[I
left off “The Last Frontier” with Part 2 on 5 April. It covered the first leg of the cruise down
the southeastern coast of Alaska, through the Inside Passage from Seward, where
we embarked on the MS Statendam, to Sitka, the capital of Russian America during the first two-thirds
of the 19th century. I pick up in Part 3
with the final portion of the sail south in the Gulf of Alaska until we docked
in Vancouver, British Columbia, for our final disembarcation. I recommend going back to read Parts 1 (26
March) and 2 before reading Part 3.]
After
departing Sitka at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 13 August 2003, our next port of call
was Juneau, the state capital. We had booked a long excursion here,
encompassing an overview of the city, plus a three-hour whale-watching cruise,
a salmon-bake lunch, and a visit to Mendenhall Glacier. (That’s the one I
mentioned in Part 2 that you can fly out to in a helicopter, land on, and then
get out and tromp on—but those flights are all quite expensive, and I didn’t
see any real need to walk on the ice just to say I did it.) On Thursday,
14 August,
the ship docked in the early morning, of course, and we got off at about 8 a.m.
to board
the tour bus. Finally, the weather caught up with us and it was pouring
rain in Juneau. This, as I said, is typical of the Inside Passage in
summertime, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Fortunately,
the rain came and went a bit (or we came and went in and out of it—I’m not sure
which), and it was less of a dampener, if you will, than it might have
been.
Our
first destination was the marina where the whale-watching boat docks, and we
drove out along Glacier Highway, Juneau’s one highway called simply The Road (it’s
all of about 14 miles long in toto; remember, this is the state capital you
can’t reach by land!), getting a little survey of the city, which is small,
like all Alaska’s cities after Anchorage. (Anchorage is a little over a
quarter of a million. Juneau is next with about 31,000 inhabitants, then
Fairbanks at about 30,000. Believe it or not, little Sitka is
fourth. The whole state has a little over half a million people—not counting
tourists.) The rain had slowed to a drizzle as we drove, and we caught
views of the glacier and the mud flats along the bay, which would be under
water by the time we drove back past them in a few hours. (As I said, the
tides differ by several feet from low to high, and they come in and go out
quickly. When we returned to the ship in mid-afternoon, the gangplank,
which had been on Deck 5 when we left, had been moved down to
Deck 4 to accommodate the higher water.)
The
whale-watching was terrific. The boat is enclosed (though you can go out
on deck if you wish), so drizzle and ocean spray aren’t a problem. It
wasn’t luxurious, but comfortable enough, with windows all around for easy
views. There was a naturalist on board to give us information about the
ecology and the wildlife, and the captain was a native Alaskan who knows the
waters well and added his observations. The boat supplied binoculars for
every other passenger, and since we had a pair of our own, Mom and I didn’t
even have to share a pair. There was even a small galley on board (it’s a
three-hour tour—propitious phrase), so coffee and snacks—mostly sweets and
salmon-based hors d’oeuvres—were passed around from time to time. There’s
no set route; the captain goes where he feels whales and other sea life might
be hanging out, and the other boats in the bay give heads-ups as they spot
stuff. Of course, we had a view as we pulled out into the bay of the
Mendenhall Glacier behind us, and we sailed through the extension of the Mendenhall
River as it flows into the bay, as I described in Part 1. (That’s the
opaque, glacier-fed river that flows out into the clear seawater bay without
blending in for several miles. I don’t know how long it goes before
dissipating into the ocean waters and disappearing.) This was a
successful voyage—they essentially guarantee seeing whales at this time of
year; they’re quite abundant as they feed in preparation for their return to
Hawaii to breed. Still, we got to see some uncommon sights—one even rare
and unique to Juneau.
Our
first sightings were lone humpbacks diving for food. These are solitary
animals; they don’t travel in pods, a fact that would be significant later in
the trip. Those well-circulated photos of whales rising up out of the
water, breaching into the air dozens of feet high—that doesn’t happen much in
Alaska. It’s behavior whales exhibit at the other end of their cycle, in
Hawaii. What we saw was a simple dive as the whale’s head comes above the
surface, usually preceded by a spout of water as the blowhole clears the water
in preparation for the breath the whale has to take to make its dive.
