Alaska, Part III -- Beyond the Glaciers

     Gosh, I remembered saying that I didn't care for "numbered" posts and here I am right back at it.  Old habits, and in my case perhaps because I am indeed older, seem to die hard.  We were docked in Sitka, a town rich with history (it was the original capitol of the state) and a small population, a curse of sorts for seasonal cruise towns like this which depend on tourism but perhaps not ship after ship that belches out ten times the town population in one go.  My wife and I had booked a nature walk through the world's largest temperate rain forest, which is a forest different from a tropical rainforest, or a forest in general, for this would be a forest that stretched from north of here (Sitka sits near the top of the Inland Passage) all the way down to the state of Washington.  It was the Tongass, a forest which met the temperate conditions (year-round temps hovering between 30-60F degrees) and also one that received more than 55" of rain (this area actually gets over 100").  The ferns were lush, the mosses plentiful, yet the rain here was highly acidic when compared to the alkaline-dense rains of an island chain like Hawaii.  It was a reminder that even though we were in a land rich in volcanic history, the chemistry of our planet's inner core was as varied as that which was now above ground.

The enticing Devil's Club plant

     Our guides showed us the plants to avoid touching or biting, some which could send you to the hospital.  If that seemed a silly warning, the skunk cabbage was sometimes used by bears as a fast-acting laxative, its high oxalic acid content (think rhubarb) flushing out the twigs and rocks and other "fillers" they sometimes consumed before hibernation.  One bite of the leaf, they told us, would leave our mouth stinging; and if we swallowed that bite, well, they may be calling for an ambulance.  They didn't have to tell us twice to not taste that piece of leaf.  Same with the Devils Club, its sharp thorns would prove nearly impossible to remove and thus would be quick to cause an infection.  Throw in the cow parsnip (somewhat derogatorily nicknamed Indian celery) which reacted with sunlight if your skin touched it, as in possibly giving you a reaction similar to a 3rd-degree burn.  Yikes.  Stay on the path, they told us, perhaps to hold our attention since we had encountered all three plants in a short distance.  There were berries galore, however, which the guides freely picked and ate since almost all were edible, from the watery and bland salmonberry (which had the color of salmon roe) to wild blueberries, and the cucumber stalk with its "watermelon" berries (no relation since the berries are small in size and weight, and hang like bells underneath the plants' leaves). 

Cucumber stalk and its berries...

     We also learned that most of the commercial dungeness crabs we buy in stores are males (to preserve the breeding population), identified with an obelisk-like marking on their underside.  And that there were more bears on the nearby Chichagof Island than anywhere else on the planet, bears which had so strong a genetic pool that less than 20% of their DNA is shared with the other bears in the area (strong ocean currents prevent most bears, including polar bears, from coming to the island).  Even moose, which are considered good swimmers, tend to stay put on these islands.  The bald eagles we spotted were juveniles, so identified because it takes 5+ years before their distinctive white plume arrives on top (who knew?).  And the pink salmon were still a week out, they told us, but that when they're born they will spend 2 weeks living on their egg sacs while they stay in the area to take in the mineral content of the water, a scent so ingrained by then that they would return to within 40 feet of their birthing site even after 2 years at sea; unfortunately their return to fresh water would not as forgiving as the start of their journey...they would succumb to nature, not only from exhaustion but from not fully adapting back to fresh water (on the other end of the spectrum, pink salmon are adapting quite quickly to the warming waters of the Arctic, said the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association).

Red alder covered with lichen...

      Arriving at the estuary, defined as a trapped body of fresh water occasionally flooded by tidal sea waters, we found that nature here proved the opposite of the returning salmon, that such water mixtures may often produce 20 times the amount of fish that it does at sea, and 3-5 times the plant life of a cultivated wheat field.  We also passed areas of what seemed like birch or aspen (even though no such species are in this area); they were actually red alder trees speckled with lichen that made them look like birch or aspen trees (the trees in this area consist of 10% western hemlock, 10% red cedar, and 80% Sitka spruce).  Steinway pianos only use red alder for their soundboards, as do many higher end guitar manufacturers, each swearing by the acoustic properties of the wood.  But red alder was not to be confused with red cedar, once as tall and majestic as the redwoods, and originally used by indigenous peoples to make totem poles; the species had been overharvested nearly a century ago.  I bring much of this up because had I just been taking a casual stroll through this rather lush forest, I would probably have bypassed almost all of what we saw.  Sure, I would have likely picked a few berries (but probably not eaten them), perhaps got a scrape on my arm as I followed a shortcut, and maybe even touched that "celery" plant just because I would have wondered what it was, only later being puzzled that my arm or throat was now on fire.  We miss so much, overall. 

