Thunder In Her Body (40 page)

“Let’s top the night off the right way,” he said lustily.  If the ship rocked from heavy seas, the lovers did not notice.  They had a motion of their own.

O
n their last day at sea, they took a shore excursion with Captain Larry and his purple jet boat, out onto Auke Bay, near Juneau.  There, after two previous attempts in other parts of Alaska, Lynette finally got to see humpback whales.  They breeched within 50 feet of their boat; glided by as totally silent leviathans, and wonder of wonders, twice they watched these behemoths of the oceans bubble feed. There were screams of disbelief from the group.  Cameras clicked incessantly.  Bubble feeding is rarely seen by tourists.  It is a phenomenon where the whales work in concert, rounding up a large school of fish by blowing bubbles at them.  Once the whales have them in a tight enough ball, the humpbacks surge upward, thrusting their enormous open jaws way above the water line, ingesting hundreds of pounds of fish in each huge mouthful.  It was a thrill of a lifetime.  Lynette whispered to her husband that the thrill was almost as good as an orgasm.  He patted her on the behind and laughed.  After the second explosion of bubble feeding even closer to the boat, Lynette shouted, “Oh Lord, I need a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke!”  Several of the tourists quickly understood her true meaning, and there was robust laughter and some off-color teasing among them.  Blaze whispered softly that she should see them swimming underwater.  He had.  She looked at him with a question mark on her face, but she formed no word.

Lynette desperately wanted Blaze to see this unbelievably beautiful landscape with hundreds of huge glaciers, before the glaciers receded to nothingness.  On previous Alaskan visits, she had walked on the Mendenhall Glacier, outside of Juneau.  It was receding as much as 150 feet a year.  On this visit, she pointed out where it had been the last time she was here, and how far back it had moved since then.  All but the Hubbard Glacier and a few other major glacial flows, were in retreat.  Was this the result of global warming brought on by human selfishness and disregard for the earth, or was this another cycle of retreat such as occurred 10,000 years ago?  Both Lynette and Blaze agreed with the scientists – we are killing Mother Earth.  About an hour after the ship glided out of Glacier Bay they entered the strait that ended at the terminus of Hubbard Glacier.  The ship slowly sidled up within a half mile of the unbelievably enormous Hubbard Glacier whose face stretched over six miles across.  Above the water line it stood over 400 feet high.  Below the water line it plunged another 350 feet deep.  The ranger on board announced through the loud speaker that this monster of nature began about 76 miles ahead on Mount Logan and was nicknamed
the galloping glacier
because it moved several feet forward each hour.  A boom signaled the calving of a massive piece of the ice.  There was a long hissing sound.  The captain quickly maneuvered the ship away from the tidal wave which resulted from the millions of tons of ice falling into the bay.

As they traveled westward through this true
last frontier
, they saw hundreds of areas where glaciers had been, but are now vanished.  Some tidewater glaciers, those that came right down to the water and calved, breaking off into icebergs into the bays and lakes, could now only be seen as snowy patches way high in the mountains.  Were they witnessing the end of an age?  There was a sense of finality about it – certainly a feeling of sadness.

On day four, they left their ship for the last time and boarded the Yukon and White Pass Railroad from Skagway, Alaska, headed to the Canadian Border.  From there Holland America Line buses took them up the Alaska Highway to Carcross, a tiny village in the southern Yukon, and they over-nighted in Whitehorse, the capital of the Canadian Yukon Territory.  Despite the enormous expanse of the Yukon, the population of Whitehorse is only approximately 37,000 people.  This was the land made famous by Robert Service, the Scottish poet and writer.  Lynette began to recite from
The Cremation of Sam McGee
, a poem she read in high school:

There are strange things done, under the midnight sun,

By the men who moil for gold;

The arctic trails have their secret tails,

That would make your blood run cold.

The Northern lights have seen queer sites,

But the queerest they ever did see;

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge,

I cremated Sam McGee.