Then, as the head reenters the water, the hump appears above the water line,
and then the tail comes up in an amazingly graceful arc and reenters the
water. Depending on how deep the whale is diving, it will repeat
this behavior over and over every few minutes, moving along several hundred
yards at each dive. You can more or less predict where it will surface
next in each successive dive, so it’s easy to track the whale once one’s been
spotted (look for the telltale spout). Even though this is a repetitive
sight, it’s fascinating in its grace and form. It almost seems like
slow-motion as this huge animal arcs up and back into the water, and the tail
seems to hang there a little longer than natural, as if the whale has paused a
moment in mid-dive. All this, of course, has to be viewed through the
binoculars because the regulations prohibit the boats from going closer than
something like 300 yards from the whale. The engine is damped—the boat
can’t just shut down like the busses in Denali; it’d drift away—and we sort of
make a little circle both to stay put and to give both sides of the boat a view
of the whale as it dives and resurfaces. (The regulations also prohibit
more than a certain number of boats from gathering at one spot when a whale is
spotted. I think it’s three at a time. Like I said in Part 2,
the Alaskans are pretty protective.)
After
a few minutes, we’d move along to another spot where the captain thinks a whale
might be feeding, slowly meandering around the bay. En route, we spot
some porpoises, drawn to the boat’s wake to play. They were Dall’s
porpoises, named for the same man who identified the sheep we saw in Denali (Part
1), and they’re black and white, like small killer whales. (The captain
said that some people mistake them for baby killers.) Unlike the whales,
which are solitary and shy, the porpoises are playful and travel in pairs or
groups. They’re also very fast, especially compared to the whales—no
slo-mo here. You can’t catch them with binoculars because they’re under
the water by the time you get the glasses up to your eyes. There’s also
no warning spout like the whales give off—just a quick glimpse of the dorsal
fin as it breaks the surface first. But the porpoises follow
alongside the boat so closely, you can see them pretty well with the naked
eye—as well as their speed allows, anyway. Along the way, we also saw
some sea lions lounging on a buoy, and some others just hanging out on a rocky
little island. We also saw several seals in the water, close to the shore
of a small island, not far off from another feeding whale. (I gather they
chose that spot to catch the whale’s left-overs. When the whales feed,
they scoop up tons of fish and churn up the water some as they dive, surface,
and spout. This frightens fish, especially herring, and they head for the
surface to escape the noise and the bubbles. The seals just wait around
and catch what shows up.) We also saw some eagles, this time perched on
trees on some of the nearby islands—but they were really too distant to get the
classic bald eagle sight.
After
a time, the captain deadheaded for a specific spot in the bay. He’d been
called over by another boat to see something particular—he didn’t tell us what
it was. We joined a couple of other little boats—one was particularly
tiny, considering the size of the whales nearby—and waited a few minutes.
Then a couple of whales surfaced—it looked like two or three at first—and the
naturalist began explaining this phenomenon. Remember, humpbacks are
solitary animals; they don’t travel in groups and they don’t work
together—except in this one instance: a “bubble-net feed.” This is a
behavior that’s not only rare, but it’s unique to Juneau. Not just
Alaska, but Juneau. No one knows why that’s so, but it not only doesn’t
happen in Hawaii, it also doesn’t happen in Sitka or Ketchikan, either.
And it’s rare even in Juneau. A bunch of whales—this group turned out to
be about a dozen in the end—get together and instinctively set up a cooperative
effort to get more fish. One whale dives deep and makes noise to frighten
the fish, especially the herring, which are apparently the most susceptible to
fear this way. Another whale—and no one knows how the roles in this
co-operative are assigned or how the whales decide it’s time to switch
jobs—makes a kind of net of bubbles by blowing air out of its spout and
swirling around as it swims upward. As the noise frightens the fish
toward the surface, they get hemmed in by the bubble-net and channeled right
into the waiting mouths of the rest of the group of whales. These whales
just dive and surface to scoop up as much of the fish as they possibly can,
making simultaneous arcs that look like a whale water ballet. The arcs of
the surfacing whales, from the head, through the hump, to the tail—which is the
only part to fully break the surface and fly up into the air—are often
absolutely parallel, three or four or five whales diving in a sort of
choreographed succession. If you didn’t know better, you could think you
were watching Disney animatronics—it’s that perfect. Needless to say, we
watched this for some time before moving away. (Boats aren’t supposed to
hang around too long—I don’t know if there’s a specific time limit or if it’s
just up to the captains to decide—so as not to inhibit the whales as they feed,
and also to allow other boats to come in and have a look, too. Feeding is
their one and only chore in Alaska, to build up their blubber supply for the
trip back to Hawaii, where they breed and calve. If they don’t eat their
fill while they’re north, they don’t survive the journey south.) I don’t
know how long this behavior went on, but it was a remarkable sight—paid for the
whole day in Juneau, I can tell you. One remarkable aspect is that, on
top of being a fascinating phenomenon, the whole activity was absolutely
gorgeous aesthetically. (And, in case you can’t picture them, humpbacks
aren’t especially beautiful creatures—not like killers or blues. They’re
quite ugly, really—out of the water.) What a treat!
