Cruising
One of my favorite moments on our Alaskan cruise took place in the dining room. Two elderly people passing by stopped to interact with another couple having lunch. The woman was using a walker and her husband, following behind, was on oxygen. The woman said the last time they were in Haines, they’d taken a boat and then a railroad trip in Skagway. “We heard it was so good,” she said. Then she paused, tilted her head, and said, “Meh.”
They were going to try a different excursion this time. I had a hard time imagining what would be exciting enough, or epic enough, to impress her. Perhaps she had seen some amazing things in her life. Perhaps she had seen it all.
My main goal was to see whales, which I’d always wanted to see. My parents told of waking up in their hotel in Hawaii and looking out and seeing whales coming up the channel right below their room. I had a very dramatic picture of this event in my head, one that matched my mother’s enthusiasm as she said, “They were so big! They were right there!”
I did not really want to see orcas. I wanted to see humpback whales, preferably breaching or “bubble feeding,” a new behavior I read about in reviews of the tour we’d booked, whereby whales cooperate to drive a school of fish together and then all strike in several directions.
I’m not going to say whale watching in Alaska is underwhelming, but here is a photo. What you see is the whale floating near the top of the water. Spouting. If you are on a cruise ship, you cannot hear the sound of the spouting. If you are on a whale-watching boat and it is turned off and floating near the whales, you can, and that is cool.
Then the whale typically comes up and down a few times, and you see the hump of the back and the dorsal fin. And then the whale dives, and the tail comes up out of the water. The whale tail is the number one symbol of Alaska. I should have learned something from that fact. Not the whale, but the whale tail, is the symbol of Alaska. You can buy it in almost any form, including carved out of wooly mammoth tusk. There seems to be a lot of spare wooly mammoth tusk around for Alaskan carvers.
As we approached Glacier Bay National Park, we saw our first whales. People with their cell phones and binoculars ran from starboard to port side, watched, and applauded the tail. I took a photo of a man sitting reading a book on deck. He was not interested at all in seeing the whales. (I seem to have lost the photo!)
Of much greater interest to me, as we cruised in to see the glaciers, were the harbor seals, especially those floating along on glaciers. My sister and I had great fun imagining what they were saying to each other.
The glaciers, also, were stunning. I had wanted to see that water, see that blue ice. There were kayakers very close to the glacier which added perspective.
I find myself these days thinking a lot about what it means to be alive. Not “the meaning of life,” but just the experience of life. I find myself assessing periods of life, not my own necessarily but often others, that seem to be empty or lonely. I find myself wondering just how deep my experience as a “consumer” goes. Do I consume not just through buying things, but also buying experiences? Do I consume through a particular way of looking and valuing what I’m seeing (or not valuing as the case may be)? What is the nature of my consumption of food?
The first night of the cruise, we had been gifted a fine dining experience. However, we missed our reservation because we didn’t get to the boat early and then there was a safety orientation that took some time. Still, about 8, we were told we could still go to the restaurant. My sister and I went and I was very, very crabby. We were seated and it was clear we were about sixth in line for service. Everyone had come from the safety drill and we were seated last in the section. The waitress would not let us order — we had to wait our turn. It was clear we would not be fed, even if things went brilliantly, until after 9:00. It had been a very long day, a few hours in Anchorage, a very annoying 2-hour shuttle ride with an incompetent and insufferable driver who made a couple serious mistakes (including leaving the back door open, though thankfully no luggage fell out), the “embarkation process,” and the drill which required standing very close together for a long time and my feet were killing me. I was very, very crabby. Even looking at the glorious menu — everything seemed rich. Would I be going to bed at 10:30, exhausted and filled with rich food?
My sister endured my bad mood. I was not openly crabby or negative, but I did not want to be there and it showed. I wished I’d sent my friend instead to dine with her. We did entertain ourselves with our Hungarian waitress’s barely contained misery. She smiled as she placed my steak knife, but it seemed there was a very real possibility she might also suddenly turn and stab me. And then there was the woman who sent back her playful maple-glazed bacon on a clothesline, twice, claiming it was not cooked enough. When she said “raw, it’s raw” as they brought it to her a third time, I turned and saw the darkened slabs hanging from their line. “Not what I’d call cooked,” she said. The waitress and her husband convinced her to try it (she would not order another appetizer, of course) and she did eat it all, though it was not crispy.
Sadly at another table, a woman who was the spitting image of Judy Dench did not get her meal. If that had happened to me that night, I would have been so, so upset. She was so, so upset. We were getting our dessert when she was loudly asking the wait staff to just bring her some bread and soup, please, whatever was fastest to prepare, so she could eat and leave.
We fear Dame Judy did not have a good cruise. By the fourth day, she and her husband were spotted sitting in different areas of the theater during a show, and dining alone on opposite sides of the Lido deck dining area.
Lucky for me, our order went through. When the food started arriving, it was fantastic. It was truly one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Though tomatoes are not really in season, the burrata that came with my tomato salad was extraordinary — creamy and flavorful, it did not taste like fresh mozzarella, as too much buratta does. I wimped out on the crab legs (too rich) and got a small, perfectly cooked, very tender filet minon. A roasted beet salad side. We finished with lemon sorbet. I was not stuffed. I was totally satisfied. I was very, very happy. Good food makes me happy.
