Not quite as thankfully, I was awoken at about 3:37 AM by
Angela.
“Get out of bed!” she said as she kicked me to the
floor. “The boat is docking soon and I
want to get MAXIMUM ENJOYMENT out of our time in Ketchikan.”
“Then you’re out of luck,” I said. “Ketchikan was like three days ago. Today we’re in Skagway.”
I crawled back into bed.
About ten seconds later, a cold pail of seawater was thrown on me.
“GET UP!” she said.
“We’re going to go have an exciting, fun-filled, action-packed day out
in Ketchikan!”
“Can I take a shower?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can I shave?”
“If you must,” she said.
“Can I go back to bed?”
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
It was off to the shower for me, then. This was a little strange: normally, I’m the
plan-plan-plan on vacation guy, the one who wants to get maximum fun for our
vacation dollar, and she’s the go-along get-along touristy type. So to see her eager to get going was a big
change.
Once I’d showered, and shaved, and been kicked out of bed
about three more times, it was off to breakfast. It wasn’t even 7:00 yet, but the place was
already filled with eager, bright-eyed vacationers eager to make the most of
our brief stop in Ketchikan.
After we’d eaten, Angela chivvied me off the boat like I was
a suspect in the Kennedy assassination and then frog-marched me up the
dock. Then she turned and looked at me.
“Well?” she said.
Uh, had I missed something?
Dimly, I tried to remember what we were supposed to do today. Did I promise something? Had we agreed upon some kind of trip or
something?
Then it slowly came back to me: all she wanted to do in Ketchikan was go see
the totem poles. Panicked, I looked
around the dock for something I could pass off as a totem pole: a light post, a
trash can, a homeless guy, anything.
Failing that, I looked for every tourist’s fondest hope: a
tour company. Thankfully, there was one,
a gap-toothed guy selling tickets for a “Saxman Village City, Wildlife, and
Totem Pole Tour.”
“Does this go to Saxman Village?” I asked.
“Of course!”
“Do we get to walk around and see the totem poles?” Angela
asked.
“Of course!” he said.
“Then I’ll take two tickets.”
“There may not be wildlife,” he said.
“What?”
“There might not be wildlife,” he said. “There’s no guarantees.”
I exchanged a confused look with Angela. “What wildlife?”
“I don’t know if you’ll see any wildlife,” he insisted. “You know, because they’re wild. They might not show up.”
I frowned. “You mean
at the totem poles?”
“Oh, no, there’s no wildlife there.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I just need two tickets.”
“But you understand that there might not be any wildlife.”
Again, I was confused.
He was the one who brought the wildlife up – I certainly hadn’t
mentioned it. Does he really get a storm
of angry passengers coming back and insisting on refunds because they didn’t
see any wildlife?
Does that really happen?
“Okay,” I said.
“Whether or not I see Yogi, and whether or not he steals my pic-a-nic
basket, I will hold you blameless.”
“That’ll be ninety dollars,” he said.
“Great,” I said as I paid the man. As soon as I had the tickets in hand, I
turned to Angela. “He promised me we’d
see bears eating sea lions!”
Yes, I was in a mood.
Once we’d boarded the bus, I was pleasantly surprised to
find we had complementary binoculars. We
also had the whole front half of the bus filed with totem statues of elderly
Japanese tourists.
“Ew,” Angela said. “I
smell mold.”
“I think it’s them,” I whispered. “Try to be nice.”
Finally our last two tourists boarded.
“We’re going that way to the totem poles, right?” one said
belligerently.
“We’re going to Saxman village,” the bus driver said.
“Oh, no!” the guy insisted.
“I want to see some totem poles!”
“That’s where they are,” the driver said. “In Saxman village.”
“I want to see the totem poles here!” the guy insisted.
This went on for a few minutes. I tried to get a chant started: “Fight! Fight!
Fight!” but neither Angela nor the elderly Japanese were up for it. Finally the guy settled down and the bus ride
started.
We went all of ten feet to another dock to pick up some more
passengers. Then another ten feet to
pick up some more. Then, we circled all
the way back to the front of the dock line to pick up a few more.
“This is where we started from!” the angry belligerent man
said.
