The Last Frontier, Part 4: Vancouver, British Columbia

[This is the final installment of my Alaska travelogue, covering the added visit to Vancouver, British Columbia, following our disembarkation from the MS Statendam and the voyage down the Inside Passage.  My mother and I stayed in Vancouver for two days before flying back to New York City.  I suggest that readers turn back to read the first three parts of “The Last Frontier,” posted on 26 March and 10 and 25 April, before reading this last segment.]

After reboarding the ship in Ketchikan on Friday, 15 August 2003, we set sail at about 6 p.m. for Vancouver.  The rest of that day and all of the next, the Statendam cruised along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia.  Aside from scenery-watching, the ship provided nothing of special interest for the day.  (There were the usual nonsense activities—”final” art sales, “final” pastime activities, and so on—but nothing I’d have been interested in.)  There was a briefing about preparing for debarkation and the process of passing through customs and immigration into Canada the next morning, and instructions about filling out the necessary forms and attaching the appropriate luggage tags.  Then, of course, we had to pack and tag our luggage so we could put it out in the gangway before we went to bed and fill out the customs and immigration forms; we had to settle the ship bill, too, of course.  Other than such mundanities, however, it was a day mostly of just relaxing and watching the coast go by. 

The ship docked in Vancouver early the next morning, Sunday, 17 August, and all the passengers had assigned debarkation “codes” that determined when we got off the ship.  (This is obviously to assure that people with connections can make them without having to struggle through crowds of other passengers who are just trying to get early starts on their own schedules.  It’s actually pretty efficient.)  We had requested the earliest possible departure so we could get to our Vancouver hotel without wasting the whole day.  The luggage had been transported off the ship first thing and was waiting in the appropriate spots in the terminal, depending on your departure plans, so all we had were our carry-ons.  We had a moderately late breakfast in the informal dining room and then just hung around there—we had to wait in a “public” area, not our cabins, and listen for our code to be called—until we were called and told which gangplank to use.  (To prevent people from standing around blocking the ladders and gangplanks in anticipation of getting off, the codes aren’t called in any logical order and the exits are alternated—you can’t guess when or where your group will have to go.  So it pays just to sit some place comfortable and wait.)  We debarked at just about 8:30 or so and made it through the departure process pretty directly.  We were in a cab and at our hotel by 10 a.m. or so.  In fact, we got to the hotel early enough that our rooms weren’t even ready yet.  We had been warned that it might take hours to get through the debarkation process and through customs and immigration, which is why Mom didn’t book a return flight for that afternoon.  Of course, if she had, we wouldn’t have had two nice days in Vancouver at the end of our trip.

We had decided, once again, to take a city tour right off so we could get the lay of the city.  City tours took off in the morning and then at 2 in the afternoon (which we had learned from both the guidebooks and various websites I consulted before we left), and we had obviously decided to try to get on an afternoon trip the day we arrived.  We booked a tour when we checked into the hotel, and then went window shopping along Robson Street, where our hotel is located and which is the main shopping street of Vancouver.  We walked up the street several blocks, just strolling along looking in the store windows—many were not open yet on a Sunday morning, though they would be later in the day—until we arrived at the major intersection.  We found ourselves in front of the Vancouver Museum of Art, so we decided to go in for a look while we were there and had the time anyway. 

This is the regular art museum of the city, the contemporary and western art collection—the native stuff, as I said, is at the Museum of Anthropology, some distance from downtown.  We’d go there later.  It seems, however, that Canada just isn’t very good on contemporary art.  We had made a point to go on our own to the Quebec Art Museum when we were there, and it’s a very unappealing collection—and so is Vancouver’s.  (I certainly have never heard of any Canadian artists—and I guess this is why.)  There was an exhibit of works by “First Nations” artists (in case you didn’t already know, that’s the Canadian version of “Native American”) which was interesting, but not great.  I’ve seen many examples of Indian artists’ work, both live and in books, and there are many that are wonderful; these were more interesting from a sociological perspective than from the perspective of works of art.  Another exhibit here is a collection of paintings of the first local artist to record the native culture in British Columbia, Emily Carr (1871-1945).  She was essentially a realist—maybe a romantic realist, if there is such a designation—who painted scenes of Indian villages, totems, masks, ceremonies, and so on.  But her work is dark (in hue, I mean, not necessary in emotion) and somber, and not particularly interesting as art.  (I wouldn’t want one hanging in my home, that’s for sure.)  I mean, if you consider what she did, again from a sociological point of view—painting Indian culture at a time before it was considered worthy of preservation, much less interest—it was remarkable that she did it; but if you look at her paintings as art, from just an aesthetic point of view, well . . . yuck! 

Anyway, by now it was time to go back down the street to change clothes a little and meet our tour.  We weren’t really hungry for lunch, but we knew we would be at an inopportune time later if we didn’t catch a bite, so we strolled back toward the hotel and stopped in at a pub-type place and had a sandwich (which actually turned out to be huge) and looked in a few more windows.  (I actually found a carving I liked and which seemed to be a good price—it was on sale—but I was uncomfortable buying it on my very first afternoon right up the street from the hotel, and also because the salesgirl kept warning me that it might not be around the next day.  That kind of put me off.  I turned out to be right—though Mother kept saying I should go back and get it.  The next afternoon, I found work by the same carver at lower prices than the sale price in that store, and eventually found a piece I liked better for a whole lot less than either price!)

