Alaska, Part IV -- KInd of a Drag

     There are several ways I know when I am not up to par, or to be honest about it, when I am sick.  My taste for coffee in the morning or maybe a beer in the evening, and my urge to both read and to write, doesn't just  fade into the sunset but sinks as quickly as the Titanic.  I had gone to bed saying that I felt my throat was a bit scratchy, and by the morning I was sick.  The bug had hit, and not the bug known in Fairbanks and Denali as the mosquito (and trust me, mosquitoes are big, as in large in size, up here); nay this was a knock-out of a bug that came out of nowhere.  One moment I was fine but by the next morning, I was out, totally zonked.  I could barely get out of bed.  As with all such flu-like bugs, my urge was only to sleep.  Drink plenty of liquids (which I knew to do), out the window.  Hot tea or something as simple as a cup of soup or a hot chocolate?  Not a prayer.  Which begged the question, where did it come from?  Who knows?  Buffet utensils and serving spoons were everywhere on the ship, even my beer was poured into glasses (which I almost never have done since I generally just drink from the can or bottle; but then hey, this was a cruise so why not?)  Maybe the beer glass wasn't washed very well?  Or maybe it was one of the elevator knobs or bathroom sink handles; maybe even a bite from that bit of unpeeled fruit; or maybe it was something as simple as stress from weeks and weeks ago?   Let's face it, I could blame it on a million possible, probable, and plausible causes, none of which mattered to me because all I could think of was, let me sleep.  So fair warning readers, my Alaska adventures were now on pause for a few days...

     We were coming up on Skagway, the northern most part of Alaska's Inside Passage and gateway to the Gold rush and the difficult pass over to Dawson City (100;000 would make the attempt but little more than 30,000 would finish).  You'll miss the train ride that follows the pass and crosses over wood trestled bridges, my wife said.  Big deal (she never did get sick despite being stuck in the room with me each night; on a ship there's not a lot of places to move to other than going outdoors onto the freezing balcony...this was Alaska after all).  Then it was the door opening; what, back so soon?  How was it?  Blah, blah, blah, sounds interesting, now let me go back to sleep.  Next stop, Juneau, Alaska's capitol and named after Joe Juneau, Canadian trapper and yet another city where the indigenous name was ignored, although even I had to admit that the Tlingit version was tough to remember (Wikipedia translated it this way: Dzánti K'ihéeni Athabaskan pronunciation: [ˈtsʌ́ntʰɪ̀ kʼɪ̀ˈhíːnɪ̀]).  The city was/is known for being the only state capitol with no road connecting it to the outside world...only accessible by air or sea, which is why voters decided to change the capitol to the  city of Willow in the 1970s (the decision was reversed in 1982 due to projected costs; Sitka was the original capitol of Alaska).  Then the door opened again.  What a cute little town, my wife said, and the trail to Mendenhall glacier was spectacular (but full of mosquitoes).  Yeah, yeah, but I'm still a bit tired; tell me about it tomorrow.  But here's what had changed in those 48 hours...I had actually stepped out of the cabin sometime around 3 when most of the passengers were off on excursions, and had ordered a tuna burger at the outdoor bar (away from everyone) and took a few sips of beer.  My body had apparently put up another good fight and after two days was coming out ahead.

     But all that is how we think when we're sick, isn't it?  That whatever we have is just a temporary bug, a set back and we'd be fine after a few days rest.  I couldn't help but feel that that was probably how my brother felt, only for him a few days of rest didn't seem to help.  After a week, he was feeling even more fatigued.  But even in trying to put myself in his place, I felt that I, too, even after a week or two, would be in denial and feel that I would get better.  Certainly you couldn't be that sick, even if at some point (a week, two weeks?) you'd come to accept that maybe you'd better see a doctor (by this time, my brother was having difficulty walking).  More rest said my brother's doc; we'll do some tests.  Then after what became a wasted week and a trip back to the hospital, the scan showed his test results....time to start saying your goodbyes.  Wait, what??  Na Leo's song kept coming back to my head: Where are you going inside your mind?  I guess we're always living on borrowed time.  Who can accept that you would go from a flu-like bug from which you've always bounced back, to getting a diagnosis that this was it?  But I had to admit that even as sick as I felt, I felt that I would recover.  And yet, I couldn't shake that little bit of genetic history from my groggy head...could the same thing that happened to my brother now happen to me?  In the middle of a cruise?  What would be my final plans, things I needed to tell others, things I "needed" to get done.  And then, almost miraculously, I felt like a beer...

