Not Even Not Zen 414: Biomythography - Note 128: The House Intercom

The House Intercom

Our house on Black Rock road had an intercom when we moved in. Our neighbors, the Ganleys, put it in with a 1960s style of wiring. At the time, it must have been very modern. Even so, I suspect there was something retro about it even when it gleamed. The control knob and the metal speaker grate were both putty colored. Intercom systems had been around in offices, after all, for thirty years. The Ganleys liked theirs well enough but they decided to build another house for themselves, moved next door, and sold off our place. Eventually, we moved in and inherited the intercom.

My mother caught on right away. She started pressing the intercom button to summon me.

"It's time for chores," she said. "Come to the kitchen."

My father didn't seem to like the system but the rest of us got used it. We kids loved it, at times. My little brother and I pretended to be spies via the intercom. We sent each other coded (ha, ha) messages over the radio. Never mind it didn’t make much sense. We were playing. The intercom was an ever-present walkie-talkie to us. Sometimes we were genuinely spies, too.

"Go up there," I hissed from my bed.

"Why me?"

"Because I've already gone a bunch of times. Mom is getting suspicious."

I would send my brother upstairs to report on what our parents were doing. This was partly to find out dumb things we could have simply asked about, like when dinner might be ready, but partly to slip out of the house without my parents seeing. Then my brother would give me his secret report via the intercom.

“You know I can hear you sending messages about me, right?" my mom told me one time.

“Oh, yeah.” I sat up straight. I had been caught!

As a spy system, the intercom had its drawbacks.

One day, I woke up to music coming over the intercom. It was a 1920s jazz band number with a lot of clarinets. I remember thinking, this is not a bad way to start the morning. I assumed my father had snuck a radio into my room. I tracked the sound to the intercom speaker and felt confused for a few minutes. When I got upstairs, things made more sense.

My father was standing between the dining room and kitchen. On the counter next to the kitchen intercom, he had placed one of his smaller radios. He had found a morning jazz broadcast on it. Normally, big band era music bothered me. The tunes seemed slow, overly simple, and even the lyrics got boring. Sometimes, though, the same broadcasts would insert a hot jazz age number in the playlist. This was one of those.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"It's nice," I admitted. It was dangerous to admit I liked anything. My father would use it as permission to repeat it endlessly, sometimes in the worst variations possible. (I admitted liking 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down' and it resulted in four years of 'Three Little Fishies' on my father's theory they were basically the same thing.) That came true this time, too, as for five days running we woke up to radio broadcasts on the intercom. Eventually, my mother spoke to my father about it.

A few months later, my father got interested in the intercom one more time. He heard me and my brothers playing. When he took the session over, he insisted I do an Abbot and Costello routine with him.

Me, prompted by my father: "Nicknames, nicknames. I’m supposed to say nicknames. Now, on the team we have Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third."

My dad, gleefully : "That's what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the team."

Me: "I'm telling you. Who’s on …"

My dad, interrupting to say my lines, which are Abbot's lines: "Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third."

My dad as Costello again: "You know the fellows' names?"

Me: "Yes, I know this, dad."

Dad as Costello again: "Well, then who's playing first?

Me: "Who. I mean, Yes."

Dad: "The fellow's name on first base."

Me: "Who is on first."

Dad: "Yeah, who is the fellow playing first base?"

Me, getting tired and trying to sound like an owl: "Hoo. Hoo."

Dad: "Hah!"

He had heard the routine hundreds of times and memorized most of it. Heck, he'd subjected me to it so much I'd memorized most of it against my will. And yet it still made him laugh. We could never go more than halfway through the routine without him stopping it with his laughter or him wanting to redo some part of our sketch to make it better. It was the most fun he ever got out of the intercom.

A few years after we moved in, static started to appear on the line. The power started to fade. Eventually, the system didn't work at all. Finally, during a remodeling effort, my parents covered up most the intercom speakers with paneling or backsplash tiles.

Not Even Not Zen 413: Biomythography - Note 127: Laundry Chutes

Laundry Chutes

My parents didn't have a laundry chute in their house. We experienced our indoor slides through the grace of my Aunt Jenny. By 'we' I mean me and my younger brother. We had access to her slide, or at least our cousins did. I wanted to try it so much I may have peed my pants a little while thinking about it. My parents didn't care.

As soon as we arrived to see my aunt's new home, I heard from my cousins about how great it was to play on the indoor slide. The metal ducting led down to a basket in the laundry room. When my Aunt Jenny gave her brother and the rest of us a tour, we followed her to every room, to the bathrooms, even to the attic. Jenny had a sparkling smile, great perfume, and the warm manners of a natural hostess. Her dark, auburn hair was beautiful. Everything she showed us was beautiful. A couple of my cousins lived in the attic and I envied the huge and weirdly segmented space they had. But the only place where I stopped and sighed was the tan-brown flip door to the laundry chute. I think the adults noticed.

After the tour, my cousin Annie took me aside.

"We can't play in the laundry chute while guests are here," she told me. "My momma says."

Her younger brother, Gary, nodded. He had heard the same orders. Gary was my age and one of my best friends. Annie was the voice of wisdom to us both. I slumped in disappointment. One of my older cousins, Bobby, was standing nearby. He saw my reaction.

"Maybe when the adults all go outside," he allowed.

"They might smoke on the back patio." Annie added thoughtfully. She was a rule-keeper. However, she was sharp about how adults worked.

Even when my understanding was limited, I knew enough to realize Annie was the best guide I had to the ineffable world of social rules. If she said grown-ups wouldn't care about us using the laundry chute if we didn't bother them about it, then she was right.

Although the adults did eventually walk out onto the patio to smoke, we didn't get to use the slide on our first visit to Aunt Jenny. The timing didn't work out. I got to romp around the house with Gary, though, so I wasn't too disappointed. Plus we played board games with my older cousins, who were understanding about my age and lack of understanding, and hence they were fun. As we left their house, I closed my eyes. In my car seat, I pictured myself next time, sliding down the inside of Aunt Jenny's house. The idea burned me so much I felt it in my arms and belly.  

But we didn't even get to look at the laundry chute in our second, brief visit. We had to follow a grown-up agenda. It was our third trip when, finally, we were granted sleepover privileges. The adults wanted to do their unknowable (or just unmemorable) things, whatever they were. I wanted to play with Gary, maybe Annie, maybe even Bobby or Jim or the neighborhood kids. With luck, we could read comic books at night. I'd almost forgotten about the slide.

In the morning after the sleepover, the adults abruptly drove off. They wanted breakfast out. Gary was the first to see the opportunity.

"Their car just pulled out of the driveway," he whispered as he approached me in the hall. Even when he was trying to be sly and conspiratorial, Gary had a wistful, abstracted smile. He was already looking forward to something. "We could slide down to the laundry for a while."

Gary organized it, so he went first. He laughed when he hit the basket in the basement garage. He clambered out, made some unseen adjustments, and called to me up through the ductwork.

"Okay, it's your turn!"

As I scrambled in, I held my breath. The space was smaller than I'd realized. The slide down shocked me. The laundry chute ductwork was big enough - and it was fast - but this was the first time I'd descended in pitch darkness. It was also my first experience with claustrophobia in a slide. The thrill of fear lasted a couple seconds. I popped out into the bright lights of the garage and plopped into the laundry.

I laughed until I held my sides. They really hurt. The panic, the relief, and then the fun of sailing through the air into the pile of laundry made me hyperventilate.

"Wanna do it again?" Gary asked. He leaned down to check on me.

"Yeah!" My body went from lying down, gasping, to springing up on my toes, ready.

"Let's go!" He raced through the garage side door and into the house. I hopped over the canvas-covered basket wall and thundered after him.

After a couple more trips down the slide, my younger brother discovered us. Naturally, he demanded a turn. And immediately after that, Annie found us all. She didn't approve. In fact, she worried about us, especially about my brother. Nevertheless, she agreed this was the right time to play. The adults had gone. Annie took over playtime and became our slide supervisor. She decided whose turn it was and if the laundry at the bottom was piled deep enough.

