain, do two things:
So, here we are. Amid the natural beauty surrounding this city is the fact that oil drilling, transporting, and exporting is a big part of what makes this state tick, despite its fairly recent, halfhearted efforts to change.
A Juneau paper Dan found on our first day in Alaska had John Minge, the chair of BP exploration in the state, taking pains to reassure all the Alaskans employed by his company that their jobs wouldn't go away just because the corporation criminally screwed things up much farther south. It's a "nothing to see there" attitude that burns me up, because it's working here. Up here, BP is the good, philanthropic, environmentally friendly neighbor sponsoring everything from the Imaginarium's kinetics room at the Anchorage Museum to the Alaska Native Heritage Center to an example of creek restoration near a trail edging the Cook Inlet. Distance and money make hearts here less likely to be sympathetic to the oiling of the Gulf of Mexico's shores, sea life, and bird life - well, except for the folks most affected by the Exxon Valdez spill in all the years since that day in 1989.
We move from this hotel to another in Anchorage tomorrow, where I'll hopefully be spared the sight of BP's Alaska exploration headquarters from our hotel room window, nor will I see any electronic agendas in the lobby containing dates and times of BP meetings. It felt good to give that building my middle finger as we passed it by earlier this evening - but their hold on Alaska won't be easily loosened. ______________________
Today was marked mostly by my son's general misery - not that it was a complete concoction of his stubbornness. He awoke in hurt, complaining of pains in his hip joint, which instantly had me thinking, "Oh, NO. Not again. Not here, not now," as I stumbled out of bed. He's had joint problems before, and I hoped the complaint was of that nature. An ice pack in the right place seemed to be of help - until we were off to breakfast and his misery really began.
The worst part of today was trying to juggle my husband's semi-dogged adherence to the trip's agenda and the little guy's physical ailment dictating how much the kid was into the day's activities. Truth be told, I lost it. The kid was milking his pain some as an excuse for not wanting to check out the Alaskan Native Heritage Center, but I also wasn't sure of Dan's approach to the kiddo's discomfort-into-major misery, which was to act like the whining and crying were no reason for the little guy not to walk around some and take in the exhibits and performances. I felt stuck, powerless to do very much except to try to smooth some sharp edges in the head-butting between them and to try not to lose my own mind - but I lost it anyhow when it came to going to Friday night services.
My feelings were irritated in general by the kid's attitude towards attending Friday night services anyplace; he'd have behaved the same way if we'd told him the playroom had disappeared from our synagogue back home and he had to attend the service with us. The whining and the cries got to me and I lashed out at my son. By this time, he seemed to have mostly gotten over his joint pain, even walking on some trails edging the Cook Inlet with us and playing at some playgrounds along the way. I thought he was being ungrateful and insulting to his upbringing and told him so. Anger coursed through me, lingering even after Dan told him we were going anyhow and our son ran to the bathroom, cried it out, then joined us in the car, a look of still-not-quite-pleased resignation on his face.
As it turned out, the kid conked out part way through the service...just when the rabbi was sharing his theory concerning what he really thinks the Exodus is - an allegorical retelling of Jeroboam's triumph over Judean king Rehoboam in the days after King Solomon's death...but, over the centuries, the allegory was held up as the major epic on which Judaism (and Christianity, to a different extent) is based. "Egypt" replaced "Judea", Moses took the place of Jeroboam - and the only clues that the Exodus might not have much to do with Egypt are in comparisons of the geography mentioned in Numbers 33:1-37 with what we've found, archaeologically, in the present about those places - all of them far, far away from Egypt.*
Mind-blowing.
Also mind-blowing? Taking my son out to a bench to finish his nap, a bench in view of the windows looking out onto the front parking lot and the gardens - and then spying a mother moose and her baby walking amid the shrubs and chewing on the leaves as though their lives depended on it, all while everyone else was grazing at the oneg Shabbat in the room behind me. Just incredible.
The two things that really made me angry yesterday:
I saw this machine at a mall near the in-laws' house and I instantly wanted to take a bat to it and throw it over the nearest railing, which, incidentally, wasn't too far from the machine itself. Like we go around putting earthquake simulation machines in the malls down south...I did see that a Hurricane Simulator is located at The Esplanade Mall, though. There are many others in malls in other Gulf states, judging from the website, and I just want to shake my head and wonder why there aren't at least some booklets with some information about the damage storms can do accompanying the machines. At least there's some of that with the 40-below simulator that was at the hotel we stayed in while in Denali. The hurricane ones simply have you pay $2 for the privilege of having your head nearly blown off in a person-sized container. Know what I now want? An oil disaster simulator. It may be the only way we get funding for the recovery of the Gulf of Mexico and its shores. I think we should begin by inviting Tony "Frodo" Hayward to cough up his pension for the privilege of getting dunked.
