ABOARD THE KENNICOTT
My own expedition began with a train to a plane to a bus, which deposited me next to a boat in Bellingham, Washington, on the last Saturday afternoon in May. Bellingham is where the southernmost Alaska Marine Ferry terminal is located, and turned out to be a lot closer to Vancouver than to Seattle, which I’d flown into. At three in the afternoon, a very long line of vehicles was already waiting to drive aboard the MV Kennicott. According to my reservation, the vessel was scheduled to disembark at six. The ticket agent at the ferry terminal said our departure had been delayed three and a half hours due to low tides further up the coast. The Marine Highway had neglected to inform passengers about the new departure time, so a lot of unhappy vehicle owners, many of who were Alaskans returning home, having driven several hours already, were walking from car to car commiserating about the waste of their time. (Alaskans, one quickly learns, have an especially low opinion of bureaucracy.) Fortunately for me, Bellingham is the sort of cute seaside town whose economic engine runs on leisure activities, so I whiled away a few hours browsing in the bookstore, sipping beer, and purchasing a few last trip essentials.
Boarding the Kennicott felt less like setting sail on an all-inclusive Caribbean cruise than it did punching in for work at a shipyard. Cars and trucks rolled onto the ship alongside pedestrians. A significant percentage of passengers carried coolers and grocery bags. You were supposedly limited to a hundred pounds of carry-on weight, but no one I met had ever heard of anyone checking. Perhaps half the people in line wore baseball hats and boots. The predominant color scheme was camouflage, which seemed to be the navy blue of Alaska. Had a voice come over the public address system asking anyone who’d reached the finals of a Willie Nelson look-alike contest to report to the ticket office, the crowd would have thinned by about a third. Most of the passengers seemed to be men traveling solo, but there were some retired couples and a few young families. I’d reserved a roomette and waited in line at the purser’s desk to get my keys and rent a set of sheets and a towel.
Not everyone was willing to shell out the fifty dollars a night for a bed. By the time I located a wall map to find my room, squatters with sleeping bags had occupied all the booths in the cafeteria. Hardier folks had duct-taped tents to the floor of the outdoor observation deck, which took on the look of an REI refugee camp. I shared the elevator to the sundeck level with a gray-haired couple who seemed to be in a festive vacation mood. The man, who wore a goatee and a beret, used a gnarled six-foot walking stick to push the elevator buttons. “See, I told you it would come in handy,” he told his wife with satisfaction.
With its soothing beige-and-baby-blue color scheme, linoleum floors, and faint smells of cleaning products and machine oil, the Kennicott reminded me of a giant floating Laundromat. My roomette was identical to a two-person sleeper on Amtrak, about eight feet long by six feet wide. Two pleather-covered seats faced each other, with a low Formica table in between, as if in preparation for a chess match. These folded down to make a narrow bed; another bunk was strapped against the wall above. A communal bathroom with showers was located at the end of the hall. The view from my single porthole looked out onto the ankles of some fellow passengers and their cigarette butts. Together with the two pints of pale ale I’d consumed, the Kennicott engine’s soft hum had a soporific effect. I folded down the table, arranged my bed, and marveled at how the roomette managed to be both womblike and sterile. Within minutes, I drifted off.
Perhaps half an hour later, I was awakened by pounding on the wall above my head and screaming. I looked out the porthole and ascertained from the relative calm of the assembled ankles that we were not on fire. We hadn’t even left the dock. The noise was coming from the room next door and apparently was one end of a cell phone call. Most of what I could make out consisted of the same profanity repeated over and over, followed by a litany of a Kennicott roomette’s shortcomings.
“WHERE’S MY [FORNICATING] PRIVATE BATHROOM?”
“WHERE’S MY [FORNICATING] TV?”
“WHY DID I HAVE TO PAY THREE [FORNICATING] DOLLARS FOR [FORNICATING] SHEETS AND SOAP?” (This was actually a valid complaint, since the sheets were thin and scratchy, and my bar of soap had clacked like a poker chip and cracked in two when I dropped it on the linoleum floor. My neighbor’s final criticism was timely, and certainly a complaint never heard aboard the Elder.)
“DID YOU KNOW THERE’S NOT EVEN A BAR ON THIS BOAT?”
For years, the bars on Alaska marine ferries had been one of the fleet’s most famous and appealing features, a place where sourdoughs (longtime residents of the state), cheechakos (newcomers), and visitors could mingle and get acquainted. On his way north in the book Going to Extremes, Joe McGinniss tosses back cocktails with a high-ranking state official and an ex-hippie coke addict. Unfortunately, a steep decline in the price of oil had left Alaska with an enormous budget deficit, and the money-losing ferry bars were an early victim of the state’s newfound austerity. From what I’d read, much deeper cuts were still to come.
Passengers could still purchase wine and beer in the cafeteria, which was open until midnight. I assume this was my neighbor’s course of action, because when I got up early the next morning and stepped into the hall, his keys were dangling from his doorknob. For a moment I considered tossing them into the sea as a thank-you gift for waking me the night before, but this seemed contrary to the open-minded spirit of an expedition. Instead I walked down to the showers and had a pleasant conversation with a nude halibut fisherman. He happily accepted one of the halves of my cracked soap.
The air outside on the deck was cold. I took the stairs down to the cafeteria, which opened at 4:00 A.M. (staffed by the same guy who’d served beer until midnight, who was now chopping iceberg lettuce for the salad bar), and bought a cup of coffee. Between the retro decor and the lack of cell service, which led most people to stare out the window, read a book, or do crossword puzzles, it could’ve been 1998. Mostly, people passed the time by talking to strangers.