"You are not allowed to stop," she told my brother after he playfully halted himself in the middle of the laundry chute. He let himself fall again a few seconds later but the pause worried Annie. She focused on me because it was my turn next. "You, either."

She glared at Gary and her older brother Bobby, who had joined in, on the basis those two had likely given my brother the idea. (She was correct.) I was totally in awe of all three cousins. They didn't just have the best slide in the world; they had advanced themselves to the point where they did tricks while using it.

My younger brother raced up the stairs and announced, "This is the most fun I've had in a house!"

I knew what he meant. I felt like I could have ridden the laundry chute all day and all night. I would have happily slept in the laundry basket at the bottom. It would have been the best way to wake up early and slide again in the morning. We kept taking turns.

"I hear tires," Annie said eventually.

"They're here." Bobby spied out the window. "Hurry up, hurry up!"

Gary had been the last to slide down to the garage. That was good because he knew how to put the laundry basket back where it belonged. My three cousins skittered frantically in different directions all at once.

There's a classic cartoon in which Donald Duck panics and dashes around trying to fix all the messes he's made in a room before he's discovered. This was the same sort of thing but with three ducks quacking and hopping with worry. In the end, though, the cousins succeeded. Mostly under Annie's supervision, they restored the house to a reasonable level of neatness for adult approval.

My brother and I didn't get to visit again for nine months. The next time we arrived, I found the laundry chute door sealed. Amazingly, my aunt and uncle seemed to be working to remove it.

"What happened?" I asked Gary.

"Bobby got stuck." He waved impatiently at the laundry chute door. "It was kind of a big thing. The firemen came."

Gary liked firemen. He loved fire trucks, too, so he should have looked happier. As it turned out, the problem had been bigger than he admitted at first. He didn't want to talk about it. I had to get the details from Annie.

Bobby, my second oldest cousin, had hit a growth spurt. During it, he started to find it hard to fit down the laundry chute. But the laundry chute was fun. He ignored the rug burns (really, metal joint burns) he started to get from the slide. He ignored the two shirt buttons that one trip ripped off him.

After a couple more close calls, he resisted the impulse to go sliding for a month. But then he did it again. And he got stuck.

This was not a matter of getting caught in a cute way. Bobby wasn't left with his legs kicking comically in the air. He didn't get pinched by his fat like Winnie the Pooh and with his head poking out in the hallway at the top of the stairs. No, Bobby had no fat. He was a skinny guy, just grown too big for the ducts, which formed a kind of S shape within the wall. On the day he jammed, he made it through the curve at the top. Where it bent near the bottom, toward the garage, is where he got stuck.

1. Picture a tight space where you can't move your arms or legs.
2. Make it utterly dark.
3. And you're jammed so hard in the stomach and chest, you can barely breathe.

No, it didn't sound like a cute sort of accident. Bobby panicked. He yelled. His brothers tried to rescue him. They lowered knotted towels to let him grab on. They tried to pull him up. No success. They tried to pull him the rest of the way down, instead. Even worse. He jammed tighter.

Bobby's parents arrived and tried to rescue him. Again, they made it a little worse. At least they felt secure enough in their understanding of a nearly dire situation to call the fire department. Even the emergency crew, though, felt flummoxed by the situation. While they tried to figure out how to get the job done - cutting into the wall and the duct meant possibly cutting into Bobby - the young teen spent another hour stranded in a dark, narrow space. Eventually, the rescue team poured grease on him and pulled on his feet. Success!

"My momma says it's off limits," Annie concluded. After her story, I wasn't tempted.

Well, I wasn't tempted for about half an hour. My younger brother, the smallest of us at the time, felt the rule shouldn't apply to him. I sort of felt the same. When my brother learned the slide was getting blocked off and removed, he panicked. He begged me, got me to take his side, stomped his feet over the unfairness of the house rules, and appealed to Annie.

Later in the day, I trotted in through the garage taking a break from a game of freeze tag. My little brother popped out of the laundry chute and fell into a mound of laundry.

My mouth opened in outrage. When I advanced on Annie, ready to make my case about how unfair this was, she turned her back and disappeared.

I never did get to try the laundry chute again.

#

Laundry chutes were common features in multi-story homes between 1920 and 1970. Since then, most buildings have done away with them. Although children getting stuck was a factor in putting them out of style, the more important reason turns out to be house fires. Flames travel between floors faster when a house has a laundry chute.

There's no reason modern laundry chutes can't have safety features like their own sprinklers in case of a fire. It's probably easier to make people carry their laundry downstairs, though, so here we are.
 

 

Not Even Not Zen 412: Biomythography - Note 126: Lightning Bugs

wikimedia, Claudeverett

Lightning Bugs

When I was two, my mother flew with me from her army base in Germany to my grandmother's home in Annapolis, She and my father wanted to tour more of Europe, so she had to unload me somewhere.

Her mother was willing, even happy, to care for me. It's strange but there it is. That summer in Annapolis was the first time I saw a jar full of lightning bugs. At least, it’s the first I remember. My uncles filled a tall jar, half as big as me, with the blinking, glowing angels. I even caught one myself. (Well, it landed on me and an uncle scooped it off.) They made the jar a tinfoil lid with holes poked in the top.

"Now he'll sleep," said Uncle Mike. Apparently, I had started bursting into tears at bedtime because I was missing out on the lightning bugs. This was his answer.

All my uncles, even the adult ones, wanted a jar of lightning bugs anyway. I was their excuse to make one and keep it. They placed it on the floor next to my bed. As soon as everyone left, I crept down to lie on the floor next to the glass. I curled around it, the closest I could come to hugging the swarm, and I stared at the tiny bodies and their lights. They were beautiful. They were sacred. They were holy spirits so far as I was concerned. They were not a sign of anything, just a form of awe dressed in beetle costumes with wings. They inspired, in me, a trembling wonder.

In the summer when I was four years old and again when I was five, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents. The Stockett family bug jar tradition continued. I was twice as tall by then but the glass vessel still seemed reassuringly large. I think my grandfather and uncles may have resorted to an ancient pickle jug. Pickles meant 'whole cucumbers,' at least in my family at the time, and those required a container of significant size.

"We need to use a real lid," one of my uncles decided.

Apparently I had removed the tinfoil from an earlier version or one of my uncles had done it and blamed me.

"Put it up where he can see it," my grandmother told them. "Not on the floor."

My grandmother had found me sleeping on the bedroom floor earlier. She was determined to put a stop to it. She enforced her stay-in-the-bed rules by checking on me and the lightning bug jar every fifteen minutes.

I climbed down to be close to the jar anyway. I had discovered I could hear the floorboards squeak when my grandmother approached. If I paid attention, I could climb into bed and pretend to be asleep before she opened the door. This time, I discovered something more, too. My uncles had used an awl to make the holes in the lid. I had watched them do the job. But those holes were too big. The beetles could climb out through them, so they did. They flew around the room, blinking. Some of them landed on me to rest. It was wonderful.

When I was five, my little brother came with me to my grandparents' house. That year, we had a harder time collecting lightning bugs.

"Damn pesticides," my grandfather told us. "They're doing the job, killing bugs. But still."

No one really meant to kill the lightning bugs. Everyone noticed it happening, though. Every summer at Riva Road, we found fewer of them. At my parents house, in the grassy and wooded park, blank spots appeared in the lightning bug swarms. One year, they disappeared from the grassy fields. The next, a strip of creek came up barren despite running through the shelter of the forest. The year after, swaths of woodland fell dark. The next and the next, the few fireflies remaining around us grew sparser and harder to find. The only ones we could locate lived in the woods.

We also started calling the bugs 'fireflies.' I'm not sure why. Maryland is an odd state, linguistically. Once, it was southern. Over the years, we adopted northern terms here. Even more dramatically, Maryland became cosmopolitan and suburban, influenced by the big cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC.

We adopted modern insecticides. We built more, which meant we compacted our soils with bulldozers and heavy trucks. Compacted soils killed the lightning bugs and other insects that previously spent most of their lifetimes underground. We sanitized our yards and cleaned up the leaf litter many species of fireflies require to live.