After some confusion (including a lady who got on, announced
the bus full, and then stood and glared at us for no reason like we were the
problem) we got everyone into seats and got the tour started.
It began with a very boring tour through a very boring part
of Ketchikan filled with boring houses about which the guide related boring
stories while driving boringly.
But I might have spruced that up a little bit too much.
As we were driving, a bus alarm went off. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!
“Don’t be nervous,” he said.
“That’s a faulty alarm on my bus.
I checked it this morning and I can assure you everything is okay with
the bus.”
Then he continued to mutter “oh no, not again.” I had the vague feeling that either the bus
always malfunctioned, or it was about to explode and kill us all. Either way, I began scratching out my will on
a gum wrapper.
And having flashbacks to our drive down to Abu Simbel five
years ago, but that’s a whole different story.
Finally we arrived at the first wildlife viewing area, where
we saw three eagles and a big eagle’s nest.
After that, we drove through some more boring areas, and
arrived at the second wildlife viewing area, a tidal flat near a sawmill. During the drive the guide regaled us with
tales all about fish sex and the decomposition of salmon after they die.
He made the joke that “unlike people, salmon sponge off
their parents even after they’re dead” proving that he’s never seen relatives
fight when somebody dies intestate.
So he says that this second area is the best place to view a
bear, as there are two female bears and five cubs that live right around this
tidal flat.
“Do you know why the bears choose to live here?” I asked
Angela.
“No, why?”
“Because it has the bear necessities.”
She groaned.
“I can bear-ly wait to see it,” I said to Angela. “I sure hope it will bear up under
scrutiny.” Then I paused a moment as we
pulled up. “It’ll probably take me a
minute to get my bear-ings once we get off the bus!”
There was nothing but groaning and eye-rolling all around.
“Does anybody wanna switch seats?” Angela asked. There were no takers.
I kept it up after we got off the bus: “I can bear-ly see anything. I can’t bear just standing here and
waiting. Do you think they’re off
hunting bear-ries?”
More groans, more eye rolling.
“Seriously, I’ll give anybody like ten bucks to switch
seats.”
“Don’t do that!” I said.
“I can’t bear to be parted with you!
You’d leave my life bear of all meaning!”
“Twenty?” she asks.
Needless to say, no bears arrived. I did, however, see three more eagles.
As we boarded the bus again, I looked down at Angela (who
was in our seat). “Do you know what that
alarm that keeps going off is for?”
“No,” she asked.
“What?”
“Bad Bear-ings.”
“Okay, fifty bucks, people, just to switch seats,” she
said. “Are you guys sure there’s no
takers?”
Then it was off to Saxman village. Now, Saxman village is named for a
schoolteacher who disappeared while helping the tribe look for a good location
for a village. But that was supposed to
be a good omen. I guess because when you
send troublemakers out on busy work, you’re always glad they don’t come back.
But I confess that I might not have been paying good enough
attention.
When we got to Saxman, I was struck by two things:
-Our guide’s admission that his tour operator was too cheap
to pay for the whole tour
-How few totem poles there actually were
Also, I am sure that the totem poles do tell a story, but so
far as I can tell the story they’re trying to impart is how the carver doesn’t
feel the need to do any decoration at all between the thing on the bottom and
the thing on the top.
I mean, I guess the totem poles were okay, but I couldn’t
help but feel that I did almost as good a job back in Boy Scouts this one time,
and if I’d had paint, I could have done something worthy of display in the
Saxman Village (of course, space was apparently limited, since this massive
congregation of totem poles was only about fifteen specimens). But I guess they’re big, so they’ve got that
going for them.
Once we got back on the bus after that, I leaned over to
Angela.
“There were bear-ly any in there,” I said.
“That was last stop,” she said.
“Good point,” I said.
“But after pole-ing the bus, I learned that they wanted more bear puns.”
She just sighed.
Twenty years with no chance for time off for good behavior.
So by now we’d spent about 2 ½ hours with this guy, driving
all over Ketchikan and looking at boring things and listening to boring
stories. And he pulls out of the parking
lot of the Saxman Village, and I’m expecting us to have to listen to another
hour of boring stories as we drive back across to Ketchikan. But he turns right, instead of left, and in
about ten seconds we find ourselves in Ketchikan proper right next to the boat
docks.
