At about 7:00 Alice handed me the phone and asked me if I wanted to say Happy Birthday to our son Steve. I was still mostly asleep and had little to say. But it really was interesting to realize that we were communicating easily and clearly by phone with somebody over 2300 miles away without any physical connection to land.
We anchored in the harbor at Sitka at 7:30. Since there was quite a crowd going ashore, we took our time and went ashore around 9:30. Since the boat was anchored about a mile from the Sitka docks, we had to take a small boat called a tender to and from the Veendam. We were immediately impressed with the number of eagles in Sitka.
A wonderful source of visual information on this region can be found in the Virtual Guidebook at
http://virtualguidebooks.com/Alaska/SoutheasternAlaska.html
This web site presents panoramas, which permit the viewer to click on an area and then to move the perspective to look “all around.”
We visited the Sitka National Historic Park, which is located at the site of the 1804 Battle of Sitka. During this battle a group of heavily armed Russians with Aleutian assistance ousted the local Tlingits, who had thrown the Russians out two years earlier. In a sense, the Tlingits lost the battle but won the war, since the Tlinglit culture is now obviously valued in this region of Alaska. We had a speaker on the ship who told us about the Tlingit culture, including some of their traditional stories.We subsequently had a Tlingit bus driver in Juneau. The Tlingits have an interesting culture and even a strong web presence.
A park ranger named Laura took us on a walking tour of the temperate rain forest. She was well informed and interesting.
Since the park had a historic theme, totem poles were abundant. The poles that we saw were actually reproductions; the originals were safely stored in a secure place.
My knowledge of totem poles was restricted to what I had learned in the cub scouts nearly fifty years ago - actually, to what I remembered from that time. In more recent times I have become more familiar with the concept of totems as I read the books in Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series of novels, where totems are an important part of primitive people’s understanding of life.
I had thought that all “Indians” had totem poles, but they are actually unique to the natives of the American northwest, especially Alaska, where they were important to the personal, family, and tribal identities of peoples like the Tinglits.
Here’s something that I’ll have to remember for Trivial Pursuit or for my future appearance on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The phrase “low man on the totem pole” is a mistake. The very bottom position on a totem pole is actually the strongest. The pejorative use of the phrase is European in origin and is evidence of ignorance of Native customs.
The highlight of Alice’s visit to the park was her sighting of the banana slug. She had been having trouble getting photographs of eagles in flight, but she experienced little trouble catching slugs as they ambled across our paths.
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The banana slug (ariolimax columbianus) travels on a muscular foot, leaving a trail of slime that serves several purposes. This creature has a dorsal hump, a radula with 27,000 teeth-like structures, and a mantle with a cavity.
Although the specimen shown in the above picture is much smaller, the banana slug can grow up to 12 inches (about 25 centimeters) and is the world's second largest slug.
Slugs are slimy. Besides aiding in breathing, the slime has several other functions. The slime protects the insect. Some predators do not like the taste of the slug's slime. The slime also makes it easier for the slug to crawl along the forest's floor. During mating season, the slime contains a chemical that attracts other slugs.
Slugs are hermaphroditic. This means they have both male and female reproductive organs. This is an amazing coincidence, because I was listening to the audiobook of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, in which the narrator is a human being who displays a similar characteristic. Normally, slugs trade sperm with other slugs, but can also fertilize their own eggs. Hence, the correct reply to an expostulation that one perform an apparently impossible sexual act with oneself would be, “Do I look like a slug to you?”
Alice is enthusiastic about recycling, and this may explain her fondness for the banana slug, which feeds upon plants, fungi, and decomposing vegetative matter. They use their radula to scrape food off the source, and are useful in keeping the forest clean.
Our ranger showed us numerous plants that had medicinal value. One of these was devil’s club (oplopanax horridus), which is armed with numerous large yellow spines on the stems and leafs. These fester when embedded in the skin. The small fragrant greenish-white flowers are followed by inedible red berries. The plant sometimes forms nearly impenetrable thickets in moist (especially coastal) forests. Nevertheless, it has a tradition of use among the Tlingit, Kwaikiutl, Skagit, and many other nations within the plant’s range. She said it can be used as a blood purifier, pain reliever, tonic, or digestive aid. She said she has never purchased a drug from a drugstore or pharmaceutical company. The temperate rain forest, she said, is full of edible and useful plants. She frequently comes to the forest to obtain fixin’s for a good meal.
The above photo shows me on a bridge over the Indian River. There is a legend that says that if a person blesses herself with the water of this river, she will return again to this river. As the next photo shows, Alice decided to give it a try.
After the tour of the park, we went to the Alaska Raptor Center. The Center helps injured raptors. Each year, it supplies medical treatment to approximately 200 injured bald eagles and other birds of prey. Their goal is to release the birds back into the wild; and they even have a flight training room to accomplish this. However, some of the birds are injured so severely they could not survive in the wild even after rehabilitation, and these birds may join the Raptors-in-Residence program.
The above photo shows Volta, a bald eagle that had an unpleasant encounter with a high-voltage electrical wire. Volta is a Raptor-in-Residence.
The above picture shows a great horned owl. He looks genuinely angry about being awake in the middle of the day with some woman shooting off a flash camera in his face, doesn’t he?
We strolled through Sitka, and in the front yard of a house on a side street we spotted some beautiful blue flowers that we couldn’t identify. You can take a virtual stroll through Sitka (sans flowers) at http://www.untraveledroad.com/USA/Alaska/Sitka/Sitka/62NTour.htm.
Sitka was the strongest Russian presence in North America. This brings to mind certain facts that will be familiar to viewers of The History Channel:
It is interesting to note that (according to one of our guides) the islands off the coast of Alaska along the inside passage are more closely related to Asia than to the North American land mass. Over the millions of years of the earth's evolution, the forces of plate tectonics have pushed and pulled these islands from somewhere in the area of Afghanistan to their present location. The same forces are responsible for the huge piles of rocks that comprise the mountain ranges in Alaska.
We returned to the boat in time for the afternoon team trivia contest at 3:15. Our team finished first, and each of us won a Veendam umbrella.
We had an interesting time discussing religion with the members of the team that we beat on the tiebreaking question. One of the members of that team was reading The Da Vinci Code, and that led to a lot of interesting ideas. One of the participants in that discussion was a retired professor of social psychology from the University of Washington. He was of Japanese ancestry and said that he had grown up in an American concentration camp during World War II. He said that in 1953 a teacher in his school asked him to recite the new Pledge of Allegiance. He replied, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands.” He stopped; and when the teacher told him to continue, he said he was finished. “The part about under God doesn’t belong there,” he said; “And I haven’t experienced liberty and justice for all.”
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