The capture jars got small, then they disappeared. We stopped catching fireflies. Instead, we laid down in the dark, in the grass, to watch. Over the summers, the beetle mating seasons grew briefer. Several species of firefly seemed to disappear. There were too many types to catalog, at first, and we didn't understand the types or we didn't consider the variety to be important.

Now there are societies trying to track the destruction of the fireflies, just as there are groups watching butterflies disappear or birds go extinct.

#

What I'm hoping to do, where I am:

1. Is there a way to de-compact our soils? Maryland has lots of clay soils. Once heavy machinery has compacted them, I think the best way forward may be to create new, loose topsoil and spread it over our yards. I'm making topsoil with compost but the process takes years, at the least.

1a. Maybe I should buy some topsoil.

2. Create and stack leaf litter. This is a tough one to do artistically - that is, to ensure the neighbors like it. Leaf litter tends to blow around. Keeping it in spots around my yard may involve some mini-fencing. If I can do it, though, it would help some kinds of fireflies re-start.

3. Plant native shrubs and trees. We've been here only a few years but almost everything in our yard was non-native when we arrived. I tend to like fruit trees, too. Paw-paws and red mulberries are natives. They seem worth consideration.

4. Let areas of the yard turn to tall grass. Like stacking leaf litter, this will be tough but it should be doable.

5. Have a safe water feature in the yard for the species of fireflies that need water. Honestly, I'm not sure how to do this without having even more mosquitoes than we do. I may give up on this one.

6. Some fireflies feed on snails and slugs. Well, we've got that covered. Ugh.

7. Some fireflies feed on plant pollen or nectar. With buddleia and russian sage, we might have enough but, then again, we might need to plant native flowers for fireflies, not the ones we've got.

Not Even Not Zen 411: Biomythography - Note 125, Internal Mapping, Pt. II

Internal Mapping, Pt. II 

 College: 

I'm driving home in a caravan with friends, all of us bound for the DC area. Partway there, we grow tired. We had planned to stop at my house and unload stuff from my friend's Subaru wagon into my parents' house. Instead, when we talk at a rest stop, he says he'd rather drive straight home.

"Can you give me directions to your house?" Thomas asks. "A map? I like maps."

"Yeah, sure." I grab a blank sheet of paper and sketch out how to get to my house from the DC beltway. I deliberately foreshorten the 395 beltway itself and 70N as well, so I can draw a more accurate picture of Route 28 to Black Rock and, on the other side, Route 117 to Seneca to Black Rock. I've driven the areas close to my house in the light and the dark, sometimes literally (although briefly) with my eyes closed. These are roads I know. The map is quick.

A few days later, Thomas drives up to my house. After a shoulder-thumping hello - Thomas is not much on hugs, at least from other guys - he gawks at the woods around us. He laughs.

"This really is the middle of nowhere," he says.

"Told you."

"Yeah, lots of people say they live nowhere. But you literally have cow fields on every side. And then there's this forest." He flashes the piece of paper.

"The map worked," I observe.

"You fucking know this road. It's kind of insane. I came up route 117 and every turn is exactly where you drew it, every little church. Every big tree on Black Rock is right there, on the map. The creek. The bridge. Everything." We share a big smile and I realize he's driven from the center of a big city, Washington DC, for an hour to get to me, to here, to nowhere.

"The boxes can wait," I tell him. I motion to the house. "Come on in."

At this point my writing was improving but I hadn’t stopped drawing. Both sets of skill were finding a way to coexist. Although I blame my writing, hobby for my waning nonverbal mental skills, maybe the real reasons are more closely tied to giving up math, geometry, and drawing. Once, they were daily habits.

One year after college: 

I’m starting to feel my mental mapping skills fading. I've been to my friend Richard's apartment once before. It's in Rockville, not too far from his work. And once is usually all I need. This time, I get partway into Rockville and I start feeling uncertain. His apartment complex has a bunch of tall buildings, all alike. 

Naturally, I hadn't asked him for directions. I had just said I'd meet him there at four in the afternoon. With three minutes to go, I pull into the wrong apartment entrance.

When I eventually find the building and enter the lobby, I wish I had looked at his apartment number. I had counted on finding it by its location in my memory, as usual. I know the feeling of the floor, the kind-of-stained carpet, the beige walls.

When I get to the right place, I tap on the door. It feels wrong. I look at it more closely. This isn't the right knocker. It's brighter colored. When I wander a little farther down the hall, I recognize the wear on the metal, the peephole above, the room number. This is it. I take a longer look at the number, really trying to remember it for the first time.

When I step inside, I glance at Richard's wall clock. I'm at seven minutes past the hour

"Sorry I'm late," I say.

"It's only a few minutes." He shrugs it off. 

"I got disoriented. I figured I could duplicate how I got here last time but I had to double back when I didn't recognize a turn."

"Well, what roads did you take?"

"I don't know the names."

We chat for a while. It turns out I missed all the landmarks he uses. He brings up a bunch of them to see if I'm paying attention to the landscape. Apparently not, because I can't picture a single one. He orients himself by stores, signs, statues, and skyscrapers, none of which I ever notice. I passed by them dozens of times and I never caught a glimmer of their existence. And of course I don't know the names for any of the roads, although I'm aware of a couple of their route numbers.

"Never mind how you got here," Richard snorts. "If you don't see the landmarks and don't know the names of any roads, how do you ever get anywhere?"

I shrug, struggling for a way to explain the maps in my head. 
 

Not Even Not Zen 410: Biomythography - Note 125, Internal Mapping, Pt. I

Internal Mapping

As a child and a teen, my world was more visual than it is for me now, a more sensual place in general, full of smells, internal or external sensations like kinesthesia (feeling acceleration) or proprioception (awareness of body organs) that I didn't have names for but which affected me strongly and constantly. Nowadays, like everyone, I get to filter more of the world through learned behaviors, like language, logic, or conditioned reflexes.

"If your eyes see fine, how can you get any more visual?" someone asked me a month past. I'm trying to explain. 

Years ago, I didn't have to see with my eyes to know where I was or where I was going. Karate, baseball, and basketball gave me a sense of motion and a mental map of the consequences. I learned to fall and not be hurt. I learned to anticipate a pass. I learned to track a curveball. Similarly, house construction with my father gave me a sense of how three dimensional objects rotated and how they fit together (and sometimes failed to fit).

Moving anywhere, in any way, gave me a map in my head of where I had gone and therefore how to get back. If I walked down a trail in the woods, even if I went off-trail, I walked back the same way. How could I not?

Writing changed this part of me, over time. Devoting myself to verbal expression dampened my visual sense, I think. Some of the changes became obvious.

Fourth grade: 

In a geography test, Mrs. Kramer assigns the homework of drawing the continental United States. It takes a while but, unlike most homework, I can do it while listening to the television. It's fun. I use two-thirds of a box of crayons and when it’s done I hand in a map as big as my younger brother.

A couple days later, we have a test.

"You'll draw the United States from memory," she says. "Don't worry, you won't get them all. This is just to see how much you remember."

She allows us most of the class time for it. My drawing goes fast. Only the middle of the southwest gives me problems. Confused, I get dimensions wrong and find it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit just right. But soon enough, it's done. I list all the state names. I include all the state capitals except for two. (In South Dakota, Pierre makes me laugh.) Most of my time, I spend coloring. I love shading the rivers deep blue. I love marking the forests green.

The next day, Mrs. Kramer hands back the tests. I don't get my page back.

"Where's mine?" I ask.

"Next week, we have parents' night," says Mrs. Kramer. "I have to hang yours on the wall to show your parents. Did you look at a map during the test?"

"No?" There was no way to do it, sitting in the middle. Besides, it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit right even with an example.

She nods.

"The capital of Nevada is Carson City," she tells me. "Don't feel bad. Only the new girl got that one."

Tenth grade: 

I'm in a calculus class. The teacher starts drawing a problem on the board. It's new to us, two trains moving toward each other on train tracks. He draws curves representing the varying accelerations. In an instant, I see the answer.

"It's seventeen!" I blurt.

The teacher pauses. He turns to stare at me. The rest of the class turns to look, too. A couple of them had been writing notes. I had no pencil, no notes, no book open in front of me.

