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Europe. Nobody knows where it's really supposed to go, so it doesn't go anywhere." In Juneau, the ambiguity deepens. Like Gaul, it is divided into three parts. People live in town or they live in the valley or they live out the road. The town is small; during the tourist season the locals can be easily outnumbered by those arriving on the weekly cruise ships. There may be between twenty to thirty cruise ships a week, each carrying hundreds if not thousands of passengers. The valley is the Mendenhall Valley, dwarfed by the Mendenhall Glacier that doesn't seem to belong where people live. Or maybe it's the people who don't belong. And then there are those who live "out the road". The road is the road that leads forty miles from Juneau to nowhere. My sister Hanusia lives twenty-one miles out the road and that is where I slept. Sort of. I was in Juneau at the end of May when daylight begins at three- thirty in the morning and ends at eleven-thirty at night. I cannot sleep in daylight and so I didn't. Sleep or no sleep, every morning was special, a prelude to a new day of discovery. I would ease myself into each with a cup of coffe and a stroll up the boardwalk that leads from the house to the road. Along the way I would be met by one or more of the members of the neighborhood menagerie ..... Sadie, Betsy, Kino and Rev (the dogs), Ricky and Lucy and Rubio (the cats). Rubio, like my sister, is an emigre from a Manhattan apartment. He has become an Alaskan hunter, specializing in voles which he deposits on the door mat with justifiable pride. Across the street is "Bonnie's property", a semi-cleared plot of ground that has yet to be built upon and offers a spectacular view of the Lynn Canal and the Chilkat Mountain Range. And here, with my canine or feline companions, I would sit, mute and contemplative. It was my "quiet time", a private moment to try to absorb yesterday's sensory overload and prepare for what was yet to come. I bought a pair of hiking boots before I left home, an $80.00 investment that paid for itself over and over as I hiked through snow and mud and water or scrambled over slick rocks on endless beaches or defled gravity and sanity by scaling huge boulders merely to see if I could. From one such boulder I saw a couple of sea lions sticking their heads out of the cold waters of Sunshine Cove, barking at each other or at the intruders who had ventured into their space. From another, I saw hump-backed whales spouting water from their blow holes, then flick their tales, then disappear. From another, I watched a bald eagle soaring and then swooping to catch in his talons an elusive fish. I Alaskan Grizzly Tlingit Raven Totem. Carved into bark of tree on Mt. Roberts.
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