Not Even Not Zen 410: Biomythography - Note 125, Internal Mapping, Pt. I

Internal Mapping

As a child and a teen, my world was more visual than it is for me now, a more sensual place in general, full of smells, internal or external sensations like kinesthesia (feeling acceleration) or proprioception (awareness of body organs) that I didn't have names for but which affected me strongly and constantly. Nowadays, like everyone, I get to filter more of the world through learned behaviors, like language, logic, or conditioned reflexes.

"If your eyes see fine, how can you get any more visual?" someone asked me a month past. I wanted to explain. I’m trying.

Years ago, I didn't have to see with my eyes in order to know where I was or where I was going. Karate, baseball, and basketball gave me a sense of motion and a mental map of its consequences. I learned to fall and not be hurt. I learned to anticipate a pass. I learned to track a curveball. Similarly, house construction with my father gave me a sense of how three dimensional objects rotated and how they fit together (and sometimes failed to fit).

Moving anywhere, in any way, gave me a map in my head of where I had gone and therefore how to get back. If I walked down a trail in the woods, even if I went off-trail, I walked back the same way. How could I not?

Writing changed this part of me over time. Devoting myself to verbal expression dampened my visual sense, I think. Some of the changes became obvious.

Fourth grade: 

In a geography test, Mrs. Kramer assigns the homework of drawing the continental United States. It takes a while but, unlike most homework, I can do it while listening to the television. It's fun. I use two-thirds of a box of crayons and when it’s done I hand in a map as big as my younger brother.

A couple days later, we have a test.

"You'll draw the United States from memory," she says. "Don't worry, you won't get them all. This is just to see how much you remember."

She allows us most of the class time for it. My drawing goes fast. Only the middle of the southwest gives me problems. Confused, I get dimensions wrong and find it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit just right. But soon enough, it's done. I list all the state names. I include all the state capitals except for two. (In South Dakota, Pierre makes me laugh.) Most of my time, I spend coloring. I love shading the rivers deep blue. I love marking the forests green.

The next day, Mrs. Kramer hands back the tests. I don't get my page back.

"Where's mine?" I ask.

"Next week, we have parents' night," says Mrs. Kramer. "I have to hang yours on the wall to show your parents. Did you look at a map during the test?"

"No?" There was no way to do it, sitting in the middle. Besides, it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit right even with an example.

She nods.

"The capital of Nevada is Carson City," she tells me. "Don't feel bad. Only the new girl got that one."

Tenth grade: 

I'm in a calculus class. The teacher starts drawing a problem on the board. It's new to us, two trains moving toward each other on train tracks. He draws curves representing the varying accelerations. In an instant, I see the answer.

"It's seventeen!" I blurt.

The teacher pauses. He turns to stare at me. The rest of the class turns to look, too. A couple of them had been writing notes. I had no pencil, no notes, no book open in front of me.

"How did you get that?" the teacher asks. His voice seems stern.

In response, a kinetoscope of slides re-plays itself in my head. I don't understand the pictures completely. They have something to do with the areas under a curve I've been picturing. When I make the rectangles for the estimates narrower, the answer gets more accurate, I know. I see where it's all headed. It's definitely seventeen. I can't explain it, so I shrug.

"Well, that's correct," the teacher says. Now he sounds disappointed. "But the rest of us are going to step through the problem. I hope you do, too."

The summer between tenth and eleventh grades: 

One of my friends likens the IQ test to a barometer. This feels wrong.

"I've always thought of intelligence as having a multi-dimensional shape," I tell him.

This isn't strictly true. I've thought this way for a couple of years. But it's entirely true I get pictures in my head for different personalities. When I concentrate, I see cross-sections of their heads interspersed with graphs and diagrams for the different features of their minds.

Some are yellow, geometric cores with green galaxy-graphs. Some are pale blobs with a bluish arrow running through. Some of the mind-views are in constant change as different personalities come to the fore during a conversation. Most of them are this way, in constant change. Some of the people who get called dumb seem very bright-minded in this view, albeit they are sometimes bright in a specialized way. Some of those called intelligent seem very rule-following and timid.

