A Way of Looking at Things No. 26: What is this world coming to?

A Way of Looking at Things – No. 26: What is this world coming to?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2002

I just completed a ten-day vacation including a seven-day cruise to Alaska on the cruise ship the Norwegian Sky. In my somewhat charmed life, I still had never been exposed to such continuous obsequious and indulgent service. Nor had fine dining been my experience virtually every meal a day. Once a year on our wedding anniversary was the rule. But no elegant restaurant in the Tampa Bay area topped what was the normal fare on this ship every meal.

The ship was comparable to the Titanic of the movie with its comfortable compartments (with cable TV), five stylish restaurants, glass-enclosed elevator in the atrium, winding stairways, plush bars and Broadway type entertainment every night. I love art and the art director of the ship had four shows during the trip, with my wife Betty and I attending every one, and even purchasing some original artwork. I’m not a collector but found I could be easily talked into becoming one.

Indeed, the Norwegian Sky was a floating commercial with a thousand places to spend your money including a Las Vegas type casino, cigar emporium, boutiques, photo gallery (like the paparazzi, photographers were constantly taking your picture, then posting them in the photo gallery at $10-20 per picture), jewelry stores, and beauty/massage vanity shops, to name only a few of such venues.

Once on shore, the coastal cities and towns of Juneau, Haines, Skagway, and Ketchikan along the way have dreamy tourist traps to disgorge you of your money, along with other diversions such as train trips, helicopter rides, all kinds of tours, hydroplane rides, and on and on to relieve you of several more hundreds of dollars. The appointed amenities on board are all free but with beguiling temptations beyond these amenities always waiting to collect your lucre. On shore nothing is free.

We took a dreamy ride through the mountains in Skagway for only $184, but spent most of our time in the very reasonable and accessible museums along the way in tours designed by us simply by reading the free tourist maps provided by the ship.

It was on these private excursions where reality soaked through our fraudulent temporary opulent suspension to give us pause and appreciation of this place.

Our capitalistic system is built on greed, and greed is built on comparing and competing. It is not enough to be doing well. We must be doing better than others. We are a restless people who believe happiness is somewhere “out there” to be attained. Movies and magazines provided this stimulating imagery for my generation. Now, it is television and the Internet that provide it for my children and my children’s children. It is the same disease wrapped in different tantalizers.

It so happens that the route of our cruise was identical to the “Alaskan Gold Rush” of 1897. A few prospectors discovered gold in the Yukon in 1896, but it took them eleven months to get to Seattle with their booty. Gold then was the standard upon which the American dollar was based. These prospectors had accumulated over $100,000 in gold nuggets, which would be tens of millions today. A Seattle newspaper ran the headline “Gold, Gold, Gold!” This accident of history turned Seattle into a boomtown, and in time into the largest city in the Pacific North West, which it remains today.

One hundred thousand people left what they were doing to join the gold rush – doctors, lawyers, engineers, politicians, farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers. The mayor of San Francisco was on vacation when the news hit, left his family, and didn’t even bother to resign from office but instead took off immediately for Alaska to pan for gold.

Of the 100,000 that arrived in Alaska, 50,000 saw what an ordeal it would be and immediately turned around and went home. Of the 50,000 left, only 30,000 actually made the adventure. Of that 30,000 only about 3,000 stayed the course until their two-year required complement of staples ran out. And of that 3,000 less than 100 ever discovered much gold. And of that 100, only about 7 or 8 struck it rich, which is about average today for people who believe in “get rich quick” schemes such as the lottery.

Fortunately, along the way, buried in modest museums in these surviving Alaskan boomtowns are the artifacts of the indigenous peoples. The Inuit or Eskimo people, like the American Indian, lived in harmony with nature, and took from nature only what they needed to survive as a people. Their skill in boat building and canoe making rivaled any engineering that I have encountered. The same was true of the use of animal skins to make clothes, and tents, paints, artwork, and oil for their lamps.

Totem poles, which are not religious icons but expressions of feelings, made a special impression on Betty. They still grace burial sites, but are also produced to embarrass someone who has failed to pay a debt, or who has behaved poorly. Once the debt is paid or the bad behavior bridged the totem pole goes down.

Considering how much work went into one of these massive sculptures, it gave me special pause. I am one that never forgets and seldom forgives someone who has treated a loved one or me poorly. Perhaps I should work on constructing totems.

Being something of a wordsmith, I was especially moved by the eloquence, brevity, charm, mystery and mystique of Inuit storytelling.

I read these Inuit stories on woodcuts in a museum in Haines, Alaska. Haines is a small ocean side community (2,500) embraced by white-capped mountains, and snuggled in an insular bay. I fell in love with the place.

