North to Alaska

… there go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport with. Psalm 104

My better half and I just returned from the sea. We set sail earlier this month to check out Alaska’s Inside Passage. It’s a trip we’d wanted to take for (literally) decades, but could never put enough scratch or time together simultaneously to make it happen. It seemed like every “milestone” (like 10th, 25th, or 40th anniversary) was accompanied by some ship-wrecking family or parish emergency that took precedence. Life happens.

We’d reached the end of summer and I decided it was time to give mother nature and the fates the slip, so I booked the Alaskan adventure when they weren’t looking, and it worked!

I won’t bore you by detailing the trip. If there’s anything worse than sitting through someone else’s home movies, it’s sitting through those home movies without the pictures, slides, or super-8s (and accompanying narration). I will say that we had shockingly good weather considering the Alaskan coast sees rain 300 days of the year (we had only two wet days), and relatively calm seas (only two days of the nine where we pushed through eighteen foot swells and felt a bit like we’d signed onto a nautical version of rodeo bull-riding). 

Before we left, a friend asked what part of the trip I was most looking forward to, and I confessed, “Getting home.” I am a home-body. I know that, and my answer was true. But it was true only for the reason I wasn’t sure what to expect on our voyage. As a card-carrying pessimist, I prefer to let an adventure unfold and surprise me with something good happening, than to anticipate something wonderful and then be disappointed with a lesser reality.

We took in a few of the standard tourist excursions, like the White Pass train ride out of Skagway, a hike to the Mendenhall Glacier, followed by a whale watching expedition out of Juneau. We caught crabs in Ketchikan and could almost reach out and touch the Johns Hopkins Glacier as it calved a small berg into Glacier Bay. Each excursion was delightful in its own way, but none was what I would term memorable. I’m sure I will remember them, of course, the way one remembers bits and pieces of life’s experiences. But “memorable” as in life-altering? No.

I realize that Tourism is an important industry; I don’t intend to besmirch it. What I enjoyed most was being immersed in nature whilst disconnected from the world. We could pay for internet and cellular service if we wanted it, but my goal was to forego all of that. What good is it to get away if one doesn’t actually get away? I did check text messages and send location updates to friends and family when I had cell service in several ports of call, but beyond that, I let the world spin on (or off) without me.

It was being out in the natural world I enjoyed most. It was handling a live Dungeness crab on a small boat (not the Deadliest Catch variety - just a coastal runabout). It was spending time in the bays and inlets watching whales clear their spouts upon surfacing, dolphins porpoising past the boat, harbor seals and sea lions sunning themselves on harbor buoys or floating lazily about just off-shore, each ignoring their hominid cousins bobbing about for their own look-sees and amusement. 

Sadly, I did not see any bears on this journey. I was in a tour group that did see a momma Brown bear and her cub on the road on Chichagof Island, but folks crowded the bus’s windshield and blocked the view from everyone else. I did see the bear via several cell-phone view screens, but alas, not directly. That’s OK, though. I can bear the disappointment.

Our final stop before returning to Seattle was shortened due to weather, so that was a bit of a let-down. Still, I don’t think Gilligan and pals could have hosted a couple thousand additional guests to house and feed, so our captain made the right decision to steer clear of the autumnal storms that threatened us. I can live with that, too, here in this, our valley. It’s good to be home.

Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)