Some people, whatever their other traits, seem to have a part like a bicycle chain, a systematic approach, a logic, chug, chug, chug, which is sometimes slow. But it's inevitable, too.

By this point in my life, my mental maps are emotional. I don’t mean only that I get a mental shape of each persons mind when I concentrate. The maps come with emotions, too. My mental traversals of trails in the woods are reassuring. They smell wet.
 

Not Even Not Zen 409: Frenemy

Frenemy

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

(sing ska background music) 

If you win yourself a Darwin prize
I'll lay the funeral wreath
If you need yourself a dentist 
I will rearrange your teeth

Your friends are no damn good, you know 
I make them all commit
Your foes have no respect for you, 
Don’t tell you when you’re shit 

But I will 
But I will

If the cops decide to kick your ass
You'll take one in the plumbing
Then I'll kick their ass right back
Because they got it coming. 

I'll slap you in your cigarettes 
Cause they’re bad for you
And punch your friend who helps you smoke
He's got it coming, too.

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

You know that she don’t love you 
It's the other one who does
And if you make a dumb mistake
I will remind you, cuz

And the next day I'll remind you
And next and next as well
And when the wrong one leaves you
We will laugh at you in hell

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

When you brag about the stuff you did
I'll say I never noticed.
When you tell your friends how you are scum
It's a 'yes' until you protest.

You think I'm not so nice
because my morals are askew
But I'll make you do the right thing,
it's the right damn thing to do!

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

I'm always hanging out there
when you give the club a whirl
I'm not there with the other punks.
I'm dancing with my girl.

I'll knock down you when we slam dance.
Because I'm not your friend.
I’ll be there to put you down 
And to pick you up again.

(tag) 

I think you tripped, you stupid bastard
You're such a fool, you stupid bastard
You're wrong again, you stupid bastard

You can depend on
You can depend on

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me 

 

-- copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher

 

 

Not Zen 206: The Ranch Hand

wikimedia - Byeznhpyxeuztibuo

The Ranch Hand

The youngest hand at the ranch was assigned the job of doing ground work each morning with the new horses. The ranch had bought four, all unbroken or 'green broke' mustangs. His task was to attach a lunge line and lead them in circles before the experienced trainers arrived.

One morning, a mustang broke free. It ran for the almost-closed gate. As it passed by him, he grabbed the lunge line to stop it. However, the horse pulled him off his feet, dragged him through the gate, and bounced him along the road past one of the arriving trainers. 

"Cactuses coming up," observed the trainer.

"He's dragging me!" protested the young man.

"Let go or suffer!" the trainer called. 

The inexperienced hand was not a fool. He had worn heavy leather chaps and a jacket. He thought he could get to his feet. He was still holding onto that idea and onto the rope when the mustang dragged him through the first cactus. 

He took sharp, thick spines to his left hand and to his ear. He lost the rope. The mustang ran free. After the trainer stopped to make sure the ranch hand hadn't taken any spines to his eye, he trotted off after the mustang. In a few minutes, he coaxed it back to the corral. Then he took his young friend to the nearest doctor to have the needles removed. Some had broken under the skin.

"Sorry about this," said the ranch hand as the doctor dug into his skin to remove the fragments.

"Just remember the lesson," said the trainer. 

The ranch hand couldn't forget. Later in the year, though, he lusted after the beautiful women and the trappings of wealth the older men had achieved. Soon enough, he thought he found them both in an slightly older woman, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. She had money and she liked him. She only kept company with him for a few months, however, before she left him for an even younger man at another ranch. After she made her decision, he tried to meet with her. She refused. When he ran into her at a farm show, he thought he'd gotten lucky. This seemed to be another chance to persuade his woman to come back. 