"How did you get that?" the teacher asks. His voice seems stern.

In response, a kinetoscope of slides re-plays itself in my head. I don't understand the pictures completely. They have something to do with the areas under a curve I've been picturing. When I make the rectangles for the estimates narrower, the answer gets more accurate, I know. I see where it's all headed. It's definitely seventeen. I can't explain it, so I shrug.

"Well, that's correct," the teacher says. Now he sounds disappointed. "But the rest of us are going to step through the problem. I hope you do, too."

The summer between tenth and eleventh grades: 

One of my friends likens the IQ test to a barometer. This feels wrong.

"I've always thought of intelligence as having a multi-dimensional shape," I tell him.

This isn't strictly true. I've thought this way for a couple of years. But it's entirely true I get pictures in my head for different personalities. When I concentrate, I see cross-sections of their heads interspersed with graphs and diagrams for the different features of their minds.

Some are yellow, geometric cores with green galaxy-graphs. Some are pale blobs with a bluish arrow running through. Some of the mind-views are in constant change as different personalities come to the fore during a conversation. Most of them are this way, in constant change. Some of the people who get called dumb seem very bright-minded in this view, albeit they are sometimes bright in a specialized way. Some of those called intelligent seem very rule-following and timid.

Some people, whatever their other traits, seem to have a part like a bicycle chain, a systematic approach, a logic, chug, chug, chug, which is sometimes slow. But it's inevitable, too.

By this point in my life, my mental maps are emotional. I don’t mean only that I get a mental shape of each persons mind when I concentrate. The maps come with emotions, too. My mental traversals of trails in the woods are reassuring. They smell wet.
 

Not Even Not Zen 409: Frenemy

Frenemy

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

(sing ska background music) 

If you win yourself a Darwin prize
I'll lay the funeral wreath
If you need yourself a dentist 
I will rearrange your teeth

Your friends are no damn good, you know 
I make them all commit
Your foes have no respect for you, 
Don’t tell you when you’re shit 

But I will 
But I will

If the cops decide to kick your ass
You'll take one in the plumbing
Then I'll kick their ass right back
Because they got it coming. 

I'll slap you in your cigarettes 
Cause they’re bad for you
And punch your friend who helps you smoke
He's got it coming, too.

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

You know that she don’t love you 
It's the other one who does
And if you make a dumb mistake
I will remind you, cuz

And the next day I'll remind you
And next and next as well
And when the wrong one leaves you
We will laugh at you in hell

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

When you brag about the stuff you did
I'll say I never noticed.
When you tell your friends how you are scum
It's a 'yes' until you protest.

You think I'm not so nice
because my morals are askew
But I'll make you do the right thing,
it's the right damn thing to do!

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

I'm always hanging out there
when you give the club a whirl
I'm not there with the other punks.
I'm dancing with my girl.

I'll knock down you when we slam dance.
Because I'm not your friend.
I’ll be there to put you down 
And to pick you up again.

(tag) 

I think you tripped, you stupid bastard
You're such a fool, you stupid bastard
You're wrong again, you stupid bastard

You can depend on
You can depend on

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me 

 

-- copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher

 

 

Not Zen 206: The Ranch Hand

wikimedia - Byeznhpyxeuztibuo

The Ranch Hand

The youngest hand at the ranch was assigned the job of doing ground work each morning with the new horses. The ranch had bought four, all unbroken or 'green broke' mustangs. His task was to attach a lunge line and lead them in circles before the experienced trainers arrived.

One morning, a mustang broke free. It ran for the almost-closed gate. As it passed by him, he grabbed the lunge line to stop it. However, the horse pulled him off his feet, dragged him through the gate, and bounced him along the road past one of the arriving trainers. 

"Cactuses coming up," observed the trainer.

"He's dragging me!" protested the young man.

"Let go or suffer!" the trainer called. 

The inexperienced hand was not a fool. He had worn heavy leather chaps and a jacket. He thought he could get to his feet. He was still holding onto that idea and onto the rope when the mustang dragged him through the first cactus. 

He took sharp, thick spines to his left hand and to his ear. He lost the rope. The mustang ran free. After the trainer stopped to make sure the ranch hand hadn't taken any spines to his eye, he trotted off after the mustang. In a few minutes, he coaxed it back to the corral. Then he took his young friend to the nearest doctor to have the needles removed. Some had broken under the skin.

"Sorry about this," said the ranch hand as the doctor dug into his skin to remove the fragments.

"Just remember the lesson," said the trainer. 

The ranch hand couldn't forget. Later in the year, though, he lusted after the beautiful women and the trappings of wealth the older men had achieved. Soon enough, he thought he found them both in a slightly older woman, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. She had money and she liked him. She only kept company with him for a few months, however, before she left him for an even younger man at another ranch. After she made her decision, he tried to meet with her. She refused. When he ran into her at a farm show, he thought he'd gotten lucky. This seemed to be another chance to persuade his woman to come back. 

The horse trainer passed by while he was making his case. The young farm woman, dressed in designer clothes and leaning against the door of her new truck, seemed unimpressed. The trainer stepped in to pull the younger man aside. 

"Remember the horse that escaped?" he asked.

"Oh yeah, that was rough." He shook his head at his past foolishness. He tried to nod in acknowledgement of the lesson but, after a moment, his gaze fell on the beautiful woman and her expensive truck. The trainer followed his eyes.

He said, "Let go or suffer."

-

copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher

Not Zen 205: A Parent Way

A Parent Way

Across from a busy road, in the shade of peach and poplar trees, park planners made a clearing and planted grass. They built play areas for children. They placed benches so parents and other caretakers could rest as they watched. Soon enough, the local parents came. Their children played. More and more people traveled for miles to enjoy the park.

From a bookstore across the street, members of the philosophy club came with their books. They sat at the picnic tables. They read quotes from Zhuangzi and debated their meaning. New to the philosophy, they wondered how one would go about putting the Tao into action.

The discussion was led by a woman who needed to let her children play while she talked. She had read Zhuangzi many times and she was able to tell the group about aspects of the Tao, its history, and its practice. However, in an hour she reached the end of the time she had allotted. Her children began to interrupt her.

“I should go now,” she announced. “Please continue the book discussion.”

Several other members left with her but the rest, although they past their scheduled time, looked around them and decided to talk about nature for a while. The felt the natural world was related to the Way. In any case, it was a beloved subject on its own. They couldn't help but notice and comment on the park and the trees around them. Soon, though, all the members had to leave except for three, who had no other obligations.

The two younger members discussed their adventures outdoors, their observations about the natural world, and the Way, while the eldest mostly listened and contributed a few observations about people. As they talked, a young couple wandered over with their toddler and a crying infant. They parked their covered stroller, infant still crying inside, and the woman left with her toddler. The man, sitting on a bench next to the stroller, got out a book to read.

"Can't he quiet his baby?" asked one of the members of the philosophy club.

"Why did the mother leave?" asked the young lady who was also a member. She scowled at the mother as she disappeared with her toddler down a trail in the park.

"You haven't mentioned the other children," said the eldest. "I notice some who are well-behaved, some who are not, some who are loud, some quiet, some who flee their parents as soon as they can, and others who hang close by."

His observation sparked a debate on the best way to raise a child. The younger members of the club had not yet had children of their own. As it happened, they took opposite sides on parenting philosophies. One supported an authoritarian approach while the other proposed a reasonable, permissive approach. Each of them pointed to parents and children around them, citing examples, while their elder tried to remind them of other ways.

"When a child gets old enough, a moral approach can work," he suggested. "It's firm but reasonable."

"What, bothering your child about right and wrong all the time?"

"Yes, exactly."

Meanwhile, the infant cried in its baby carriage. Its father sat close by, reading his book and occasionally peeking under the hood of the carriage to see his child.

"Shouldn't he do something?" asked the younger man.

"No, it sounds like a teething cry," said the elder.

"Couldn't the mother come back and do something?" the woman asked.

"Not even a mother can fix sore gums." He knew it was likely the parents had taken whatever steps they could. 