The tour was pretty much what we expected, and we did get a sense of the city.  Except that Vancouver is built sort of upside-down—what feels like north is actually south—and we just never got our sense of direction right.  We’d look at a map, and be totally confused because what we felt was “up” on the ground was actually “down” on the map.  So much for getting a feel for the city!  (Of course, I’m not necessarily the best one to judge.  I’m the guy who comes out of a subway in New York City and heads off in the wrong direction because I have no sense of geography—and I’ve lived in New York for almost 30 years.)

Anyway, we did go over most of the city, including Chinatown—the third largest in North America (after New York City and San Francisco, I believe)—and Gastown, a kind of Greenwich Village or Gaslight District (in San Diego) that’s where Vancouver started a little over a century ago.  (British Columbia is relatively new, as far as settlement is concerned.  Vancouver was essentially invented by the Canadian Pacific Railroad barons as the terminus of their new railroad.  It had been nothing but a trading post and a lumber camp before that.  Nothing in Vancouver is much more than 100 years old; it was founded around 1875 (as Granville) and only named Vancouver in 1886.  Most of the modern city is very, very new.)  Both Chinatown and Gastown are near the downtown area where our hotel was located, though it’s too much for Mom to walk comfortably.  Vancouver is pretty hilly, like a little San Francisco, because the mountains start pretty much right up from the coast.  We took busses, including two out to the Museum of Anthropology the next day. 

Despite all the new buildings and even the Victorian-era oldies, Vancouver didn’t strike me as a particularly pretty city.  (Vancouverites have a predilection for round buildings for some reason.)  And there’s a lot of construction going on everywhere, which doesn’t help.  It’s obviously a booming city economically—well, for Canada, that is.  Compared to New York or Los Angeles, or even Chicago and San Francisco, it’d be called downright mellow.  Stores on the main shopping strip closed on Sunday morning?  Never happen here!  And when we arrived too early to get into our hotel, we took a short stroll around the downtown area.  There was almost no car traffic!  We’d wait at lights, and no cars would go by.  (By the way, it’s an odd thing, but if you jaywalk in Vancouver, and a car does come by . . . it’ll stop to let you cross!  Even though you’re jaywalking in the middle of the block, nowhere near a crosswalk, the driver’ll stop and let you pass.  Try that in New York City!  German drivers will stop for pedestrians—but you have to be in a crosswalk.)

The city tour got us back to the hotel after 6, and we had made reservations for dinner at a First Nations restaurant, so we took a little down time.  We took a taxi to the restaurant, which wasn’t far but we didn’t want to walk the hills or get disoriented as we had begun to do.  The restaurant, Liliget (which means something like “happy eating”), was very interesting.  It’s set up like a native feast house—you sit on the floor, but the tables are set into pits so it’s like sitting at a bench, not Japanese style—and the menu features foods common to the local Indians: elk, buffalo, duck, and lots of seafood (especially salmon, of course).  I’d have liked to try the meat dishes, but they were only on a feast platter, which was huge even for two people, so we had to opt for the seafood dishes.  I had what amounted essentially to an Indian bouillabaisse, but in a tomato-based “broth,” and it was quite good.  Mother had crab cakes—which look a lot like the ones you get here (or, more appropriately, in Maryland), though they’re made from Dungeness crabs instead of blues.  (For some reason, Dungeness crabmeat shreds; it doesn’t come out in nice lumps like blueshell.)  We also had bannock bread, which the natives learned to make from tribes to the east and south.  It was an interesting experience, and a very nice meal.  (I still wish I could have found out what elk tastes like.  Probably like venison, I’d imagine.  We did eventually get to taste reindeer sausage, by the way—after the disappointment at Denali.  It was served at one poolside lunch on the boat and then at the cannery in Ketchikan.  It’s very good—a little spicy, though I don’t know if that’s the meat or the way the sausage is made.  So, as awful as it may sound to some folks, I’ve happily eaten Bambi, Thumper, and now Rudolph!  Ya wanna make somethin’ of it . . .?)

The next morning, Monday, 18 August, we went into Gastown (named for “Gassy” Jack Deighton, a frontier character who built a saloon there to serve the lumbermen, thus starting what would become Vancouver; “Gassy” refers to his tendency to talk a lot and tell tales—no smart-ass remarks, please—it’s a Canuck sobriquet, not what Americans might otherwise think).  This is where most of the galleries that specialize in native art are located, so I wanted to check them out anyway.  It’s not a large district, and the principal street, Water Street, is only a couple of blocks long, so we took a bus over and walked from one end to the other on one side of the street and then crossed over and walked back.  We checked out the named galleries and all the little tchotchke shops in between.  Except one or two of the galleries which featured “real” art (as opposed to folk art or crafts, if you get my distinction; “high” art, I guess it would be called), which had some terrific things at some very high prices, the things in the other named shops (“named” in the sense that they were listed in guidebooks, or advertised in tourist magazines and art brochures like the one we picked up at the art museum) were of the same quality range as the junky shops, and usually had higher prices.  (They did also have a larger selection most of the time, too, and a greater variety of objects—masks, plaques, drums, paddles, figurines, prints, and so on.)  Since by this time, I had pretty much decided what I wanted, and the matter was only of finding the right price, quality, and image, it was relatively easy to sift out what I wanted to consider from anything that I could just dismiss.  Ironically, it was in one of the last stores—one of the junky ones, too—where I found the piece I ended up buying.  (It was even on sale, and then the shopkeeper ate the sales tax to boot.  I’d have taken the piece anyway, but what the hey!) 