The horse trainer passed by while he was making his case. The young farm woman, dressed in designer clothes and leaning against the door of her new truck, seemed unimpressed. The trainer stepped in to pull the younger man aside. 

"Remember the horse that escaped?" he asked.

"Oh yeah, that was rough." He shook his head at his past foolishness. He tried to nod in acknowledgement of the lesson but, after a moment, his gaze fell on the beautiful woman and her expensive truck. The trainer followed his eyes.

He said, "Let go or suffer."

-

copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher

Not Zen 205: A Parent Way

A Parent Way

Across from a busy road, in the shade of peach and poplar trees, park planners made a clearing and planted grass. They built play areas for children. They placed benches so parents and other caretakers could rest as they watched. Soon enough, the local parents came. Their children played. More and more people traveled for miles to enjoy the park.

From a bookstore across the street, members of the philosophy club came with their books. They sat at the picnic tables. They read quotes from Zhuangzi and debated their meaning. New to the philosophy, they wondered how one would go about putting the Tao into action.

The discussion was led by a woman who needed to let her children play while she talked. She had read Zhuangzi many times and she was able to tell the group about aspects of the Tao, its history, and its practice. However, in an hour she reached the end of the time she had allotted. Her children began to interrupt her.

“I should go now,” she announced. “Please continue the book discussion.”

Several other members left with her but the rest, although they past their scheduled time, looked around them and decided to talk about nature for a while. The felt the natural world was related to the Way. In any case, it was a beloved subject on its own. They couldn't help but notice and comment on the park and the trees around them. Soon, though, all the members had to leave except for three, who had no other obligations.

The two younger members discussed their adventures outdoors, their observations about the natural world, and the Way, while the eldest mostly listened and contributed a few observations about people. As they talked, a young couple wandered over with their toddler and a crying infant. They parked their covered stroller, infant still crying inside, and the woman left with her toddler. The man, sitting on a bench next to the stroller, got out a book to read.

"Can't he quiet his baby?" asked one of the members of the philosophy club.

"Why did the mother leave?" asked the young lady who was also a member. She scowled at the mother as she disappeared with her toddler down a trail in the park.

"You haven't mentioned the other children," said the eldest. "I notice some who are well-behaved, some who are not, some who are loud, some quiet, some who flee their parents as soon as they can, and others who hang close by."

His observation sparked a debate on the best way to raise a child. The younger members of the club had not yet had children of their own. As it happened, they took opposite sides on parenting philosophies. One supported an authoritarian approach while the other proposed a reasonable, permissive approach. Each of them pointed to parents and children around them, citing examples, while their elder tried to remind them of other ways.

"When a child gets old enough, a moral approach can work," he suggested. "It's firm but reasonable."

"What, bothering your child about right and wrong all the time?"

"Yes, exactly."

Meanwhile, the infant cried in its baby carriage. Its father sat close by, reading his book and occasionally peeking under the hood of the carriage to see his child.

"Shouldn't he do something?" asked the younger man.

"No, it sounds like a teething cry," said the elder.

"Couldn't the mother come back and do something?" the woman asked.

"Not even a mother can fix sore gums." He knew it was likely the parents had taken whatever steps they could. 

After another minute, the cry changed. The child's father closed the book, stood, and rummaged underneath the stroller. When he pulled out a bag of changing supplies, he spilled it. The smaller items bounced away from him. The senior member of the philosophy club rose. He picked up pieces of the changing kit, handed them to the father, did it again, and did it one more time laughing about how many pieces there were. Soon, he and the father traded murmured phrases the others couldn't hear, followed by a shared laugh. The father changed the infant's diaper and, for a moment, the infant stopped crying. The senior man returned to his seat at the shared philosophy club table. The others chuckled as he took his place.

"Was that a moral approach?" asked the younger man.

"It doesn't answer the question about approach at all," said the woman. "It doesn't tell us anything about which way will win."

The older man thought about it for a moment. He rubbed his chin.

