At Icy Strait Point, a scenic natural entrance to Alaska’s Glacier Bay, the brochure hands you a mountain. You ride a gondola up Hoonah Mountain to a spot they call Sky Peak, and the higher you climb the smaller your ship gets in the water below, until the thing that carried you across an ocean looks like a toy you could pick up off the bay. From the top, Alaska does what Alaska always does. It humbles you with green and water and distance. It reminded me, of all things, of Stubnerkogel in Bad Gastein, another gondola, another set of peaks in another life. Beauty rhymes across the world if you travel long enough.
But I have learned that the view is never the story. The story is always who built the railing you are leaning on, and who is going to wipe it down after you leave.
So start with the ground itself. Icy Strait Point is the only cruise port in Alaska owned by the Native people whose land it sits on. It belongs to the Huna Tlingit, through their own corporation. And if you read my last letter, the one from the blue wall of Glacier Bay, you already know who the Huna are. They are the people the advancing ice drove out of that bay two and a half centuries ago, the ones who fled across the water and began again at Hoonah.
Sit with the symmetry of that. The people the ice exiled now own the harbor the ships sail into. The old cannery that once processed their salmon under someone else’s name is theirs now, run by them, the dock their dock. Of all the ports on this coast, the one that answers the question who really runs this place with the cleanest conscience is the one run by the people who were sent away and came back. That is the first answer, and it is standing on solid ground.
But the gondola took me back down to the water, and the question came with me. Because if the Huna run the port, who runs the ship?
Not the captain. I am sorry, but no.
There is a man at the buffet named Jason. You meet him first as a sound, “washy washy, happy happy,” the cheerful little chant he sends down the line as he waves you toward the sanitizer before you touch the serving spoons, the same four words ten thousand times a day. Most people hear a mascot. I heard Cebu. I answered him in Cebuano and watched his whole face change, the way a face changes when a stranger turns out to speak the language of your mother. He is from Carcar. When I told him I had studied at USC Talamban, he did not wait for me to finish. “Fine Arts,” he said. Because Fine Arts had been his dream too.
Let that land the way it landed on me. I got to live the exact life he wanted. I went to the art school. I made the work. I have the career. And he, who dreamed the same dream, stands at a buffet a half a world from Carcar, saying washy washy to tourists who will never learn his name. He spent our whole conversation taking care of me, steering me toward the good dishes and away from the sad ones, the way you look after someone from home. The deferred dream, served with a smile, to the woman who got to keep it.
There is a barista named Iya, who learned my coffee order and started handing my son my Venti Mocha before he could ask, “for your mom, Glenda.” I never had to ask her schedule. I already knew it in my body, because it is the schedule of everyone I come from. She will work until August. Then she will go home for a breath, to whoever is waiting, and then she will come back and do it all again. Months on the water, a few weeks on land, repeat. The whole crew lives on that tide. You learn to read it the way you read weather.
And there is Neh, who kept our stateroom. On most ships the rooms are worked in pairs, a steward and an assistant. Neh, as far as I could tell, worked alone, ten rooms or so, every single day, by herself. I never asked the exact number, because the number was not the point. The point is what she did the afternoon my vertigo flattened me and I hung the Do Not Disturb sign and disappeared behind it. A tired worker, an honest worker even, would have been quietly grateful to skip the room. Neh called instead. She called to ask if I was alright. If I needed anything. If I wanted the room freshened whenever I surfaced. She saw, behind a sign designed to make a guest disappear, a person who might not be okay.
I notice these people because I am these people. I was born in Guiuan, out on the edge of Eastern Samar, where the Pacific is not a view, it is the thing that raises you and the thing that can take everything in a single afternoon. I am the girl who got out. And on every ship I have ever boarded, the staff turns out to be a roll call of the places that export their tenderness. The Philippines. Indonesia. India. We are very good, my corner of the world, at being the hands that make other people’s holidays float.
The ship floats on engineering. Steel and ballast and physics. But it runs on Jason and Iya and Neh. On ten thousand washy-washys, and a Mocha handed over with the word mom, and a phone call to a guest who hung a sign that said leave me alone. The captain gets the stripes. They get the ship actually working.
So the next time you are standing at the top of some gorgeous mountain, looking down at your ship like a toy in the bay, do one small thing for me. Come back down. Learn one name. Say it back to them in their own language if you can find it. They will spend the whole season making your week perfect, and they would love, just once, to be seen doing it.
That is who makes it float.