When we sailed into the dock at Juneau, Alaska, I had been staring at fir-lined shores for hours. We had seen the mainland from the observation deck for most of our trip. The coast had been green the whole time.
So Alaska is as lush as the rest of the northwest. Well, it's overgrown in the summer and there are still snow-capped hills in the distance. Maybe during the winter it's a sheet of ice with polar bears walking around in white parkas but I wouldn't know. Even the Pacific waters are a summery green, here. They are a little translucent, too. The effect is haunting.
Juneau has about 38,000 people, or so said our tour guides. That means the state capital is about half the size of my hometown, Frederick. Downtown Juneau looked busy when we docked, although I know it may simply have been due to our arrival. Tourist boats create a rising tide, it seems, which lifts the local shops financially. This is a place where "remote wilderness destination" and "summer tourist trap" occupy the same geographical coordinates.
Diane and I headed down the departure ramps soon after we were allowed. Together, we hiked the town. I was amused to find a Ben Franklin store on the main drag. I hadn't seen a Ben Franklin anywhere else for fifteen years. I even bought knickknacks and candy from it. Mostly, though, we bided our time until we could tour the countryside.
Off-Roading on Segways
Our scheduled excursion began with a bus trip into the hills beyond Juneau. Along the way, our guides introduced themselves. RJ was from Utah. Ally was from Tennessee. Both of them claimed their jobs were really great. They were happy to be working in Alaska and happy to have been recommended to their positions by their friends.
From the sound of it, they do have nice summer gigs. Although Alaska rents are high and the Segway tours are essentially a company store (with the apartments provided by the business), the pay is good enough and the rent cheap enough that everyone makes solid money. Many of the summer jobs in Alaska are run on the company-store model and not all of the rents allow for a good-enough profit by the student workers. This outfit was doing well by its staff.
Along with us for the trip were two other segway guests, both women from the Princess cruise line. They said they were mother and daughter, aged 60 and 30, but they looked 45 and 15. It was kind of shocking but I have been made aware previously of a West Coast aging difference. They were from Seattle. The daughter, not actually a teenager, seemed sort of in charge on their side.
"I invited my mom for her sixtieth birthday," she said.
Neither of the women had been on anything like a segway before. For their first time, they opted to go off-road on the big-wheelers, which seemed like a doubtful choice to me. After the older woman sat through the safety video, which points out all the ways you can disfigure yourself or die, she got so frightened of her prospects on the machine I started to worry for her, too.
Our instincts turned out to be correct inasmuch as her sense of caution made her stiff. As a consequence, she found it hard to steer. (You steer by changing your balance.) She made jerky, panicked movements that turned simple forward motions into gyroscope-assisted seizures. Meanwhile, her daughter glided around like she was born on wheels, serving as an enthusiastic cheerleader with comments like "You're doing great, Mom!" which is what people say to you when you're clearly not doing great but they're trying to prevent you from having a nervous breakdown.
We drove along the woodland trails beside a scattering of small ponds. At one point, the tour guide stopped us. We hopped off our vehicles and, since I was freed of the need to worry about our companions, I immediately started walking towards one of the ponds. Before RJ or Ally could say anything, I sank into quicksand.
Fortunately, my reaction was pretty good. I scrambled back out with barely any harm to my shoes.
"Yeah, you can't really walk there," RJ drawled.
"Seems like." I exhaled, hands on hips, and stared at my mostly-clean shoes. I had been ankle deep a moment earlier, so the sight was weird. The surface hadn't left much impression on me. When I glanced back, I saw I hadn't left much impression on the surface, either. It had seeped back in around my footprints.
“Well, how deep would you say that pond is?” he asked, pointing to one of the many circles of stagnant water with a yellow water lily in the center. I could see the bottom of it, which was only about two feet down.
My wife guessed, "About three feet."
“That one goes at least twenty feet. What looks like the bottoms of these ponds are just silt. The silt rests on a bunch of floating plant roots, so it makes a surface that looks like a solid floor but it's not."