After another minute, the cry changed. The child's father closed the book, stood, and rummaged underneath the stroller. When he pulled out a bag of changing supplies, he spilled it. The smaller items bounced away from him. The senior member of the philosophy club rose. He picked up pieces of the changing kit, handed them to the father, did it again, and did it one more time laughing about how many pieces there were. Soon, he and the father traded murmured phrases the others couldn't hear, followed by a shared laugh. The father changed the infant's diaper and, for a moment, the infant stopped crying. The senior man returned to his seat at the shared philosophy club table. The others chuckled as he took his place.

"Was that a moral approach?" asked the younger man.

"It doesn't answer the question about approach at all," said the woman. "It doesn't tell us anything about which way will win."

The older man thought about it for a moment. He rubbed his chin.

"The way of taking an appropriate action, whatever it is," he suggested, "is a winning one."
 

Not Even Not Zen 408: Worst in the Field

Worst in the Field

Worst in the field,
Worst in the field,
I’m the worst soul in the field.

Verse 1:

My super power is 
making things awkward.
You don't want me on your side.
My love is just
a drop in the ocean.
I'm not the king of the tide.

Verse 2:

I chop the wood
I carry the water
No wisdom do I gain
You know I'm living
paycheck to paycheck
then I do it all again.

Chorus 1: 

I think and think
But there’s nothing I’m knowing.
I sweat and toil 
but I'm not really growing.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

Verse 3:

I hold your hand
I sweat like I'm bleeding
'Cause I'm a stupid goon
I'm a swamp
I smell like a crayfish
Creature from a lagoon

Verse 4: 

I work a job
But don't really cut it
Learned it yesterday
I don't need to
relearn the lesson 
but I'm doing it today

Chorus 1A: 

I think and think
But there’s nothing I’m knowing.
I sweat and toil 
but I'm not really growing.

Chorus 2: 

I’m a slip 
in the walk of devotion. 
I’m the saltiest drop 
in the ocean.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

Verse 1R:

My super power is 
making things awkward.
You don't want me on your side.
My love is just
a drop in the ocean.
I'm not the king of the tide.

Verse 2R:

I chop the wood
I carry the water
No wisdom do I gain
You know I'm living
paycheck to paycheck
then I do it all again.

Chorus 1: 

I think and think
But there’s nothing I’m knowing.
I sweat and toil 
but I'm not really growing.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

Chorus 2: 

I’m a slip 
in the walk of devotion. 
I’m the saltiest drop 
in the ocean.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

I’m the worst soul in the field. 

I’m the worst lily in the field.

-- copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher

 

Not Even Not Traveling 64: Alaska, the Complete Visit

Coastal Alaska

A cruise ship seems too removed and too upper-class a method to use for visiting a U.S. state.

It wasn't. I came around to the idea in part due to family persuasion but also in part because traveling by ship does, in fact, become reasonable when looking for ways to visit our state with the largest coastline. We missed the interior, naturally, of which there is too much for us to ever really know. We saw a significant amount of the Alaskan seaboard, though, and it was fine.

• Days zero and one, getting into Vancouver, Canada. 
• Day two, getting onto the Koningsdam. 
• Day three, shipboard life. 
• Day four in Juneau, Alaska. 
• Day five in Skagway. 
• Day six, Glacier Bay. 
• Day seven, Ketchikan. 
• Day eight, differences among ship crew and guests. 
• Day nine, the Vancouver Aquarium. 
• Final observations. 

We went in the summer, admittedly - but it was very fine. 

Not Even Not Traveling 63: Alaska, Entry 10

 

Final observations and lessons from life aboard a cruise ship:

The Return

On the Friday we turned toward home, we woke to discover we had lost an hour overnight. The time changed forward from 2:00 a.m. to 3:01 a.m. or something like that although it actually happened whenever we hit the arbitrary time zone line. The hour stayed lost all the way to Vancouver.

Working Out

Although we walked more on the Koningsdam than I’d expected, I still needed my low impact exercise. The leg movements designed to keep me able-bodied require a gym with an elliptical, stationary bike, rowing machine, and a treadmill. Our cruise ship had everything. Moreover, it had a sub-culture of fitness I wasn’t expecting to find on a cruise. 

For instance, the Koningsdam had a yoga studio. Everyone in it seemed to be a yoga professional, so I thought I’d better hold off. They wouldn't want to teach me the basics when they're all super advanced. Admittedly, I could have probably have gone in, failed to keep up with them, and still been welcomed to some extent. But why do it? I had plenty of fitness center equipment. 

There were more passengers enrolled in the fitness classes like yoga or spinning (interval training with stationary bikes ) than I ever saw in the sauna or hot tub. 

My main goals were to spend enough fitness time to help my body and to avoid any further injury. It was way easier to do than I expected.

Missing Out 

We could have chosen to take knitting lessons or other art lessons during the voyage. We could have gone for the dancing, too. (I used to love dancing.) There’s only time for so much at once, though. Choosing one activity pushes out another. I’m glad I kept up my writing, exercising, and playing games with friends. If I had to point to what I longed to do but missed, though, it would be dancing. And probably the art. I’m impressed they were possible choices. 

Trivia Games 

On Friday, we finally won a trivia game. We had lost a bunch of games by two or three points. This time, we won by two, maybe because it's a general trivia round, not a subject-matter round about pop music or about cruise ships in history or about Alaska history. However, I was busy writing (this, among other things) in the library when it started. I had to rush and still missed the first half of the game. Maybe the team won because I didn't mislead them. I got to answer the last third of the questions but, for those, I got a couple of my votes right, so yay.

 

Vancouver Library

We went to the library partly because we like books but mostly because a well-supplied library seemed such a startling and welcome sight. The downtown library is huge. The books come in many languages. The reading spaces are beautiful.  

 

Not Even Not Traveling 62: Alaska, Entry 9

Saturday - Vancouver Again

On Saturday after our cruise ship landed, we found that we weren't allowed to check into our hotel. It was too early in the day for our rooms to be ready. It’s a common-enough problem with cruise timing. The YWCA offered a bag holding area we could use. We traveled with lot of baggage, too, because the ship and the YWCA had plenty of space. 

By the way, about the YWCA Hotel in Vancouver, BC,

Cost: Expensive
But in Comparison: Half the price of other downtown hotels nearby
Staff: Very good
Facility Quality: High
Result: Recommended 

My wife asked me to sort through our options for the day. I had a fistful of brochures because the city is big. There are plenty of activities to choose from. I wanted to find a low-key one during which we could a) see more of the place and b) make our own tour, of sorts. I ended up putting the Vancouver Aquarium at the top of our list. It is Canada's largest aquarium, which seemed promising, and it was bound to have a lot of Pacific Northwest attractions, also cool. 
 

Vancouver Aquarium

We took the bus. That may seem like an odd choice but I wanted to take public transportation, not a taxi or a ride share. Diane felt the same way. You can get to know a lot about a city by its subway or its buses. To our surprise, the Vancouver buses were accommodating for city visitors. They are not just for commuters with pre-bought cards. Some other places (ahem, Chicago) made us go to a special shop and buy blocks of passes. Vancouver accepts a credit card swipe and that's all it takes. No preparation necessary. Sweet. 

During the ride we saw a lot of college-aged folks getting on and off. Some of them were, like us, headed to Stanley Park. Now, from the park to the aquarium I knew we'd have a hike - but that was also the idea. The park was large. Our destination was in the northeast center of it. I thought walking through the place was a way to see people and understand a little about the city. That proved true, too. We got a glimpse of the river harbor action. I enjoyed the various fitness-and-recreation crowds (joggers, cyclists, dog walkers, dog trainers, musicians, etc.). On the way back we got to see (and hear the bagpipes played for) a Scottish-Canadian wedding outside a restaurant in the park.

You can buy aquarium tickets without waiting in a line if you stop by a booth along the way. They're even discounted slightly. Why wouldn't everyone do this? Of course we got our tickets there. But we encountered (and bypassed) a big ticket line at the front entrance to the aquarium, so obviously not everyone goes to the satellite ticket counter. 