What the heck? If I’d
know Saxman was this close, I’d have just walked up here and saved ninety bucks
and Angela wouldn’t have had to listen to sixty thousand bear puns.
I could bear-ly stand it, I tell you!
The first chance we got to jump off the bus, we took
it. As he pulled up to a stop, Angela
looked out in the water.
“Check it out!” she said.
“Harbor seal!”
Sure enough, out in the water there was a mottled
gray-and-white heat of a seal sticking up out of the water.
“Look!” She
announced. “Harbor seal!”
Here is exactly what the dude said: “Meh.”
As he drove off in a huff, Angela looks at me. “What was his problem?”
“You were seal-ing his thunder,” I said. “He couldn’t bear to think about it. He knew he was low man on the totem pole.”
“I swear to God I will push you off the boat,” she
said. “So help me, I’m going to buy one
of those Ulu knives and-“
“Okay, okay, I got it,” I said. “No more puns.”
“You should have been a comedian!” a woman who also got off
the boat laughed.
“Please don’t encourage him,” Angela said. “Please.”
“Hey! Weren’t you two
on the game show?” somebody asked.
“Come on,” Angela dragged me away before I could begin
talking to my public. “Let’s go look
around.”
Do you know what the only thing more boring than a
bus-guided tour of Ketchikan is? A
walking tour of Ketchikan. That’s
what. Once you get into your head that
they have thirteen feet of rainfall a year, it’s all boring after that.
Once we’d seen and shopped all we wanted, it was time to go
back to the ship. We reboarded, and who
did we run into but our drunken acquaintance?
“Hey!” she slurred, barely holding up her wineglass. “How are you two?”
“Fantastic,” I said.
“Great,” Angela said.
Then she said something, mostly intelligible, and caught her
elevator. I stopped to talk to a few
more fans, and then it was off to our room to catch some rest.
At 2:45, eager for vengeance, we headed back down to the
trivia room for a game of “Where is This?”
We’d played this yesterday and gotten horribly skunked, so I was
confident that today we’d do better. And
who did we run into but our Aussie friends from last night, who were eager to
join our team.
And thank goodness they did, as my only contribution to any
answer whatsoever was to tell them Angela was wrong and City #12 was not New
Orleans. When the answers came around,
sure enough, it was New Orleans, proving that any trivia game involving
photographs of stuff is one I need to be kept as far away from as possible.
Somehow, though, our team won, meaning that I’m three
signatures away from a full activity card.
What that means, I don’t know, but I do know that since I see twenty
boxes, I want them filled, because that is the definition of success.
Later on, we participated in a “Songs of the 90’s” trivia
game. On the face of it, this seems like
a good thing. Angela and I were 17 when
the 90’s started, and 27 when it ended.
Prime music-listening age, right?
Well, sort of. Angela
has had a steady job since she was 10, and I got out of college in 1995. What this means is that anything in the
latter half of the decade we stand a good chance of not knowing, since that’s
when we transitioned to adulthood and didn’t have time for all that tomfoolery
any more.
Even worse, Angela was not at all in a good mood heading
into the trivia game.
“I don’t see why it has to be 90’s music,” she complained
all the way down there. “Why can’t it be
eighties music? Or 70’s music? I mean, last night it was 50’s and 60’s
music. Why does it have to be 90’s music
now? Where is my 80’s music? I would
rock 80’s music. I don’t know this 90’s
crap. It’s going to be all Britney
Spears and some other harlots.”
And on and on, and so forth and so on. I did, however, like how she used the fancy
word from the Red Onion, which made me think of the best lunch ever.
Unlike Angela, I had a plan.
See, I was strategizing how to win this thing. I figured we had the early 90’s covered, so
all we needed was the late 90’s. So what
we were looking for was somebody in their 20’s who could help us.
And glory of glories, who should sit down next to us: not
one, but two males ages 22 to 27, both who described themselves
as avid listeners of music.
“Let’s team up,” I said, taking away their score sheet so
they had no choice. “Between your
knowledge of late 90’s music and my cupidity, I’m sure to get the signatures I
need to fill up my activity card!”
They looked at me blankly, not understanding my inexplicable
use of cupidity (which means greed, by the way), and I knew that they were more
malleable than half-chewed play-do in the hands of a particularly vigorous
toddler.