(By the way, “Gassy” Jack’s story is somewhat amusing: He came to the area when there wasn’t any town, just a lumber camp.  He convinced the lumbermen to build him a saloon in which to serve them, and they did.  In one day!  Tom Sawyer—or was that Huck?  Don’t remember—didn’t have nothin’ on ol’ Gassy Jack!)

After checking out one or two galleries just as “museums” (we weren’t buying, just looking), especially one that specialized in Inuit art, we headed back to the hotel by bus.  (The Inuit gallery was interesting to me because I had bought an Inuit sculpture in Quebec two years ago, and I had read about Pudlo Pudlat, an Inuit artist on whom I did some research some years ago.  He’s dead now, but he’s fairly well known.  (I published “Pudlo Pudlat, Inuit Artist” on ROT on 28 September 2009.)  I saw some of his stuff on exhibit in Quebec, but I spotted one of his lithographs in this Vancouver gallery.  I’m sure the gallery owner was astounded to hear me drop Pudlo’s name; how many browsers would 1) know the name or 2) spot his work behind the sales counter?  We had a brief exchange about Pudlo’s work.)  We realized we weren’t going to make it to Chinatown if we were going to go out to the Museum of Anthropology, which I insisted on, so we had dim sum for lunch at one of the recommended Chinese restaurants which just happened to be right across the street from the hotel.  We had stopped in at the hotel briefly for a quick refreshening, had our dim sum, and took the bus all the way out to the U.B.C. campus—two busses, actually—to see the Museum of Anthropology collection of native artifacts.

We’d had a little consternation over the Museum of Anthropology after we arrived in Vancouver.  We hadn’t considered that our only full day in town would be Monday, a day many museums are traditionally closed.  It was Sunday evening when we realized this, and we asked the hotel concierge to check if the Museum of Anthropology would be open the next day.  He looked it up in an information booklet the hotel keeps, and reported that the Museum of Anthropology was, indeed, closed on Mondays.  Something told me this wasn’t accurate, and I checked the Fodor’s guidebook for Vancouver I had brought from the library here.  It was a 2003 edition, so it was as accurate as a guidebook could be, and it said very specifically that in the summer season, the Museum of Anthropology is open Mondays.  (It is closed that day after the summer, suggesting that the concierge had looked at the off-season schedule by mistake.)  Of course, one or the other source could have been wrong, but the dichotomy meant that we should check again more carefully.  On our way out to Gastown the next morning, I asked the concierge then on duty—a different guy—to check again, and he called the museum.  It wasn’t open at that hour, but the recording clearly said it was open till 5 every day and later on Thursdays or something.  So after our trip down to Gastown and our dim sum lunch, we took the busses as instructed out to U.B.C., found the museum (which is on the other side of the campus, but a pleasant enough walk—including through a formal rose garden where Mom could stop for a brief rest) at about 3:30.

We spent an hour-and-a-half at the museum looking at the totems, masks, paddles, and other carved, painted native British Columbia artifacts.  (The Museum of Anthropology, which is part of the university’s anthropology department, also has exhibits of artifacts from other cultures from around the world, but our interest was in the local Indian stuff.)  These things were relatively old for the most part, of course, removed from sites where they were deteriorating from exposure to preserve them.  Some of the examples of totems and masks and such on exhibit here were obviously outstanding and special, with particularly expressive or unique features, but it was clear that the techniques of the work, especially the carving (since the painting was necessarily faded on these examples), were the same as the modern works we’d seen all along our trip.  (For more discussion about totems and native carvers, see Part 3 of “The Last Frontier,” 25 April.)  Today’s carvers may be using metal tools and chemical paints (and getting paid cash for the work, perhaps), but they are doing the same work their predecessors were doing a century and more ago (and, I presume, before that as well).  I never saw any evidence that the real artists used power tools (the hacks turning out the souvenir totems and masks might—probably do, I’m sure), so it still takes months and even years to carve a tree trunk.  The modern carvers apparently sketch their plan for the totem, which the oldsters probably didn’t do, but I imagine they planned the totem out beforehand—just in their heads instead of on paper.  (The mask carver on the boat didn’t have a sketch, but he was making small masks.  I’m not sure that’s an indication that for other, larger work he or other mask-makers wouldn’t also sketch out a plan.)  It apparently isn’t an inspiration-of-the-moment kind of art.  (Reminds me of the descriptions of Michelangelo and Diego Rivera doing their frescoes and murals—the “cartoons” they drew before applying paint to the walls.)

After the museum, a very worthwhile trip, and our bus ride back to the hotel—it’s about an hour each way, plus the walk to and from the museum itself—we got ready for our last evening in the Northwest.  We had chosen a seafood restaurant on a pier for dinner, and we caught a cab down even though it really wasn’t very far.  The weather in Vancouver, by the way, had been terrific—warm and sunny, after the rain of the last days in Alaska—and the evening was just right.  The restaurant is a big and bustling place, obviously popular, especially with the 20-something crowd.  We couldn’t get a table when we had really wanted to, so we arrived early in hopes that we might get seated before our reservation.  It didn’t work out that way, but we had planned to have a drink before dinner anyway, so we ordered an appetizer in the “pub” and had our drink and a knosh (fried oysters) while we waited and watched the marina outside.  No hardship, as you can imagine.  When our table was ready, we chose our final meal for the trip—salmon, wouldn’t you know—and ate looking out at part of Vancouver’s harbor and across to nearby mountains.  Not an unpleasant way to end our trip. 

