Alaska, Part I -- All Aboard

      From Africa to Alaska.  It almost sounds like a cover story for a magazine.  Instead here we were, doing the unthinkable (for us, anyway) and finding ourselves traveling way more than we normally do.  But actually, this cruise doing the upper half of the Alaskan coast was the first thing we had planned long, long ago.  We had cruised the lower half of Alaska some years ago, even flying in our first float plane where we managed to catch a rare sunny day, or so said our pilot (he ended up flying for an extra 40 minutes or so since he said that he hadn't experienced such good weather over the past few months).  On that earlier cruise, it was a larger ship, one which carried some 950 passengers (although several of the newer 2024 ships will each carry nearly 8 times that amount of people); the boat we were getting on this time would be a bit smaller, topping out at around 700.  Fares had dropped since we had booked this current cruise, as in plummeted (as but one example, I received an email from Celebrity for a 7- day cruise around Ireland for just $20 a night for a balcony; the catch was that you had to be ready to board the ship in 2 days....in London).  Getting 5000 people to commit to a dozen or so ships going to a limited number of places is apparently proving a bit more difficult for some of the gigantic ships.  And think of the 400+ cruise ships out there worldwide, each a floating hotel with chefs, entertainers, cleaning crews, engineers and on and on, not to mention the 80,000 lbs. of controversially-dirty fuel each ship burns every day.  Add all of that up and it's a lot of people and fuel navigating the seas...but then here we were, part of that mess.  That said, let me back up a bit and take you on the train that got us there.

     Think back to the last time you got on a train, a real train (vs. a tourist version which travels a few miles up and back or circles an amusement park).  It had been quite awhile since my brother and I had crossed the Sierras on AmTrak, a 16-hour journey that was as enjoyable as it was tiring.  But now we were on one of the centennial trips of the Alaska Railroad going 114 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to the port city of Seward, a trip which nearly parallelled the one Captain Cook sailed so many centuries ago (the ocean inlet is named in his honor, with our path eventually branching to the right down Turnigan Arm, so named when Cook had to "turn again" to find another passage through the inlet).  And this was no bullet or commuter train, the slow pace reflecting the wishes that passengers wanted to take it slow and to have time to admire the waters and forests that seemed to just go on and on; we were happy to have a chance to see a glacier or three, diminishing as they were.  Portage, Spencer, and Surprise glaciers were just three of the thousands of glaciers in the area.  Round a bend, a quick peek, and they were gone.  Perhaps in a few years they would be gone for good, at least from the view of a railroad passenger window.

  

     The forests were equally stunning although the spruce beetle was taking advantage of the lack of bitterly cold winters, a long winter's freeze being the bettles' most formidable foe.  We passed through the 2nd largest forest in the US, the Chugach.  Here are a few tidbits of how the Forest Service described the 2nd largest forest: The Chugach National Forest is the farthest north and west of all the national forests, and 30% covered in ice; All five North American species of Pacific salmon are found on the Chugach: king, red, silver, chum, and pink; In a distance of just 10 miles, the forest rises from sea level to 13,100 feet at Mount Marcus Baker; The Forest has 96 separate watersheds.  Yet as massive as the Chugach was, it would soon give way to something even larger next door, in fact what is the largest temperate forest in North America: the Tongass.  As our train clicked and clacked its way through seemingly endless vistas, we could spot the bowls of snow that still clung valiantly to the hillsides' but the waterfalls just below them exposed the warmer weather.  Outside, the 70F-degree air was as pleasant to us as it was damaging to the forests, a twist of fate of humankind making one more mark in the world.  

      A review in The New Yorker mentioned that Abraham Lincoln, once a "railroad lawyer," was instrumental in convincing Congress to fund the first transcontinental railroad.  Said part of the review: The Civil War had been in effect a railroad war: Grant and Sherman's ability to move men efficiently to battle depended on their access to more trains and faster rails than Lee could ever dream of...the speed of trains altered the understanding of American space, and on the way that the view from trains—the near distance racing past, the farther distance proceeding in spacious slowness—became a poetic obsession...trains are inherently implausible things. A hugely powerful and dangerous steam engine is attached to fixed cars, which are linked together and pulled along like a toy. A train can run only on fixed rails, which have to be nailed down ahead of it for every inch of its transit. The idea is so bizarre that it came to seem natural.

