© 2009 Brian Davidson, Uncharted Staff

I do not have a good relationship with boats.

With canoes, I fall out -- a lot -- taking everyone with me to their soggy doom. When we load and unload the canoe, I’m the first one in and the last one out because, my wife says, there’s no sense in everyone getting wet.

In rowboats, I fare no better. People tell me they’re harder to tip over than canoes. I’ve never noticed a difference. Nobody at Island Park Scout Camp would be my rowboat buddy because fishing a rowboat out of twelve feet of murky water isn’t a fun chore. Trust me.

Then there was the speedboat. Technically, I wasn’t in it -- I was being dragged behind it, face-first, gamely grasping a towrope with a set of water skis strapped to my feet.

The rescue boat on the North Sea out of Amsterdam went better. Ironically, I did not require rescue. The boat, the sailors said, was designed to flip over entirely in the rough water if it had to, then right itself. It did not do that on this occasion, though I’m convinced it tried. Until then, my idea of rough water was bobbing on an inner tube in Idaho’s Bear Lake. The North Sea makes Bear Lake’s rough water look like bathtub drain ripples. We did not get sick. The captain mentioned that as we disembarked. We passengers, hoodwinked aboard via a practical joke-loving cousin who knew the captain -- thanked him for the compliment. “Yes,” he said, “you looked too scared to be sick.”

So as we stepped aboard the Celebrity Mercury cruise ship in the port of Vancouver, British Columbia, I had my doubts. Alaska, I reminded my company – wife and a gaggle of in-laws – is accessible by land. We don’t have to swim there.

But that’s the fun of a cruise, they told me. We’ll see Alaska. Glaciers. Bears. Whales. Eagles. You don’t have to drive. No maps, no worries.

One of the first things you do aboard a cruise ship is to don life jackets and gather in the casino as the crew explains how to board the funny little lifeboats – they look like train cars that float – in case of an emergency. As we laugh nervously with our fellow passengers, I couldn’t help but to recall an exchange between the spies in “Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang,” as they treaded water after Baron Bomburst tossed them out of his zeppelin:

First Spy: Start swimming!

Second Spy: I don’t swim!

First Spy: Then start drowning!

To be fair, we did not drown. We never donned the life jackets again, though I checked the closet often enough to make sure mine was still there. After the drill, I started to relax. This is a cruise ship after all, I told myself. That, like a hobbit hole, means comfort.

And I was right. Never in my life have I been so pampered, so well-fed and so excited to be on a boat.

Photos and Crew Members

Little did I know how many times we’d have our pictures taken aboard this boat. We had our pictures taken getting on the boat. Getting off the boat. While eating. Shopping. I was sure after the first day someone lurking in the closet of our 110 square-foot stateroom would pop out with his camera and flash as soon as we fell asleep. All these photos are taken by relentlessly cheerful photographers who must be employed by the hundreds on this boat alone. Then the photos go on display where the game is to search among all the faces to find your own, then walk away from the display because they want $10 per picture.

A word on staterooms: Ours was indeed small. My garden shed at home was bigger. But it makes absolutely no sense to spend more money for a bigger room because the only thing you do in your room is sleep. Take my advice: Go cheap on the room in order to have more money to spend on shore excursions and souvenirs.

Then there are the crew members. As soon as we board, we encounter them – whisking our baggage to our rooms, popping out of concealed crew member holes in the floors and ceilings to ask if there’s anything else they can do for us.

They do their jobs well, and never, never hold out their hands for tips. That’s because at the end of the cruise you get handed a stack of envelopes addressed to the room attendant, the waiter, the waiter’s assistant, the maitre d’, the this and the that, accompanied by a list of suggested tips. Then being told that the tips are the only way these people get decent pay makes you feel like a heel offering anything less than the minimum suggestion.

Though they mean well, we made it a game most of the time to avoid the crew members – especially those lurking at the ends of the buffet lines, ready to carry our trays of food to our tables – because of our naturally independent Idaho nature. My wife caught one of these crew members off-guard and dodged him as he was preoccupied, only to have him chase her “Ma’am! Ma’am! I can help you with that!” to the table. She won the race.

The boat, of course, is a floating Las Vegas hotel, complete with the ding! ding! ding! of slot machines coming from the casino, karaoke from the bar, and show tunes from the theater. And lots of talk of the “duty free” shops in the three-level shopping mall (of course the ship has a shopping mall, where people may buy European jewelry, watches, and furs, along with such bibelots as fur-handled salmon-carving knives, traditional Eskimo serving bowls, bear-claw shaped salad tongs and other sundry articles all certified as made in Alaska. I bought one roll of 12-exposure 35mm film the last day, out of desperation. It cost $12. That day, duty-free lost its allure.