"The way of taking an appropriate action, whatever it is," he suggested, "is a winning one."
 

Not Even Not Zen 408: Worst in the Field

Worst in the Field

Worst in the field,
Worst in the field,
I’m the worst soul in the field.

Verse 1:

My super power is 
making things awkward.
You don't want me on your side.
My love is just
a drop in the ocean.
I'm not the king of the tide.

Verse 2:

I chop the wood
I carry the water
No wisdom do I gain
You know I'm living
paycheck to paycheck
then I do it all again.

Chorus 1: 

I think and think
But there’s nothing I’m knowing.
I sweat and toil 
but I'm not really growing.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

Verse 3:

I hold your hand
I sweat like I'm bleeding
'Cause I'm a stupid goon
I'm a swamp
I smell like a crayfish
Creature from a lagoon

Verse 4: 

I work a job
But don't really cut it
Learned it yesterday
I don't need to
relearn the lesson 
but I'm doing it today

Chorus 1A: 

I think and think
But there’s nothing I’m knowing.
I sweat and toil 
but I'm not really growing.

Chorus 2: 

I’m a slip 
in the walk of devotion. 
I’m the saltiest drop 
in the ocean.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

Verse 1R:

My super power is 
making things awkward.
You don't want me on your side.
My love is just
a drop in the ocean.
I'm not the king of the tide.

Verse 2R:

I chop the wood
I carry the water
No wisdom do I gain
You know I'm living
paycheck to paycheck
then I do it all again.

Chorus 1: 

I think and think
But there’s nothing I’m knowing.
I sweat and toil 
but I'm not really growing.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

Chorus 2: 

I’m a slip 
in the walk of devotion. 
I’m the saltiest drop 
in the ocean.
I'm the worst lily in the field.

I’m the worst soul in the field. 

I’m the worst lily in the field.

-- copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher

 

Not Even Not Traveling 64: Alaska, the Complete Visit

Coastal Alaska

A cruise ship seems too removed and too upper-class a method to use for visiting a U.S. state.

It wasn't. I came around to the idea in part due to family persuasion but also in part because traveling by ship does, in fact, become reasonable when looking for ways to visit our state with the largest coastline. We missed the interior, naturally, of which there is too much for us to ever really know. We saw a significant amount of the Alaskan seaboard, though, and it was fine.

• Days zero and one, getting into Vancouver, Canada. 
• Day two, getting onto the Koningsdam. 
• Day three, shipboard life. 
• Day four in Juneau, Alaska. 
• Day five in Skagway. 
• Day six, Glacier Bay. 
• Day seven, Ketchikan. 
• Day eight, differences among ship crew and guests. 
• Day nine, the Vancouver Aquarium. 
• Final observations. 

We went in the summer, admittedly - but it was very fine. 

Not Even Not Traveling 63: Alaska, Entry 10

 

Final observations and lessons from life aboard a cruise ship:

The Return

On the Friday we turned toward home, we woke to discover we had lost an hour overnight. The time changed forward from 2:00 a.m. to 3:01 a.m. or something like that although it actually happened whenever we hit the arbitrary time zone line. The hour stayed lost all the way to Vancouver.

Working Out

Although we walked more on the Koningsdam than I’d expected, I still needed my low impact exercise. The leg movements designed to keep me able-bodied require a gym with an elliptical, stationary bike, rowing machine, and a treadmill. Our cruise ship had everything. Moreover, it had a sub-culture of fitness I wasn’t expecting to find on a cruise. 

For instance, the Koningsdam had a yoga studio. Everyone in it seemed to be a yoga professional, so I thought I’d better hold off. They wouldn't want to teach me the basics when they're all super advanced. Admittedly, I could have probably have gone in, failed to keep up with them, and still been welcomed to some extent. But why do it? I had plenty of fitness center equipment. 

There were more passengers enrolled in the fitness classes like yoga or spinning (interval training with stationary bikes ) than I ever saw in the sauna or hot tub. 