There was also an illusionist on board. The more he said his name, the more I knew I would never remember it. We actually saw him before the show, when we were out walking around the promenade deck. A man with unnaturally blond hair in khakis, a white undershirt, and fine black shoes, was picking up his Pomeranians from the deck, where they had just done their business on two boards, one grass and one dirt. I said, “Oh, I bet he can make those Pomeranians disappear!” He gave me a look I have tried to figure out a word for ever since. The best word, I think, is “arch.” He ducked into a “staff only” door. We talked about whether or not he was actually the magician, and what it might do with the Pomeranians if he were. Onstage, he said his claim to fame was winning the “people’s choice” award at a major Las Vegas competition. Well, the reason was absolutely clear. It wasn’t his illusions. It was the Pomeranians! His act was scarves and cards and making a photo of George Clooney appear, and some good sleight of hand with pink balls between his fingers, some of which were squishier than the one that could bounce. He cut an assistant in thirds, and made one Pomeranian disappear, which involved boxes and were the only tricks that weren’t obvious. At the end he made many, many scarves appear out of one scarf in his hand, sort of a cascading bloom of scarves, and at the end he had a ball of scarves in which was a Pomeranian, a good grand finale. He both made me sad and made me laugh.
The number of short Southeast Asian men and women working the ship, just those in plain view, was astonishing and also somewhat depressing. Somewhere an incredible amount of laundry and food prep (our report at the end of the cruise said over 22,000 eggs were served) and dishwashing was being done, and the steward came to fix up our room three times a day, and the nature of pretty much all relationships on a ship other than the relationships with those you are traveling with is mind-numbingly shallow. The idea the crew would have to start over again the following week, only a few hours after we were whisked off board, being asked where they were from and how long they’d been on the ship and what they did before that and did they have family… well, it made me think again of that “what is living like” question.
Overall, the trip gives one a glimpse at the world economy. In Anchorage, the company that handles baggage at the airport seemed to be 100% Native American. In Minneapolis, when I landed, the company handling baggage seemed to employ only Somalis. The spa on the ship seemed to hire primarily young African women. The restaurants and hotels in Anchorage had a large number of Eastern European staff. I could not have imagined it, but instantly recognized Ketchikan as the gritty, beautiful, down-on-your luck, adventure-filled town where many college and post-college kids go to try to make money in the cannery or on fishing boats during the summer. The main attraction is Creek Street, the Gold Rush red light district, which boomed during Prohibition and busted in 1952 when Alaska cracked down on prostitution, leaving behind the old, mostly black, madams in their houses on stilts, now historical sites.
Ironically, walking with the thick crowd down Creek Street, we suddenly got a very strong whiff of marijuana. A teenage boy, a local, ran out of the ice cream/coffee shack where he was working and loudly, full of moral indignation and outrage, said: “Right here, on Creek Street! He was smoking pot right here on Creek Street!” The plaques had not described Creek Street as a place of high moral values, but for that kid its only history was as a district of respectable businesses where tourists came to spend their money.
There were wonderful interactions, too. In Haines, we met and talked to a very interesting totem pole maker and saw his studio. The town mostly consists of an old government fort that served as an R&R location during WWII. Four of the vets came back and started a ferry after the war, keeping the town alive. Our totem pole friend, Lee, was the son of one of them.
Afterwards, my sister and I took an ill-fated trip over a giant hill, hoping to end up at a “beach” or river. I still had those salmon in mind. For me, it was a difficult walk, and it led nowhere, really, not near enough to the inlet. It turns out what we wanted was too far away, more accessible by bike than on foot. But in Juneau I realized what I’d been looking for — not a road along the side of a forest with scattered houses and the sole plant in bloom, fireweed, but some richness that was eluding me.
The whale watching tour was somewhat disappointing, but what happened afterwards was surprising. Our whale watching excursion included a salmon bake, kind of thrown in, and I had very low expectations for this. Our bus dropped us just off the main road (there’s only one road through Juneau), and we walked into a cheesy Gold Rush attraction. Lots of young people carrying bins — picking up dishes, delivering salmon to the grill, loading wood. A place where you could stick you faces in holes and pretend to be prospectors. Tents and picnic tables, a buffet. Very good salmon. Expensive beer. And “Dueling Banjos” on repeat. But when we walked to the creek we could hear a waterfall.
In two weeks, the sign said, there will be salmon running, which I would like to see (though I guess that can be distressing as the poor salmon throw themselves against rocks and many get bashed to death before they make it up the falls). We learned about the five different species of salmon. And also we saw what it means that Juneau is a rain forest. Although we’d been hearing that, all I could see was mountains covered with pine trees. You have to get into the forest — and it turns out you don’t have to walk that far to get there — to see the “rain forest” quality of it. I ended up taking a half dozen photos of this short walk.
I think it triggered memories I’ve been returning to often lately, of being in the Sierra. Either on camping or backpacking trips, I didn’t realize how much I loved my time hiking, sleeping, and swimming in the Sierra outside of Lake Tahoe and farther south in California. After about two miles of hiking, you get away from the crowds and can really experience the landscape. The granite and the glacial lakes and the trees. The Sierra have the added benefit of no biting bugs (though we didn’t have that problem in Alaska, either). But for me the experience of being in it, of being there, is what made it spectacular. I had a glimpse of that at the waterfall in the Juneau rain forest, and would have liked much more of that.
So, in the future I won’t be “cruising through” spaces, but going somewhere and staying a few days. The trip did not make me want to go to dramatic beautiful places any less — I have my sights set on the Canadian Rockies now. And I’m not kidding myself into thinking I could stay overnight in a tent sleeping on the ground ever again. I won’t get as deep into the places as I have in the past. And I’m so thankful I was able to go to those places when I was younger. But also, you don’t have to go very far. Just a few hundred steps beyond the salmon bake, it seems.
And back on the boat, we enjoyed the views, the food that just kept coming, the sunsets at 11 p.m. And each other. No small things.
