Ketchikan
The previous entry is Sailing the Georgia Strait.
May 31
Ketchikan is where we first glimpsed bald eagles making lazy circles above the forested shore across from our balcony. I have no pictures of those eagles: they were gone before I got my camera ready. (On NPR yesterday, I heard them mention Ketchikan and caught this story.)
This was our first port-of-call: Ketchikan is the southern-most city in Alaska that cruise ships routinely visit. There might be something more southern, but Ketchikan proclaims itself to be the Alaska’s “1st city” as well as the salmon capital of the world. We’d later be told by our tour guide that, while there are still salmon canneries in the area, tourism is now a major slice of the local economy. You can see this in the thicket of souvenir stores that line the main roads of the town and the waterfront: a bizarrely large number of jewelry stores, the usual t-shirt shops, places hawking mugs, keychains and other tchotckas. When we got off the ship, there was a line of tour buses for the various land tours that run through the area, mainly to the Tongass National Forest. We had a little bit of time before our own bus was to depart for a old salmon cannery tour, so we walked around the town.
Ketchikan is spread out on a long, thin strip next to the water, with most of the downtown streets running only a few blocks in from the shore until buildings start rising next to the mountains. There’s actually a funicular — the first time I’ve seen one or heard of the word — that runs a short ways up the side of the mountain to a cliffside restaurant and observation deck. The Lonely Planet guide suggests walking a few blocks in from the pier, away from the glut of tourist shops in downtown, to Creek Street, where the density of souvenir stores is only about 75% instead of 95%. Most of the buildings here are built on stilts above, well, a creek. Creek Street used to be the redlight district of Ketchikan, and there’s a bordello museum tucked in near a more modern Chinese restaurant. This district was apparently just outside of the original town’s jurisdiction.
The shore excursions are contracted out to local tour companies, who operate the ground transportation, supply guides and so on. Holland America provides us with an envelope full of vouchers for these tours, to be presented when departing. The cruise company recommends booking these excursions online before the trip, as some excursions may sell out. Excursions can also be book onboard, at the hotel frontdesk or through the concierge. Most of ours were done online, though we also booked a Salmon Bake in Juneau (our morning excursion ends just before lunch) and did an upgrade for the ground transportation from Seward to Anchorage, after the at-sea part of the vacation was over. It’s pretty well organized, with the shore excursion tours bringing their buses right up to the pier and dropping you off again at the same spot afterwards.
Our Ketchikan excursion was to an old cannery about half an hour out of downtown, with a stop at Saxman Village, a Tlingit settlement, on the way back. It was a peek at Alaskan history, before oil and tourism. Apparently, a lot of Chinese immigrants worked in Alaskan canneries, though there was little settlement by them afterwards: they were seasonal workers, brought in for the salmon run. Salmon are basically hand gutted and de-headed, then fed through various machines that chop them up and put them into cans. The cans are then cooked at a high enough temperature to pasturize them as well as melt the bones — there’s no processing to debone the fish. There’s no refrigeration at the canneries: the place kept running until all of a given salmon catch was processed.
Some of the machines have fanciful, non-PC names from the early 20th Century. In particular, there’s the “Iron Chink”, a fiendish contraption obviously invented by some honky to replace the efforts of poor Chinese immigrant workers. I don’t recall what stage of the salmon cannery process this represents, but, in the future, if I ever do a lot of online gaming, this will be my screen-name.
Saxman Village is known for its collection and production of totem poles — the Tlingit are the totem pole builders among Native Americans. The center of town has some sort of Tlingit theater — we didn’t arrive when they were doing a show, though we did walk through it briefly — and a totem pole workshop, where one of the artisans were sketching out a design. The half-carved totem poles reminded me of the the stone-cutting work in the early 1990s at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine near Columbia: we visited during one of the art hum classes, and various saints and their symbols were sketched out in chalk on the marble columns at the entranceways, or were emerging slowing from the stone.
Similarly, totem poles are commemorative, or represented a narrative for populations before literacy, just like cathedral iconography were originally for the peasant masses. Such-and-such pole tells the fable of the Raven and the Frog, and so on. They may represent historic events: Saxman Village actually has a pole with Abraham Lincoln on top of it. Apparently, an American frigate helped resolve a dispute between two Tlingit groups, who built a totem pole in honor of the occassion. The Tlingit didn’t want to put a frigate on the pole — something to do with living things — so instead put Lincoln up there, based on a photograph carried by the warship.
Ketchikan was actually a short port-of-call, as we left in the mid-afternoon to sail on to Juneau. The ship departures — there were several cruise ships docked that day — are probably timed so as not to clog up the channel with large vessels; we shadowed a Princess cruise ship that day and evening. In the evening, we had our first whale sighting: a humpback not too far off starboard. The Inside Passage is glacier-carved and deep, and whales and dolphins will run besides cruise ships. There was other sealife, too, including a group of seals using a convenient marker buoy to lounge on.
Here are the photos:
The next entry is Juneau.