Adventure!

Yesterday I got an email from an old friend that I worked with one summer in southeast Alaska.  She is one of those forever friend types.  I have a poster she made when me and the-spouse-who-came-after got married.  It said "Follow your dreams."

Where lots of people will say that and feel like it would be a good idea for other folks to do, she actually does it, and is telling it to folks more as an injunction than a piece of advice.  The dream she is following is to fill her life with adventure.  For Pete's sake, the girl is a Basque from southern France and she got herself to a piece of Alaska that could only be reached by plane or boat - Adventure!! 

She certainly helped fill that summer with adventure for me.

We spent quite a bit of our time off in sea kayaks exploring and camping in a place called Glacier Bay - think steep black cliffs with waves of green forest breaking at their base.  Think wispy fog and magnificent frozen white masses ending at the water with jagged teeth.  Think birds of endless variety floating around you and seals and sea lions slithering beneath and around your boat.  Think...wait a minute - was that really me that did that?  Geez man, it was.  Holy cow.

But our Adventure! of all Adventures!! was just outside of the Bay at a place called Point Adolphus.  Adolphus just bespeaks Adventure! don't you think?  My friend Maritxu (Mar-ee-chuu) - again name = adventure! - got it all figured out with our boss that we'd have one of the fisherman take us and our double kayak over to the point on his boat.  I can't remember much happening on the first day other than that there were some stellar sea lions that were kind of freaking me out.  Sea lions will bump your boat around and look at you with black confrontational eyes and you know they're saying to each other, "Hey Vinny, 's that girl botherin' you?  'Cause if she's botherin' you..."  So you do your best not to bother them.  I was kind of worried about them mugging us that night in our tent.

But the next day...gosh.  Point Adolphus is well known for being a gathering spot for humpback whales...those enormous, ugly, but gorgeous creatures.  And that day, we had two whales right off of where we had camped.  You can hear them spouting at night...pshhhhhhh...as you fall asleep...pshhhhhh...and try not to think of bears...pshhhhh....ahhhhh, I miss it.  Maritux saw those whales in the morning and had us in our kayak to seek our adventure!  lickty split.  I was in the front.  She was in the back...with the rudder.  That made her the captain.  And the orders for the day were to chase those whales and their 45 feet and 75,000 pounds of flesh and blubber.

That morning was spent watching for a hump to rise displacing water into a wider and wider elipse of whale halo, then paddling furiously toward it trying to reach it before it went down again.  Stop, search, see, paddle!, whale disappears (there should be an upside down exclamation point that means oh boo).  Stop, search, search, search, see, paddle!, oh boo.  Stop, search, start to feel nervous, search, ummm...is this really safe, search, see, paddle!, boo again.  The more we went through this routine, the more time I had to think about a story I'd been told by a guy at church who had a boat/whale experience of his own.  He had been on a 25 foot boat with his brother when a whale breeched underneath them.  It had flipped their boat and sent them flying into the water.  Luckily they were close to an island and were able to swim to shore (these strandad island things really happen!).  They were found pretty quickly and taken home that day, just short of freezing to death.  Now mostly we'd been told that whales had a sixth sense about boats being overhead and they were careful not to come up on them.  But I knew this guy and he wasn't a liar and my thoughts were that whales and boats are probably just lucky that its a big ocean out there.

As I said above though, I wasn't the captain.  Maritxu was and we were in for some adventure!  She got us closer and closer and closer to these whales.  I remember one time in particular zooming toward a piece of erupting whale flesh and nervously crying from the front of the boat which was closer to the whale than the back of the boat, "uhhhhhhhhhh Maritxuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!"  As in "halt, cease, stop, I'm scared!!!!!!"  But I guess that is when you sometimes need to keep going.  Finally one of the whales came up out of the water and rolled slightly to its side like a dog needing a belly rub.  We paddled up on it and it didn't disappear.  We paddled closer, and closer and closer.  We could see the barnacles attached to its skin all brown and crusty.  We could see the lines in its leathery blue-black skin.  We could see in perfect relief its utter enormity.  And we touched it.  It wasn't a Sea World touch, it was a wild, wild, world touch.  Nuts!  Crazy!  Adventure!!  I'd never have touched a whale if it weren't for my good friend.  I'd have been happy with the pshhhh, pshhhhh, pshhhhhhh.

So today I want to declare with all of these exclamation points that I am grateful for the Maritxus of the world and especially for the Maritxu that I got to know that summer.  Life is awfully special with a little bit of Adventure! mixed in.