The Louisiana Science Education Act has ensured that this state can add urine to its education pool in the form of teaching creationism alongside science if a school district desires - and now that some in this state actually want to get it going, it makes me want to vomit. Link via Suspect Device.:
At its July 22, 2010, meeting, the Livingston Parish School Board announced its interest in teaching creationism under the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act. Actually, they did more than announce their interest. They proclaimed it. There are more Discovery Institute connections to this development than you can shake a stick at....If there was any doubt that people in Louisiana understand exactly why the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) was enacted into law in 2008, those doubts have now been dispelled. Our citizens have clearly connected the dots that link the LSEA and creationism....
Incidentally, one day the little guy had to get out of the swimming pool in which he was taking lessons a little earlier than usual, ostensibly for a safety lesson...which turned out to have been spurred on by someone vomiting in the other end of the same pool. We keep mixing water with too much crap these days. When will it stop?
______________________
There's a few more Alaska journal entries to come, don't worry. Our trip didn't end in Anchorage. Hang with me, readers.
“Louis,” a silent film directed by Dan Pritzker and starring Jackie Earle Haley, Shanti Lowry and Anthony Coleman, will premiere in US cities in late August with live musical accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis, renowned pianist Cecile Licad and a 10-piece all-star jazz ensemble...Shot by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond as a modern re-imagining of early silent film, “Louis” is an homage to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, beautiful women and the birth of American music. The grand Storyville bordellos, alleys and cemeteries of 1907 New Orleans provide a backdrop of lust, blood and magic for 6 year old Louis as he navigates the colorful intricacies of life in the city.
Early morning wake-up call from the cell phone alarm - the call to get up and off my sleeping spot on the floor and pack everything in the roomette to depart the boat at Whittier. I jump in the shower, towel off with the miniscule cloth they gave us when we rented washcloths, bars of soap, and bedding. I take a peek out the window and notice that the weather's the grossest it's been since we've been in Alaska. I dodge my husband and son in order to stuff clean clothes and laundry to be done in the same bag, put the room to pre-arrival rights, and make sure all the rest of our crap is out of the room.
It's off the docked boat and into the van ride that almost wasn't - because 2 other people who'd made reservations by email like Dan did were no-shows, the shuttle service thought we'd be leaving them low and damp, too - but thanks to some deft work with credit card information transferred to the dispatcher through the driver's cell phone, we piled in with some backpackers from France and the UK in time to get a short tour of Whittier. We waited in line for the only way out by car: the over 2 mile long, one lane vehicular and railroad tunnel that connects Whittier to the Seward Highway. Yes, I said ONE LANE FOR CARS AND TRAINS. Cars are allowed out twice a day, but if a train comes along, it has priority. Thankfully, there are no problems getting us into and through the tunnel (25 mph speed limit - slow and steady won out). We were told about a guy who got into the tunnel and took the opportunity to use one of the turnouts within to change his clothes, never suspecting that there were security cameras mounted in the tunnel. Ooops.
We saw some sun for the first time in days after that. Along the highway to Anchorage, we saw lots of mountains (the Chugach range), the 20 Mile River and its mud flats, the tips of a few glaciers, and some blessed blue sky before we dropped everything off at a hotel and grabbed a late breakfast in downtown Anchorage. Got a table at the cafe just in time to see a fire truck pull up. Firefighters entered the place and headed for a room behind the to-go counter. Turned out an employee needed some medical attention - but while the wait was on for the paramedics, I spied some people using the sight of a parked Anchorage F.D. rescue truck as a background for a family photo op. Once the EMTs came, it looked like those people were going to go one crass step further with their cameras and take some shots of the employee heading into the ambulance, too. Who does that? I told Dan about it and he took it as an opportunity to inform me about which nations boasted the worst tourists (i.e., people from _______ country going to other countries). Although Americans are up there in the bad traveler department, the French are apparently the worst. It was of small comfort learning that as I watched the picture-happy crew pulling out in their SUV with local plates on it - the older ones, not the newer, spiffier Alaska Gold Rush Centennial ones.
We walked along touristy 4th Avenue (can't decide if it's Schlock Street or Tchotchke Row - but it's quite trappy) and found only one shop that had anything of interest - coloring books based on a parody of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue and t-shirts that said Alaska: I Can See Russia From My House on them. Our true destination: the postmodern-looking Anchorage Museum.