After
the whale-watching, we drove up to the Visitors’ Center of the Mendenhall
Glacier, the most accessible glacier in Alaska (maybe even North America—I’m
not sure). As I told you, not only can you fly over it in a plane, but
you can land on it in a helicopter. You can also drive up to it—-well, to
the Visitors’ Center; then you can hike out to the actual glacier. As I
said, I didn’t see the need to stand on the ice—seeing it from as close as the
grounds of the Visitors’ Center seemed quite enough of a visit. Not that
the glacier isn’t a natural phenomenon worth the attention, you understand, but
being this nearby seemed good enough for me, not being a glaciologist.
The Visitors’ Center provides a lot of information about the glacier (and
glaciers in general), as well as panels that describe the parts of the glacier
you can see from the building and its grounds. Then you can go out and walk
to as close to it as you like, depending on your stamina for hiking.
Mother elected to stick around the Visitors’ Center—she has trouble walking
sometimes: she runs out of breath for reasons no one has been able to explain
so far—and I walked a couple of dozen yards along one of the paths to a photo
outlook—essentially at the edge of the glacial Lake Mendenhall, which is where
the glacier terminates. (Mendenhall Glacier feeds Lake Mendenhall, which
in turn is the source of the Mendenhall River—the one that runs out into the
bay. Gets monotonous in terms of names, doesn’t it?) From across
the lake, with the binoculars, you can see many of the features of the glacier
quite well—though, of course, you only get the features that are at the end of
it. Just as a river is different at one point along its flow than it is
at another, so is a glacier. (I sound a little like Heraclitus of
Ephasus, don’t I?) Nevertheless, I felt I could get enough of a sense of
it from an easier vantage point for my needs. (Remember, I don’t care
much for roughing it. Hiking and climbing aren’t really my cuppa—though I
did a little in New Mexico to see some Anasazi caves and even in Quebec
to walk across the top of a frozen waterfall.) I won’t describe
the glacier in any detail—it’s much like many of the others we saw earlier,
except that this was closer and it terminated at a lake rather than the
ocean. Mendenhall is a hanging glacier (it doesn’t end in the water) and
it’s receding—several yards a year.
Glaciers
advance and recede naturally—though they may be helped along by such things as
global warming—and the earth is in a part of the cycle that causes many
glaciers to recede because we’re actually coming out of a mini-ice age.
The reason glaciers advance is that new snow falls up the mountain in the ice
field where they form, pressing the air out of the snow beneath the new fall,
eventually pressuring the old snow into nearly airless ice. (Contrary to
what many people think, a glacier is a river of ice, but not a frozen river.
It was never liquid that froze—it was snow that has been compressed into
ice over decades of accumulation.) As new ice is formed in the
mountains, gravity pulls the ice that’s formed down the slope. A glacier
recedes, contrarily, because less new snow falls at its source than melts down
below—and that’s mostly a natural, and cyclical, phenomenon. The
crystalline structure of the snow-formed ice is why many glaciers are blue or
bluish green in appearance: the crystals refract the light so that only the blue
spectrum passes through. Mendenhall is very blue. At the terminus,
where the ice melts, the blue color dissipates and vanishes because the
crystalline structure breaks down. (Icebergs can be blue or green in
color, too, but that’s from algae in the ice, not from light refraction.)