My main goals were to spend enough fitness time to help my body and to avoid any further injury. It was way easier to do than I expected.

Missing Out 

We could have chosen to take knitting lessons or other art lessons during the voyage. We could have gone for the dancing, too. (I used to love dancing.) There’s only time for so much at once, though. Choosing one activity pushes out another. I’m glad I kept up my writing, exercising, and playing games with friends. If I had to point to what I longed to do but missed, though, it would be dancing. And probably the art. I’m impressed they were possible choices. 

Trivia Games 

On Friday, we finally won a trivia game. We had lost a bunch of games by two or three points. This time, we won by two, maybe because it's a general trivia round, not a subject-matter round about pop music or about cruise ships in history or about Alaska history. However, I was busy writing (this, among other things) in the library when it started. I had to rush and still missed the first half of the game. Maybe the team won because I didn't mislead them. I got to answer the last third of the questions but, for those, I got a couple of my votes right, so yay.

 

Vancouver Library

We went to the library partly because we like books but mostly because a well-supplied library seemed such a startling and welcome sight. The downtown library is huge. The books come in many languages. The reading spaces are beautiful.  

 

Not Even Not Traveling 62: Alaska, Entry 9

Saturday - Vancouver Again

On Saturday after our cruise ship landed, we found that we weren't allowed to check into our hotel. It was too early in the day for our rooms to be ready. It’s a common-enough problem with cruise timing. The YWCA offered a bag holding area we could use. We traveled with lot of baggage, too, because the ship and the YWCA had plenty of space. 

By the way, about the YWCA Hotel in Vancouver, BC,

Cost: Expensive
But in Comparison: Half the price of other downtown hotels nearby
Staff: Very good
Facility Quality: High
Result: Recommended 

My wife asked me to sort through our options for the day. I had a fistful of brochures because the city is big. There are plenty of activities to choose from. I wanted to find a low-key one during which we could a) see more of the place and b) make our own tour, of sorts. I ended up putting the Vancouver Aquarium at the top of our list. It is Canada's largest aquarium, which seemed promising, and it was bound to have a lot of Pacific Northwest attractions, also cool. 
 

Vancouver Aquarium

We took the bus. That may seem like an odd choice but I wanted to take public transportation, not a taxi or a ride share. Diane felt the same way. You can get to know a lot about a city by its subway or its buses. To our surprise, the Vancouver buses were accommodating for city visitors. They are not just for commuters with pre-bought cards. Some other places (ahem, Chicago) made us go to a special shop and buy blocks of passes. Vancouver accepts a credit card swipe - and that's all it takes. No preparation necessary. Pretty sweet. 

During the ride we saw a lot of college-aged folks getting on and off. Some of them were, like us, headed to Stanley Park. Now, from the park to the aquarium I knew we'd have a hike - but that was also the idea. The park was large. Our destination was in the northeast center of it. I thought walking through the place was a way to see people and understand a little about the city. That proved true, too. We got a glimpse of the river harbor action. I enjoyed the various fitness-and-recreation crowds (joggers, cyclists, dog walkers, dog trainers, musicians, etc.). On the way back we got to see (and hear the bagpipes played for) a Scottish-Canadian wedding outside a restaurant in the park.

You can buy aquarium tickets without waiting in a line if you stop by a booth along the way. They're even discounted slightly. Why wouldn't everyone do this? Of course we got our tickets there. But we encountered (and bypassed) a big ticket line at the front entrance to the aquarium, so obviously not everyone goes to the satellite ticket counter. 

Inside, the exhibits divided quickly into themes. There was the BC Coast, Pacific Coast, Tropics, Amazon, and a special Jellyfish display. We explored them all. The bigger aquarium tanks took two floors of vertical space. The biggest displays of all - those for the sea otters, seals, and walruses - were actually outside to give them more room. 