Our flight out on Tuesday, 19 August, was at 11 a.m., a nice hour—not too early and not too late.  Everything went without event, from the check-in through customs and immigration (U.S.) to the change at O’Hare.  In contrast with the miserable trip out, the return was a joy (if flying can ever be a joy these days).  We got into LaGuardia on time and got back to Manhattan and home at about 10:30 or 11 p.m., as I had expected.  I took Thespis, my Jack Russell-mix, out as soon as we got in, and met my young dog-sitter just as she was coming in to retrieve her stuff.  As I said, the tour aspects of the trip left a lot to be desired, but the Alaska parts were good enough to make up for it for the most part.  If we had known better, we’d have been better off making some plans just on our own and cut out HAL altogether for everything except the ship.  But I don’t know how we’d have known that until after we’d made the mistake.  Even the travel agent in Washington Mother used for the flights and the hotel in Vancouver recommended going through HAL because it was easier to coordinate that way, and they had the reputation of being good.  Well, either they never deserved the reputation or they’ve slipped recently.  It all ended very well, however.

This whole saga reminds me of something my dad said after we’d seen the six-hour, two-part Soviet film version of War and Peace way back when.  The next morning he said, “I’m exhausted.  All night long, I kept marching back and forth across Russia!”  Do you feel like you’ve trekked from Anchorage to Vancouver now?  I guess I did go on, didn’t I.

[Well, if I did “go on,” and you’re still here, I guess it wasn’t that taxing, was it?  Rereading this travelogue after 11 years brought a lot of this trip back to me—and I hope you all who read it here had something of the experience.  Because of the hardship of travel nowadays, this trip to Alaska was one of the last long ones I’ve made.  In the old days, my mother and I tried to make one longish voyage a year—Istanbul was the last one we did (reported on ROT on 24 June 2010)—but that’s no longer true.  (On that last trip, when we were making our way out of the airport after the return flight, Mom insisted that it would be the last one she made.  It’s just more work and less fun now.)  In any case, I hope this log of my long-ago trip to “The Last Frontier” entertained you all.]

 

The Last Frontier, Part 3: The Inside Passage (Juneau and Ketchikan)

[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.)]

 

The Last Frontier, Part 2: The Inside Passage (Seward to Sitka)

[In Part 1 of “The Last Frontier” (posted on ROT on 26 March), I described the land-tour portion of my 2003 trip to Alaska and the Inside Passage.  In the continuation of the log of that trip, my mother and I board the Holland America Line cruise ship MS Statendam in Seward and set sail south along the rugged coastline of southeastern Alaska.  This was the bulk of the visit to the 49th state and it took a week to get to Vancouver, British Columbia, a distance of 2,318 miles (2,014 nautical miles).  This installment of “The Last Frontier” will cover the first part of the voyage, from Seward to the island of Sitka, 549 miles southeast along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska. The voyage continued on to Vancouver where we disembarked and stayed for two days; those portions of the trip will be covered in subsequent installments.]

We arrived in Seward, about 130 miles south of Anchorage, in the early evening on Sunday, 10 August 2003, and the process of getting aboard the ship was actually remarkably efficient considering that it required passing through customs and immigration (we would be disembarking in Canada), plus the process of getting a boarding pass for the ship (which isn’t a card like on planes, but a laminated plastic credit card-like ID with a bar-code for an optical reader; it had to be presented whenever we left or reboarded the ship).  The Customs and Border Protection thing (the former INS passport control) was expedited because I had pre-registered our forms on line before we left New York.  Apparently, some things do work as they’re promoted!  Our bags were even in our cabin within minutes of our arrival (and yes, the couple with the missing bags in Fairbanks did get them on the ship!).  The ship sailed just about right on time—9 p.m.

After dinner (I had salmon again, by the way!), we looked around the ship a little, to start to figure out where things were.  (We actually never really did.)  The MS Statendam V and her sister ships (the Maasdam and the Ryndam) are really huge.  They hold 1600 passengers (there were something over 1300 booked on this trip, apparently) with a crew of 557.  Afloat since 1993, she weighs over 55,000 tons and is 719 feet long with a beam of 101 feet; she’s 130 feet tall with 14 decks.  No matter where we set out for, or how careful we tried to be to get there efficiently, we nearly always ended up going up the wrong ladder or elevator and found ourselves on the wrong end of the ship.  (I did learn one thing, after several abortive attempts: Deck 7 is blocked in the middle of the ship by the galley—you can’t go from one end of the boat to the other on that deck.  If, as usual, we ended up at the wrong end for where we wanted to go, we’d have to go up or down a level to cross over!  After a couple of experiences, unless I was certain the place on Deck 7 where we wanted to end up was at the same end of the ship we were on, we’d go straight to Deck 8 to cross over.)  Even after a week aboard, there were some places on the ship I could never remember if they were located fore or aft—even if I knew which deck they were on.