In all other respects, Mendenhall is just like the other glaciers in
Alaska—it has streaks of moraine (the dirt the ice picks up along its
edges as the glacier grinds along) and it pulverizes the bedrock into glacial
silt that clouds the waters of the lake—it’s a kind of blue-gray, with huge
chunks of ice floating in it (one of which looked exactly like a giant ice
canoe)—which, in turn, makes the river opaque (allowing you to distinguish
the river as it flows through the bay). Curiously, if you’re like me,
you’d guess that it takes many centuries for all this to happen, from snow
above to iceberg below. If so, you’d be wrong, much to my surprise: the
ice that falls off the end of the glacier is only a couple of centuries old.
That suggests that the glacier moves pretty fast, relatively speaking. I
mean, you can’t see it, of course, but you can measure it. If you put a
stake in the glacier at some point, you can come back in several months and see
with your naked eye that it has moved down the mountain.
Following
the glacier visit, we went to the salmon bake for lunch. The rain had
picked up again (or we returned to it, whichever), which was too bad. The
salmon bake is in a sort of picnic grounds—it’s commercial: you can just go
there, pay $5 or whatever it is, and eat your fill—which would be quite lovely
in its wooded setting, but we had to stay under the plastic tents which took
some of the charm out of it. Otherwise, the people were very friendly and
personable, and they had a folk singer/guitarist to accompany our meal.
And a dog that ran around and barked occasionally—just to make me feel at home,
I think! Except for the salmon, all the fixin’s were at cafeteria tables
(albeit, outdoors), and there was plenty of the usual side dishes—cole slaw,
potato salad, corn, cornbread, yada-yada-yada—all fine and plentiful. The
salmon was being prepared continuously on a series of large grills, and it was
a kind of Alaskan barbeque—there’s a sauce on the grilled salmon that we saw
several times elsewhere, too. It’s slightly sweet, though not
unpleasantly so, but I don’t know what it’s ingredients are. Some people
suggested that it contains brown sugar, and that would be possible (though
there’s obviously other stuff in it—it’s not that
sweet). Since I love salmon anyway—which is why we went for this
particular inclusive excursion—this was all fine with me, except the rain, of
course.
(It
was at this lunch that we first heard the news of the blackout in New York,
Canada, the East, and the Midwest. You eat at long tables, taking seats
wherever you can find them, and our nearest tablemates turned out to
be from another ship and had just heard the news. It was about 1
p.m. Thursday, 14 August, in Juneau, making it 5 p.m. on the east coast, so our
informants didn’t have any details—just the names of the cities that had been
hit. They didn’t even know then that terrorism or sabotage had been ruled
out. We wouldn’t find anything more out until we got back to the ship at
4—8 p.m. in New York—and turned on CNN in our cabin. I waited until after
Governor Pataki’s news conference before I called the young woman who was dog-
and apartment-sitting for me—that must have been about 9 p.m. EDT by then. It turned out that she was providing shelter
for her boyfriend, her dad—my friend Kirk—and several of his co-workers from
their midtown office who were all stranded in Manhattan. Apparently my dog was having the time of his
life with all the attention! I told my
house-sitter where to find matches, candles, flashlights; they’d already found
the old-fashioned, non-electronic phone I had in my living room that worked
without Con Ed’s power.)
Between
the rain, which had let up some by the time we got back to the ship, and the
blackout news, we never did get back out to walk around Juneau. That was
disappointing—though we can’t blame HAL for this one. It’s a shame,
though, because the way all the Inside Passage towns are laid out—along the
coast, with very little depth because of the mountain range just above them
all—almost everything is within short distances of the ports. Since we
were docked in Juneau, we could go on and off the ship pretty much at will (as
long as we were on board when she sailed, of course). In fact, since the
ship’s phones are satellite, and very, very expensive to call from, I hopped
back off the ship to make the call to New York from the dock. (It was
only drizzling a little by then.) Essentially, I could see all of
“downtown” Juneau from the Statendam’s
moorage—it would
have been pretty easy to walk around town a little under other
circumstances. (Once again, as would be the case in Ketchikan as well,
there were shops after shops, all catering to tourists, and most of them
jewelry stores! There were a few restaurants and bars—including the
somewhat famous Red Dog Saloon, a short block up from the ship.) After I
called home and returned to the cabin, it was too close to sailing to go back ashore.
A missed opportunity because of the weather and a technical mishap in the
Midwest. Still, this shore excursion, especially the whale-watching, was
worth the time and money. (Despite the rain and plastic cover, the
salmon-bake lunch was both fun and tasty. Under a sunny sky, it would
have been excellent!)