We found plenty of animals in terrariums, as well. Some of them had cute names, like Quentin Tarantullino. Those names are mostly for the parents, I think. References to movie directors aren't going to tickle the fancy of most five year olds or get them to like the tarantula, which mostly hides from them anyway. I also liked the common names for some animals, like those in the Pleasing Poison Frog terrarium. It's a darned nice name. Those little frogs do look friendly. Don't pet them, obviously. 

Our tickets included the 4-D Movie Salmon Run. After enough walking from place to place, taking a seat for a while seemed attractive. However, only a minute into the show, I blinked, fell asleep in my chair, and woke when the "4-D" experience began by shooting cool air into the back of my neck and hitting me with soap bubbles. (The bubbles were supposed to enhance the film of salmon swimming upstream in a bubbly river.) Although the focus was on the salmon, the film showed us plenty of brown bears. Grizzlies are a subset of the brown bears and, as a group, the brown bears are pretty dangerous for humans. Black bears can get shy; you can literally scare them away sometimes. Polar bears are more often immediately deadly; too bad for you. But brown bears are inconsistent. People can feel safe around them and, suddenly, a brown bear changes its mindset and people become its prey.

 There's no question about salmon being the prey of bears, eagles, foxes, and more. Animals on the pacific coast are dependent on the salmon runs. This was a film for family audiences, though, so all the shots of salmon losing their battles were shown from a distance or they otherwise managed to avoid showing gore. Soap bubbles, that's the thing. We got washed by them twice. 

We skipped the science exhibits that were strictly for kids (and grudging parents). Instead, we next headed outside to the big animals. 

Well, the sea lions were loud. They had the biggest tanks, dove the deepest, and they were charming but, still, they liked to yell. In a separate set of trenches and tanks, the seals stayed quiet to the point of being almost invisible. And in their set of narrower tanks, the sea otters were the most charismatic. It really did look like they enjoyed showing off to the audience at times. They pranked each other. We watched one otter steal ice from another, mostly for the laugh of it. Neither otter seemed to prize the ice. It was something to be hoarded by the otter who wanted to lie in it. It was something to steal and eat for the otter who wanted to annoy her aquarium-mate. Little kids crowded around the otters more than any other exhibit. I sympathized with their choice. 

Amazingly, on the way back from the aquarium and at the southmost edge of the park, we saw an English Bay otter in the wild. I have no idea how common the sight might be. A dozen other people in the park stopped to watch the otter as well. It kept diving and ignoring the audience. Presumably, it could not obtain a standard feeding time in the wild the way one might in an aquarium, so it had to go about its business, hunting and foraging in the bay.
 

Not Even Not Traveling 61: Alaska, Entry 8

 An Aside: More Cruise Thoughts

Ethnicity on the Ship 

I do try to make travelogues into 'should I do this?' reviews and I'll get back to doing that. I've come this far with plenty of mentions of travel groups, though, and I haven't touched on race or ethnicity. Those are groups Americans think about a lot.

The number of African Americans or African Canadians aboard the Koningsdam was small, maybe one or two percent.

Chinese Americans and/or Chinese Canadians were better represented. They were still no more than fifteen percent of the crowd, though.

Ethnically, I can't tell Canadians and Americans apart unless they're being really obvious. I could tell we had a fair number of Dutch, Germans, French, Scottish, English, and other Europeans, though. We had some Indian Americans (not American Indians) and some non-Chinese, non-Indian Asian-Americans but not many. 

The crew, of course, was totally different. The main dining room staff were composed totally of Indonesian nationals, almost all of them men. In other places, we met cruise staff who were Indian, Philippine, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Thai, Laotian, Dutch, and Mexican. We may have had a few Africans as well, possibly from Ghana or South Africa to judge by accents. The only European Americans I noticed on the staff were the entertainers. 