Actually, a ship the size of the Statendam is too big.  It becomes like an exercise in efficiency rather than comfort and pleasure—what you’d think a cruise was about.  Also, that efficiency didn’t always work out—like the morning we got off the ship by tender in Sitka.  (The so-called Captain’s Night was also a study in cattle-herding!)  Furthermore, the part of the trip that was “cruise”—the shipboard stuff like the casino, the shops, the silly activities they devise, the “art” auctions (you never saw such dreck!), and so on—mostly bores me anyway.  Though not everything was useless.  There was a naturalist on board who gave talks about the kind of wildlife and topography we’d be seeing.  (At Glacier Bay National Park, a Park Ranger boards the ship and talks specifically about the park and glaciers.)  The naturalist also led a whale-watching session on deck one afternoon (yes, we did see some killers).  There was also a native artist on board.  This one was carving masks—though he did other work as well, like drums, paddles, and larger carvings—and he was interesting to watch and talk to about his work.  (The art of the Northwest Indians really knocked me out when I first saw it in Seattle years ago.  I have a mask from that trip, and that’s the same culture as in British Columbia and Alaska; they do the same kinds of imagery both in their traditional art—masks and totems—and their more modern pieces.  Beside the scenery and the salmon, the native art was one of the things in which I was most interested in Alaska.)  Otherwise, the ship stuff was only there to fill truly empty time as far as I was concerned.  We went to several of the “entertainments”—sort of college-level quality, as I’m sure everyone knows—and a couple of the movies.  Anyway, I wasn’t on a boat for the “cruise”; I was there to look at the coast as we sailed down the Inside Passage.  After about a day, we discovered the Crow’s Nest, a bar at the aft of Deck 12—the highest point on the ship that’s still inside.  We’d go up there and sit and watch from the comfort of an indoor vantage in upholstered arm chairs.  At cocktail time, we’d sit and watch the scenery go by with a drink before dinner.  Now, that’s sightseeing!  (I’m not really into roughing it, in case you hadn’t figured that out.)  Occasionally there’d be little to see through the fog and mist—I said that was common along this stretch of Alaska—but often it was just astounding.  Then again, the fog and mist can be sort of intriguing, too.

The first two days out from Seward were cruising days.  On the first morning, Monday, 11 August, we cruised around College Fjord, one of the many inlets of the Inside Passage that give the coast its craggy, rough, uneven appearance on maps and photos.  College Fjord, like most of these, has glaciers that flow down from the mountains—but College Fjord has a great many of them (over a dozen major glaciers).  They are mostly named for colleges—Harvard Glacier, Johns Hopkins Glacier—which funded teams to study them after they were discovered at the turn of the last century.  (Men’s colleges are on the southeast side of Prince William Sound, women’s colleges on the northwest.  Like education in the 19th century, the glaciers are segregated by gender!)  The ship cruised around the fjord as the naturalist illuminated what we were seeing and pointed out the various aspects of the glaciers.  Did you know there are several kinds of glaciers?  They’re not really different except in how they end at the bottom, but they have different descriptive names.  A hanging glacier is one that doesn’t meet the sea—it’s receded back up the mountain enough so that it ends before the water.  A tidewater glacier ends in the ocean.  That’s the kind of thing the naturalist explained as we cruised past the big ice rivers—there are dozens in College Fjord—along with the basic formation of glaciers and how they move and calve.  (We didn’t see any calving, unfortunately.  That’s supposed to be quite a sight to see—or, from what I gather, hear.  As large chunks of the glacier break off to form icebergs, it makes a really loud noise that sounds like thunder or an explosion.  While there were lots of small bergs, floes, and other hunks of ice in the fjord—as there would be also in Glacier Bay—we never saw any drop off.) 

From what I had read before we left and from what the naturalist, and later the Ranger, explained, there are a lot of details and facts about glaciers, some of which I remembered, albeit vaguely, from geology class in college, but the main thing, for me at least, was just the remarkable appearance—the fact, if you will—of them.  I mean, I knew in my head that glaciers are rivers of ice, that they flow, and so on, but when you see one—or, in the case of College Fjord, many of them—it’s really astounding that they exist—that there is such an immense thing as a glacier at all.  I mean, you can know that a glacier is a river, but when you look at this mass of ice and think, ‘That thing moves,’ and see what it carves out over the centuries—and that there are hundreds of them just along this one coast . . . well, it’s just sort of too much to credit, you know?  Like the aurora borealis, it’s just something that shouldn’t really be—but it is.  (Later, in Juneau, we went close up to a glacier—you could fly out to it in a helicopter and get out to walk on it, but we passed on that experience—and it’s even more astonishing after you see what it really is.)  From a distance, they can look like smooth ribbons of white, sometimes with brown streaks—the moraine, or ground-up land they plow up at their edges as they move along—and sometimes with a bluish tint, but they are often actually gutted and uneven, with rifts, crevasses, and pillars of ice, formed as the glacier rolls over rough or uneven terrain or around curves and obstacles.  Of course, in a place like College Fjord or Glacier Bay, where there are so many all in one area, it can be overwhelming.  (The Ranger, who, like so many of the people we met in Alaska, isn’t a native of the state, explained that a common reaction of new arrivals after a short time in Alaska is “majestic overload.”  From the wildlife to the topography to the meteorology, so many things there are huge, vast, or unique that you can get swamped.)  After a while, as remarkable as they are, one glacier begins to look like another, even when the “differences” are quite obvious.  Nevertheless, the scenery remains unforgettable, even if the variations from one individual glacier to another cease to be significant.  Sitting back, as we were in the Crow’s Nest after a while—we started out on the deck, rushing from side to side to see what the naturalist was describing—it was just breathtaking as a panorama: the rough, rugged coastline of green and brown mountains (which from the distance of the ship could look like plush carpet) streaked with gleaming white vertical lines.  Once again, it looked like a kind of Star Trek set: something that just shouldn’t really exist on this planet—or anywhere in reality.

