Archive | November 2025

Alaskan Bytes

Nov26

Fighting sleep despite a full tummy and a fresh diaper, my one-month-old infant squirmed restlessly. I placed her against my shoulder and gently patted her back. I stood holding her this way, swaying, looking out at the night sky through the window in the back door of the mobile home we lived in. Above the northern horizon, I saw a ripple of pale green, blue, and white lights slowly dancing in the sky, reminding me of seaweed moved by an invisible ocean current. The little one burped and fell asleep. Her breaths were warm against my neck.

Some memories are like snapshots. Vivid, clear, but limited to just one frame. Like a memory I have of a very young me sitting on the steps at grandpa’s apartment, waiting for the grown-ups to finish rounding up cows that got loose. Other memories are like short, four or five frame videos, like the one I recounted of one night shortly after my daughter, Niki, was born.

Why do we carry around so many short memories that seem to have no point or connection to the main theme of our lives? I don’t know, but I do know that I love these short ‘clips’ and wouldn’t want to be without them!

I have several short memories from the Alaskan cruise my daughter and I took in September. I’m calling them Alaskan Bytes, because there are eight of them, just like the eight bits contained in a computer byte. Also, because Alaskan bytes rhymes with northern lights!

1) Tammie and I were in the World Stage auditorium. A handsome young man on the stage told us he belonged to the Tlingit Indian tribe, explaining, “When you say, ‘Tlingit’, if you don’t feel your breath under the tongue, you didn’t pronounce it correctly.” For many years Western laws made it unlawful for tribe members to hunt and gather as they did in the past.  While in high school, he was encouraged by a teacher to investigate the law forbidding his people to harvest sea gull eggs. His assignment led to a special permission for him to gather eggs. When he gave his mother a couple, he claimed she said, “This will be the first time in my life that I will eat sea gull eggs that weren’t poached twice!”

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Remembering Him

Nov19
I’m ready to do metal work!

One weekend, months before my daughter and I went on our Alaskan cruise, Tammie insisted we sit down and schedule our onshore activities. She urgently informed me, “We can’t put this off! Some of the activities have limited enrollment. I’ve checked and found some shore excursions with only a few openings left!”

Frowning, I exclaimed, “But the cruise is months away yet!”

Nodding, Tammie pointed out, “Some people plan their trips a year or more ahead,”

Ruefully, I admitted, “Your daddy’s habit of making last minute plans must have rubbed off on me! I thought we had plenty of time yet.” For the following hour my daughter and I went over all the shore excursions offered at each port and discussed the pros and cons of each one. One of the more unusual options described was in Sitka where each person could make a metal wall decoration under the supervision of a metal shop teacher.

Without hesitation, Tammie announced, “I want to do this! The decoration we could make would be a great souvenir! Also, going to a metal workshop makes me think of how I used to visit Daddy in his workshop.”

I approved, “Arnie would have loved visiting Alaska. Taking this workshop is a nice way for us to remember him in a special way.”

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Holy Cow!

Nov12

The dining room waiter pulled out my chair and then deftly slid it in as I sat down. I smiled at him as he opened my cloth napkin and laid it on my lap. Such respectful, formal treatment by everyone working in the main cruise ship dining room made me look forward to returning there for all my meals. Besides the sterling service, the food we ordered was, without exception, well prepared and attractively presented.

This morning, we shared our table with fellow travelers, Pat and Lorin. Our conversation centered on how many cruises we’d been on and about the park rangers who were giving talks on the Alaskan wildlife which was to take place in the Crow’s Nest Lounge. The main activity for the day was seeing a glacier close-up. Our cruise ship was to approach within half a mile of the face of the Johns Hopkins Glacier, in the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

Upon parting from our dining room friends, Tammie and I hurried up to the Crow’s Nest Lounge on deck eleven. Good fortune allowed us to almost immediately find recently vacated deck loungers along the observation windows. The ship was moving slowly now, and tall, rocky land rose up on each side of us. In the distance, we could see snow-covered mountain tops.

The lounge was very large and curved, so I couldn’t see where the ranger was, but he had a microphone so everyone could hear. He explained that Harry Fielding Reid, who discovered this glacier in 1893, named it Johns Hopkins after the university in Baltimore, Maryland. The ranger continued, “The Johns Hopkins Glacier is one of the few advancing tidewater glaciers of the Fairweather Range. Starting on the eastern slopes of Lituya Mountain and Mount Salisbury, it is12 miles long. The face of this glacier is one and a half miles wide.”

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Where There’s Gold!

Nov5
I used sunlight and magnification to make my 8 gold flakes look like nuggets.

In the distance, I could see what looked like a small village on the shore. I stated rhetorically, “That can’t be Juneau. It looks too small to be Alaska’s state capital!”

My daughter studied the buildings and the dock, which our ship, the Eurodam, was approaching. Before she could say anything, an overhead announcement began, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is your cruise director…” He told us the dock we were approaching was to our right. While to our left, was Douglas Island. Explaining that Juneau has no highways or railroad tracks connecting it with the rest of the country, the cruise director quipped, “The only way to visit Juneau is to travel there by ship, airplane, or birth canal.”

Although Douglas Island is separated from the mainland by the Gastineau Channel, it is a part of the city of Juneau. A bridge over the channel connects the two very different residential neighborhoods and business districts. Tammie, who was standing with me at one of the ships starboard windows, commented, “I think we are just seeing the original part of Juneau. The coastline curves, we just can’t see the rest of the city from here.”

Effectively making her point, an airplane flew over the ship we were on. We watched it bank to the right over the Gastineau Channel and disappear behind the mountain that rose up beyond the Juneau docks. With all the mountainous Alaskan land that I could see from the ship, I wondered where there was land flat enough for an airport landing strip.

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