Alaska - Part X

[leftyjew]

Wednesday - Portage Glacier (cont'd)

So the boat driver has a winter job - he drives a high school bus in Seward. He knows several of the exchange students the organization that I work for put there this year. That was kinda cool. He thinks its fun to drive a school bus, and also fun to drive the Portage Glacier boat. Good for him! He's a really good guy.
The forest ranger was a good guy, too. He gave a bit of history of the lake (how it used to not exist), and spoke a bit about the spruce trees. I forgot to mention what Wolfie, the kayak instructor, told us about spruces. There are three spruces in Alaska - the white spruce, the black spruce and the Sitka spruce. The black spruce grows with its branches angled down. The white spruce grows with its branches flat. The Sitka spruce grows with its branches angled up, but in the winter, they lower the angle so that when the snow falls on them, they don't break. I'm sure there's a midrash here. Also, I think that if Judaism began in the Pacific Northwest, our psalms would not boast about the cedars in Lebanon, but would talk about the birches in Alaska. כבירץ באלסקא ישגה שתולים בבית נשרים....

Anyway, back to the boat ride. We putter around in the white-blue not-so-salty glacial water, seeing tiny icebergs and listening to the spiel about the until we come across the glacier. Click-click! She's interesting. She's actually a combination of two glaciers which have merged together. You see that black streak that looks like a truck ran over it? That's where the two glaciers spew dirt on each other. Yes, glaciers spew dirt along side their path as they come down mountains. They grind it very very fine. Some of it gets trapped in the glacier and gets ground even finer (this changes the water to that weird white-blue color). There are some living things in the glaciers, like ice worms and snow algae, but you don't get too much life until the glacier retreats. As the glacier retreats, you can see lichen, then alders start to grow. They are nitrogen-fixing so that the soil becomes tree-sustaining. Then you get spruce. Anyway, you can see the whole timeline around Portage Lake. We saw evidence of an avalanche that had happened the day before (or was it two days before) and we saw a sizable chunk of glacier sitting aboard the boat. They passed around pieces of this to touch. Glaciers are so heavy that they create the kind of pressure to create new forms of ice - ice II, ice III, etc. The outer layer is a plastic, which my friend, Annie, tells me, means that it's somewhere between liquid and solid, but in layman's terms, it means it's very slick and allows the glacier to flow more easily. We got the captain to give us a piece to take home for alanscottevil (who upon receiving a hunk of melted glacier, immediately drank the remains of age-old ice.
The ranger also pointed out the site of the longest auto tunnel in the world (shared with a train). It goes to Whittier, a town so small, everyone lives in one of two apartment buildings. The tunnel is one lane and only allows car traffic in one direction for 15 minutes every hour. I guess the train is what was key when it was built.
Anyway, after disembarking (not "deboating") we get back to the car and are again greeted by the smell of mold - when we get to Talkeetna that night, arctic_alpine swears she will finally do laundry. After confronting the odors, my phone rings. It's Anna inviting me to shabbat at alanscottevil's! "Who are you talking to?" she asks. "arctic_alpine." "Oh, is she back?" "No." "Wait, where are you?" "Outside Portage Glacier." "Ohhh! Awesome. I guess you can't make it in for shabbas." "Nope!"
And we left Portage to the same beautiful views we had going in.