Glacier Bay: Watch It, Young Lady.

As every guidebook will tell you, sailing up Glacier Bay is like watching a glacial retreat movie in reverse. At the mouth of the bay you're looking at land that was under a 20-mile-wide river of ice when Captain George Vancouver first sailed by in 1794 -- and now it's covered with huge forests.

By the time you get to Russell Island (in the West Arm), you're passing land that had just emerged from under the glacier when John Muir came to visit in 1879. Even here there's been enough time for soil to build up and smaller trees to grow. But as you move further up the bay, the vegetation gets smaller and finally disappears altogether, until you're seeing snow-capped hunks of rock that were probably still under the ice when Buddy Holly died.

I had been expecting the whole journey to feel like one big global warming emergency alert drill -- and it did, in a way. But it also brought home the awesome feeling that these massive glaciers are way bigger than us in every sense, that their saga is way longer than human history and will continue long after we're gone. This map doesn't show it, but some of the glaciers have actually advanced and retreated again since Muir's visit -- and four or five times in the thousands of years before anyone was keeping track.

And somehow after you've steamed past the hemlocks and the alders and the lupins and up through the scraped-bare boulders, when the the air has turned wintry and hunks of ice are floating past you, when you're face to face with a heaving, crackling, 250-foot-thick wall of ice, it's hard not to feel a little bit reassured: Oh yeah, that's right... We're all insignificant specks. (Am I the only one who finds this realization liberating -- even exhilarating?)

Josie's teacher told us that in the 17th century (between glacial advances) Glacier Bay was a wide grassy valley, with a Tlingit village situated on the banks of a river full of sockeye salmon. Then one day, as the story goes, a teenage girl offended the spirit of the glacier, and it began to advance toward the village.

Can you imagine this thing thundering down on you -- "faster than a running dog," they say -- throwing off hunks of ice the size of the Statue of Liberty, crashing through your beloved grassy valley, crushing everything in its path? People barely had time to grab their stuff, leap into their canoes, and paddle away into Icy Straight. Legend has it that the girl's grandmother stayed behind, hoping this sacrifice would appease the angry glacier.

Geologic evidence indicates that the glacier did stop, but not before completely destroying the village. And, in the scientific-euphemistic words of Dr. Wayne Howell, the glacier's sudden advance triggered a century or more of "unstable living conditions for humans" in the whole region: not only were there icy katabatic winds blowing down off the glacier, but the weight of the ice caused the surrounding land to sink (a phenomenon known as isostatic depression). Archaeological evidence and Tlingit legend both point to a prolonged period of starvation and desperate conflict as the coastal flora and fauna on which the tribe relied for food were submerged. Apparently those old shorelines are emerging again as the land bounces back up (isostatic rebound). But it's going to be a long, long, time before Glacier Bay is a grassy valley again.

I think the Tlingit elders who passed this story down meant it primarily as a warning to disobedient girls, but I'm having a hard time leaving it at that (too many Women's Studies courses, I guess). Of course it's a fine thing for teenagers -- and not only the female ones! -- to be reminded that thoughtless actions can have catastrophic consequences, and that even though your grandmother would gladly throw herself in front of whatever disaster you've stirred up, it might not be enough to save the village.

But surely there's a message here for the glacier too (which honestly seems to have been taking Harsh Lessons from Yahweh) about maybe calming down and not taking things so personally. Maybe leaving a little room for kids to learn from their mistakes, to grow out of their sullen, sarcastic phase into the responsible adults we know are lurking in there somewhere. A little room for forgiveness, maybe. Redemption, even.  

There's all kinds of ways the story could have gone, I suppose. It's possible the girl was so alienated, so full of rebellious, idealistic rage that she didn't even care if she totally destroyed the whole stupid screwed-up world and all the damn phonies in charge of it -- we've all known kids like that, for sure. (Hell, anyone who's paying attention feels that way sometimes...) Maybe the glacier had been issuing patient, firm warnings and negotiating limits and offering loving support and reasonable choices for years, and finally reached the end of its rope. (It happens.)

At any rate, I know I'm not the only one who spent the rest of the trip eyeing the young ladies among us warily, shuddering at the awesome power of their rudeness, wincing at its uncanny ability to enrage beyond reason those of us to whom it is occasionally directed, and discouraged by the feeble effect of the grandmother's noble sacrifice.

But also -- ultimately -- deeply grateful for the chance to know and love the many different sides of these mercurial, adorable, impossible, incredible creatures.

(Thanks again to Zeke for letting me share the glacier pictures, by the way -- I got kind of lazy about taking my own once I realized there was a real photographer aboard. The ones of Josie are Josefina's -- thanks to you too!)