Inside, the exhibits divided quickly into themes. There was the BC Coast, Pacific Coast, Tropics, Amazon, and a special Jellyfish display. We explored them all. The bigger aquarium tanks took two floors of vertical space. The biggest displays of all - those for the sea otters, seals, and walruses - were actually outside to give them more room. 

We found plenty of animals in terrariums, as well. Some of them had cute names, like Quentin Tarantullino. Those names are mostly for the parents, I think. References to movie directors aren't going to tickle the fancy of most five year olds or get them to like the tarantula, which mostly hides from them anyway. I also liked the common names for some animals, like those in the Pleasing Poison Frog terrarium. It's a darned nice name. Those little frogs do look friendly. Don't pet them, obviously. 

Our tickets included the 4-D Movie Salmon Run. After enough walking from place to place, taking a seat for a while seemed attractive. However, only a minute into the show, I blinked, fell asleep in my chair, and woke when the "4-D" experience began by shooting cool air into the back of my neck and hitting me with soap bubbles. (The bubbles were supposed to enhance the film of salmon swimming upstream in a bubbly river.) Although the focus was on the salmon, the film showed us plenty of brown bears. Grizzlies are a subset of the brown bears and, as a group, the brown bears are pretty dangerous for humans. Black bears can get shy; you can literally scare them away sometimes. Polar bears are more often immediately deadly; too bad for you. But brown bears are inconsistent. People can feel safe around them and, suddenly, a brown bear changes its mindset and people become its prey.

There's no question about salmon being the prey of bears, eagles, foxes, and more. Animals on the pacific coast are dependent on the salmon runs. This was a film for family audiences, though, so all the shots of salmon losing their battles were shown from a distance or they otherwise managed to avoid showing gore. Soap bubbles, that's the thing. We got washed by them twice. 

We skipped the science exhibits that were strictly for kids (and grudging parents). Instead, we next headed outside to the big animals. 

Well, the sea lions were loud. They had the biggest tanks, dove the deepest, and they were charming but, still, they liked to yell. In a separate set of trenches and tanks, the seals stayed quiet to the point of being almost invisible. And in their set of narrower tanks, the sea otters were the most charismatic. It really did look like they enjoyed showing off to the audience at times. They pranked each other. We watched one otter steal ice from another, mostly for the laugh of it. Neither otter seemed to prize the ice. It was something to be hoarded by the otter who wanted to lie in it. It was something to steal and eat for the otter who wanted to annoy her aquarium-mate. Little kids crowded around the otters more than any other exhibit. I sympathized with their choice. 

Amazingly, on the way back from the aquarium and at the southmost edge of the park, we saw an English Bay otter in the wild. I have no idea how common the sight might be. A dozen other people in the park stopped to watch the otter as well. It kept diving and ignoring the audience. Presumably, it could not obtain a standard feeding time in the wild the way one might in an aquarium, so it had to go about its business, hunting and foraging in the bay.
 

Not Even Not Traveling 61: Alaska, Entry 8

 An Aside: More Cruise Thoughts

Ethnicity on the Ship 

I do try to make travelogues into 'should I do this?' reviews and I'll get back to doing that. I've come this far with plenty of mentions of travel groups, though, and I haven't touched on race or ethnicity. Those are groups Americans think about a lot.

The number of African Americans or African Canadians aboard the Koningsdam was small, maybe one or two percent.

Chinese Americans and/or Chinese Canadians were better represented. They were still no more than fifteen percent of the crowd, though.

Ethnically, I can't tell Canadians and Americans apart unless they're being really obvious. I could tell we had a fair number of Dutch, Germans, French, Scottish, English, and other Europeans, though. We had some Indian Americans (not American Indians) and some non-Chinese, non-Indian Asian-Americans but not many. 

The crew, of course, was totally different. The main dining room staff were composed totally of Indonesian nationals, almost all of them men. In other places, we met cruise staff who were Indian, Philippine, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Thai, Laotian, Dutch, and Mexican. We may have had a few Africans as well, possibly from Ghana or South Africa to judge by accents. The only European Americans I noticed on the staff were the entertainers. 

Of course, the most important categories are these:

Friendly and open
  - Most guests fall into this category
Friendly but shy
  - A minority number but still significant
Mostly polite
  - Over-populated with the ship staff
Disdainful of others
  - This includes multi-generational families
  - And includes large groups of retirees traveling together
  - And any other group preoccupied with their members
Unfriendly
  - Almost none (yes, actually)

Food Service

The full service restaurant had bad service by American standards. However, that’s maybe a too high (or just too different) standard. It was still very good but it wasn't what we're accustomed to having.

* If your fries come with vinegar, there will not be enough
* No one will check with you to bring more
* If you ask for any condiment, you will not get enough
* You will need to learn to ask for two helpings of sauces if you like them 
* The food is like Golden Corral, always a bit bland
* The cooks don’t know how to make good fries
* The waiters won’t leave a menu at the table
* They really want you to order everything at once, even the dessert
* You need to get a manager if you want to add to your initial order
* You probably won’t see your waiter again 
    - the team system means you’ll see six different waiters instead
    - none of them will know what you said to the others
* The system is super efficient, fairly uncaring, and very polite
* And the food is good. And the service, too. It really is - but it's different.

Not Even Not Traveling 60: Alaska, Entry 7

Cruising Tricks

Once more, we ordered room service with the aim of carrying it up to the crow's nest. That's where we could eat with more elbow room and comfort. This time, however, the room service staffer caught me carrying the tray. He was an Indonesian man about my height, dressed in white kitchen clothes. He insisted on taking over my job, putting the tray back on his cart, and delivering our full and somewhat fancy breakfast to the crow's nest area. There, he placed our breakfast on the table of our choosing. He was solicitous about it every step of the way.

At 6:00 in the morning Pacific time, there were only five other guests in the crow's nest. They stared in awe at us. 

"How did you get breakfast delivered here?" A man asked me as soon as the server left. He was tall, bearded, and rather genteel-seeming. He kept his voice low.

"My wife has been ordering room service," I said. I gestured to the direction she had left in search of the fancy coffee drinks we blended with our regular coffee. "We've been taking it up here every day, pretty much."

"But he delivered it!"

"Yeah, he caught me." I shrugged. "And he insisted."

"Wonderful," he breathed. 

Not much later, a middle-aged woman approached me ask. A taller woman approached right after. This made for three out of the five early risers in the crow's nest who asked about our food delivery, all of them in tones of awe. The tall woman, who had a German accent, repeated the question and added an eye roll as we talked, as if she were stunned by the obviousness of my answer.

"Your wife is a genius." She said after she heard the story. She gave me a thumb's-up. 

I didn’t think the ship's crew had really understood what we were doing until today. Now I was worried that everyone would know. And yet we were following the ship's rules. Our cabin was too small to eat breakfast. We could take it someplace better. We did. 

Ketchikan, Alaska

On Thursday, we arrived late to the port in Ketchikan. I had time for an extra-long workout on the ellipticals in the ship's fitness room. 

To be clear, we were following the Holland America schedule. The ship's plan was to dock in the late morning. Traveling on the ocean takes time. Even revving at all-out power, all night, the engines of the Koningsdam couldn't get us southward through the straits from Glacier Bay to Ketchikan any faster. For our berths at Juneau and Skagway, the captain (and the cruise line, I'm sure) timed our arrival for roughly dawn. That gave the crew enough light to operate and it gave the ship's guests their maximum time in town for nature hikes, train rides, shopping, rafting, or whatever. 

In Ketchikan, we were scheduled for a cross-country jeep drive plus a canoe trip. It was one combined adventure.

It was our least adventurous excursion of the trip. From the description, I thought I would be steering or at least paddling the canoe. The pictures looked reasonable. Not to give too much away at the beginning, but the guides were pretty good. The excursion itself, as designed, was the problem.

Well, I said the guides were fine but mostly I meant the bus driver. He was an unusually articulate fact-fountain about the Ketchikan area. He had been working in Alaska, not always in the same position or for the same company, for six years. He observed the weather was sunny but he mentioned that, in Ketchikan, it's usually not. Ketchikan gets thirteen to fourteen FEET of rain per year. In May 2025 alone, it got two feet of rain. The area doesn't get much snow. 