The
next morning, Friday, 15 August, the Statendam put in at
Ketchikan, a coastal town of just over 7,000 inhabitants. Like Sitka (and
many other Alaskan coast towns), Ketchikan is essentially a fishing
village. It’s also the unofficial totem pole capital of Alaska—there’s a
park with scores, maybe even hundreds of them. We got off the ship in the
morning and it was pouring rain—much harder than in Juneau. We were
making up for all that good weather from Anchorage to Sitka, and with a
vengeance! (Unlike Juneau, this downpour did not let up much—the lightest
it got was a steady drizzle. And just to make it all worse, this was the
first day of rain in two weeks! Ketchikan was having a “drought” until
the day we arrived.) But this was our last port of call in Alaska, so we
sort of had to suck it up, and plan to walk around a little later anyway.
But first, we had booked a town tour in the same vein as Sitka—expecting a
little survey of the town, the totems, and so on, and then some time to look
around on our own. Once again, we had been sandbagged by the descriptions
of the shore excursions provided by HAL. (If we had been a little more
secure about what we were doing, we might have opted not to book any excursions
in advance—you can do that individually in each port if you want to, or just
wander around on your own, or hire a car or otherwise make your own
arrangements. But, unless you have some idea what’s up in each town,
that’s hard to plan on, and the HAL-booked excursions, though they’re operated
locally by the same companies with which you can book privately, are all
guaranteed to meet you at the pier on time and deliver you back to the boat
before it sails. You makes other arrangements, you takes yer
chances. Remember what happened to the couple flightseeing in Denali
(Part 1); it’s much harder to rectify that on a boat that’s sailed!)
Anyway,
excuses aside, the tour was a drive through town, pointing out as we passed,
the famous street-on-stilts (Creek Street, which is where many of the little
shops are today—though it used to be the red-light street back when) and the
marina with the commercial fishing boats—though most were out at work by this
hour. Our destination was a salmon cannery—like the gold-dredge in
Fairbanks (Part 1), it was no longer operating (it had been a Libby cannery),
but was now owned by a company that was preserving it as a sort of
historic site—which required a short trek through the woods. Fortunately,
the trees created a kind of natural umbrella (and there were a stash of regular
ones on the bus, too), but it still wasn’t a big thrill to walk through the wet
forest. Like the gold-dredge, the cannery visit is extensive, with
detailed explanations of how the fish is caught—there have been different ways
through the history of commercial fishing in Alaska, but I doubt this would
really interest you; it didn’t me beyond a modicum—how the fresh fish is
prepared for canning (both our guide’s parents—she, herself, is a 5th-grade
teacher—worked at the cannery; so did her grandparents), how the canning itself
is accomplished, how the cans are steamed (the fish is packed raw and “cooked”
in the can), labeled, packed, and shipped. And, like the gold-dredge tour,
we were ushered into the souvenir shop at the end! (Gotta move them tchotchkes!) To be
fair, the shop does sell a variety of salmon products, from several kinds of
canned salmon (there are 5 species of salmon, not to mention the numerous ways
you can prepare them all) to salmon pâtés, salmon jerky, salmon chowder, and so
on and so forth. Most of this is quite good, depending on your taste, but
we weren’t in the market at this moment. (Actually, Mom was sort of
looking for a kind of canned salmon Dad had brought back from his business trip
to Alaska in 1960. She was never able to find anything she thought might
have been the same thing. We also used to get a packaged smoked salmon
chowder from a mail-order house which Mother hasn’t been able to get anymore for
some time now—we kept trying to see if there was any equivalent around.
In the end, though, carrying that kind of thing back home just seemed too much
hassle.) Salmon’s really big in Alaska, as you might gather! In
fact, the king salmon is the official state fish. (We did see the salmon running upstream to
spawn and lots and lots of dead salmon, the aftermath of that activity.)
