'49

  Sketches for an Alaska travel piece that probably won't be written. 

...sitting on deck, scanning the water for wildlife.  Anticipation becomes the dominant emotion of the day.  Every whitecap is the flank of an orca, every shadow a humpback ready to launch itself into orbit...

...not surprising for a center of government, the state capital Juneau attracts a fair share of lovably eccentric wierdos like our guide Micheal who sings us the safety features of his bus on his ukelele, or the young Tlingit who plays his drum and sings us down the cable-car.  His enthusiasm is attractive, but not nearly as much as the quiet wisdom of the grandfather elder whose stories accompanied us on the way up...

 ...looking up at the glacial-scarred hills.  I begin to see certain patterns that resemble the totem art of the local natives.  And in such looking I may have some insight into their origin...

...amazing emerald green of their rivers, laden with the minerals of glacial melt off...      
  
...the impossible blue of the Sitka spruce needles, enhanced perhaps by my colorblind eyes;  Eagle flying past below me to perch in a tree, its white head ever watchful amongst the green branches of the hemlock;  Canadian maples, red all summer long...

..Prince Rupert, where the highway ends. From here the choice is by boat, plane, or (suicidally) foot...

...new discoveries:  Dolly Varden salmon;  the subtle blue-greys of Sitka Spruce;  the awe in watching floatplanes landing and taking off; the landscape that dwarfs everything;  the glacial u-cuts of the valleys, the weight of their ice depressing the earth; the cruise ships overwhelming all: 6000 passengers in a town of 900;  the wonder that is spruce beer...

...staring at the shoreline as it passes, in awe of the mountains as they rise above. The density of vegetation, the wildlife within.  The waters too equally dense, an unfathomable 1500 fathoms below me, in a body of water as narrow as a modest river... 

...stepping on deck to see a whale sound; a mere curvature of slick grey back, like a great serpent sinking beneath the deep...

...Alaska is a place where the many "me's" collided.  That is to say, the various persons I was at different times in my life:  

An unfinished anthropology Masters degree, where the lecture hall resounded with the hard consonants that form the names of Tlingit and Kwakiutl, as well as with the more melodic Salish and Haida; 

Being offered a job on a fishing boat the summer before Japan, one that turned I down when the captain wouldn't offer return airfare and I was pinching pennies for my move to Asia. (Fair enough, as he only knew me through a couple of friends who had crewed for him previously.) But this month, reading McCloskey's Highliners, is a reminder of the perils of romantic ideals.  Then again, I read it with the apprehensive eyes of middle age, having long ago forgotten the indestructibility of 27;

I suppose the apprehension began nearly two decades ago, upon reading Krakauer's Into the Wild, a book that served as reminder of who I'd once been.   McCandless' spirit was mine, and I just as easily could have shared his early demise...        

 
On the turntable:  The Doors, "Waiting for the Sun"
On the nighttable:  John McPhee, "Coming into the Country"