Quote of the Day | June 7, 2008: Ketchikan, Alaska

Revisiting Charles Kuralt's America for June in Ketchikan, Alaska:

It was raining in Ketchikan.

This is like saying it was hilly in San Francisco or it was crowded in Tokyo or it was romantic in Paris.

It is always raining in Ketchikan. Seattle, which has a reputation as a rainy city, gets thirty-eight inches of rain a year. Ketchikan gets fifteen feet. June is the dryest month in Ketchikan. It rained the whole time I was there.

I didn't care. It wasn't the kind of downpour that drives you indoors to stare glumly out the window. Ketchikan's rain is what you'd call a soft drizzle or a hard mist. It's steady, but it's gentle. I wore an old, oiled green jacket and a Norwegian fisherman's cap every day and hung them both in the hotel bathroom every night. By morning, they were almost, but not quite, dried out.

The rain reminded me of everything I love about southeastern Alaska: the rain forest, the mountain lakes, the waterfalls, the fjords, and the glaciers. (When more rain and snow comes down on a mountain in the winter than melts away in the summer, eventually you have yourself a glacier. Alaska has tens of thousands of them.)

When I was planning my perfect year in America, I knew I had to spend a month of it in Alaska. But Alaska is way too big a place in which to contemplate spending a mere month -- 2,500 miles across. There used to be four times zones, Pacific, Yukon, Alaskan, and Aleutian, before the bureaucrats, playing God with the sun, reduced the four time zones to a mere two sometime in the Eighties.

If I wanted to explore only along the coast -- well, the tidal coastline measures 47,000 miles.

So I thought, well, I'll just poke around in Southeastern, as Alaskans call the panhandle which stretches down toward the Lower 48 states, and see how far north I get. I got only as far north as Glacier Bay, revisiting a few favorite places along the way. But the beauty of this trip along the Inside Passage took my breath away, the effect it always has had on me, the effect it has on every visitor. I said to a Tlingit Indian woman one time that I thought she lived in the most dazzling place in America.

"It's God's thumbprint," she said.

And it is.

Tags: Charles Kuralt, America, Ketchikan, Alaska