Oh,
and one other little detail from the cannery tour. One of the ways fish
were caught in the past was trapping. It’s a practice that was prohibited
by the state constitution in 1959 when Alaska gained statehood, but a fish
trap is essentially a maze of nets out in the ocean into which the fish
are lured. In the center of this net labyrinth is a tiny, floating cabin
in which lives the trap master—all alone at sea, 24/7. Well, they had one
of these little cabins—they’re no more than 6′ by 6′ at most, with a little
bed, a shelf, and a wood stove for heat and cooking—in the cannery. It
was just sitting in one of the big rooms (the disused cannery space is rented
to local fishermen to store and repair their nets and equipment—this room had
piles of nets stored), a large wooden box, really. As we approached it to
leave the building—it was sort of near the exit—the door flings open and a
young man (a teenager, obviously a highschooler) bursts out with a
pistol in his hand. He’s wearing trousers held up by suspenders over
an old-fashioned undershirt. He starts a spiel—he’s sorry to have
frightened us, but he thought we were fish pirates. He’d been robbed a
few nights earlier, you see. Then he tells the story of how he came to be
trap master and what his work is like—it’s a little performance (and not bad
acting, either, all told), amusing and kind of clever, all in all. Kind
of a funny summer job, though. (Later in the shop, the kid was working
the counter, so I guess he has other responsibilities, too.)
So
after the cannery, which wasn’t uninteresting but, like the gold-dredge, was an
insufficient glimpse of the town as a whole, we drove back down into Ketchikan
(the cannery’s several miles outside of town, as you might imagine—it is a factory, after all)
and stopped briefly at a place called Saxman Native Village. Now, my
understanding was that Saxman was an artificial “village” set up as a sort of
living diorama—with native craftsmen and dancers living in houses sort of the
way people “live” in Plimouth Plantation, or maybe Colonial Williamsburg
(though people do actually live in Williamsburg—they just contract to dress and
behave as if they were in the 18th century). I thought it was a way to
see native arts and crafts in process, see some more totems (they’re really
everywhere in Alaska—you see plenty of them, both old and new, original and
reproductions). It turns out that all there really is is a clan house,
which you can’t go into if there’s anything going on inside (it’s authentic in the
sense that the local beaver clan actually uses it for ceremonials and rites)
and a large workshop where several native carvers are making totems, masks, and
other objects. There are, of course, several totems standing outside,
too. But the “village” turns out to be regular, ordinary modern
homes—they just are inhabited by Indians! It’s like a subdivision of
Ketchikan, reserved for Tlingits who want to live there. (It’s not a
reservation or anything, though I don’t know if the homes are subsidized—like a
Manhattan Plaza for Native Americans.)
Now,
the clan house, which is traditionally also a residence for several
families—sort of like a big dormitory—as well as a ceremonial structure, is all
painted on the outside, in that same Northwest Indian motif that I like so much
(except, of course, it’s a much bigger scale—duuh!), identifying the clan, and there are naturally totems
outside as entrance posts, so it isn’t a complete waste to see it. And
it’s always interesting to watch the artists and carvers work, but these guys
were especially closed-mouthed and unresponsive. There were two carvers
working that day, and when people asked questions—not even rude or stupid
questions, which you could understand might turn the artists off; they were appreciative
and honest questions about the work—one guy never opened his mouth and the
other gave some vague, short answers. There was also a young boy, the
nephew or grandson of one of the carvers, and he had a potlatch mask on
display—one he wore at the ceremony, not one he had made. Someone asked
if it would be all right to model it for us, and when his uncle/grandfather (I
just don’t remember—it wasn’t unclear at the time) said there was no reason not
to, the boy, about 11 or 12, just didn’t much want to do it. (He
eventually did, briefly and sort of grudgingly.)
A
potlatch, if you don’t already know, is a ceremony of thanksgiving. It
can be for any number of reasons—to celebrate a birthday, a wedding, an
engagement, a recovery from illness, or just gratitude for something good—but
the person doing the celebrating arranges the potlatch, and gives gifts to
everyone who comes—food or crafts and such, though today I think they give
store-bought stuff, too. Part of the ceremony includes dancing, and the dancers
wear these immense masks—they’re worn on top of the head, like a hat, rather
than over the face—which are not only very large (and held in place by the
dancer’s hands; they’re way too big to balance on their own), but elaborately
carved, painted, and decorated (with feathers, cloth, and any other medium
that’s available). The one the boy had, a bird—a thunderbird, I
think—with elaborate feathers as well as the painted carving, included eyes
that moved and a beak that opened and shut. As to why these folks all
seemed reticent, considering they were working in a place intended to be on
display to the public, we never figured out. (I talked to other native
artists later that day, in their studio-shops in town, and they were quite
voluble. The native artist on the ship also liked to talk about his
work—though, of course, that’s part of his gig, to explain his culture to
others like us; he works for the state. He also teaches traditional art
to Indian children. One of the Ketchikan artists I spoke to was a modern
artist who used the traditional iconography in his non-traditional works.
