Unplugged for a Week Along Alaska’s Inside Passage

 Unplugged for a week 
 In Nature’s wilderness.
 We cruised Alaska’s Inside Passage
 12 pilgrims (five of them small children)
 Finding divine presence
 Everywhere
 Including games
 Of Yahtzee, Go Fish,
 Poker, War 
 And endless rounds of Monopoly.
  
 We started out 
 In Petersburg’s fishing village
 With its canneries
 Reeking of halibut and salmon, 
 Boats of all sorts,
 And Alaskan natives
 All wearing Levis, 
 Weathered baseball caps
 Padded parkas
 And rubber boots
 Reaching beyond their calves
 In the mid-August rain.
  
 Our vessel was a 100-foot yacht
 Called “Golden Eagle,”
 With its crew of five
 All under 30 –
 Its captain of 27 years
 Eager to talk of God
 Justice and Karl Marx,
 A wondrously skilled cook, 
 Two naturalist guides
 Wise and competent beyond their years,
 And a delightful 20-year-old concierge.
  
 With them, we hiked, kayaked, fished
 And immersed our selves
 In Alaska’s stark wonder
 Beyond anything
 Previously experienced:
 Spruce-covered mountains
 Blue calving glaciers
 Whales by the score,
 Sea lions, seals, otters, bald eagles,
 Wild churning waterfalls 
 And a steaming hot spring
 Beside an icy lake,
  
 All the while
 We read Michener's Alaska 
 With its tales 
 Of seductive cave women
 12,000 years ago
 Of huge mastodons
 Saber tooth tigers,
 And giant Grizzlies 11 feet tall,
 Of sailors, miners, clergymen
 Saints and remorseless sinners
 Who slaughtered unsuspecting natives
 And purposely vitiated them
 With rum, racism and rapes
 Of native teenage girls 
 Afterwards kicked and spat upon,
 Of heroic Eskimos
 With their mighty sled dogs,
 And enormous capacity 
 To endure cold, long journeys
 Stupid Russians 
 And even denser Americans.
  
 It was the familiar story 
 Of imperialist settlers
 And their colonial theft 
 Of native wealth
 Arrogant beyond belief
 Imagining that white men
 Have a Manifest Destiny
 To ravish, torture, and kill
 Their humble betters
 Destroying 
 Everything in their path
 Leaving chaos in their wake
 And Mother Nature prostrate,
 And bleeding to death.
  
 Once we entered 
 An empty lighthouse
 On a tiny island – 
 A stubborn relic 
 Of FDR’s New Deal,
 A sometime research center
 For maritime scholars
 And whale-trackers
 Who live there like monks
 Each summer
 And sleep in spartan bunkbeds
 Leaving behind crude sketches
 Of whales with 
 Signature painted flukes,
 Along with
 Flashlights, compasses, charts
 And scattered coffee cups – 
 
 All proof 
 Of purposes other 
 Than ours
 And of transcendent life forms
 In that vast harsh outpost
 Across the well-worn foot path
 That became
 Captain Bering’s Strait
 For millions
 Man and beast alike.