In Haines I met a young folk singer that had been in Haines for eight years, a motorcycling shopkeeper, a 25-year resident, who made jewelry while his wife maintained an eloquent flower garden and painted with equal eloquence, and a former diplomat from the State Department who has lived in Haines for fifteen years.

It occurred to me that Haines would be a perfect place to think and write about America's incessant bungee jumping into one form or another of craziness. Haines has access to the Alaskan Highway, and so the appearance of isolation is more psychological than real.

What was strangely missing from this idyllic environment (except in the curiosity shops in porcelain, rubber or plastic models) was the Inuit or Eskimo child. Only occasionally would I see a face with the slanted eyes, dark hair, sharp straight nose, angular face, and dark skin the color of earth. I would smile. They would study my Nordic features suspiciously and look away. I was an intruder on their sacred soil, a fact that long ago their people have come to accept but never learned to live with comfortably.

These momentary glances were full of meaning, which still resonates with me as I recall some of the marvelous stories read on woodcuts in the museum. Here are two of them:

Caribou and Raven
Raven was flying around one day when he saw a caribou. He flew down and picked some low-bush cranberries near the caribou, filling up his pockets. The caribou then charged the Raven, attacking him with fangs. In those days, caribou had fangs like bears and some other animals. Raven fought back with the berries though, and caribou lost his fangs forever. After the fight was over, Raven asked the caribou why he couldn’t smell. Without waiting for an answer, Raven flew away and gathered pieces of birch bark. Putting them in his pocket, he came back to the caribou, rolled up the bark and put it in the caribou’s nostrils. That is how the caribou became able to smell, so when people are upwind of him, he knows they are there.

The Birds’ Bear Hunt
Raven went bear hunting with Magpie, Blackbird, Dipper and Camp-robber. The birds put out fish tails and hid inside them. Raven was the first to be picked up by the bear, but he got frightened and flew away, so the other birds laughed at him. Dipper then hid in the tail, was swallowed, and killed the bear by cutting a hole from inside it. Seeing how it worked, Raven used the same trick to kill many bears. The birds began rendering the bears’ fat to get grease to eat. Raven left to get wood and came back disguised as a brown bear, frightening the birds away so he could eat the grease himself. The birds figured out what Raven had done, however, because they had hit the bear with a stick and when next they saw Raven, he was cut. Without knowing he’d been found out, Raven arranged a big feast, inviting all the other birds and animals to come. After they ate up all the food, the other animals and birds stomped all over Raven and killed him. Then they went home.

I find multiple meanings to these exquisite stories applicable to our contemporary world, as I’m sure you do as well. Human nature and the folly of humanist is not a recent discovery, and how better to show this than through the metaphor of animals. Incidentally, the Raven has great prominence among the Inuit for its cleverness and yes, blameworthiness as well. Poe of course immortalized The Raven for us in his famous poem, which beginning lines are in the back of all our memories:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door –
Only this and nothing more.

Remember now? Of course you do. If you believe in sociobiology, and I do, the idea that we all have a common ancestor, and that the culture of the human ancestry is carried in our blood, then the Inuit spirit is rising to Poe’s consciousness in celebration of this wondrous bird.

As many of you know, I have been working several years on a novel of my youth. In a museum in Seattle I found myself studying a fading photograph of Chief Seattle (1786 – 1866), for whom the city is named, along with the Indian Chief’s sayings which resonate with the landscape of my novel:

At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent,
And you think them deserted,
They will throng with returning hosts that once filled
And still love,
This beautiful land.

No words better capture my nostalgia for the place of my birth than these. Also Chief Seattle reminds me of another aspect of my novel with these lines,

And when your children’s children shall think themselves alone,
In the fields, the store, the shop upon the highway,
Or in the silence of the pathless woods,
They will not be alone.

For me who has been somewhat of a serious student of the human condition, progress as America’s most important product, has always been somewhat flawed leaving me bewildered.

Progress has built this monument of technology on the Indian carcass of what is for me a much more sane and better world, a world which we have all but destroyed save for the remnants of it in museums.

This fortuitous trip into the frenzy of a “gold rush mania” that has never left the American psyche, this desire for more at any price, while ostensibly cruising in luxury to forget, if only momentarily, of a mundane existence has left me with more a sense of loss than of peace. This is hypocrisy; to be sure, as I still exist pretty much in the lap of luxury, comfortably surrounded by the instruments of technology.

The irony of what the world is coming to seems to be that we are attempting, yes, at all cost, to avoid struggle, when struggle is life’s only teacher.

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Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com