The little guy picked some tiny strawberries off the plants at the entrance, then, after our ticket purchases, proceeded to the Imaginarium, where, aside from one walk through the Alaska history exhibit, he stayed until we went to eat at the museum restaurant. Dan and I took turns with the viewing of the rest of the place.
We finally extracted our son from the interactivity and settled down to a nice meal, marred only by the presence of a mouse in the dining room. A nearby construction site was responsible for some of the little creatures sneaking into the place in recent days - we got free dessert as a result of discreetly telling the servers about the furry guest without alarming fellow diners. A brisk after-dinner trek was livened by a quest to find the Sun and the first four planets in a solar system "planet walk" that began at 5th Avenue and G Street and ended at Elderberry Park - which just happened to have a playground.
More thoughts later. I'm still feeling as though I'm at sea on the Kennicott, especially when I'm sitting down. Plus, we were informed while in the tunnel that a 5+ scale earthquake had hit the Anchorage area last night. Guess I'll have to take my cues from the moving furniture if an aftershock occurs - because something in me thinks the waves are, even now, softly rocking the earth on which I sit.
Trying to be a responsible girl and wait 'til I get back to a library so I can check the books out instead of buying them. We're now thinking of redoing the attic room in the house, since a) we saw my sister-in-law's nice basement renovations and b) we've invited a number of folks from the ferry down to our place for Mardi Gras. It's going to take some bucks to transform it from a repository for throws, miscellaneous crap, and a cat box into and actual guest area. Must...curb...book...addiction...
We just keep finding new, more novel ways to keep doing this to the public schools.
Missed this study that the Golden Gophers' Institute on Race and Poverty did of New Orleans public schools post-8/29/05...but not by much:
The University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race and Poverty (IRP) evaluated the success of the rebuilding efforts in a new study -- "The State of Public Schools In Post-Katrina New Orleans: The Challenge of Creating Equal Opportunity" -- which found that the rebuilt public school system fails to adequately provide equal educational opportunity to all New Orleans students.
The study finds that the state-driven reorganization has created a "separate but unequal tiered system of schools" which sorts white students and a relatively small share of students of color into selective, high-performing schools, while steering the majority of low-income students of color to high-poverty, low-performing schools.
The study also finds racial and economic segregation in the city and metropolitan area to be a continuing concern, still undermining the life chances and educational opportunities of low-income students and students of color. It documents that school choice in the form of charter schools does not by itself empower students of color to escape the negative consequences of segregation, especially when it leads them to racially-segregated, high-poverty, low-performing schools.
The detailed PDF is here, all ninety pages of it. Some key conclusions:
Under policy recommendation #1, on pages 7 and 8: The charter school sector has been growing in a haphazard way in response to strong financial incentives and not because of their superior educational performance...There are also indications that the recent rapid growth in the charter sector cannot continue...Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that, in the long run, a fully charterized system is not sustainable.
The differences are not all that great between the performances of the traditional schools and the charters, but there are significant "tiered" differences between the OPSD schools, the BESE schools, and the RSD schools in the area...and "white students and a relatively small share of students of color" tend to be steered into the higher tiers of the OPSD and the BESE in New Orleans, while the majority of the low-income, nonwhite students go into the RSD.
These conclusions are not incredibly new...but they do come from studies of the schools in 2009. I don't think too many people will complain that they were done at a time when it was too early to tell how the "experiment" done on New Orleans public schools was working. Bottom line: we're coming up on the fifth anniversary of the Federal Flood next month, and we're still experimenting on the area's children.
I don't know how seriously the current "system of schools" will take this study; the fact that the study notes that the charters are set to expand even further in the city is a good indication that the various public school entities will keep taking a Social Darwinian approach to public elementary and secondary education for a long time to come simply because it's tough to stop a machine like that once it starts...and because funding for education is being eviscerated in this state in general. The testing, testing, and more testing kicked up too many notches by No Child Left Behind's policies doesn't help matters much, either. The region's unwillingness to diversify its economy will ensure that a pool of the poor will be constantly stirring about aimlessly in its own brackish waters unless many things change for the better.
How long will it take us to see that a willful ignorance and suppression of diversity will be our undoing? 'Cause I want to be alive when it happens. The way things are going, however...well, my optimism is a-fadin' fast.
The M/V Kennicott, built in Gulfport and working its way up the Alaska Marine Highway with us aboard, is in the fishing village of Yakutat...or it was. We exited Yakutat Bay and are now on the nonstop leg of our journey to Whittier.