"So this is a good day for your too-er," he concluded. The first few times he said the word 'tour,' I had to figure out what he meant. I still have no idea what accent he had. 

The normal population of Ketchikan is 8,000. We had arrived on a day with five ships in port. The next day, there would be seven. Basically, cruise ships can triple the population because Ketchikan is so small without them. It's a good example of an Alaska town, though. It's isolated. It's near the water. It's got mountains. (Deer Mountain, right at the southern foot of the place, rises over three thousand feet.) It's got a cog railway going up one mountain, a tunnel near the town center (built by dynamiting beneath existing houses), a boat in the marina from “The Deadliest Catch” television show, a place called Danger Island, and impossible parking.

Many residents have no parking near their house or apartment. Lots of their buildings sit on steep hills. It's not unusual to park downslope from home and take a hundred-foot staircase to the front door. 

The bus driver unloaded all this info in five minutes. We spent at least twenty minutes riding and he did not stop talking. We heard about the Tongass National Forest, people living on houseboats, the logging industry, area construction projects, and high retail prices on everything.

Finally, we arrived at the base camp for the jeeps and, unfortunately, we were not done. The driver selected a few guests to start their jeep tour. The rest of us had to endure another bus ride to the lake because, due to overbooking, we had to start with the canoe leg of our excursion. 

We endured a terrible drive not meant for buses, with potholes taken at two miles per hour, and enjoyed another great lecture on Alaska. On the way, we learned about three major native tribes, totem pole builders, how to make paint from salmon eggs, and more. There are no moose near Ketchikan, the driver pointed out, and very few wolves, so the only large animal we were likely to see hiking was a bear. At last, we arrived at the lake.

Kind of Lame

Well, it was a pond, really. It had deep, black water, as many Alaskan ponds and lakes seem to hold, but you could skip a rock across it to the picnic site. 

This is the start of my not recommending this particular excursion. After a lecture that covered material we'd already heard (not the canoe guide's fault, I think), we got into our watercraft. If you've ever paddled a boat with two dozen other people, you may have some idea what it was like. Four paddlers did all the work. Another four dipped their paddles in and tried to help. Someone's child back-paddled randomly, slowing our progress. The people in front had the most control over the steering but they didn't want to steer. The back-paddling child influenced our course randomly.

The pond is so small, all of this made no difference. And the trip was so brief, only a few minutes, our uncertain paddlers had no time to learn how to improve. 

The pond was great. The water was interesting. The place is nice. But our experience: boring. 

Then came the nature hike. I've had longer hikes coaxing an escaped cat to return to my house and seen more wildlife then, too. The nature path was well built. It simply didn't go far enough before looping back. There were mushrooms and fallen trees to discuss but, compared to most hikes, that's not a lot. After the walk, we paddled back in pretty much the same muddle in which we'd arrived. Finally, it was time for the off-road experience.

Beep-Beep, another Jeep

Well, I've done some off-roading. It can offer great sights and sometimes a challenging experience. This driving, though, was equivalent to driving on a bad road in Pennsylvania. We rode on logging trails with potholes. We were surrounded by vegetation at all times so, except for one pile of bear poop, there wasn't much we could see. There were no sights, no challenges, no learning. At the halfway point, we got out to talk. 

Right away in the discussion, I learned at least one woman seemed entertained by the off road experience. So I withheld my comments. Still, I kind of felt that if you were entertained by the drive you would also be entertained by parking at a Wal-Mart if there were sinkholes. We drove out; we turned around; we drove back. There was no discovery of a place or an emotional arc of achieving more and more difficult terrain, and no wildlife. We didn't see any unusual plants. I ate salmon berries at the brief stops because my wife made the effort to find them. They were moderately bad, as salmon berries usually are, but they were the highlight of the trip. 

Not Even Not Traveling 59: Alaska, Entry 6

Wednesday, the Glacier Experience

If you're an early riser and your cabin room is small, order room service. You need to order it the evening before, true, but there's a payoff. You'll get a full breakfast hours earlier than the food becomes available elsewhere on board. Plus, you can carry your tray wherever you want. Everyone else is asleep. You can walk to the next floor up and eat breakfast in the crow's nest while watching Alaska drift by. We did.

For a while on Wednesday, it was mostly us and our coffee. Slowly, other guests joined. The ship sailed into the mouth of Glacier Bay. Soon, standing by a window with my cup, I discovered sea otters in the blue-gray waters around us. After a while, I realized they were everywhere. They floated in twos or threes, sometimes whole rafts of them. From a distance, they looked like furry potatoes. Sea otters aren't a glorious sight from the top deck. Other folks in the crow's nest claimed to see whales, and I did spot some movement in the water along with a plume that could have been a whale or could have been two sea otters sneezing. 

I had failed to bring my binoculars at 6:00 a.m. At the times when I have my glasses on, I can count the barnacles on a whale's backside, but I didn't have those, either. I wanted to run back to my cabin for them while shouting at the whales to ‘hold it right there’ but that didn’t seem like a promising prospect.

This was maybe a form of payback. For years, on vacations at places like Virginia Beach, I would spot dolphins and point them out. My wife, effectively blind without her glasses when we were young, would scramble to get her lenses on. She was always too late. Within a second or two, the dolphins would submerge. They would pop up in a different position after she'd removed her glasses. Sometimes she put on and took off her glasses three times. But I was the only one seeing dolphins, really. Since then, she's had corrective vision surgery.

"Hah!" she said next to a window in the crow's nest. She pumped her fist. She told me she'd seen the fins of two whales in the distance. But this time, it was just plumes for me. That was all. Eventually the crow's nest filled up around us with a couple hundred people all trying to look at Glacier Bay simultaneously, most of them with cameras. It wasn't easy to move around.  

The ship's crew set up a microphone in the middle of the crowd. They took turns speaking about the bay. Eventually, they introduced the National Park staff. The park service staff included among them a Tlingit tribal member. The Tlingit have lived in the area for hundreds or possibly thousands of years. Archaeologists and botanists have figured that some green areas of Glacier Bay (forests, bracken, grasses) existed 8,000 years ago. There have been signs of continuous inhabitance uncovered, so it's possible the same tribe has been here the whole time. However, the park staff and Tlingit administered no lessons about the glaciers (none I hadn't heard or read before, anyway) so I plodded down to my cabin and climbed back up to deck twelve. From the Koningsdam, deck twelve provides the clearest view of the shoreline. I took my binoculars. 

We passed Reid Glacier on the starboard side. (I rushed from side to side as I needed. After all, there were otters.) The Reid ice was dirty with rocks. Glaciers are nature's bulldozers. They push things around pretty fast, geologically speaking. The edge of Reid had pushed a lot of rocks into the sea. Then it receded. It's a thing that happens depending on sea temperatures, salinity, and the pace of the ice's push down the coast. So the ice kept its land-locked dirty color most of the way to the beach. 

Not much later in our voyage but on the port side, we encountered the John Hopkins Glacier. In this one, the ice glowed blue in parts, much as you might see in a picture postcard of glaciers.

This glacier was named after the college in Baltimore. That seems weird but it's what we were told by the park service announcer. It’s not named after Hopkins, the Quaker who founded the school. It really is named after Johns Hopkins University by an alumnus who explored Glacier Bay. I suppose we have to be grateful he didn't name it "Johns Hopkins Where I Got My Degree And My Parents Are Very Proud Glacier” although I think that's supposed to be understood.

The Koningsdam proceeded to spin next to the Johns Hopkins glacier while staying (very nearly) in place. For such a large ship, its turn radius amazed me even though I knew about the azipods beneath the waterline, now. I felt almost sorry we didn't negotiate other, even more narrow spaces or do silly water tricks with the Koningsdam. 

My lawnmower doesn't turn as well as this, I thought.

As a group (well, as a captain and four thousand passengers), we proceeded past Clark Glacier and Riggs Glacier while I dashed from port to starboard and back, pointing out sea otters. Not everyone had seen them. A set of four ladies followed me from place to place for a few minutes, long enough to spot the floating, furry brown dots. Two of the ladies used their binoculars to confirm for the others.