    So, the travelogue sort of ends here, but not before presenting a few views of the ship.  By the third morning I was so well rested that I was up "touring" the boat at 4:30 in the morning; yes 4:30 AM, where I saw back-of-the-scene workers vacuuming foyers and polishing brass rails, getting the ship prepped so that all would look sparkling when passengers woke up.  Every one of the workers was pleasant, if a bit surprised, to see someone walking around as wide awake as they were...at this hour!  And in a another sign that I was on the mend, I had brought my tablet to do some writing.  And I found that I was reading, and reading a lot.  It was that chance to both catch up on a potpourri of articles and notes (which I tend to bring on trips but usually don't get to) and to watch that pile diminish.  So, to end this folksy cruise "tale," here are a few of the tidbits I "learned" while on my road to recovery (when I ordered a scotch at dinner on the third night, my friend said politely, "you must be back").

     Drag: in my day, the only meanings for drag was for racing or boredom.  But today, the "world" of drag seems to be everywhere except in those original meanings.  And I'll admit that I was (and am) naïve about that world; the only time I can recall seeing that world was when a gay friend showed me his beauty pageant photo and dang, he did look pretty impressive.  So when the London Review had an article that went into depth about that world, well, I was like a school kid sneaking into the movies.*  Said part of the article: Everything is exaggerated: layers of padding around the hips and thighs, tucked genitalia, asphyxiating corsets, towering heels and large silicon breast plates -- not to mention heavy wigs, which affirm the Southern Baptist adage that "the higher the hair, the closer you are to God."  The Queens glue down their eyebrows or shave them off.  They block out any hint of stubble and smooth the foam padding with four or five pairs of tights.

    On the other end of the spectrum came this from WIRED on manscaping (what??): Millions of men are adrift, withdrawn, confused, enraged, and susceptible to messages that they stink -- culturally, psychologically, and bodily.  On the extreme end, they hear Tucker Carlson touting "testicle tanning" as a "bromeopathic" therapy to bolster testosterone...Most manscapers tend to be men in their thirties, but the sack spray community spans 13-year-olds to octogenarians.  Wait??  13-year-olds?  One manscaping company alone (and there are many) brought in $300 million selling shavers, sprays and other products strictly meant for men's privates (Men's Health reported that 62% of men in their survey shave "down there.").  And I won't even go in to the world of male "enhancements," another $500 million business said The New Yorker, and one which involves "degloving" or flipping the male "part" inside out, inserting the implant, then tucking it all back in.  Ouch!  Man oh man (pardon the pun), this was bumming me out.  What happened to the world of my youth when men just wanted to race two muscle cars down a straight line?  And then there was that piece on how Nashville was changing into a land of "bro" country (quick, name the first Black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry).  What the heck was bro country?  Reading all of this was, well, kind of a drag.

    So onward to even stranger things, like the oceans and oceans of...plastic.  As if I hadn't already read about state-sized "patches" of floating plastic, now there was a report on microplastics and how they're everywhere, shredding off of our car tires as well as falling like shedded fur from our clothes (the majority of our clothes involve plastic).  Said the piece in The New Yorker: As plastics fall apart, the chemicals that went into their manufacture can leak out.  These can then combine to form new compounds, which may prove less dangerous than the originals—or more so.  A couple of years ago, a team of American scientists subjected disposable shopping bags to several days of simulated sunlight, in order to mimic the conditions that they’d encounter flying or floating loose.  The researchers found that a single bag from CVS leached more than thirteen thousand compounds; a bag from Walmart leached more than fifteen thousand...Then, there’s the threat posed by the particles themselves.  Microplastics—and in particular, it seems, microfibres—can get pulled deep into the lungs.  And one of the worst offenders?  Paint (what??)...yes, once we got rid of lead in paint we needed another binder and what better than microscopic pieces of plastic; said the short piece in Bloomberg, plastic is now in 95% of all paints worldwide: About 58% of microplastic in oceans and waterways comes from paint, according to a 2022 report from Swiss consulting firm Environmental Action.  Okay, even more bummed, but on the bright side, newer plant-based paints are emerging that last longer than current paints and cost about the same or less.

