Paths in the Sea

 “Birds of the air and fish of the sea pass through paths of the seas.”*  Following ancient ways of fish and birds, our ship makes a path in the sea, much as I navigate lanes on earth.  The ship makes a bow wake and a stern wake on both sides, like left and right-brained memories printed on a changing sea. 

Between them, astern of the ship, a track of disturbance in the otherwise tranquil ocean, a path in the sea.  Wakes spread out as mourners remember where ships passed in paths of lives.  Undercurrents beneath the waves.

Our ship traveled a little faster than this one, so we passed it on our starboard side, as they were drinking port on their port side.  

Having passed and shown our stuff, we pulled in ahead of it, spewing exhaust in its face, on travelers like us who come to Alaska to escape the air pollution of Los Angeles     

How far we have advanced from the Tlingit, Makah, and Kwakiutl who came here ten thousand years ago, and built villages along these shores.  In short brutal encounters between them, women and children were taken as slaves by the victors; the men they usually killed.  Now the Inside Passage is a path in the sea for tourists, where we show compassionate, luxurious, and sometimes vicious sophistication.    

A ship ahead of us enters  Glacier Bay
between Sitakaday Narrows and Russell Island

So it was that we sailed into Glacier Bay, where as you saw in my earlier post, we witnessed the crumbling of a great tidewater glacier as it returned its portion of uplifted water back to the sea.  I showed you icebergs in the making as they crashed away from a 200-foot high wall of ice.  But I did not show you the ship we followed to get here.  See it in the distance as it enters the fog.  Like us, those passengers hoped the fog would break, allowing them a view of natures spectacle in flowing ice.   

A ship ahead of us enters  Glacier Bay
 between Sitakaday Narrows and Russell Island

Now we see it turn to starboard, almost lost in fog.  We keep going; it keeps going, all of us hoping the fog will lift.  

As we approach our destination in the Bay before Margerie Glacier, that obnoxious ship is there in our way.  The Park Service allows only one large ship near the glacier at a time, and this ship’s time is up; a honk of our foghorn tells it so.  The offensive ship turns as we approach and heads back down the fjord.  We pull into its place, claiming our rightful place in the sea.

We came to dock in Skagway, where I related to you a story about the Klondike Goldrush and how it ties me to my father.  That’s our ship you see straight on.  Behind it is another cruise ship of similar size.

And across the harbor another similar ship is docked, with another approaching its berth.   You might ask how a town of a few hundred residents deals with four large cruise ships arriving on the same with a total population of about ten thousand tourists.

I can’t answer that because I was the first one off the ship, headed straight for the mountains, and was one of the last back on. 

*Psalm 8:8