Day 11

This morning we docked in Ketchikan to let some passengers off and pick up more. I took the boys out onto the back deck to see the town as we approached, and we got to watch several float planes land and take off very  close to the ferry. The boys loved it and Josh didn’t even mind the noise. I think this trip has been as good for him as it has been for me.

We bumped against the dock so gently that I didn’t feel it and then tied us up. We were able to disembark in town, which came as a pleasant surprise to me, so we made a run for the grocery store to pick up more food for Josh. Because of his allergies and the desolateness of the area where we are, I’m not entirely comfortable trusting someone in a kitchen unaccustomed to making allergy modifications with his safety, so we’ve been feeding him food we’ve packed. We got some essentials there, including a pack of Oreos, and I was reminded by the prices of the fact that everything has to be shipped up here. It kinda makes me wish I’d packed peaches to hand out to people up here so they could taste what fresh fruit was meant to be…

Although I guess this is Day 10, so they wouldn’t have been any fresher than what they normally get, so nevermind on that.

The water changed colors sometime on the morning of Day 10, or maybe even the night before. It has been a beautiful dark gunmetal grey, almost black when the wind whips it into waves, and now it’s the color of glacial silt—a silvery-blue-grey that almost glows. It’s still stunning, but it’s amazing to me how the color could change so drastically in a matter of hours, when the water is so deep.

After lunch I took a nap with the boys and woke up when we docked in Wrangell. No one planned to get out there, because it was less than an hour long stop. I didn’t hear the announcement from our room, but John told me later that the man on the loudspeaker told them that Wrangell is where they lose the most people (who get off and don’t make it back on in time), and told them not to worry, it was an easy flight to Petersburg (a stop about four hours away by ferry), and that they could always meet us there.

I don’t think we lost anyone. Don’t worry. Haha.

When we eventually got up from our naps, we went up to the viewing lounge to watch the boat navigate through the Wrangell Narrows. Y’all, you seriously would not believe the small space this huge ferry can fit through. John just kept staring and saying “I don’t know where this boat thinks it’s going!” because it literally looked like we’d reached a dead end—there was water ahead of us, but with all of the markers and rocky islands in the middle of it, it really didn’t look navigatable.

 I knew it was, though, because I’ve been through them before. Last time we went through at night, though, so it was an entirely different experience. We watched from the viewing room as we passed by green and red blinking lights and a man read us a poem called “The Wrangell Narrows at Night.” I can vaguely remember having been nervous about them that first time, but they turned into something special and magical as I watched the blinking lights out the window in a hushed room full of people listening to that poem. I’ve been looking forward to going back through them ever since.

This time we passed through in the daytime, which was a fun new experience for me. At times the boat is so close to shore that I feel like even the worst swimmer could have jumped from the boat and made it to shore without any effort at all.

After spending some time watching from the front (inside) we moved to a side deck. We were the only ones on the deck at the time, which made it even more special. Somewhere in the middle of the narrows we started to see houses. Houses! What a cool place to live. There were actually a decent number of them, like a very spread out neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. We waved to the people who were outside watching the ferry go by, especially the kids we saw jumping up and down on their front porch. They looked about Joshua’s age—how fun to grow up in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness!

We took pictures of the houses and after not too long they got even closer together. We saw a group of people crowded onto the porch of one cabin and then they shot off fireworks! It was so cool because I had just been thinking that I was a little disappointed to have missed fourth of July fireworks (I did see one on the 3^rd, but one doesn’t really count), and they shot off somewhere between five and ten for us, right from their deck overlooking the water! We watched, laughed, and enjoyed them.

Even more than the fireworks, John enjoyed the eagles. He’d seen one a little while before and looked at it for a while through his binoculars, but when the fireworks went off about six of them flew out of where they’d been sitting in the tree tops. I thought he was going to burst from excitement.