Ice Field Fantasy

Juneau is a major tourist destination. Most visitors come up on tour ships and spend between ten and 12 hours sampling the local possibilities. One of the very popular things to do is to take a helicopter up to the Juneau icefield. The choppers take off, at regular intervals, from the heli-pad, heading south. They circle widely to the east, and then fly north to the glacier. They go up in groups of eight. I used to think this was somehow related to buddying up for safety, but it turns out that one tour bus just fills eight helicopters.


Which shows both that I need to know the reasons for things and that if I don't, I make up something that sounds reasonable. Took me a while to get a handle on this and to start identifying, both for myself and anyone I might entertain with these with terms such as "I think" or "my theory" or "my fantasy." At any rate, I know the facts now because Richard was talking to one of the pilots and asked. Amazing. Instead of taking a wild, improbable guess, do research.

And what the tourists are going up to the icefield for is to take a ride on a dog sled. This seems so silly to me -- Southeast Alaska was never really dog sled country. Dog sleds are used in flat country, like the interior and far north. Juneau is much too mountainous to make it a very safe way to go. However, here in the Southeast we have glacial icefields, which are flat and frozen during the summer when the tourists come; in the interior there is no available snow this time of year. You can ride in a dog sled on wheels in Danali National Park, but that's about it.

I like to watch the helicopters fly up towards the glacier, although I hate being at the glacier and hearing them; they destroy the quiet. And people who live in their flightpath hate them. This segment of the tourist industry is just a few years old, and people built and bought houses in what was supposed to be pristine conditions. I've been in houses when these things fly over, and the picture breaks up on the TV.

Anyway, all of that is background for my fantasy (and you thought it was the buddy system) about all of this. The choppers remind me of big dragonflies. I picture them filling up with gray haired folk, flying them up to their mammoth nests on the icefield, and feeding them to their young.

Do you suppose this macabre bent to my mind is natural or did I pick it up reading all those Edward Gory books? I mean, doesn't feeding senior citizen tourists to baby helicopters remind you of Milicent Frastly being sacrificed to the insect god?