     What the heck was I doing, reading such depressing material?  Wasn't this supposed to be a getaway to make me feel better?  So I decided to pick up a piece on dogs, only even that article turned out to be a bummer.  Said the article in The New Yorker: Ten years ago, the journal Anthrozoös published a study of sixty societies.  In fewer than half were dogs considered pets, and even pet dogs were, in most cultures, kept around for practical reasons: guarding, herding, hunting.  In only seven were dogs fed and sheltered inside the home, and in only three did people play with their dogs.  “Cultural differences and historical changes in patterns of pet-keeping...do not support the idea that love for animals is a hard-wired human trait,” Harold Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, concluded, seven years ago, in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.  Wait, I love my dog, and besides, my neighborhood is surrounded by every version of a "doodle" you can imagine (our animals are all rescues so no St. Bernard-a-doodles for us).  Added the piece: Maxes and Bellas [are] (the most popular dog names nationwide, according to one survey, though it’s Murphy in Vermont and Sadie in Delaware). 

The morning coffee "bar"...

     It all matched the other strange "news" out there, the unsolved Stradivarius murders,** the $500 million market for stolen catalytic converters (skilled thieves can go under you car and saw it off in 2 minutes, and it will cost you about $5000 to replace), the book out by Idaho Senator (R) Brian Lenney titled: Why Everyone Needs an AR-15: A Guide for Kids (no really, as Lenney told the Idaho Press: ...we'll walk you through how awesome the AR-15 is, how it can be used for good, and why the Gun Grabbing Lefties should focus on something more productive...added Wikipedia: According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, there were an estimated 24.4 million AR-15s in private circulation in the United States in 2020.  According to a 2021 Georgetown University poll of gun owners in the US, 24.6 million persons have an AR-15 or a comparable firearm in their possession.  And lo and behold, London was now the private jet capital of Europe, (what??) said The London Review.  Then came this about the retirement getaway city in my home state, St. George, a desert oasis where residents use more water than most others anywhere in the entire Southwest.  Some of the developments happening in addition to all the golf courses already there?  A 1,200 foot lazy river in one golf resort, three man-made lakes for a water skiing complex, and a Yogi Bear-themed water park which will need 5 million gallons of drinking-grade water for its rides (the golf course next door already used 60x that amount).  As the water program manager for Conserve Southwest Utah told High Country News: We're 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we're not really that concerned about it.  That's the culture.

 

     But it wasn't all bad, at least once I got all those articles out of the way.  That same magazine reported about owls in Napa's vineyards: One of the happier wildlife stories this fall involved the army of owls enlisted to fight gophers and mice in Napa Valley’s vineyards.  The birds are voracious eaters; a family of barn owls can gobble as many as a thousand rodents during the four-month nesting season, averaging around 3,400 in a single year, reports the excellent EcoWatch.  Realizing what a valuable tool this predator-prey relationship could be --and that it could render the use of poisons obsolete-- graduate students at Humboldt State University in California, working under professor Matt Johnson of the university’s Wildlife Department, placed 300 nest boxes in local vineyards.  The owls are now dining on pesky rodents in 75 vineyards.  And this from Fast Company about the company C16 Biosciences that uses yeast to create a palm oil alternative under the name Palmless: Palm oil is found in 50% of packaged items on supermarket shelves, including shampoo, ice cream, lip balm, and laundry detergent.  The $60 billion industry is expected to quadruple by 2050.  To produce palm oil, tropical forests are slashed and burned.  Together with soy, palm oil drives nearly 20% of deforestation...at least 70% of all cosmetics are estimated to contain palm oil and palm oil derivatives...Palmless uses a precision fermentation process similar to brewing beer: as yeast grows in steel tanks, oil grows in yeast's cells.  Also in the magazine's awards, the partnership of Dole and vegan textile manufacturer, Ananas Anam to make "leather" from discarded pineapple leaves (the products are already in use by Nike and Adidas, as well as retailers such as Old Navy and WalMart).  Top it off with the story of dedicated Marines and others who took it upon themselves to help Afghans left behind in the pullout (ordered by Trump and completed by Biden); in an uplifting but harrowing story in WIRED, a coalition of veterans have gotten 1500 translators and others out of Afghanistan after its takeover by the Taliban (65,000 still remain).