Ketchican: Fish, Fur, Eskimo Socialism

There are a lot of dead fish in Ketchican. Salmon, to be precise, including a gutted fish dangling enticingly outside of Dolly’s, one of the city’s formerly-notorious cathouses. There are also, we note, plenty of stores where cruise-goers can buy (surprise!) European jewelry, watches, and furs. Sport fishing, especially sport fishing involving cruise ship passengers, is a staple industry in Ketchican. Hence, the fish on display everywhere were meant to entice the men into a fishing trip.

Being the cruise equivalent of steerage passengers, we bypassed these stores and the fishing trips. Michelle’s parents guided us instead to Creek Street, where the street really is a creek. Sidewalks are actually boardwalks suspended over the salmon-filled creek and houses and shops are built on piles sunk into both the creek and hillside. A number of fellow cruise ship passengers joined us, plonking up and down the boardwalk, reveling in the street’s unusual character – as if Venice has been built of clapboard and perched on a steep hillside.

Further venturing led us to another of Ketchikan’s tourist traps – the totem center. We learned a lot about totem poles there, including what the killer whale, eagle, raven and frog symbols – or moietys – mean. I probably should have written it down. From what I remember, though, the order in which the moietys appear on the pole gives a genealogy of the individual family.

We also learned about potlatch poles. A potlatch is basically a big party a family or clan throws on occasion, inviting everyone they know and making a special point not to invite their enemies. The wrinkle is that to throw the party, the family or clan basically sells everything they own to provide food, lodging and extravagant gifts for the attendees. Then they wait for a friend or neighbor who is not their enemy – they’re big on poking their fingers in the enemy’s eye – to also throw a potlatch so they can rebuild their store of household goods. Then the clans run around figuring out whose clan potlatch pole – to which the clan adds a ring every time they have a party – is the bigger one. I’ve probably messed that up in a culturally insensitive way. But we were, after all, decadent cruise passengers who didn’t really have time for cultural sensitivity since we were due back on the boat for dinner.

Everything is Food

I started out my comments with the boat-as-hotel metaphor, but my brother-in-law Carl said it best when he quipped, “It’s like living in a restaurant.” And they're not kidding. Ship food services brag that, in a 24-hour period, there are no fewer than 27 opportunities to eat, whether in the formal dining room, the buffet, the ice cream parlor, the pizza parlor and other little eateries stuffed in nearly every nook and cranny of the ship.

Indeed it was a floating restaurant. Half of two decks is home to the Manhattan Restaurant, where we ate from painstakingly-arranged Celebrity Mercury china every night. And by painstakingly, I mean if we deliberately jiggled one of the plates so the Celebrity Mercury logo was not at the top, a waiter or maitre d’ would gently reposition the plate for us. I’m sure they would have spoon-fed us if we’d asked. Our waiter is Mircha, a Romanian. His assistant is Vladimir, a Ukranian. Hearing those eastern accents as we ate made me feel like a capitalist running dog lackey, which, I suppose, is how I should feel, given that I was part of a group of bloated Americans being served fancy food on a cruise ship. We especially liked hearing Mircha do his menu schpeil every evening, particularly the part where he got to the domestic and imported “chizzes,” available in lieu of dessert. He took our teasing – and our tips at the end of the cruise – very well. And I’m sure, in the kitchen or wherever it is they went after dinner was over, they made jokes about this chatty family from Idaho who never ordered booze and always forgot which one was the salad fork.

And if the restaurant was closed when we got hungry, no worries. The buffet beckoned. As did the pizza and ice cream parlor. And if you dashed to the deck to avoid the food, waiters followed, hawking $8 souvenir mugs of hot chocolate.

Ice and Bacon

Do not trust bottles of pure glacier water. I’ve seen pure glacier water. In its raw form, it is not crystal clear. It is pale blue, due to the large amount of “glacial flour” suspended in it – dust the glaciers have picked up over millennia of flowing from the mountains into the sea.

We saw two species of glacier on the trip: The kind the boat takes you to, and the kind you have to walk to.