Another surprise for me about the glaciers was the life that exists around it.  (There’s actually life in a glacier—a creature called an ice worm—but since you can’t see them from outside the ice, that’s not what I mean.)  I guess I knew that seals and sea lions, as well as several sea birds, hang around ice floes and icebergs—you see enough pictures of that—but I never stopped to think, first of all, that that meant glaciers or, second, that there were other animals that hang around the ice that way.  Both College Fjord and Glacier Bay are full of wildlife.  The Statendam entered College Fjord early in the morning so we were already there when we got up.  I looked out the porthole in our cabin before we went for breakfast, and just below me in the water was a sea otter.  (I remember sea otters from Monterey, California—they’re funny little critters.  When they eat, they float on their backs and crack shellfish open—in Monterey it was abalone—onto their bellies.)  The little ice chunks floating around were perches for all kinds of birds, none of which I could identify.  Later, as we cruised around the fjord, we caught sight of a few sea lions on floes.  We didn’t see any sea animals—fish, dolphins, or whales—but the naturalist explained that they often head for the glacial terminus, especially when there’s liquid run-off from under the glacier.  The temperature contrast between the icewater running from the glacier into the somewhat warmer (it can’t exactly be called “warm”) water of the ocean creates an updraft that forces smaller fish to the surface, and that attracts predators that feed off them.  Hence, the glaciers become feeding grounds for all kinds of animals whose diet is fish—including also bears (of which we saw none) and birds of prey.  So around all that ice and icewater—a human wouldn’t survive 15 minutes in that water (actually, the naturalist explained that he’d drown before he froze anyway)—teems animal life.  Who knew?  (Well, maybe you did, but I didn’t—not consciously, anyway.) 

The next day, Tuesday, 12 August, we cruised around Glacier Bay National Park, obviously another glacier place.  (This is where the Ranger boarded and became our narrator.)  I believe Glacier Bay is home to more glaciers (over 50 named glaciers) than any other single location on earth.  (I may be wrong about the superlative, but it’s close—maybe it’s just the northern hemisphere.)  Because it’s a national park, all human activity here is severely restricted—including cruise ships.  There are limits to the number that can go in, the size of the vessel, how close it can go to the shores, how long it can stay, and even how fast it can cruise (engine noise and wake, you know).  (You know, it’s ironic: for a state whose entire congressional delegation, plus its governor, promotes development, drilling, logging, and mining at the expense of wilderness, Alaskans, both native and immigrant, love and protect their environment quite jealously.  Glacier Bay is federal, of course, but other areas are not and the state has some strict regulations, and even the local residents in towns and cities have rules and laws to protect both fauna and flora.  I never asked anyone why there seems to be this dichotomy—the same Alaskans elect those officials, after all—and no one ever raised the issue.) 

Aside, once again, from the simple astonishing fact of this place, the curious thing about Glacier Bay is historical.  Well, “natural” historical perhaps.  When Captain George Vancouver (yes, the city in British Columbia is named for him) first saw this part of the coast in 1794, he never knew it was a bay.  It was covered with ice for something like 70 miles from the shore, believed now to have been the peak of the bay’s glacial coverage.  In the short time since then—actually within 100 years—the glaciers all receded to uncover the entire bay; tourists began visiting what became called Glacier Bay in the late 19th century, and the park was designated in 1925.  Sailing into it—or around it, since we actually entered the bay very early in the morning—it’s hard to fathom how Vancouver saw it 209 years ago, not knowing there was a bay beneath the ice.  Needless to say, Mom and I viewed this landscape from a perch in the Crow’s Nest, equipped with our binoculars as the Ranger narrated. 

There were also a fair number of Indians—Tlingits, the major tribe of this part of Alaska—living in this frozen territory then.  Tourism, and then the establishment of the park, began driving out the inhabitants and today only a few natives still live in the territory, subsisting on fishing and hunting.  No modern settlements are permitted, of course.  After the Ranger gave his presentation in the ship’s auditorium, he turned the stage over to a native representative who spoke about the way his people lived in the territory, both today and historically.  Aside from the general interest in an exotic way of life, you have to be a little appreciative that someone like this native speaker would allow people like us to treat him as a museum exhibit in a sense, telling us about what for us is a matter of curiosity, however sincere, but which for him is his life and culture.  (I had this same sense in New Mexico when we went to the pueblos and to the home of a Pueblo Indian near one of the villages.  It’s a little strange, if you think about it.)  Still, I confess it was interesting to hear about it. 

Actually, as hard as it might seem to us to have lived in this area, the Indians of the interior—like Denali, where we had a native storyteller relate some of the legends of the local people there (they’re a different tribe from the coastal Indians—they’re Athabascans, related, ironically, to the Navajo and other Indians of the Plains and Southwest)—considered the coastal natives to have had it easy.  They had a ready—and essentially inexhaustible—supply of food from the sea and the coastal forests, plenty of wood for both fuel and building, and much more temperate climate.  Even the wildlife on the coast fares better than those in the interior.  A grizzly from Denali might weigh 500-600 pounds, but one from the coast can weigh up to a ton—all on account of the abundant, year-round food supply.  Except for the constant rain along the coast, the weather there is less harsh than you’d imagine for Alaska.  It never gets very warm, but it also doesn’t get very cold.  (Sitka, which is on an island rather than the coast itself, never gets much below freezing.  It gets far more rain during the year than it gets snow.  In fact, we get more snow on the east coast than generally falls along the coast of southwest Alaska.  Inland and up in the mountains, of course, is a very different story.)  It’s not as if these guys had modern conveniences or anything, but if you’re going to be a subsistence inhabitant of Alaska, you’re way better off down with the Tlingits and their neighbors than you’d be with the Athabascans. 