     And I have to end with a shout out to the youth of Ecuador who recently and successfully ended their 10-year battle to defeat two oil developments threatening to drill on indigenous people's land.  Said a piece in The New York Times: The section of jungle on the ballot Sunday, part of Yasuní National Park, is one of the most ecologically rich places on Earth and home to Indigenous people who want no contact with outsiders...According to official estimates, the country stands to lose $1.2 billion in revenue a year if the oil is left underground...It was during those days that Antonella Calle, 19 at the time, along with other young people and environmentalists, decided to keep fighting as part of a new organization called Yasunidos (which) recruited around 1,400 volunteers to walk the streets and knock on doors across the country.  In a six-month whirlwind, they collected more than 757,000 signatures, almost 200,000 more than required to trigger a referendum...The referendum also builds on work by Indigenous groups in Ecuador.  In 2019, for example, after a court battle, a Waorani Indigenous community managed to block oil development on its land.  “Mother Earth isn’t waiting for us to save her,” said Nemonte Nenquimo, a leader who pushed that effort.  “Mother Earth is waiting for us to respect her.  If we don’t respect her, Mother Earth herself will swallow humanity.”  After a 10-year fight, the Yasunidos celebrated as the Ecuadorian Supreme Court allowed the referendum to go up for a vote.  With almost all ballots counted, 59 percent of voters sided with the young activists who spent a decade fighting for the referendum...It is widely considered to be the first time a country’s citizens voted decisively to leave oil in the ground.  In a separate referendum, Ecuadoreans also voted to block mining in a biosphere reserve.  Under the rules of the referendum, said the article: ...the state oil company, Petroecuador, will have roughly a year and a half to wind up its operations in the area, known as the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini Oil Field.  According to Andrés Martínez Moscoso, a law professor at the San Francisco de Quito University, neither the president, Congress nor a new referendum could undo Sunday’s results.  But by now, Petroecuador has invested more than $2 billion to extract oil in the parcel.  The company said it would have to spend an additional half-billion if it was forced to dismantle miles of pipelines, close hundreds of oil wells and disassemble a dozen platforms.

     What I think I learned from seeing such immense forests and glaciers in Alaska, along with such seemingly endless ocean waters and vistas, AND getting sick in the middle of it all, was that often we have to take the good with the bad; there will always be gunk and stuff that can hit you unexpectedly and come out of nowhere.  But as with my body, perhaps we as a nation and planet can and will recover, sometimes unexpectedly.  There is a lot left to discover but often we need to step out of our comfortable routines just to see how magnificent our planet not only is, but can be.  As I'm learning with the indigenous peoples of so many thousands of years ago (and the youth of today), it's just up to us to do our part...

The view from my "recovery" room...

*Speaking of movies, a cute family tale which will catch you off guard comes from Sweden where an aspiring dancer (young Molly Nutley -- her mother wrote the script and her father directed) arrives at a prestigious theatre audition too late but finds her chance at yes, a drag club.  It's better than it sounds and may give you a small insight into this world of "expression."  Dancing Queens is on Netflix...

**If you're wondering who in the world "collects" Stradivarius instruments, well, apparently quite a few people.  But not the everyday person.  Said the article: The roughly 600 remaining violins built in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Italiann luthier Antonio Stradivari, revered for their exquisite craftmanship and tone, can fetch as much as $20 million each.  Prices have risen higher than ever in recent years, owing to an influx of buyers from Asia and a secondary market driven by large investment firms.  Some have even built funds allowing investors to bet on a slice of a given violin's future value.  These tend to be solid bets in part because many Strads now come with centuries of lore.  The 1697 Molitor that sold for $3.6 million in 2010, for instance, was said to have been owned by Napolean.