Skagway, AK 59.466859° N, 135.298146° W day two.
My heart pounded and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I tore off the shirt that felt tight around my neck. We needed to be at the docks in 15-minutes. There was no time for a panic attack. I haven’t had one for months. Maybe it was getting on a boat and heading out to a 2000-foot-deep fjord in icy cold waters that was getting at me—or maybe it was just the shirt.
We had booked a cruise to Juneau, AK on a small ship with a two-person crew. The dock was difficult to find. Even after we found a perfect spot to park the RV we headed toward the ships to find a map of the docks at the end of the wrong dock—could’ve been at the entrance, but that would have been too easy. We all but ran, trying to figure out where to go as the minutes ticked by. I looked at my phone, it had only been two minutes, I swear it felt like ten. We finally found a shall ships sign to the right dock, but there was a fenced-in rail yard. Once we got around that, there was a fenced-in boatyard. When we rounded that corner there was a fenced-in RV parking lot.
Finally, we spotted the boat—at the very far corner of the docks and down a long ramp. It was a woman from the RV park in town that saved us. She saw our @thewheatonway written with white shoe polish on our RV when we passed them on the winding mountain pass through avalanche zones, tsunami zones, and dense clouds between Whitehorse and Skagway the day before. She heard our last name called moments before the ship was due to leave and told the captain to wait. She even recalled the make, model, color—and trim color—of our RV.
As we reached the steep ramp down to the boat a kind man asked if we were the Wheatons. Out of breath and with a pinch of pain in my side from hucking it there, I told him we were. It was the captain. I felt like as asshole as we boarded. Everyone else was seated and ready. Here we were, a huffing and puffing hot mess with a wet dog. I thanked the woman who’d had the boat wait profusely.
Moment after departing from the port the captain began announcing the sights, geology and history of the area. The sound of the engines and loud speakers was ridiculously loud. I get that he had to be louder than the engines and that the majority of the 30 or so folks on board were old and likely half-deaf, but it was so loud that if I hadn’t kept earplugs in my backpack for my anxiety I would have had a very, very difficult day. I wore them the whole four-hour ride. It was so loud I could still hear all the announcements and people yelling over each other.
I went out to the aft deck, and there I stayed for the majority of the journey taking in the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever experienced in my life. And that’s saying a lot after the diverse destinations we’ve been over the last six years of marriage.
Lush mountains rose up at impossibly steep angles from the tidal waters with waterfalls threaded between the uniform spruce trees. Only a few cabins could be seen close to Skagway, then more as we approached Haines and Juneau where the topography allowed. Otherwise, it was an untouched wild landscape shrouded in thin clouds. Glaciers peeked out between the impossibly-high peaks between opaque clouds. Juneau is on the edge of a massive ice field where 11 glaciers converge.
Juneau is a temperate rainforest with temperatures in the 40s and it rains or snows 236 days of the year. Yesterday was no exception. Everything was coated with moss. There was moss between the boards of the docks, in the street between cobble stones, even clinging to storefront signs. The trunks and lower branches of trees were coated in it.
Upon docking in Juneau we marveled at how close the massive cruise ships could dock to the downtown area. The flat ground the town itself was built on, all the overpriced restaurants and roads, were built on rocks excavated during the Juneau gold rush only a century before. There were float plane docks too, and they kept taking off with by the outdoor dining we’d ordered fish a chips at. I kept my earplugs in a while longer.
After we’d had a couple local IPAs in thin plastic cups, and Chip had his fill of cod, we explored the local shops near where a massive cruise ship was docked. One was a knife store that had ulus made with mammoth fossils and walrus bone handles. Skinning knives with a rounded end that was sharp on both sides and had a wonderfully engineered gut hook—I really, really wanted one, but not for $600. Some of the fossil-handled ulus were over a thousand.
Everyone in there wanted to pet Chip. We let the two young women working there hold him, and of course he was perfectly sweet. A working man there gave Chip a treat, which he declined. I always apologize for my dog to turn down treats. He’s way too spoiled. He offered him a little bit of pizza crust instead, which Chip gladly accepted.
One of the woman asked what kind of stone is in my new ring I’d bought at a thrift store just a couple days before in Whitehorse, YT. I told her it was resin and I’d been waiting to find a UV light to check if it was genuine. She had one there! It lit up a cloudy, ghostly glow even in the brightly-lit room. She also made mussel shell earrings dipped in resin. I told her I also worked with resin and made foraged-mushroom jewelry. We told her we are from Maine, and she happens to be visiting there soon.
We decided to go to the historic downtown area where we hoped things were more affordable. Our time in Juneau was limited by the tour—something we tend to avoid, but you can’t drive an RV to Juneau. We wandered around until we found a head shop. I’ve been thinking about getting a small bubbler or bong. It’s only me smoking and it seemed wasteful.
We found a distillery with “Juneauper gin” made with real juniper berries. They also made ginger beer, which was lovely paired with the gin. The drink had a fun name, which I cannot recall. Kevin had something with whipped cream on top, which he shared with Chip. A tourist snapped a shot of them with a polaroid camera.
On our way back to the tour bus back for the ten-minute drive back to the dock for small boats on the outskirts of town, Kevin stopped for a reindeer hotdog. A man in line with a very round belly struck up a conversation. He leaned back to balance it out. He was upset he didn’t get to go on the passenger train excursion in Skagway where we had left the RV. I guess they’d used the excuse of poor weather—which was not true. It was barely sprinkling on the way in, and the captain had told us the weather and waves were much better than usual. I was surprised how calm the water’s surface had been.
While Kevin munched on his reindeer hotdog, Chip scavenged under a bench nearby for rotten meat which had to be pried from his greedy little cute face. We made our way back to the tour bus that shuttled us back to the boat.
On the way back, an impossibly tall waterfall poured right over the peak of a steep mountain on way back. It was fed by a massive glacier locked between the peaks beyond. Clouds and mist shrouded it in mystery, as hard as I strained my eyes, I couldn’t tell how big the glacier was.