Of course, I’d have to think three or four times about living in Alaska even under modern circumstances.  Aside from the weather and all, you can’t get from one place to another in many cases by conventional means.  The whole of the Inside Passage is inaccessible from the rest of the state by land—i.e., no driving, even from town to town.  (Juneau boasts of being the only state capital which you can’t reach by car.  Some boast!)  Because of the mountains just behind the coast, the ice fields (where the glaciers are born), and the glaciers themselves, no town along this stretch has roads more than a few miles long, dead-ending at some natural barrier or other.  The state runs a ferry system along the coast—the Alaska Maritime Highway—for commuters, and the Alaskan bush pilot is like a taxi driver in New York City.  Most Alaskans are pilots—we met a couple of locals who admitted they learned to fly before they were old enough to get driver’s licenses—and many own planes, some of which, especially along the coast, are ”float planes” (which we used to call seaplanes—though why the name change came about, I don’t know). 

On top of these peculiarities, and certainly in large part because of them, prices in Alaska are outrageous.  Milk costs as much as $4 a gallon, and homes can go for $300,000 for a one-bedroom cabin.  (Of course, if you’re a permanent resident of the state—once you’ve been there for a year and don’t have a primary residence someplace else—you get a stipend from the state.  And there are no state income taxes—though sales taxes can be fairly high.)  The people who live up there, however, put up with this because they really want to live in Alaska.  It’s a very peculiar sort of attitude that Alaskans have, both the native-born (“Sourdoughs”) and the newly-arrived from the “Lower 48.”  They see the rest of the country as too busy, crowded, hurried (Alaskans we met frequently spoke of “ish time”: everything in Alaska runs on an approximate schedule—”7-ish” or “10-ish”), and overbuilt.  (I guess they look at rural Montana, say, and see Manhattan!)  By the way, we met one Alaskan—native-born in Anchorage—who was married to a Hawaiian.  Now there’s an odd match!  Oh, and one of our guides in Sitka was a school teacher during the rest of the year and she reminded us that during the winter, the kids go to school all day in the dark.  (Recess is indoors.)  Can you imagine living that way?  All-day sunshine might take its toll for some for a while, but that all-day nighttime would drive me ’round the bend pretty fast, I think.  I got antsy in Berlin when I went to work in the dark and came home in the dark—but we did have sun in the middle of the day at least; I could see it at lunch time.)

On our third day out from Seward, Wednesday, 13 August, we put in at the first port of call, Sitka.  As I said, Sitka is actually on an island (Baranof Island), not the coast of the Inside Passage, but it’s more different than that.  Sitka was the capital of Russian Alaska (Novo-Arkhangelsk—New Archangel—in those days) until the U.S. bought the territory in 1867 (remember “Seward’s Icebox” and “Seward’s Folly”?) and is the center of Alaska’s remaining Russian heritage.  The name Sitka sounds like it ought to be Russian, in fact, but it’s not actually.  It’s a corruption of Shee-Atka, the Tlingit name of the island.  (The Tlingits actually defeated the Russkies under Alexander Baranof in 1802 and sent them packing for two years.  The Russians returned with warships and cannon, retook Sitka, and established their capital there.)  One odd result is that, while we (or, at least, I) think of Indians who have become Christians as mostly Catholics because the Spanish did most of the converting in the Southwest and California, the Indians of Alaska are often Russian Orthodox.  According to the history of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Sitka, several of the important religious leaders of the colony were converted natives, several of whom became saints in the Russian Orthodox church. 

We arrived in Sitka in the morning, as usual, but because the town and the harbor are so small, this was the only port in which the Statendam couldn’t dock.  (Other large ships were also moored out in the harbor.)  That meant we had to go ashore in a tender.  Aside from being a little awkward—you have to go down an outdoor gangplank several decks to the water level and climb into a bobbing little boat—it’s also not easy to go back and forth from the shore to the ship on a whim.  (When we came back to the ship, the tide had come in so not only did the gangplank now lead to a higher deck, but the step up from the tender to the bottom of the gang was a lot higher—a real problem for my tiny little mother!  Tides in Alaska differ greatly between highs and lows—and there are two changes each day.)  In addition, since the tenders can only take a certain number of passengers and it takes time for one to make the round trip, there was a wait to get ashore that could sometimes be lengthy.  (There were two tenders, but it still took time for one to unload returning passengers and turn around for the trip back to shore.)  Here was another aspect of the trip that was less than pleasant.  You can’t just get a pass for the tender and then go off somewhere else on the ship to do your thing and then come back in time to go ashore.  You have to get your boarding number and then wait around—they used the movie theater—doing nothing until your tender trip is ready to board.  Obviously, there are more people who want to go ashore at certain times of the day than at others—early morning (because of those who booked morning excursions) and around noon (afternoon excursions and most of the people who were just going ashore to wander and shop on their own) were most popular.  There was a lot of dead time at those hours, and, of course, we decided to go ashore at 11 a.m. and got caught in a mass of waiting passengers. 

This didn’t do any real harm, except that we had to sit in the theater twiddling our thumbs for half an hour.  Once we got on our tender, the trip wasn’t long, and we got to Sitka with time to look around, grab a little lunch, and return to the pier for the town tour we had booked.  We had dressed for cool weather, thinking it’d be that way in the morning off the ocean and all, but we immediately found that we were overdressed for the bright, sunny warmth.  (This is where not being able to hop back on the ship was inconvenient—we couldn’t go back and dump jackets and sweaters and come back.)  Sitka is tiny, of course—about 8,000 inhabitants in the town, with more, of course, around the rest of the island.  (You can imagine what these little towns are like, especially from the perspective of the residents, when several large cruise ships unload their passengers directly into the downtown.  At times during the season, tourists outnumber the residents several fold.) 

