Before my family left last summer for a cruise through Alaska's Inside Passage, my wife, Joan, and I asked our then five-year-old son, Thomas, what he expected to see when we got there. A naturalist in the making, Thomas replied, "It will be completely white and covered with snow, and there will be polar bears, moose, whales, raptors and huskies everywhere." (Our daughter, Mia, then two, was too preoccupied with packing her favorite purple dresses to share her thoughts about the forty-ninth state.)
Thomas's concept of Alaska was not far from my own, which was formed through schoolboy studies of frostbitten prospectors and of what we used to call Eskimos, with their harpoons, igloos and diets of whale blubber and fish eyes. Readings of Jack London had only confirmed my belief that a cold, harsh exoticism blanketed the vast state like a dark and still night's snowfall.
As it turned out, the Alaska of our imaginations was not exactly the one we encountered; what we did see, however, fired our imaginations in wonderful new ways. To begin with, we journeyed in July, and summer touches Alaska as surely—albeit not as emphatically—as it does the rest of the United States, with daytime temperatures often reaching well into the sixties. More to the point, we traveled on the Crystal Harmony, a sleek 940-passenger luxury ocean liner—not the normal mode of transport for intrepid outdoorsmen.
We certainly were not heeding any call of the wild when we boarded—in Vancouver, a few days into the Harmony's twelve-day round-trip out of San Francisco—and were shown to our quarters. Joan and I had one penthouse stateroom; Thomas and Mia shared another with Dina Rivera, our babysitter from New York.
I'm no cruise neophyte. My mother won't fly and loves to sail, so when I was growing up, we'd often travel by ship. Back then my sister and I were usually among a handful of children on board, but as we toured the Harmony, I was struck by how many kids we passed on every deck. (The ten-and-under set tended to congregate in Fantasia, the ship's children's-activity center, with its perennially cheerful staff.) Yes, most of our fellow passengers were older than sixty. But the many young faces we encountered bore out what I'd frequently heard: that Alaska is the leading cruise destination for families. I also soon noticed that many of these families were multigenerational—grandparents, parents, teenagers and toddlers all finding common ground, as it were, through a shared interest in the vivid history and unspoiled beauty of the United States' last frontier.
The ship soon pulled out of Vancouver's sunny harbor, and we headed up the coast. A day later we began to crisscross the waters of the southeasternmost spur of Alaska, hugging the green, rain-forested shores of the Inside Passage, a photogenic 500-mile-long collection of unpopulated islands, whale-filled straits and narrow fjords that would sometimes dead-end at massive glaciers calving house-sized chunks of ice into the sea.
Unless you have the time, inclination and daring to charter small planes and hop from lodge to camp to rustic lodge—and how many people traveling with young children do?—most of the fabled attractions of the massive state (more than twice the size of Texas) are out of reach. This time around we didn't take in the endless caribou-and-moose-covered tundra of the state's interior; or the sharp, frigid crests of Mount McKinley, North America's tallest peak; or the lonely Arctic Circle whaling town of Barrow, without a single road leading in or out of it; or even the rugged, wind-whipped Aleutian Islands, poking bravely into the Bering Sea. In other words, what we saw and experienced in our few days at sea was just—and I can write this now that I am back on terra firma—the tip of the Alaskan iceberg.
But what a tip-top tip it was. The Inside Passage coastline affords some of the most gorgeous scenery you'll ever have the good fortune to sail by at twenty-two knots. Clouds hover over steep, evergreen-covered mountains marked here by a gray, jigsaw-puzzle outcrop of granite and there by a thin vertical slash of white: a waterfall, whose great height is impossible to calculate. The landscape is not all that inspires; the water, too, is striking, changing constantly—from aquamarine to blue black to a gray so steely it's as if cold were made visible. Earth and sea together comprise a palette different from anything I'd seen before—resembling not so much a Turner oil as an oversized Rothko color-field painting.
