Morning at Lake Eva trail, and it’s so quiet I can hear our footfalls on the path. Not totally silent: the birds are at work, and we stop to listen—Pacific wren, hermit thrush, dark-eyed junco, ruby-crowned kinglet.
At times when we stop our gaze is drawn up up up long straight tree trunks to linger on intricate branches of spruce and hemlock. Just beyond them, it seems, is the sky. Then two eagles soar above, glimpsed through branches, and we realize that tall is not infinite. And the trunks aren’t invulnerable as they look; standing snags and fallen logs speak to the ferocity of winter storms, only imagined. They are being put to good use by insects, fungi, seedlings, and plants. In one smooth old standing dead tree there’s a sapsucker nest.
Everything that could be called a surface is covered with moss. We don’t stand still too long; it might just grow on us too! We meander through forest and meadow, along small ponds decorated with pond lilies. We are following the river, listening to rapids, and descending from time to time to look into calm pools. At one, salmon hang in the deep water, quiet and mysterious. Tiny fry are here too, nearly hidden against the rocks of the stream bottom. We spot a banana slug, a squirrel home, a blooming columbine. There is a kingfisher working the river. Life, everywhere.
It’s something to think about back aboard, as the ship pulls away for an afternoon of cruising the shoreline of Baranof Island. We know what it is like, now, walking under those trees. The details we noticed are repeated, literally as far as the eye can see, and farther. How many moss covered logs with tiny flower gardens? How many banana slugs? How many warblers, salmon, meadow grasses, mushrooms? More than our imaginations can encompass.
There are whales to think about too, as we get a presentation from Dr. Andy Szabo of the Alaska Whale Foundation. Young explorers get a visit to the bridge of the National Geographic Sea Bird to learn navigation, and even, it’s rumored, take a turn at the helm.
Evening comes, and it is time to go into Red Bluff Bay. For this, prose simply won’t do. A poem, then:
The steep mountains soar
a waterfall roars,
and the helm lets the ship
slip
through a narrow gap seen
between trees, misty green.
Now a bear, with its hump,
and its brown furry rump,
strolling and grazing,
gazing and lazing,
when up pop two cubs
for a peek,
and some love.