     Here's one example of missing things as noted from Ed Yong's book, this on treehoppers (tree what??).  The insects send vibrations through the plants, and when researchers clipped a microphone to a leaf and sent the baby treehoppers underneath scurrying, they heard through their headphones not chaos but sounds "like cows mooing."  As the babies returned: ...their cacophony of vibrational moos turned into a synchronized chorus.  Still watching them, Ryan (one of the researchers) took the headphones off.  All around him, he heard birds singing, howler monkeys roaring, and insects chirping.  The treehoppers were quiet.  Ryan put the headphones back on, "and I was transported into a totally different world...it was sensory travel.  I was in the same place, but stepping between two really cool environments.  Added Yong: It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.  It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness.  It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity...When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.  Listen to treehoppers, and you realize that plants are thrumming with silent virational songs.  Watch a dog on a walk, and you see that cities are crisscrossed with skeins of scent that carry the biographies and histories of their residents.  Watch a swimming seal, and you understand that water is full of tracks and trails.

     Walking through that forest on even that short walk helped me realize how much of this vibrant world existed just outside my bubble, and how much we all can and often do miss simply because we either feel that we don't have time, or simply aren't interested.  As author Yong continued: ...it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and we easily mistake it for all that there IS to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.  We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can.  We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect.  We can't trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can.  We can't feel the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a wandering spider does.  Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of elephants and whales.  Our eyes cannot see the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes detect or the ultraviolet light that the birds and the bees can sense...There are animals that can hear sounds in what seems to us like perfect silence, see colors in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibration in what feels to us like total stillness.  There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin.  Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins with their entire bodies.  The star-nosed mole feels around with its nose, while the manatee uses its lips.  We are no sensory slouches, either.  Our hearing is decent, and certainly better than the millions of insects that have no ears at all.  Our eyes are unusually sharp, and can discern patterns on animal bodies that the animals themselves cannot see.  Each species is constrained in some ways and liberated in others.

     So that was my brief experience in Sitka, but what I discovered could have happened in any forest, or ocean, or backyard.  Now before you overdose on my visit to Sitka, allow me to throw in a few parting thoughts on its history for as with so many Caesar-like veni, vidi, vici colonialists, early Russian settlers arrived, built a fort, and were promptly defeated by the indigenous Tlingit (pronounced, according to our guides, as kling-it).  Not to be humiliated the defeated Russian commander returned 4 years later with more men and more firepower and took back the fort, one which they discovered was largely empty.  The Tlingit had moved on.  The Russians proclaimed Sitka their new Russian-America capitol and also proclaimed, let the logging begin (bye bye red alder and cedar).  Obviously miffed, the Tlingit felt that when Russia "sold" their land to the U.S. some 60 years later,  they might come to see some justice; but alas, the Russian-American treaty was drawn up and signed without a single Tlingit in sight.  It would be more than 175 years before the U.S. would recognize the original inhabitants of the land, even though the original Tlingit name of Shee Atika was reworded down to Sitka (the Tlingit words meant "people on the outside of the Shee area").  Still, even with much of its timber and gold gone, Sitka would prosper not by the shiny metal but by returning to the original "gold" of the Tlingit, the salmon.  At one point Sitka was larger than San Francisco (the Tlingit were known to have traveled as far down as Washington state, but who's to say they didn't venture even further south?)

     Now, perhaps as then, we were here as mere interlopers, rushing off of our luxurious ship to take a quick peek then moving on.  Yet to come were other coastal places with other histories...Skagway, Juneau, Ketchikan.  Each was as rich with good and bad memories for the indigenous peoples, each now displaying once-proud histories of earlier days.  In many ways, Alaska was proving to be little different than what little we saw of Africa, and I couldn't wait...except, my throat was getting a bit scratchy.  It'll be fine, I thought, except that from all that I had seen so far, I would discover that this too would soon overwhelm me.  But the thought lingered that after all that I had "learned" from my nature walk, I had to ask what early European and American settlers had missed by trouncing through this land, mowing down trees and hillsides and cultures.  Perhaps the real gold lay buried in the thousands and thousands of years of the early peoples, traditions and knowledge trapped in the minds and ways of the people here long before the first sailing vessels arrived, knowledge perhaps long gone or but a thread of itself.  As author Yong pointed out, we feel as if we now know so much.  But as my walk pointed out, there are worlds just in front of us that we still have yet to discover...even in something as simple as a scratchy throat.