"They really are otters!" she declared. Without binoculars, as I mentioned, they might as well be brown potatoes floating there.
 
Then it was time for me to rejoin my party, play afternoon trivia and, eventually, meet again for dinner. 

Evening Dress

At our fancy, nice-shirt dinner we had one more odd thing happen. We got visited by whales. 

Out the port-side window, a plume shot up. It was a puff of white against the dark blue sea. Behind everything, the shore trees looked slightly dark in the gradually waning sunlight. 

"Oooooh!" Three or four people who had happened to be looking in the right direction made appreciative noises. One of them stood up.

"That was definitely something," Diane told me. She smacked my forearm.

"A whale?" I turned my head.

Before she could answer, another plume shot up. This time, more people rose to their feet. I was among them. 

"Good of you to order the whales," I mentioned to the couple whose table I was starting to crowd as I edged toward the window. They made appreciative noises and also made it clear they didn't mind if I and the others got closer. 

The Koningsdam was really at top cruising speed. We were leaving each individual whale behind. Sometimes, though, we saw three or four spouts at once. We had to be passing by an extraordinary number of them, an entire pod of humpbacks spread out for a mile. Finally, I got to watch a pair of whales breach together. At least, from the dual splashes, that's what I was seeing. The main thing I noticed was the wide tail fin. Even at a distance, I could tell a humpback was diving. As our guides had explained, once you saw the tail you would not see the same individual again. It would be under the surface too long to pop back up while being still in our changing view. Instead, I stood and watched until the spouting and ripples slowed their appearance. 

We traded quips with the couple who had been nice enough to let us lean over their table as we watched. With glances back at a final spout from a submerged humpback, we walked back to our seats.

Not Even Not Traveling 58: Alaska, Entry 5

Tuesday, the Docking Procedure

We walked up to the crow's nest just after dawn. I wanted to watch the Koningsdam sail into the dock. At first, our passage through the fjord leading into Skagway looked like any other part of our trip. As we closed in on our destination, though, the waters narrowed. Suddenly, our ship needed to navigate a narrow channel between several other large ships and two dozen smaller ones. Space between the vessels started to seem awfully close.

As we neared our docking point, I looked to the east where a Princess cruise vessel and one from the Celebrity fleet had settled. The Princess, oddly, was launching an escape boat. The passengers were fleeing or at least they were shuttling from their ship to some other.

At the same time, a ship behind us to the south from the Royal Caribbean line was closing in. We in the Koningsdam were getting near to colliding with a vessel directly to our north, a second ship from the Princess line. The near-collision was eerie. No one seemed worried. The captain sounded no alarms. All the same, the momentum of our multi-story vessels looked unstoppable. I was watching it happen.

The Princess turned sharply, as if backing into its parking space. I hadn’t known it could maneuver quite so deftly. It wouldn’t help the Koningsdam, though. I could tell. The bow of the Koningsdam was going to hit the Princess broadsides. Yet as close as we were, we also were turning. Our ship spun in place, or so it seemed. It moved like one of those trick cars that can turn all their wheels at once. 

Later, my brother-in-law Norm clued me in about the azipods. They are combined units providing both a propeller and a steering mechanism. Each azipod allows for 360-degree rotation. Does the captain need to turn on a dime? No need for a rudder, just turn on the azipods! The big cruisers still have main engines and rudders; that's what they use when they want to plow straight ahead with a lot of power. When they need to pull a stunt, though, like making an impossible turn in a tight spot, it's azipods all the way. 

Underneath the waterline, around the sides of the ship, the azipods wait, ready to be multi-directional engines like on a spaceship.  

A side note: the Princess ship with escaping passengers? That really was pretty much how it seemed. The passengers were off-boarding via lifeboats. The reasons: earthquakes and avalanches.

The Princess cruise ship had to dock in its berth. There aren't many docks and they are reserved years in advance, so there was no choice. However, a recent avalanche had cut through the boardwalk area for the Princess line and buried it under tons of rubble. There was no path left for the Princess passengers to disembark in Skagway, not via their dock ramps. They had to use the emergency lifeboats to go into town. 

Skagway

One of my earliest sights in town was the airport. It was populated by a dozen helicopters, most of them employed by the tourist industry, of course, during the summer. I would guess they do other jobs over the winter. From the ship's observation deck, we also got a good view of speedboats in the harbor, the tourist mecca of the closest streets, and buildings in the non-tourist parts of town, which were often hidden among the tree-filled hills.

It turned out that one of the speedboats was our morning destination.

The Ocean Raft Adventure 

The description of this excursion was misleading. 

1) The bottom of the boat is a thick aluminum alloy. It's not something I've seen on wooden rafts or rubber rafts.

2) The engine is a high powered racing model. Again, that doesn't say "rafting" to me.

3) The sides of the boat are inflatable like a river raft. Yay. They are exactly what you'd want on a bumper car, because they are ready for some contact with other boats, the shore, etc.

4) The passengers would not survive high-speed contact. The boat would be fine. However, the seats are saddles with no stirrups or seatbelts. So a big "bump" would launch everyone into the water (best case) at 70 mph. 

That's never happened at Skagway, ever. Nothing like it, even. Still, that's what the rules of momentum dictate.

When I saw "raft adventure" in the excursion title, I thought I would be doing some steering and paddling. Instead, the captain gets licensed every year by the Coast Guard. She made the engine go breeeeeeeeee!  Until she throttled it up a notch, which made it do breeeeeRAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR and the little aluminum wedge skipped along the tops of waves like a Jet Ski or Waverunner. Thump, thump, thump. Twenty two passengers bobbed their heads up and down like we'd agreed to this. 

My general advice is: read the excursion descriptions carefully. 

As a speedboat crew, we were dressed like the Oompa Loompa Space Force in bright orange jumpers. There's a good reason for it; it gives the locals a laugh. Also, it was warm. The wind in the fjord was frigid and fast. I would happily take home one of those super-expensive jumpsuits right now even if it stayed in my closet for most of the year. As we picked up even more speed and did donuts to test our hand strength (the saddles had grips and they were essential), I thought: gosh, I'm warm. 

I also thought: this is going to be the fastest wildlife spotting, ever. Can I identify a bald eagle as we pass a roost at 50 mph? 

As it turned out, the captain knew what she was doing. We skipped across the waves from site to site, sure, but we slowed down to gawk at the wildlife, too. Since the captain (Alyssa, with her assistant Hannah) *did* spot eagles in trees at high speeds, our overall performance was excellent. At first, she pointed to an eagle, then another. She found a bumper crop of seals sunning on rocks along the shore. She located another colony on a different, less rocky shore. Soon, though, we were finding more and more eagles everywhere the boat turned. 

"Wow, this is a really good day for the eagles," she commented.

It was a pretty great day for waterfalls around the fjord, too, but I gather most days are. We skipped from place to place, slowed, and gawked at the various features of the landscape, flora, or fauna. Since the tide was about 10 feet low (it gets up to 20 feet low sometimes), we got to see black mussels lining the rocky shores. It's a natural version of wearing Goth necklaces, bracelets, and bangles. 

On the water, we spotted a rare species of sea duck, although by "rare" our captain meant they're out of season, not endangered. They don't get hunted. They're not even worried by our speedboats. 

On the sides of cliffs, we pointed out waterfalls to one another. This included the unfortunately named Twin Waterfalls, which suffered damage in an earthquake tremor last year is now pretty much a single fall. I had the feeling the boat had to stop there because it had stopped there for years before. The site was still in the script. A note of uncertainty in the voices of Alyssa and Hannah indicated they weren't sure if the tradition made sense. Maybe they used to say, "The twins are the best! Taa daa!" and they haven't figured out how to replace that.

I would rate the excursion highly. The score, roughly, is

Seals: 25
Ocean ducks: 44
Eagles: 17
Adult passengers: 21
Twelve-year-old passengers: 1

By the end, our young lad begged to sit on the outermost saddle seat while the captain made the speedboat do donuts. The captain gave in to his request after some careful testing to make sure he wouldn't fall out. Then she spun a final set of donuts in the fjord. My inner twelve years thought it was fun, too.

Ocean Raft (Speedboat) Adventure: 10