When I arrived in the cafeteria, at around four thirty, two men were standing apart, staring out the large windows into the day’s first light, which revealed what most views along this stretch of the British Columbia coast do: a thickly forested shoreline obscured by a gauzy drizzle, dotted with occasional homes and lighthouses. Soon enough, the three of us were drawn together by whatever invisible force compels men to talk about directions.
“I think those lights might be Powell River,” said one. “I used to fish up here some.”
“Could be,” said the other. “Sure would be nice to know where we were.” He turned and asked if I had any ideas.
“I’m sort of enjoying not knowing where I am for once,” I said, and meant it. I couldn’t have pegged our location within a hundred miles if I’d wanted to.
We sat down at a round table and sipped our coffees. Doug was a retired fishing guide who was moving to the Alaska town of Homer with his wife; they had a good portion of their worldly possessions, including their dog, stashed in a truck on the car deck below us. The other fellow, Beau, was a retired California state hydrologist who’d shaped much of his life around traveling. When his kids were younger, he’d planned a special trip for each, purchasing a box of books about the upcoming destination for father and child to read and then discuss as they spent months together in a camper van. I assumed Beau’s children didn’t forget to call on Father’s Day.
“This journey on the ferry up the Inside Passage is probably my favorite in the world,” he said. He’d made it several times already.
It takes thirty-eight hours to sail from Bellingham to Ketchikan, the first stop in Alaska. Thirty-eight hours is an ideal amount of time for ferry travel, roughly akin to the rhythms of attending an out-of-town wedding minus the ceremony. You get an optional night of fun (if so inclined), a full day of socializing, and a final morning to revisit with anyone you especially like, or to hide out if you’ve embarrassed yourself. The cafeteria served three mediocre hot meals a day, none of which would cause a stir in a high school lunchroom, which, if you squinted, we could have been sitting in. People cruised the room holding orange plastic trays, looking for a welcoming smile as an invitation to join someone’s table.
Because the mood was generally festive and entertainment options were limited, the usual social taboos were suspended. Anyone could, and did, walk up and talk to anyone else. It probably didn’t hurt that customers were allowed one free refill of coffee, and consumption wasn’t policed unless someone abused the privilege. An air force pilot in her mid-twenties sat down at our table and explained what it was like to handle a C-130. (“You could land one in a parking lot if you had to—that’s what it’s designed for.”) A guy from Northern California who’d just sold his winery explained why life as a vintner was less glamorous than it seemed. (“You’re still a farmer, you’re just a farmer who grows grapes.”) Doug’s wife arrived and gave a brief sample of her singing voice, and she and Doug asked Beau—who now consulted in organic farming—about the best gardening strategy in Alaska’s brief growing season. (Answer: a greenhouse, sunk a few feet into the ground to access warmer soil.) Beau’s college roommate Paul, temporarily his bunkmate again in a roomette, arrived shortly before lunch and recounted the effect his sister posing as a Playboy centerfold had on his college years, in the early 1970s. “As you’d imagine, the subject did come up occasionally,” he said.
Some people, like me, were eager to have their first look at Alaska, but many more were excited to be returning. One navy veteran, in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and a baseball cap bearing the name of a ship he’d served on long ago, said, “I’ve been Outside for five years,” using the Alaskan term (usually capitalized in print) signifying the other forty-nine states. “It feels good to be almost home.”
Mile after mile of hilly green shoreline unspooled through the windows. Every few hours, an announcement came over the public address system saying that passengers were allowed down to the car deck, to let their dogs out for a bathroom break or to grab something from their vehicles. The contents of the car deck underscored the utilitarian mission of the ferries: to get stuff to places in Alaska that had no road access—a front-end loader on a flatbed, a couple of boats, small commercial trucks. (It is possible to get from Seattle to Anchorage via the Alcan Highway, but the estimated drive time is forty-two hours. Seattle to New York, twice the distance as the crow flies, is forty-one hours.) Some vehicles were headed for those towns—Haines, Skagway—where the Alaska road system begins. Most of them were modern covered wagons: cars and pickups and a couple of U-Hauls loaded down with all of someone’s personal property, belonging to people like Doug, headed to new territory.
One such pioneer was Stan, a chubby guy from Ohio who wore the jersey of his favorite NFL quarterback all three days I saw him.
Stan borrowed Beau’s atlas and pointed out the spot where he’d purchased an old gold mine. His plan was to use a backhoe to dig up bucketfuls of earth that he could then sluice for precious metals. His finger indicated a spot just south of Denali National Park, which seemed a bit isolated. For Stan, this was a major selling point.
“I hate the Lower 48,” he said. “I’m tired of paying taxes, tired of paying to raise other people’s kids.” (Alaska, thanks to oil revenues, has no income tax and no statewide sales tax.) He had little patience for anyone who believed in climate change or the “amateur experts” who worried about it. “What really happens is the glaciers melt into the ocean, which starts the ice age process all over again,” he said, citing as his source a PowerPoint presentation he’d seen at a convention for people in the power plant business, from which he had recently taken early retirement. Not that he was very hopeful about the future anyway, since he was fairly certain that Armageddon was coming and had stockpiled plenty of guns and freeze-dried food at his new homestead. Stan was the only person on the Kennicott whom I saw reprimanded for taking more than one free coffee refill.
“Man, I can’t wait to get to Alaska,” he said finally.
That feeling, anyway, was universally shared.