     

     Looking down at those tracks and the water and forests that hemmed us in, it was daunting to imagine the planning involved (or as the article implied, the lack of planning) as these rails crossed over swampy tidal flats and raging rivers: the cutting through this difficult forest terrain with hand saws, then having to level the land after that, the amount of rock and gravel and railroad ties which then needed to be brought over hundreds and hundreds of miles, not to mention the steel rails that had to come later and to be spaced perfectly apart before being pounded in by workers with sledgehammers.  If the rails were placed too close or too far apart on even one section, it would send a locomotive toppling over with little hope of recovery.  And yet here we were thinking about none of that, just admiring the glimpses of nature that we "needed" to snap us back to what was real.  Tossed out into the forest here would be nearly identical to falling overboard once on the ship.  We were comfortable in our safe cabin, but out there?...not so much.  In fact, none of this wild land or waters would be familiar to most of us, two wilderness realms where we were little more than bait...

     Alaska itself has as convoluted a history as any pre-colonial nation or continent, for while native Alaskans lived in these massive areas for over 10,000 years, history books don't have Alaska being "discovered" until the 1600s when a Spaniard captain is noted to have "spotted" the area; but it would be another 100 years before a Danish sailing ship would explore the area in more detail.  The ship's captain was Vitus Bering (as in the aptly-named Bering Strait, and Sea).  It would take another 50 years before Captain James Cook, in his search for a northwest passage, would follow by adding to his charts his arrival in Anchorage.  But unfortunately, as with so much of what Cook left in his wake, came the wiping out of populations (back then, these were explorations seeking new markets and new places abundant with things to trade or take) -- within 10 years, most of the sea otter population of the area was gone (like the beaver, their pelts were coveted as a fashion "must have" by Europeans); and in less than 100 years nearly all of the indigenous Haida peoples had succumbed to diseases the many new-world ships perhaps unknowingly brought with them.  Still, just 10 years after the pelt industry was over, Russia had declared Sitka its colonial "America" capitol; and 25 years after that, Russia, Britain and the U.S. signed a treaty officially taking ownership of the land.  The original inhabitants no longer owned any of it (although the idea of any person or country "owning" any part of the Earth was something most native peoples would never even consider; the "mother" land was there for everyone, for all life forms, and under no one's dominion).  By 1867 Alaska in its entirety was "bought" by the U.S. (gold would be discovered 5 years later, and 25 years after that, gold, like the otters, would pretty much be wiped out).  In another half century the shiny metal would be replaced a newer, darker one; those primeval forests which were even larger than both the Chugach and the Tongass would be buried and decay and turn into that black gold which would come to fuel our cars, ships, and planes and a byproduct...plastic.  It would nearly parallel gold in its hypnotic control over us.  10 years later, Alaska was declared a state (1959).

      So what was gained, or lost?  These rails and shipping routes and highways (the arrival of WW II saw the AlCan highway built in just 8 years, one which crossed from the US border through Canada to Alaska)  brought more and more of us in, even as native Alaskan populations shrank into a single term, a term foreign to most of the indigenous cultures here, Eskimo.  For the Haida it was too late; but even now, the names of Athabascan, Yup'ik, Tsimshian, Inupiat and other nations have struggled to not be bulldozed over.  In 1973 the Native Claims Settlement Act was passed but with a key provision: any claims to Native sovereignty were now void.  The hatchet had fallen, the cutting off and the historical "record" was now complete.  Perhaps the words of naturalist Henry Beston can be expanded to this part of Western history, that by claiming ownership and dominion we may have lost much more than we gained.  Said Beston: They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Coming up...back to the ship.

*So here is where most books place their footnotes, at least in print copies.  These footnotes (what goes at the back of the books are endnotes) are tidbits of information which the authors or editors felt were important "details" but didn't quite fit into the main body or paragraph as an insert.  The book I am currently reading has footnotes, and often multiple ones, on nearly every page.  The author, Mark Z. Danielewski, placed footnotes everywhere in his novel House of Leaves, even in the side margins, "notes" which were difficult to read since they sometimes consumed half of the page but ones which ended up telling an almost completely new story.  Typically, a footnote is marked with an asterisk first, followed by a dagger (yes, that's the grammatical term) then a double-dagger.  I tend to use an asterisk, followed by a double asterisk and every now and then, a third asterisk; such punctuation would cause any real editor to have heart palpitations.  And while I tend to keep such footnotes in the normal type size, such notes are generally this small (I've actually enlarged and spaced this a bit to make it readable) so imagine how having to jump back and forth can break your train of thought, although I happen to be the odd reader who tends to find the information in such notes equally --and sometimes more-- fascinating.  But then if I threw in all that stuff on the Chugach forest way down here, and in this tiny type, what are the odds you would have read it?  So it went into the body of the post.  Hey, this is a blog so why not?  But speaking of thoughts and trains, it is indeed time to move on to the ship...anchors aweigh!