Glacier National Park-So Big, So Bold and Breathtaking
Alaska
Where Wilderness Is Therapy
The wilderness makes me want to wrap myself in tinfoil and walk on the moon.
Nature is more. Man and cruise ship, less.
Alaska reduces the scale of the self. Glaciers move, fjords hold memory, weather erases certainty, and the traveler becomes a witness again. The point is not to conquer the wilderness. The point is to let it recalibrate you.
None of these landscapes are ugly because they are natural and wild. I learn about geography by traveling by cruise ship; geology, the day after a huge event. They take place every day somewhere around the planet - earthquakes, hurricanes, even glaciers move.
When I attempt to pick out anything by itself in Alaska, I find it connected to everything else in the Universe, yet I feel my smallness because of its vastness.
All other traveling, including on this ship, is Karaoke traveling - a cheap imitation. But it's still worth doing. I can hear the ice sheet-music of the glacier calving and the music of the bay written in ice river lines.
I'm not swimming with the sharks in New York City, I am keeping company with the glaciers in Juneau. The rain, the cold and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of me, reducing my digital narcissism to zero.
Traveling in places without electricity are not voyages of discovery, but rituals of reassurance. The wilderness is therapy. God's only voice is nature - Mother Nature, unconditional, indiscriminate and unbridled love for anyone who arrives here.
Quinn The Eskimo, Dylan's song, personifies the inside passage. Traveling is a Life Sentence - we yearn for journeys like prisoners dream of rooms without bars. And we all want time off for good behavior, which we get in a place like now.
Sometimes the deepest truths are found in the simplest observations. The wilderness strips away pretense and leaves only what matters.
I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Male energy and efforting doesn't pay off - conquering mountains, owning the ocean, the weather and wilderness won't make you, it will break you, if you are in competition instead of collaboration and cooperation with Gaia. The idea that I, the land takes hold.
A fjord is when sea water floods a valley carved out by a glacier. I have cruised in New Zealand's Fjords, and Norway's, and this one, Tracy Fjord is equally astonishing and beautiful. The Fjords are Alaska's Ecstasy.
Glaciers appear blue in color because water, including the frozen water that makes up glaciers, is very good at absorbing light. The more icy and clear an iceberg, the bluer it appears.
I met a guy named Art. I took him to a museum, hung him on the wall, criticized him, and left. Alaska, however, makes me want to wrap myself in tinfoil and walk on the moon.
The ego gets smaller. The world gets larger.
Alaska does not need to be conquered, optimized, posted, or explained. Its value is the correction it makes to scale: glaciers become clocks, fjords become memory, and wilderness becomes a way of seeing.