Of course, the most important categories are these:

Friendly and open
  - Most guests fall into this category
Friendly but shy
  - A minority number but still significant
Mostly polite
  - Over-populated with the ship staff
Disdainful of others
  - This includes multi-generational families
  - And includes large groups of retirees traveling together
  - And any other group preoccupied with their members
Unfriendly
  - Almost none (yes, actually)

Food Service

The full service restaurant had bad service by American standards. However, that’s maybe a too high (or just too different) standard. It was still very good but it wasn't what we're accustomed to having.

* If your fries come with vinegar, there will not be enough
* No one will check with you to bring more
* If you ask for any condiment, you will not get enough
* You will need to learn to ask for two helpings of sauces if you like them 
* The food is like Golden Corral, always a bit bland
* The cooks don’t know how to make good fries
* The waiters won’t leave a menu at the table
* They really want you to order everything at once, even the dessert
* You need to get a manager if you want to add to your initial order
* You probably won’t see your waiter again 
    - the team system means you’ll see six different waiters instead
    - none of them will know what you said to the others
* The system is super efficient, fairly uncaring, and very polite
* And the food is good. And the service, too. It really is - but it's different.

Not Even Not Traveling 60: Alaska, Entry 7

 Cruising Tricks

Once more, we ordered room service with the aim of carrying it up to the crow's nest. That's where we could eat with more elbow room and comfort. This time, however, the room service staffer caught me carrying the tray. He was an Indonesian man about my height, dressed in white kitchen clothes. He insisted on taking over my job, putting the tray back on his cart, and delivering our full and somewhat fancy breakfast to the crow's nest area. There, he placed our breakfast on the table of our choosing. He was solicitous about it every step of the way.

At 6:00 in the morning Pacific time, there were only five other guests in the crow's nest. They stared in awe at us. 

"How did you get breakfast delivered here?" A man asked me as soon as the server left. He was tall, bearded, and rather genteel-seeming. He kept his voice low.

"My wife has been ordering room service," I said. I gestured to the direction she had left in search of the fancy coffee drinks we blended with our regular coffee. "We've been taking it up here every day, pretty much."

"But he delivered it!"

"Yeah, he caught me." I shrugged. "And he insisted."

"Wonderful," he breathed. 

Not much later, a middle-aged woman approached me ask. A taller woman approached right after. This made for three out of the five early risers in the crow's nest who asked about our food delivery, all of them in tones of awe. The tall woman, who had a German accent, repeated the question and added an eye roll as we talked, as if she were stunned by the obviousness of my answer.

"Your wife is a genius." She said after she heard the story. She gave me a thumb's-up. 

I didn’t think the ship's crew had really understood what we were doing until today. Now I was worried that everyone would know. And yet we were following the ship's rules. Our cabin was too small to eat breakfast. We could take it someplace better. We did. 

Ketchikan, Alaska

On Thursday, we arrived late to the port in Ketchikan. I had time for an extra-long workout on the ellipticals in the ship's fitness room. 

To be clear, we were following the Holland America schedule. The ship's plan was to dock in the late morning. Traveling on the ocean takes time. Even revving at all-out power, all night, the engines of the Koningsdam couldn't get us southward through the straits from Glacier Bay to Ketchikan any faster. For our berths at Juneau and Skagway, the captain (and the cruise line, I'm sure) timed our arrival for roughly dawn. That gave the crew enough light to operate and it gave the ship's guests their maximum time in town for nature hikes, train rides, shopping, rafting, or whatever. 

In Ketchikan, we were scheduled for a cross-country jeep drive plus a canoe trip. It was one combined adventure.

It was our least adventurous excursion of the trip. From the description, I thought I would be steering or at least paddling the canoe. The pictures looked reasonable. Not to give too much away at the beginning, but the guides were pretty good. The excursion itself, as designed, was the problem.

Well, I said the guides were fine but mostly I meant the bus driver. He was an unusually articulate fact-fountain about the Ketchikan area. He had been working in Alaska, not always in the same position or for the same company, for six years. He observed the weather was sunny but he mentioned that, in Ketchikan, it's usually not. Ketchikan gets thirteen to fourteen FEET of rain per year. In May 2025 alone, it got two feet of rain. The area doesn't get much snow. 

