Southeast Alaska has been a kaleidoscope around us this week, color, texture and sound, motion and emotion, thought and feelings that swirl though our minds. Sun pours down in tandem with pearly threads of waterfalls, cascading past ledge after ledge all the length of a dark granite wall into the milky green fiord. Aquamarine icebergs tumble in the rising tide, shaking off a skein of mist colored gulls. A cinnamon brown bear ambles across a tidal meadow, sniffs the morning mist and pauses to munch a few blades of emerald grass. A wall, a battlement, a great rampart of ice sighs gently, then cracks and roars as thousands of tons plunge into the sea, and the splash rises up like a geyser. A young humpback whale, visiting Alaska for the first time himself, rolls and splashes gleefully in a floating patch of kelp while his mother dives deep to the lightless depths in the company of four other great leviathans. Seabirds whistle, tidepools glisten, forest giants rustle in the wind, hummingbirds zing by. The kaleidoscope wraps around us and through us.
Beneath the sea, as everywhere, an entirely other universe of color and sensation unfolds for us. Delicate young kelp blades flutter in the cold currents. Jewel bright anemones, red and green and crystalline clear, surprise us with brilliant colors never seen in the world above the waves. Fish spread fans like fins as they lift off the bottom, flashing electric turquoise spots before they disappear into the surrounding gloom. Seastars of every size, color and description patrol the rocks, waving arms to taste the water’s flow. Golden nudibranchs glide over the rough rocks, a sea lion rockets by, hermit crabs climb across walls dotted with yellow sponges, one bit of algae on the bottom transforms into a small fish and swims away. The kaleidoscope envelopes us and fills us.
