We promised ourselves that as soon as the sky starting looking blue we would grab a float plane and head for the glaciers. Saturday it happened. We had watched the Celebration parade and shot tons of pixand now we made our move. The float plane trips are booked at a little log cabin on the dock, right by the planes docking spaces. There are two trips: the 5 glacier flight, which we took, and the Taku Lodge salmon feast flight, which we did not. It was quite a bit more money, and possibly fewer glaciers. Glaciers per dollar is the benchmark here.

There was a hour wait, and we walked up the hill in town and found a little place which offered 1/2 of a BLT and a coke: that’s heaven for me. Our plane was waiting when we got back, but it was overbooked. The planes seat 5 and the pilot, but weight is an issue, and they had booked 6 people. So two were offered a T-shirt to wait 20 minutes for the next flight, and we 4 who survived the selection went down to the plane.



I sat co,-pilot, which meant better views.



My camera has a “behind glass” setting which I used, and it seemed to work. We started off sliding on top of the water, after a bit the pilot boosted the throttle a bit and we were up and away, gaining altitude as we moved down the Gastineau Strait. Below us a cruise ship crept up the water towards its dock in Juneau. Snow covered mountains were visible on all sides, glittering in the sunlight. It was beautiful.

The plane took a left turn just before the Taku River and began to fly up a mountain pass. Shades of Indiana Jones. The co-pilot seat view looked like we would not clear the pass,



Glaciers are more interesting in the abstract than in the actual, considered per-se. But from the plane the views were breathtaking. Something that attracted my attention were the blue ponds that formed on top of the glacier.

PHOTO BLUE PONDS

The glacier ice fractures along stress lines as it is forced down the valley, making patterns visible from above. Below on the flood plain of the Taku were two streams, one purple and one milky blue. You’ll have to take my word for it because the photo is too blurry.



This flight lasted under 1 hour, and some of that was spent getting too and returning from the Taku river where the glaciers were, but it was an incredible time. The scenery was unrelentingly wonderful, and there’s something exciting about flying in a small plane.You can also see the glaciers from helicopters, which will land on the Mendenhall Glacier and on some top of the line trips (think $350 per person for 1 hour) let you sit in a dog sled for a minute or two. On our Mendenhall trip (more later) the air was abuzz with helicopters coming and going – it seemed like Sohum during the harvest raids by CAMP in the 1980s. I can’t compare the helicopter with the float plane directly, but I think the plane trip will prove to be the more satisfactory.

I'm at the Glacier Bay Lodge right now, and there is great wi-fi so I hope to catch you up on more Celebration and Juneau, the 5-Glacier flight we took, the ferry to Glacier bay yesterday with spectacular weather, and the bear we met on the trail at the Mendenhall glacier - but right now i'm off to have further adventures.

I have tons of photos of the dancers and singers from Celebration 2008 and when I have a secure internet connection I'll illustrate this.

The troups that present during Celebration, playing on the big stage in Centenial Hall, and the smaller stage in the ANB (Alaska Native Brotherhood) hall nearby, seem to be organized by area. During the parade Saturday some had banners announcing their locale: Angoon, Hoonah, Sitka, Juneau, Kake... Newspaper reports say about 2500 people participated in the troups.



The groups are all inclusive - inclusive seems to be the key word to the Tlingit culture. Very few are non-Tlingit. There was one Tsimiam group with a wonderful dance about being led from Canada in the late 19th century by preacher, William Duncan, who converted them to Christianity and brought them to Alaska - at the end they whipped out crosses and American flags. One Athabascan group which did some very nice dancing, and one Haida. There may have been other troups from these groups, but these were the ones I noticed. The others were Tlingit.



Ages on stage during the presentations range from babes in arms being carried by their mothers as they dance, to honored elders now too old to dance who are seated in places of honor on stage. If I might quote the song, "everyone solos" during most of the dances. A few had what appeared to be actual steps, particularliy one women's dance during which the women did a kind of shoulder movement which drove the crowd wild. But others seems like each dancer simply did what he or she felt was right, given the beat and their skill level. Skill levels varied wildly from one poor young girl who simply couldn't find the beat, to some extraordinary older dancers who seemed to these naive eyes to know the moves.



If the makeup of these troups is consistent with the tribal rolls, the Tlingit inclusiveness has led them to "look like America" as a recent President said of his cabinet. Dancers appeared to have backgrounds ranging from the native to the Russian, Euro-American, to Fillipino and African. This was especially true of the younger dancers,and I imagine that intermarriage among other groups is particularly widespread in the youngest generation.



Elders get a lot of honor and preference among the Celebrants. Not only do they get seats of honor on stage, but in the audience there are special, and excellent, seats reserved for us. Two ushers helped elders find seats - to the point of going to get extra chairs for Mary Alice and I (we qualified as elders a few years back it seems)- and they bring water around for any who want it. The troup announcers make a point of thanking the elders who have assisted the troup in learning the proper forms of traditional song and dance, and of saying that every attempt has been made to learn and preserve the wisdom the elders have given them. As a recent arrival at elder status I have to say that this attention to the needs of, and honoring the wisdom of, elders is a great idea and I commend it to the Mateel Nation.

The celebrants come from the scattered villages and towns that dot the coastal islands of SE Alaska. The Tlingits, who seem to be the principal tribe locally, (of the 20,000 SE Alaska Indians on the tribal rolls, the internet tells me, 16,000+ are Tlingits, 3000 Haida,and c. 1200 Tsimsians) are bound together by a web of relationships of (at least) clan, blood & marriage kinship, and location. Everyone is either an eagle or a raven. Within those groups are clans, and within those clans, houses. So while we are standing in line waiting for the fry-bread to be done, the man behind us introduces himself to the woman in front of us. He starts with his name and clan affiliation (if I followed the English translation he gave me) to which she responds and is in some way linked. Then he discusses his ancestors back a few generations, and where they have lived, as does she. They work out where they are located relative to each other in this web, and now they are not strangers.
There are hints of some similar arrangements in our past. Certainly there are regional affiliations among us: New England, New York City, Dixie, the West. Strangers meeting on the road hear a familiar accent, and strike up a conversation based on region. You can get it to state, but its harder to do county – although upon hearing that the 2nd mate on the MV Columbia was from Eureka I resolved to search him out (but didn’t). We are too many, and too mobile, to get down to recognizing names but people will ask if you know their relatives or friends in your area – even if your area is New York City. Back home this is sketchy, among the Tlingit, limited in number and geographic range, it seems to be second nature.
And then there is the song, Are You From Dixie?, a very successful song in the late 30s and 40s when so many southerners had to leave to find work in the North, first because of the depression, then the booming war industries of WWII. Give it a listen if you can find it on-line. Dixie is, as the song says, "anywhere below the Mason-Dixon line" which the reader will recall is the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

The situation is approximately this: some decades back the Indians received a large sum of money from oil funds or land settlements, and they formed SeaAlaska corportion and invested in the money in various businesses enterprises including the Mount Roberts Tram, and the Goldbelt hotel. Every two years they hold Celebration (that year) which is a gathering of all the Northwest Indians for several days of presentations of singing and dancing, art exhibits, craft sales, and lectures. It reminds me very much of the early folk music festivals I attended in the 1970s, imagining that they were held in the deep south. (Which they were not).