Opinion
Cruising for meaning
By Harry Davidson
I’ve often wondered what it is that people are actually seeking when they go on a tour. I am certain that the immediate reasons are as varied as the individuals themselves. But it surprises me that for all the variety of tourists and diversity of reasons and expectations, the actual tours presented by most of today’s tour operators are amazingly similar. There are the huge cruise ships stopping at small communities all the way up the coast to Seward. Then there are boat rides to outlying areas to view glaciers and marine life; and then, finally, the tourist can board a train for Denali Park for a day or two before returning to the ship or catching a flight back home. These tour packages are sold by the hundreds of thousands, as the tour companies process the tourists through their particular system.
I keep thinking that there is something far deeper and more mysterious that draws people north to experience Alaska. What ever that “something” is, the tour operators, for the most part, aren’t delivering. I’m not thinking of the Alaskan mystique of the Native American Cultures or the Last Frontier and the Gold Rush history, or even the pristine wilderness in its natural, untouched beauty. It seems to me that the ‘something’ that many seek on a tour of the North Country is different from what they are looking for in a tropical cruise, where the implicit, if not explicit, promise is ‘a visit to Paradise’. Not so with a trip to Alaska. No palm trees here! No coral-studded lagoons and warm white sand beaches. No scantily clad maidens dancing to tropical music. Alaska makes no promises of Paradise. They will find none of that here.
There is something else they seek. Something more intangible, something that has to do with a longing of the soul for ‘otherness’: the need to know and see that in spite of our affluence and comfort, there is a fierce and awesome reality that is so overpowering it has the capacity to lift us out of our ordinary consciousness and perhaps, if only for a fleeting moment, allow us to see ourselves from a different perspective - a deeper perspective that will somehow leave its impression on the soul, changing, enlarging and ennobling it, because it has seen.
The experience of ‘otherness’ is a transcendental moment. In the grip of the sense of something noble we can surpass the boundaries of our smaller selves with their needs and wants, and for those fleeting moments we can know a larger reality. Suddenly we glimpse ourselves from outside ourselves. This has the potential to be life altering. But this kind of seeing can’t happen through the windows of a cruise ship or a luxury coach speeding along the rail tracks or down the highway. Somehow we must be vulnerable to the ‘otherness’. The possibility must exist that I may as least encounter my mortality, that the otherness is wild and that therefore my experience is a wilderness experience.
I believe this is still the root reason that brings many of our visitors to Alaska. But if they actually encounter something profound within themselves through a real wilderness experience, it will be in spite of today’s tour industry, not because of it. Kind of like when a freak wave smashed into a cruise ship this spring off the coast of South Carolina, breaking out windows on the seventh story and forcing the ship into Charleston for repairs. I am certain that for all the promises of absolutely safe cruising, in which the sea had been harnessed to serve us in our floating palaces, there were some tourists on board who encountered that ‘something’ they were not even looking for. They received more than they bargained for. Some of them saw and were changed. I’m not suggesting that we arrange for freak waves to smash into cruise ships as they ply the waters for Alaska. I am asking if it is even possible for today’s tour operators, delivering the kind of packages they do, to create possibilities for travelers to have the kind of profound encounters they long for.
Harry Davidson was born in Kodiak, raised in Southwest Alaska, and is now a business owner in Anchorage. E-mail: .