I’ll describe the first type of glacier: Cold, gritty, white on the surface but sky blue in the core streaked with layers of dust succeeded by layers of snow. The hunks of ice that calve from glaciers and bob around in the fjord water sound like bacon frying, which is a good thing since the sound reminded us there was food aboard. The floes also attract seals by the hundreds. The seals loll on the floes and stare up at the excited cruise ship passengers, who in turn loll on deck and stare down at the seals. Sometimes they bark, which gets the cruise passengers talking and shouting more excitedly, which gets the seals to barking louder, which, in turn, keeps positive feedback going in the human-seal loop until each species is fast friends ready to exchange Christmas cards or at least puzzled glances followed by dives into either the water or the casino, depending on the species involved. This all took place at the College Fjords, which I recommend if you want to see glaciers before they melt entirely.

The second type of glacier resembles the first: Cold, gritty, white on the surface, et cetera, et cetera. The Juneau tourist board brags that their glacier, Mendenhall Glacier, is the only glacier in North America accessible by car, which explains why we took a bus there and still had to walk five miles round trip to see it. (Their idea of accessibility and mine appear to differ.)

Worth every step of the way, however. I’ve been sarcastic about cruise ship life but will stop that here a moment. The mountains surrounding the glacier are craggy, green, each valley beribboned with a horsetail waterfall of snowmelt rushing to meet the ocean. The air pouring off the glacier is bitter cold. The glacier itself rests in its pools of water and mud like a living thing, a mile-long whale, staring at the tiny people who walked so far to stand on the viewing platform to stare at it in its living glory. And it’s more than just blue and white. Algae, elements and sunlight combined to give the glacial ice rainbow hues, from pink to violet to green and orange.

Skagway

My first glimpse of the city of Skagway reminded me of Sweethaven from the Robin Williams film Popeye – the town looks like it could have been built in a couple of hours. A very artistic couple of hours, mind you. The Arctic Brotherhood Hall, for example, has a façade built entirely of driftwood, giving the building a unique architectural stamp in this otherwise clapboard and asphalt town – which is its great appeal. This is not the glitzy tourist town that Ketchikan is. Skagway is honest, ordinary, unadorned and, above all, my favorite port of call on the cruise.

But it was here I made my biggest blunder – I made my wife walk the six-mile round trip to The Gold Rush Cemetery to see the graves of Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, scalawag and scoundrel (who charged $2 for telegrams out of Skagway although the telegraph lines he built didn’t technically leave the city and outright lied when he told people he occasionally put $50 bills in the bars of soap he sold at his general store, making him your basic, good ol’ fashioned Republican businessman) and Frank “Frank Reid” Reid, the sheriff of Skagway who died in a duel with good ol’ Soapy. We trudged for aeons, my pregnant wife feeling sicker with every step. I promised a spectacular view once we got there. And it was, if you enjoy looking at tumbledown tombstones in a cemetery overrun by conifers.

Fortunately, our next Skagway activity was more entertaining, picturesque, and could be done entirely in a sitting position – a trip on the White Pass and Yukon Railway. This is a narrow-gauge railway that begins at Skagway and winds up the White Pass into the Yukon Territory of Canada, where the prospectors went to find their gold. From Skagway to the Canadian border, the railroad is all of 20 miles long and travels, in part, in full view of the trail prospectors took to get to the pass and into the Klondike, including “Dead Horse Gulch,” an area still littered with the bones of horses that got that far but didn’t get any further. More gorgeous scenery – waterfalls, cliffs, dropoffs, bridges and tunnels – plus several happy grinning in-laws ready to have their pictures taken.

The train stops at the Canadian border. As if it were bearing a load of plague passengers, it does not cross the borderline. They tell us it’s because they don’t want to have to fuss with passports and such. I have to wonder who would really care if, passports unchecked, we wandered into Canada in this narrow, rock-strewn valley. But we’re respectable citizens. We remained on the train, allowing our emergence onto the balcony of our train car to take pictures to be our only rebellion.

And All That

Certainly, we did more in Alaska than this.

In Juneau, we toured the state museum and the statehouse, making me feel like I was back in social studies class.

My brother-in-law Carl, working on a doctorate in religion, asked the priest at the Russian Orthodox church a question that had the priest demanding to know who he was and why he was asking such impertinent things. He did not share what he asked, though we begged him.

My father-in-law Wayne was almost abandoned at a strip mall after the bus we were taking on a site-seeing tour nearly left him in the men’s room.

My other brother-in-law Kevin, after countless hours of whale-watching, finally captured a whale on film. Or at least the whale’s tail, slipping beneath the waves. He was so proud.

So I recommend a cruise. But don’t eat for a week before you go. And if the seals bark, bark back. Just don’t fall off the boat.