The poem had come to her earlier in the day as they passed the turquoise waters of
Lake Lebarge.  She could only remember one or two of the many verses, but this one had stuck with her over the years.

“That’s the one where he put the man in the stove, and he thawed out,” Blaze remembered, laughingly, from his college days.

On the second day in
Whitehorse they toured a sled dog kennel, and got to play with real sled dogs – some of which were champions of the Iditarod or the Yukon Quest races.  This facility was called the “Club Med” of sled dog homes, because most of the dogs there were in retirement or semi-retirement and would be adopted at some point by people who’d pamper them and make these valiant athletes pets for the rest of their lives.  It was an attitude changing day for Lynette who had tremendous reservations about the grueling sport.  Continuing on up the
Alcan
, the short name for the Alaska Canada Highway, the group watched a PBS movie about the building of the Alaska Highway.  She could hear the sounds of surprise from some of the fellow travelers who didn’t know that over 4000 African-American soldiers from the 95
th
Engineering Battalion, over one-third of all the troops there, played a major roll in this incredible engineering feat, completed in only eight months.  Blaze squeezed her arm as they watched.  This wasn’t new information for her and he could feel her pride.  He knew she wanted to turn around and discuss this subject with others, but she refrained from slipping into her
instructor
mode.  It would be a subject for conversation at dinner he was sure.  As long as the fellow tourists were exposed to more African-American history, correctly portrayed, she was satisfied.

From Whitehorse, the huge, comfortable buses took them farther north to a tiny outpost named Beaver Creek, their last stop in the Yukon.  Only 125 people live there, and it gets no cell phone service.  Beaver Creek is 301 miles from
anywhere!!
  All travelers had been warned that Beaver Creek was absolutely remote, and the hotel where they would overnight was very rustic.  Blaze poked Lynette as he watched eight or nine travelers holding their cell phones to the heavens, spinning in curious circles, trying to get the five bars. The accommodations in Beaver Creek were rustic to say the least, but Ok.  The hotel, really a motel, of 1950s vintage, was undergoing some much-needed renovations.  There was neither TV nor telephone in the rooms.  Lack of amenities was all part of the adventure and kind of fun in a way.  But it was here that they experienced something quite scary.

The baseboard heaters, hard to regulate, made the couple’s small room uncomfortably hot.  All guests were warned not to open the windows of their first-floor room during the night because of the problem with bears and wolves, so Lynette and Blaze slept, in the Canadian wild, in forty degree temperatures, butt naked, out from under the sheets – which resulted in some
really hot
lovemaking.  Most people have never heard of, though they have experienced, what is called
belly popping.
  When two steamy, sweaty, hot bodies slip and slide around on each other, eventually a suction occurs around the joined belly buttons, and as they pull up or down from one another, there is a slurpy popping.  Blaze laughed at the silly sound, and moaned all in one breath as he slid back and forth then finally flowed into his bride.  Suffering almost from heat prostration and sweating like a field hand picking cotton, Blaze had to open one window in the room which was now a suffocating sauna.  The windows, high and narrow, in the style of older architecture, opened inward.  As he stood against the wall taking in the redemptive chilled outside air streaming into the room, something hit the wall – hard.  Before he could react, two furry, black paws slipped over the window ledge, claws extended to secure a grasp.  He grabbed at the window frame and slammed it down onto the paws as the tip of a huge bear nose rose into the opening.  Blaze tried mightily to shove back the nose and paws, but the strength of the bear raised its head high enough that Blaze was staring him eye to eye.  The beady eyes fixed on Blaze’s head.

