Midnight Mutterings | Return to Glacier Bay

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS BY JACKIE BATES |||

More than thirty years ago, my daughter and I went traveling. We went on a ferry/kayak trip, just the two of us, to Southeast Alaska. First, we took the Alaska State Ferry from our home in Seattle, to Juneau, sleeping in a tiny purple tent on the deck. We didn’t have money for a cabin or the cafeteria, but it was fine. We packed enough food for the three days, supplemented with quick trips to the markets in the stops along the way: the most memorable a crab quiche we bought a short walk from the ferry dock in Ketchikan. I don’t remember how we got from Juneau to Glacier Bay. Maybe a boat of some kind; possibly a small plane. Once we were there, we spent a night or three in the Glacier Bay Lodge campground, only once sighting a large bear who paralleled us on one of the trails in the park, sticking his/her large face through the bushes just before we got to the lodge. I don’t know who was more surprised—the bear or us.

A few days later we boarded the Spirit of Glacier Bay, which took us, our rented kayak, and a couple of inelegant black trash bags of food. We didn’t have dry bags. A young man, smitten with my daughter, ‘borrowed’ food for us from the lodge pantry. The food, however, was definitely elegant: smoked salmon, cheeses, crackers, boiled eggs, fresh fruit, fresh baked rolls, cookies and muffins. We had five gallons of water in a soft plastic carrier and some oatmeal and tea bags. Every morning we crawled out of our purple tent, drank some hot tea, courtesy of our tiny stove. Some days we had oatmeal with reconstituted dry milk, sometimes bagels and
lox and fruit. After breakfast, we climbed into the kayak and headed for the closest glacier we identified from the chart until one of us (who will remain unidentified) `dropped it in the bay on about day three.

After that we just kept moving up the east arm. The terrain was primitive: sand, rocks and gravel with the majestic Fairweather Range in the distance, sometimes shrouded in clouds, sometimes glittering snowy peaks. No vegetation where we were. Nothing human-made. It was like the beginning of the Earth. Our trip included the Solstice. We went to sleep and woke up in the purple light that filtered through our tent wall. It was never dark when we were awake. We did see one tour boat that tossed a huge wake our way, carrying our kayak up on the sand, and once a small plane flew overhead, reminding us of civilization not many miles away.

The tour boat wake incident did something to our kayak rudder, which we didn’t raise in time for the impact of the shore. We were shocked to find one of the small metal rings that held the rudder in place, was missing. Amazingly, there was a similar ring on a small, borrowed pack that held our oatmeal and tea and we could again take to the water in our green and white craft.

Somehow in the next few days, paddling along in one of the more spectacular places on Earth, stopping to camp when we got hungry, we managed to get to the spot the Spirit of Glacier Bay was to pick us up. Or maybe our saviors just motored along until they saw us on the shore. They never said. I don’t remember that we had any sort of timepiece and I don’t know how many days we were out. Less than a week, I think, but it seemed wonderfully endless. We still had food and water left when we returned. It never rained the whole time we were out: one of the many blessings of our trip.

My daughter and I got back to Juneau, re-boarded the ferry and continued north to Skagway before turning south again. For me it was the trip of a lifetime with my daughter. For her, it was a jumping off place. She wrote about it for her college admissions essay and returned to Glacier Bay for the next two summers, first working at the lodge, and later as a deckhand of the tour boat taking other people up bay to paddle and camp. After that, she with a friend she met in Glacier Bay to other National Parks to work outdoors in the summers of their budding adult lives.

On this recent trip to Glacier Bay, I traveled with my daughter’s lifelong friend she had met there, now older than I was on that first trip. This time, we took a plane to Juneau, stayed in a hotel there, ate in restaurants, flew to Gustavus, stayed only one night at the Glacier Bay Lodge, took the much larger boat up bay, and returned to Bartlett Cove in time to catch the afternoon plane from Gustavus back to Juneau. On the boat trip, the Fairweather Range was as majestic as ever, but the glaciers have all dramatically receded, more evidence of climate change. There was lush vegetation where there had been bare beaches, and I had entered my eighth decade. Also, it rained just a bit.

Before we left Bartlett Cove, we launched a tiny, biodegradable boat. Three inches of Orcas Island driftwood bark, with two wooden toothpick masts stepped with water-based glue, sails torn–no scissors available–from a scrap of paper. Miraculously, she stayed upright and headed up-bay: The good ship Amanda, set out to sea again.