"Are the edges of the ponds similar?" I had to ask.
"Where you sank into the moss? Yeah, under the green layer is the same kind of stuff that's in the ponds, just not as thick. Some of the ponds go at least ninety feet down, they say. Geologists come around to measure them."
RJ, with helpful comments from Ally, went on to explain how all the ponds were formed by glacier recession. That's why they are only ten feet across while being twenty, seventy, or ninety feet in depth. When the glaciers started melting at the end of the last ice age, they ripped channels in the landscape. Into those rocky fissures, the glaciers then deposited loose rocks and dirt. None of the resulting land is very stable. The ponds are sinkholes, really, where the smallest and most fragile materials have washed away and sunk into the porous landscape all around them. The resulting holes filled up with water and, eventually, they also filled with plants and loose silt.
Really, they are disguised cliff edges. There's almost always a water lily at the top.
"They do look pretty," Ally said. We all agreed.
Now, I had hopped immediately into quicksand, which is pretty dumb. In my defense, I hadn’t encountered quicksand since second grade, and that was actually in a Batman television show. In real life, I had maybe never seen it until this trip. That's despite my past slogs through swamps elsewhere.
What happened next was, our mother and daughter combination proceeded to forget about the quicksand, too. Even though they had seen me go in, even though they had listened to a lecture about the dangers of the pond edges, even though we had shared a joke about them, they forgot. I think they reacted to everyone talking about how pretty the water lilies were.
The mom said, "Let's get a selfie."
She grabbed her daughter's hand. They marched toward the edge of a disaster-pond. After two fast steps, they started to sink. The daughter screamed and leaped back. The mother was not quite as nimble. She lost her balance. Fortunately, her daughter's hand kept her upright and her daughter pulled her back. We all took a deep breath. We had a good laugh. Well, most of us did.
After a few miles, our trail narrowed. We had to park and hike across a footbridge.
We were learning about the forest. The guides seemed to understand The Hidden Life of Trees (even if they probably hadn't read the book, someone among them might have, once). They knew a forest is different than a grove, that soil needs certain bacteria to provide plant health, the roots of trees are the brainstems, the boughs preserve moisture and bring it inland, parasites only succeed when trees are too weak to defend themselves, and more.
They described specifics about the Alaska coast forests, where three types of trees predominate: Paper Birch (fast growing pioneers), Sitka Spruce (not as fast but they overgrow and push out the pioneers), and Hemlock (which can grow in a shadowy environment and eventually push out most other species). Foresters can often tell the age of an Alaskan forest by looking at which trees predominate. By the time Hemlock comes along, the forest is starting to mature.
For a while, we hiked along a creek bed. It was also a canal bed, in places. The canal was only a few feet wide. Most people could jump over it.
The reason there were flooded sections of canal, empty canal troughs, and broken timbers from a canal was: greed. Well, gold. A few miles farther on, miners had begun excavations in a mine shaft. They were part of the Alaska gold rush and their mine, although not a large one, started out promisingly enough. They were trying to follow the seam. They needed water for their animals, men, and tools. This being gold rush times, they helped themselves to the local creek.
They dug a canal to the mine. They broke the earth barrier between the natural course of the water and their canal. With that, they diverted the whole stream. They had what they needed. They were in business.
Within the year, the Alaskan snowcaps gathered ice. The ice melted. The little stream flooded. So did the canal. So did the mine. In fact, the jump-across canal wiped out the mine. The miners re-diverted the water back into its natural course but it was too late to do them much good. The water remained and worse, the sides of their tunnels fell in after the flood.
Good Evening
Back aboard the Koningsdam, we lost another game of easy trivia. It was too simple. Most teams scored better than nine out of fifteen. Once again, we fell a couple points away from the win. At least I learned, 'some boys kiss me, some boys hug me' is the start of Material Girl by Madonna.
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