#24 MORE ALASKA

“Some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
– H. Melville, Opening Line from Moby Dick

M/V Europa

57’54” N

133’27” W

8/13/01

07:00 ship time (GMT-9)

I am in a fiord. 

Hacked and ground long ago from the earth, cut deep into the skin by glaciers through repeated ice ages.  3000’ walls tower above pale milky green water, laden with glacier silt.  The glare from the early morning, low angle sun hides the icebergs in our path, and I’m glad that I splurged for the $15 polarized sunglasses in that Texas Stop-N-Go so many miles ago.  

The fiord follows the same sinuous path common to rivers and streams all over the world, with U shaped bends making us travel 20 to cover the 5 crow flown miles.  Thousands of chunks of ice clog the waterway, having calved from the glacier miles in the distance, some basketball sized, others the size of large city buses.  We avoid them all, but pay particular attention to the large bergs.  Tension mounts as we progress further into the mélange of ice, slowing to a crawl to pick our way between the sharp and dangerous obstacles.  

This morning, the wind is picking up blowing down channel and bringing with it this arcade of obstacles.  What we don’t realize till we arrive at the glacier is that this same wind has cleared out much of this morning’s calving product and as we round the bend of granite, an open bay appears below an immense wall of solid water.  500’ tall rising to 1500’ in places, the face of the glacier is a composite of solid white towers, blue translucent diamond like ice, gravel like composite of jumbled ice pieces, and dirty streaks of rock and ground earth scooped up long ago and far higher on the mountain face, carried on its catastrophic joy ride downslope to jump from this suicide cliff to the ocean awaiting below.  A large mass of ice-flows near the face of the glacier represents a recent calving that has not been blown out. The wind has died and we cut our engines, turn off our radar and float in quiet listening to the scrunch of the flows rubbing together from the gentle swell.  

An immense crack, swoosh and cannon shot rings out and we turn to see a large berg and it’s detritus collapse into the foam, sending tidal waves out into the flows.  Throughout the morning, snaps, cracks and pops continue to ring out, sometimes accompanied by bergs calving, other times, just representing tension being released.  Every once in a while, we happen to be looking in the right direction and notice visually the calving, then hear the reports 3 seconds delayed.  The blue of the dense ice is the most astounding sight. A cruel harsh dangerous absolute beauty, so foreign, so uncommon.  A closer inspection of the flows indicates the dirty spots on the ice are infact seals, and we count roughly 500-600 seals spread out sunning on the flows.  Every once in a while, I pause to look around the other directions and see  “U” shaped valleys, like The Sound of Music on steroids, which in any other context would knock one’s socks off, but hardly catches one’s curiosity here.

Saturday was spent jumping north through Wrangell and Petersburg.  We stopped at both towns for an hour to check them out.  I had spent a month working at a cannery in Petersburg back in ’82, and I went off in search of the back yard in which I had pitched my tent.  Franz was an old man when I met him.  An Alaskan from back when it really meant something, he had arrived in the 30’s and had fished, crabbed, and fox farmed and trapped till he was a riley old coot in his 70’s.  Always in a pair of denim overalls, he gardened and lived a rather sedate isolated life reminiscent of the bachelor farmers Garrison Keillor describes at Lake Wobegon.  Every summer though, he would open up his shed and back yard to a few of the itinerant cannery workers, mostly college kids, up to make some bucks during the summer.  Anyone wanting to work was ok in his mind.  I wander up to the yard just as a red pickup has parked and a tanned faced lady dismounts, looks at me with that easy going, completely trusting, open Alaskan interest, and I ask if Franz used to live here.  She smiles and we get to jabbering, me showing her where my tent was, where the shed and garden use to be, and she saying she had heard that folks use to stay out in the back yard, that Franz had died 4 yrs ago, she had never met the man, but everyone in Petersburg seemed to know him, and on and on. I wander away, a smile on my face, suddenly feeling the 20 years that have passed and realizing just one more time how Alaska has changed in the meantime.

We meet up with a couple who are on a Krogen ’48 in Portage Bay. An interesting couple, apparently both were Microsoft employees with double digit employee numbers.  We raft up for the night, trade boat/travel stories, they give us a dump of leads on good places to visit, and treat us to a wonderful peach pancakes/eggs/bacon breakfast (we’re in Alaska remember where everything is big including the appetites).

We visit the engine room (a compulsory boaty thing to do) and inspect their technology systems.  They have an Ethernet network system, linking their two PC’s with a server, I think the primary purpose of which is to store the gigabytes of digital photos they are collecting on this trip.  A wonderfully social visit and we both depart into Fredrick Sound but go different directions.  Soon after heading out, we spot our first spout followed by many more.  We head in the direction of the Humpback whales and soon are near the pod as they blow, curve and slowly sink into the sea with that characteristic roll of their tail flukes.  As we progress up the sound, we pass pod after pod, nearly always a multitude of spouts within range.  As we approach one pod who had been laying on the top, apparently sleeping or resting, suddenly two large whales explode from the surface, water flying as they throw their bodies ¾ of the way into the air, roll and land on their backs with a punch that can be felt in our boat ½ mile away.  We shut off the engines and drift in a windless mirror like surface, listening to the eerie, other-world sound of respiration, deep blows, moans, rushing air, from every direction, all out in the middle of this deep sound, 5 miles from land.  

The farther north, the more the bar is raised.

Used to be a mind trip just looking at scenery. I mean jaw dropping, mind boggling scenery. Now, I must be acclimatized to the scenery because I notice it only in spare time between dodging icebergs and steering around breeching whales.