“Lynette, throw me the bag with the snacks.  Quick,” he shouted.  Lynette bolted from the foot of the bed, fell hard against the sharp edge of the TV stand and grabbed the cloth bag from the dresser.  She lunged at Blaze’s body, falling flat onto the floor in the darkened room.  He groped for the bag as the bear’s enormous head came almost fully into the room.  He shoved the bag into the bear’s open mouth.  It was too dark to see the expression on the bear’s face, but for just a split second, it stopped all movement, then his head snapped backward as he shook the bag out of the window, and his paws disappeared.  Blaze slammed the window shut and bolted it.  He stood against the wall  breathless as Lynette literally crawled on her hands and knees into his naked arms.  Blaze’s quick thinking surely saved them from serious harm.  Had the bear forced its way into the tiny room, with a bolted entry door as his only possible escape, he may have attacked out of fear and confusion.  Blaze would not have wanted to kill
grandfather bear
, but he would have fought him to the death to protect Lynette.  Because Blaze knew how sensitive a bear’s olfactory senses are, he immediately intuited that the bear was in search of the food he smelled from the room.  It was not his primary intent to harm them, but trapped in a small space, and frightened himself at the unfamiliar surrounds, he would have.  The brief ruckus woke only the couple in the next room.  At breakfast the following morning, the neighbor told the group that they saw a bear right outside their window ripping and tearing at something white before it slowly lumbered away.  Lynette detailed the encounter, and it was the conversation for the day.  In retrospect, she wished she had kept her mouth shut, because several of their companions demanded the scary details again and again.

They were both completely mesmerized by the Canadian Yukon.  It was not a stark desert or a frozen waste land.  It was lush and green with tall stands of spruce trees and endless towering mountains peaks.  And it had permafrost – a condition where the soil, about 18 inches to 2 feet down from the surface, never completely thaws.  Consequently, the tree roots grow sideways since they can’t grow deep, and there were numerous patches of tall, stunted, spindly trees with limbs extending outward only about a three or four feet.  They viewed the mighty Yukon River and saw landing areas where tens of thousands prospectors disembarked from the steamships in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.  The guides told of the incredible hardships and despondency of most of the miners.  They heard that of the tens of thousands who came in search of wealth, less than one-hundred men ever really struck it rich.

They stayed 2 ½ days in Fairbanks, traveling down the Chena and Nenana rivers in an old, real paddlewheeler and visited a careful reconstruction of an Athabascan village.  Many people on the tour kept calling all the Native Alaskans, Eskimos.  They were corrected by the very knowledgeable guides who gave names to some of the various Alaskan bands or tribes.  Tlingit and Haidas in the southeast, Inuit, Inupiat, Tshimsins, Aleut, Shoonaq’, Yupiit, Eklutna in the central and northern parts, and so on.  The tribal divisions somewhat equated with  the Shoshoni, Pyote, Cherokee, Apache, Sioux.  The Alaskans were all Natives but not all Natives are accurately called Eskimos.  Blaze made mention that in some parts of the mountainous southwest, temperatures fell into the minus 40 degree category, when they picked up a post card showing a woman wearing a parka with wolf trim, standing in front of a Fairbanks bank sign which showed minus 44 degrees.  Except for the day they buried Lynette’s stepfather in St. Louis, with a wind chill factor of minus 41 degrees, she had not suffered in so cold a climate.  But her mind immediately went to the cruelty directed against Native-Americans who had been driven like animals on the Trail of Tears in brutally cold weather, with little more than a single blanket for cover.  She remembered a recurring dream she’d had in years past where she died in the snow on the Trail of Tears because she had only one roughly-woven wool blanket as cover against the brutal winds and snow of the blizzard.  This had slipped her mind in all the things she and Blaze had talked about.

Later that night, as they lounged in the comfort of their room at the Fairbanks Hotel, Lynette recounted a trip she and her mother took to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to conduct genealogical research.  It is the town where her father was born and many members of that side of the family resided during the early years of their lives.  About eleven miles north of that small town is The Trail of Tears State Park and Monument and they made a side trip to the site.  This park is located on the spot where nine of thirteen groups of Cherokee Indians forded the Mississippi River during the forced relocation from their native lands to Oklahoma Territory.  They were camped there, on the west side of the Mississippi River, in the brutal winter of 1838-39 with sparse provisions and no shelter.  The Park commemorates the death of hundreds of Cherokee who were forced to remain at that location, while waiting for the river pack-ice to break up,