Dan told me Yakutat wasn't much to look at - his reaction had been along the lines of this without the blizzard. He then heard a strange announcement on the ship just before it moved away from the dock...something about asking all nonticketed passengers to leave within ten minutes, when Dan thought nonticketed passengers weren't allowed on in the first place. Turns out the Kennicott's mess had been used as a prime restaurant location by some of Yakutat's residents, who had themselves a nice brunch on the boat in the early morning while the ship was docked. That was what passed for fine dining in the village, I guess.
The name of the game for getting one's sea legs is simply to get on the boat and roll with its punches - and I do mean roll - when the ship kicks itself up to 16-plus knots on the open sea. I'm sitting by the padded kids' area of the forward lounge, looking out the windows and marveling at how much the railing at the bow of the ship is bobbing up and down.
Yesterday, the boat's slow, calm amble out of Auke Bay and through the straits of the Inside Passage, combined with the fogginess clouding the horizon, contributed greatly to my feeling that I should head on back to our roomette, set up the lower berth for sleeping and hibernate in that den for the duration - meaning, until dinner came along. The ride was so calm at the beginning, and I'm so short, that, while sitting in a forward lounge chair and taking in the panorama framed between the top rail and a lower section of the deck's barriers, I could almost fool myself into thinking I was seeing blue sky peeking through all the fog. Alas, it was only the bases of the mountains closest to us that were visible, not clear skies.
All sorts of people are traveling with us: a Russian couple; adventurous, young backpacking twentysomethings; whole families. Dan met a family from Kentucky biking their way across the country on a five person tandem bike - they've nicknamed themselves the Pedouins, complete with a website and dispatches of their travels on a radio show. A couple from Ontario is looking to put their homemade canoe into the waters of every Canadian province. A pair from Kansas City hopped the ferry at Bellingham, took a tour of the Mendenhall Glacier while in Juneau for a few days, and hopped back on the Marine Highway system the same day we got on the boat. Lots of people, many stories, many travels.
So here we are, bobbing along the coast, keeping ourselves amused in any way we can. It'll be my turn to sleep on the floor tonight. There are movies playing in the theater almost all day. There's no cellular service out here. The Coast Guard requires us to hear the safety announcements every time we leave a port - the important things are to get your warmest clothes on, pull on your life jackets, and head to the designated emergency areas of the ship for further instructions by the crew. Examples of Alaskan art, awards and citations garnered by the Kennicott's crew, and blurbs on Alaska's history line much of the wall space of the boat and sun decks. It's important to remember not to take a shower until the ship is out to sea. Don't let your kids play on the outside decks or in the stairwells. You can visit your vehicle at the designated time each day.
We're sitting in a lounge a deck below our roomette waiting for the ferry to move off into the Auke Bay and head up the coast towards Whittier. This morning has already been a busy one - a walk through the state museum and a partially self-guided tour through the state capitol building took up most of it. Juneau has been rainy and foggy, with the mist lifting only a little to show the nearest evergreen-encrusted hills. The Travelodge's van driver told us she'd been born and raised here until she turned thirteen, and, as she put it, her mother got tired of the rain and moved them to Hawaii. Dan says the skies will be blue tomorrow, but by then, we'll be far from Juneau, halfway to our ferry's destination.
The ship has begun a slow turn away from the dock, and it seems most of the passengers are watching it from here. Everyone has settled in to varying degrees, whether it's people in their appointed cabins with private baths, those like us on the "sun deck", with our 2-berth rooms and our communal bathrooms (yes, I said 2 - Dan plans to snooze elsewhere on the boat or sack out on the floor of the room), or the folks on the solarium deck claiming a lounge chair or pitching a tent secured onto the deck floor with duct tape. TVs in the lounges show where we are on our journey and how fast we're traveling. There's a cafe, a bar, a gift shop, a video arcade, a movie theater, a vehicle deck, and a dining area in addition to the lounges. It's the Super 8 of cruises, I guess. Dan thought there'd be more people on board, but I guess the lure of a Norwegian Cruise Line package is too great for too many.
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We're excited. We're really excited.
The keynote speaker at this year's Rising Tide will be human rights journalist and Mother Jones' correspondent on the Gulf oil disaster at "The Rights Stuff", Mac McClelland. All the more reason to register for the conference, especially before the cost goes up on August 1st. Get it going, 'cause it's going to be a good year.
Need more on Ms. McClelland? Check some of Alex Woodward's interview with her at The Gambit's Blog of New Orleans, some extra outtakes from this article addressing the media blackout concerning the events in the Gulf. Contrary to what Jeffrey thinks, though, I don't think we'll be having to bail her out anytime soon.
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