In many ways, Sitka looks a lot like towns on Cape Cod or other seaside villages—except that the shop windows have lots of Russian-inspired stuff (mostly junk, I must say) along with the salmon, furs, and other Alaskan stuff.  Like the other Alaskan ports where we stopped, Sitka’s main drag is one shop after another, over half of them selling jewelry.  (Jewelry seems to be the tourist purchase of choice for some reason—I don’t see why.  It’s not all gold, which would make some sense even though I don’t know how much gold is still found in the state, or even made in the U.S., much less Alaska.  Some is Indian, like we saw in New Mexico—but not all of it is.  We even went to the briefing by the ship’s “shopping ambassador”—she’s supposed to have the skinny on where to go, what to look for, and how not to be cheated, and so on—on the assumption that she’d say something about the local arts and crafts.  Nope—all she talked about was jewelry, especially diamonds.  We went to her desk one afternoon to ask her specifically about art and native work, but she didn’t know anything at all.  Goof ol’ HAL!) 

We had booked a tour of “historic Sitka” on the assumption that we’d get a little overview of the town and some of the history of Russian America.  You’d think so, wouldn’t you?  I mean, this is a really unique aspect of American history—the only Russian colony on American soil and so on.  We study a lot about the Spanish, English, French, and even Dutch colonists here, but how much do we learn about the little bit of Russia that was planted in North America?  Not much, as I recall.  I expected this to get done up pretty big in Sitka where just about all that’s left of that history remains.  (There are a few remnants of something around San Francisco, but it’s not much since that extension of the Alaskan colony wasn’t much to start with.)  Well, boy were we wrong—and misled once again.  The tour was pretty much a bust as far as history was concerned.  We stopped at a cultural center with several native artisans working in various media—baskets, wood, metal, and stone—which was interesting and the work was often beautiful, and the center is set in a wooded area along the water within which are dozens of totem poles, making a lovely and interesting stroll.  We drove through Sitka and out to the airport and the driver pointed out the Russian Bishop’s House and other sights, but we didn’t stop at any of them or get any kind of historical explanation of their significance.  We went to the Convention Center for a performance of Russian (and East European) folk dances, which was nice if a little hokey.  (The ironic things about this little exercise were that 1) the dancers, all amateurs and all women, were not even Russian-Americans and 2) we got more local history from these amateur devotees than from the guide.  The dancers, who were all professionals with other, real jobs—doctors, teachers, and such—were freer with local lore than the woman we’d paid to tell us about Sitka.)  Then we were deposited at the cathedral, to go in on our own and learn what we could inside.  Hell, we could have managed all that on our own—and would have if we’d known how inadequate the “professional” tour would be.  (Our idea was to use the tour as a way to see what we wanted to spend more time with on our own afterward—like a book’s table of contents.)  We would have a similar experience in Ketchikan.

The cathedral is kind of curious in itself.  It is, of course, the Russian Orthodox cathedral of Alaska—though it’s a tiny little church, really.  It’s wooden, of course, and it sits smack in the middle of town, essentially in the center of the main street at one end of town—the street splits and creates an island for the cathedral.  But what’s curious is that the current building is really only about 40 years old.  The original 1848 church burned down in 1966—a votive candle was the culprit, I think—and the entire town descended on the building en masse to save the contents.  They stripped everything valuable and precious out of the interior, including the stained-glass windows and the chandelier, which one townsman reached by piling chairs one on top of another so he could hand it down to another Sitkan.  The 19th-century building, which was also wooden, burned to the ground, so the current one (which is a replica of the original) isn’t really historical—but everything that’s inside—the icons, statues, crosses, windows, altar, hymnals, and so on—is all original from Russia, brought over during the 120 years the cathedral stood there.  (Well, I imagine there are some things that have been added in the past 40 years, too—but you get my drift.)  It’s also curious because there are no pews.  Worshipers stand or kneel on the floor—though there are some chairs for the aged or invalided if necessary.

I started studying Russian in high school and continued in college and the army; I’ve long had an interest in Russian culture, so I was really hoping to get a sense of Russian America in Sitka, but I gather from what I did see that it just isn’t there.  I suspect that even if we had simply done our own poking around, the Russian heritage in Alaska is so far below the surface, I’d have had to be an archeologist—or at least an anthropologist—to uncover it.  I was hoping that the Russian heritage might have left the kind of imprint here that the Spanish heritage left in the Southwest or the French in Louisiana.  If it’s there, it’s not promoted.  I don’t know why, either—they’re certainly not ashamed of the heritage.  I had also hoped to find a little souvenir specifically of Sitka that was literally Russian-American—I don’t know what, but something that was both Russian and American somehow.  (I was probably thinking of something like my souvenir of New Mexico: a modern artwork by a native artist—a Taos Pueblo, in fact—drawing on his traditional cultural imagery.)  There wasn’t a thing—the Russian-flavored souvenirs (mostly kitsch from what I saw anyway) were either imported from Russia (the same stuff you can find here, especially at the Russian Arts shop that used to be down on 6th Avenue south of me) or emulations of Russian crafts.  (There are matryoshka nesting dolls of every description everywhere!)  I guess that’s emblematic of the whole situation.

[Our next port of call was Juneau, the state capital. Installment three, when I post it, will pick up with the last leg of the cruise down the Inside Passage, with the stops at Juneau and Ketchikan.  Part 4 will cover the visit to Vancouver and the flight(s) back home.  I have no schedule for posting the segments of this log so I can’t predict when (or even if) I’ll include them on ROT, so if this journey interests you, you’ll just have to check back in to the blog from time to time and see if I put up another installment.]