CROSS COUNTRY #35 Russian to Icon Say Where

Goldie: A little to the right, now the left....hold it! No, not a photo op....it’s Enchantment Bay. We are surrounded by perhaps more than hundreds of icebergs, shimmering blue and turquoise in between patches of fog. We are told a huge glacier stands behind the fog....we wait and wait, watching an alleged brown bear frolicking on the distant beach...watching and worrying as our ship begins to feel quite small in contrast to the increasingly dense icy waters and fog soup. The Captain concedes to nature and pulls us out to sea where the pitching and tossing of the ship could be compared to a cradle being rocked by a sadist.

Barry: One of the many strange aspects about this part of the world is the micro climates that exist here. So one town can be hot and dry, the next frigid and icy, the next be in a temperate rain forest, even though they are within a few hundred miles of one another.

Barry: Yesterday we went out onto Resurrection Bay to see the wildlife. We drove all around the ocean and eventually did see most things but they were very few in number- puffins, sea lions, one whale. At one point the naturalist said: "Rumor has it that an ermine type animal was sighted here." In hindsight, feeling sick (many of us on the ship have the Alaskan flu) doesn’t excuse my retort: "I didn’t come to see rumors."

Goldie: The funny thing about that tour was that it takes passengers to a "wilderness lodge."

This brand new lodge, easily accessible to the boat, has a modern kitchen which feeds 300 and a gift shop. We’d been suckered, thoroughly.

Barry: The tour also provided an "All you can eat salmon bake." The half starved cruise passengers, perhaps forgetting we get salmon three times a day on board, whooped with joy on hearing this.

But what was most striking was the wild and rugged mountains all around us. We came to an area of dead trees where the island had dropped 6 feet after the last earthquake in 1964. This was this same earthquake that produced a tidal wave that swamped and destroyed Valdez.

This rendered visiting Valdez unremarkable, it is a new, tiny, rebuilt industrial town.

Goldie: Fifty percent of America’s earthquakes take place in Alaska each year. Mark’s Torah portion is hauntingly present everywhere we turn. In the tsunami which hit Valdez we are told that over thirty people were wiped out including eleven children who were playing when the wave hit. Mark has become angry at Noah for not arguing with God for the survival of the world and angry at God for being even more comprehensively vicious than people.

For his CyBar Mitzvah web site Mark has added a quiz section titled:

You Don’t NOAH thing. We’ll let you know when the site is posted in a few weeks.

Barry: Back to Resurrection Bay. Did a little research and discovered that one mountain range onour left originated in the ocean floor in Oregon, another on our right in China. They know this because of fossils found in this mountain match those found in China/Afghanistan. Here, two huge plates are colliding, and the evidence is dramatically visible all around us. "Awesome" is used a lot over here to describe the mountains around us.

Yesterday, Mark and Goldie went white water rafting. He does roller coasters, planes and helicopters with no fear but for some reason felt unsafe going rafting. He came over to me for a big goodbye hug. I asked him to leave me his watch.

We celebrated his safe return home with a game of blackjack.

Goldie: What a thrill to take my son on his first white water adventure, albeit only two hours long. It proves we could become native Alaskans, in that we were masochistic enough to grab front seats in the raft and thus get drenched in freezing water from Class Three rapids. If the gentle rapids don’t impress you, the rock promontories will. Our river guide swirled us down backwards so we could watch the thousands of feet long waterfalls along the way.

Drenched proved to be predictive. Today we are in Ketchikan, a town which boasts that it rains here every day. Barry wore the ultimate protection, his raincoat left over from his tour of duty over thirty years ago in the South African army. Somehow the torrential rain soaked through.

Barry: Goldie wore a drably colored rain poncho with a horribly unique rubbery odor. It was draped over her backpack, giving her a hump. Mark declared that since she had a hump and smelled she must be a camel. The presence of so much water makes that unlikely.

Goldie: Despite the rain, we follow the salmon creek which runs through the town with a perfect park entwined with it. An offshoot leads to what is labeled "Married Man’s Way", where a winding wooden walkway leads past the salmon ladder to overlook the "reeshroosh"ing river.

One of my best friend’s screen name is and forever forward I will hear Alaska’s rivers singing their cascades in the musical, accurate Hebrew name....reeshroosh...pure onomatopoeia.

Goldie: Ketchikan is a place to cross off your must visit in this life time list. I’m convinced the whole town must be owned by the cruise lines. It pours all day here, locals shrug and walk as though it’s not happening. By comparison forty days and forty nights of rain would be minimalist.

Barry: I loved it. It’s quaint, it’s the rainiest place in America (200 inches a year), we were exploring on our own, and it was fun watching the poor tourists pretending to have fun.

Goldie: Six huge ships have pulled in, which is almost 10,000 tourists and the town seems to be composed almost entirely of extremely expensive jewelry stores and galleries. Except for a collection of totem poles and a fish ladder, there’s not much to do except shop....which we didn’t.

Mark made his own fun by running up the huge staircases at the end of many Alaskan streets...these lead to the homes of locals. Les miserables was played by a cluster of tourists who were met at their ship by a kayak outfitter, no doubt they paid at least $50 for the absurd privilege of kayaking among the ships....hence, I suppose, the Yiddish expression

"gey kayak af’n yam."

Here as in most places in the world the museum bears a sign with the expression "before the missionaries came, local peoples would......" I remember in the Phillippines marveling at an entire tree trunk, almost 40 feet high that had been hollowed out and made into a drum. The sign above it read: "Used in Islamic rituals before Catholic missionaries came and taught the true way." Here in Ketchikan, we view 180 year old funerary totems, which held a compartment for burial, while the casing told the story of the person’s life. A practice "before the missionaries came and taught proper practices."

One guide kept quoting the local Presbyterian minister, then he told us he was quoting the only Presbyterian minister. Why? Because their missionaries had locked the natives into the schools and beat them unless they spoke English and professed true faith. This in contrast to the Russian missionaries (Eastern Orthodox) who brought the bible translated into local dialects and supported the continuity of the local culture in a new religious context.

The Russian influence on this region has been huge....perhaps most reflected in the omnipresent samovars in area museums and some homes. Yesterday in Sitka we peeked into a tiny yet lovely icon-adorned church and then attended a Russian folk dance recital. Thirty years ago the women of the town thought to deepen their community by the enterprise of such a recital for tourists. Today thirty women participate and they have a repertoire of 35 dances. Ridiculed by the men at first for their idea, today they turn down men who want to join......too late! Mark protested the reverse discrimination, and I agree with him.

A woman came up to me in the library today to ask if I was ordained. She just completed a three year deacon training program with her husband in Minnesota. The heart-broken look on her face told me the story before she did. Her husband was allowed to be ordained but she was only given a lay pastoral title. I suggested that she band together with the full fifty percent of women in her tradition and that they form their own Woman Church and ordain themselves and let men who are not prejudiced join them.

It’s only about twenty-eight years since the first woman rabbi - out of a people that number themselves existing at least 5700 years! And now over fifty percent of all seminaries except for the orthodox ones are comprised of women candidates.