Or, insert your own metaphor here if you don’t like that
one.
The game started. The
first few songs we did okay – we at least all recognized them, and I think we
even got a title or two. And then it
started. Not only did not one of the
four of us recognize the next song, we didn’t know the song after that, or the
song after that, either. Here is an
actual excerpt from our answer sheet:
4) THESE
5) SONGS
6) SUCK
Later on, these answers would be joined by “Groovy Disco-Like
Tune” and “Mariachi Lady Screeching.”
Trust me, that was as close as I was ever going to come. I could pull exactly two awesome answers out
of the air, and one of them was Tub Thumping, which is embarrassing even to
know.
But it could be worse: I could be the band that performed
it.
Once the scores were all tallied up, we had 8 points left.
“Stupid songs,” I said.
“Why couldn’t it have been 80’s music?” Angela wailed. “I rock at 80’s music!”
“You missed the 80’s music,” one of the dudes said. “That was the other day.”
“Yeah,” the second one said.
“That was the other day.”
Whereupon Angela grabbed the cruise person doing the trivia
and hurled her down the bowling alley for a well-placed strike. “I WANT MY 80’S MUSIC!”
“That was some good freestyle bowling,” I said. “Let’s beat
it before the security heavies come looking for you.”
Scampering off, we managed to find a nice, quiet restaurant
that was completely empty. It’s the
place we ate at Sunday night, and I have to tell you, it’s the best-kept secret
on the boat. It’s probably because they
serve what’s called Comfort Food, which can be translated as “Food that people
actually want to eat.”
As opposed to Le Bistro, which serves “French-inspired crap
that you look cool eating but which tastes like crud.”
We sat, dining happily, when Angela suddenly jumped up. “Look!” she said. “Dolphins!”
Sure enough, out the window of the restaurant, we spotted a
pod of…something. Doubt, however, began
to plague us soon enough. Do dolphins live
in these waters? Was it porpoises
(porpii? Porpeople?). It seemed like
they were too small to be whales, and they definitely had blowholes and dorsal
fins, so I think dolphins.
Either that, or mermen riding orca fighting with a giant
squid.
With dinner out of the way, we decided to go looking for
somebody we recognized so we could brag about seeing dolphins. Unfortunately, it was the only time all day
that we didn’t run into somebody that we knew, or who recognized us from the
Newlywed Game. I even prompted people by
loudly saying things like:
“So, seen anything good on TV?”
They just hurried off.
Disconsolate, we headed up to the café to get some dessert
and some coffee. Angela had a glass of
water and a small sliver of chocolate cheesecake.
I had a cup of coffee, a piece of Pumpkin Spice Pie, a cube
of Chocolate Mousse Cake, and a wedge of Raspberry Huckleberry Chocolate Cake
(or something). They all kind of tasted
the same, actually, and were essentially variations on a crappy theme.
“I might have to get some ice cream,” Angela said.
“Mmmm, ice cream.”
I started to stand up to go get ice cream when I saw it: a
flock of birds out on the water. And next
to the birds:
“Whaaale!” I yelled. “A
white whale!”
Sure enough, there it surfaced, its yellow eye regarding the
boat with cold dread, a skeleton lashed to its side, held only in place by a
harpoon. Moby Dick, big as life!
Okay, maybe not. But
what I did see was a humpback whale surfacing, and then another, and then
another. A crowd gathered around us, congratulating
us on our find. The whale surfaced, and
then splayed out its tale as if posing for the gathered onlookers.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” somebody said.
“It’s gorgeous!” Another person said.
“This is fantastic!” said a third.
“Everybody who paid for whale watching wasted their money,”
I said.
That kind of killed the mood and the crowd broke up.
Having seen seals, whales, a mystery pod of blowholed
animals, and more eagles than you could shake a stick at, and having made 8,742
puns, I was pretty tired and ready for bed.
Angela, having spent yet another day with me, also said she was
exhausted (or at least she said she was tired of me), so we turned in, another
day of our vacation seized.
As we lay in bed, it was my turn to grumble.
“How come all the trivia games are some stupid song or name
this photograph crap? Why can’t we have
a trivia game about history? I’d kick
some serious butt at that.”
Indeed.
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