He had one beautiful glass plate, for instance—something new he had begun
experimenting with—that incorporated an eagle motif that was sort of his
trademark, appearing as it did in his prints and lithographs—and his T-shirts
and totebags, too. I’d have bought that plate if it hadn’t been too big
for my apartment. I even asked if he planned to make any more like it,
but smaller—he’s got a website, and I might yet check in to see if he does.)
So,
Saxman Village turned out to be less than I had expected—maybe because of the
tour operator or maybe because it just isn’t how it’s described. After
the somewhat frustrating visit to the workshop, we stood in the rain
briefly—under umbrellas, to be sure—and looked at the totems while the guide
pointed out the interesting aspects of these particular poles.
Totems,
in case you don’t already know, serve several different purposes—none of
them religious, by the way. Some people apparently think totem poles are
kinds of idols, but they’re not. They’re story-tellers. Some tell
the history of the clan or the village or the family for which it was made;
some tell legends; some commemorate a historical event, either from the distant
past or a contemporary one; some memorialize a dead person or honor a living
one; and some are actually funeral totems, with the deceased’s remains in a box
incorporated into the pole. Another fact that isn’t widely known is that
totems are seldom old—the wood just rots and the paint weathers eventually, and
they are replaced constantly by new ones—either replicas of the old one or a
new one with a new purpose. It is still a living art, though now the
artists who carve them get well known and are often commissioned to carve poles
for private or public display. Parks all over Alaska and British
Columbia, for instance, often have many totems ranging in age from half a
century old to a couple of years; new ones get added and old ones are removed
from time to time. In many cases, the explanatory plaques for the poles
give the name of the artists who carved them—like any other public art.
(The names of the carvers were on the totems in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, just
like Henry Moore’s name was on a sculpture in Queen Elizabeth Park. Only
fair, I guess.)
It’s
also true that though there is traditional iconography for many of the figures
that go into a totem—the clan symbols have the same kind of identifying
elements as, say, Greek gods (if it’s a female with a bow and arrows, it’s
Diana; winged sandals, it’s Hermes) or Christian saints (arrows in his side,
it’s Sebastian)—the form of a totem is pretty much up to each individual
artist. It doesn’t work like hieroglyphics—if you know the symbols, you
can interpret the story. A knowledgeable viewer can make good guesses,
but without the input from the artist, you can’t be sure. In other words,
they’re more like contemporary works of art than tribal icons that are
eternally the same to the initiated. The ones on display outdoors in
public spaces aren’t particularly old, as I said, and they were never intended
to last forever like Greek statues or Roman arches. However, because
they’ve become recognized as cultural and artistic treasures, old ones are now
preserved indoors, often in museums (but sometimes, just in a town hall or
cultural center). In Vancouver, we made a special point of going out to
the Museum of Anthropology, which is part of the University of British Columbia
and is way outside the main part of town, because it has a remarkable
collection of totems and other native art which is old. (Few things made
of wood are really, really old, of course. We’re talking a century, a
century-and-a-half, tops here.) Much of the paint had weathered off the
works at the Museum of Anthropology, and they are sometimes decaying in places,
but they are both aesthetically striking and very much like the ones being made
today.
Obviously,
some of the figures in newer ones represent people who’d never appear in
ancient times—Lincoln, for instance, and Seward—but the more traditional
figures are very alike in the old carvings and the new ones. It’s truly
still a living art tradition. (The modern artists do use metal carving
tools—though they’re modern adaptations of the original stone tools—and they
paint with modern paints instead of the traditional organic colors—though most
artists still use the hues their ancestors used. I never saw any totems
painted in pink or violet, though in some of the art and craft shops there were
other kinds of carvings in unlikely colors.) As striking as the totems
are when you see them displayed, I was less taken with them as pieces of art I
might want in my home (they do make small ones for souvenir and art
consumption, and some are as well-carved as any of the other art—though there’s
also a lot of junk, turned out by the hundreds) than I was with some of the
other forms. (I already have a mask—and I never saw one, aside from
museum displays, that I liked better than the one I bought in Seattle
anyway—but I began looking at drums, paddles, and “plaques”—which is what I
eventually bought.)