"So this is a good day for your too-er," he concluded. The first few times he said the word 'tour,' I had to figure out what he meant. I still have no idea what accent that is. 

The normal population of Ketchikan is 8,000. We had arrived on a day with five ships in port. The next day, there would be seven. Basically, cruise ships can triple the population because Ketchikan is so small without them. It's a good example of an Alaska town, though. It's isolated. It's near the water. It's got mountains. (Deer Mountain, right at the southern foot of the place, rises over three thousand feet.) It's got a cog railway going up one mountain, a tunnel near the town center (built by dynamiting beneath existing houses), a boat in the marina from “The Deadliest Catch” television show, a place called Danger Island, and impossible parking.

Many residents have no parking near their house or apartment. Lots of their buildings sit on steep hills. It's not unusual to park downslope from home and take a hundred-foot staircase to the front door. 

The bus driver unloaded all this info in five minutes. We spent at least twenty minutes riding and he did not stop talking. We heard about the Tongass National Forest, people living on houseboats, the logging industry, area construction projects, and high retail prices on everything.

Finally, we arrived at the base camp for the jeeps and, unfortunately, we were not done. The driver selected a few guests to start their jeep tour. The rest of us had to endure another bus ride to the lake because, due to overbooking, we had to start with the canoe leg of our excursion. 

We endured a terrible drive not meant for buses, with potholes taken at two miles per hour, and enjoyed another great lecture on Alaska. On the way, we learned about three major native tribes, totem pole builders, how to make paint from salmon eggs, and more. There are no moose near Ketchikan, the driver pointed out, and very few wolves, so the only large animal we were likely to see hiking was a bear. At last, we arrived at the lake.

Kind of Lame

Well, it was a pond, really. It had deep, black water, as many Alaskan ponds and lakes seem to hold, but you could skip a rock across it to the picnic site. 

This is the start of my not recommending this particular excursion. After a lecture that covered material we'd already heard (not the canoe guide's fault, I think), we got into our watercraft. If you've ever paddled a boat with two dozen other people, you may have some idea what it was like. Four paddlers did all the work. Another four dipped their paddles in and tried to help. Someone's child back-paddled randomly, slowing our progress. The people in front had the most control over the steering but they didn't want to steer. The back-paddling child influenced our course almost randomly.

The pond is so small, all of this made no difference. And the trip was so brief, only a few minutes, our uncertain paddlers had no time to learn how to improve. 

The pond itself was great. The water was interesting. The place is nice. But our experience: boring. 

Then came the nature hike. I've had longer hikes coaxing an escaped cat to return to my house and seen more wildlife then, too. The nature path was well built. It simply didn't go far enough before looping back. There were mushrooms and fallen trees to discuss but, compared to most hikes, that's not a lot. After the walk, we paddled back in pretty much the same muddle in which we'd arrived. Finally, it was time for the off-road experience.

Beep-Beep, another Jeep

Well, I've done some off-roading. It can offer great sights and sometimes a challenging experience. This driving, though, was equivalent to driving on a bad road in Pennsylvania. We rode on logging trails with potholes. We were surrounded by vegetation at all times so, except for one pile of bear poop, there wasn't much we could see. There were no sights, no challenges, no learning. At the halfway point, we got out to talk. 

Right away in the discussion, I learned at least one woman seemed entertained by the off road experience. So I withheld my comments. Still, I kind of felt that if you were entertained by the drive you would also be entertained by parking at a Wal-Mart if there were sinkholes. We drove out; we turned around; we drove back. There was no discovery of a place or an emotional arc of achieving more and more difficult terrain, and no wildlife. We didn't see any unusual plants. I ate salmon berries at the brief stops because my wife made the effort to find them. They were moderately bad, as salmon berries usually are, but they were the highlight of the trip.