After
the stop at Saxman, then, the tour was over and we went back to the pier.
It was still raining, but since this was our last port in Alaska, Mom and I
decided we had to walk around a little anyway. Like the other ports, most
of the town is splayed out along the waterfront, right near the pier. We
took our umbrella (we came prepared, you see) and set out to look around a
bit. Once again, it was store upon store, mostly souvenir and jewelry,
except along Creek Street (the former brothel street, which is built on
stilts—it’s not a vehicle street—over . . . well, a creek, wouldn’t ya know). The little
shops along this funny little street were a little different. There were
a couple of actual artist’s studio-galleries, a bookstore—and a former brothel
called Dolly’s House that’s a museum. (There’s a greeter, or whatever she
is, who hangs out at the doorway, dressed like a madam, and invites—entices?—passers-by
in. At least I think
it’s a museum!) Anyway, this is where I saw the glass plate I mentioned
before—in the gallery of an artist who does modern work but uses his native
imagery as a vehicle. His prints were very nice, and if I hadn’t bought a
print in Taos—and if I thought I had any more wall space left for something
like that—I might have brought one home as my souvenir. The plate, which
was blue and red in a stylized eagle pattern which, as I said, was sort of the
artist’s trademark, was beautiful, but far too big for my apartment, as I told
you. He also had some pottery items and some sculptures—as well as the
T-shirts, bags, sweatshirts, and such that were obviously his tourist items,
though they had his identifiable imagery as the design. They’re probably
what pay his rent—and they weren’t at all bad for what they were. Hell,
Keith Haring made postcards and buttons even after he became famous and stopped
doing his subway panels. Art for the pedestrian: Can’t afford a painting,
buy a pin!
(You
know the story about Picasso? He got a letter from an admirer with a
check for $100 enclosed. The letter explained that the writer loved
Picasso’s work, but couldn’t afford any of his paintings or sculptures.
Could the artist do something for the writer for $100? So . . . Picasso
endorsed the check. Badum-bum.)
Well,
I never found my absolute right souvenir. I had an idea what I wanted, in
a general sense, but I never saw the exact thing. It looked like I was
going to have to get lucky in Vancouver—a lot of the native artworks we saw in
Alaska were made by British Columbia artists; it all crossed the borders
anyway, so I figured I could just as easily find an Alaskan piece in
Vancouver. (When I was in Taos, New Mexico, which is an artists’ colony
anyway, I passed up a nice print I saw in one gallery because the artist,
though a Native American, was from Colorado. I wanted a New Mexico
artist—and found him in the best of all locations, in terms of the
appropriateness: at Taos Pueblo. He was a contemporary artist who was a
Taos Indian—the shop was his mother’s house, though his year-round home and
studio is in Hollywood, Florida.) The rain finally got to us, and it was
getting close enough to sailing, so we headed back toward the ship, detouring a
little past some other shops on the way. These were the usual tourist
shops, however, and though there were often a few pieces in all of them, I
never saw The One. (My mask was ultimately from a tourist schlock shop—I
shopped around in Seattle and the same artists were available at the same price
range in both art galleries and souvenir stores—even at the Space Needle, the
ultimate tourist destination. This one shop—a real junk shop in all other
respects, had a display of a few dozen masks and totems, and they happened to
have the one I liked. You never know. As a matter of fact, the
carving I finally got in Vancouver, I got in another junk shop after shopping
in all the galleries that specialized in native art, and even the museum
shop. In Vancouver, though, the prices varied greatly.) Anyway, we
ended up back on board after a somewhat disappointing day—though not entirely,
as usual.
[Next
stop: Vancouver, B.C. The last part
of our trip to the Pacific Northwest was a visit to the largest city on Canada’s
west coast where the Statendam ended its voyage through the Inside Passage. Part 4 of “The Last Frontier” will cover our
stop-over there and our final trip back home to New York City. Be sure to come back to ROT for the (exciting?) conclusion to my Alaska
travelogue whenever I decide to publish it.
(I have no predetermined schedule for this series, so you’ll just have
to take a shot in the dark.)]
