Flying north from Juneau

     Returning home to Alaska, much like riding a foreign bus through Brooklyn or Queens, is a constant discovery of the radically new amidst the so-called familiar. 
    The plane that brought me up here to Haines from Juneau was a striking reminder of such.
     It also functioned nicely as the latest installment of what I call "The Lenseless Chronicles": those breathtaking occasions of my life in which I managed not to have my camera on me, narratives spanning everything from the Berlin Wall to that frigid November day in 2001 when in British Columbia my dog cornered a mountain goat on the brink of a precipice. (Both goat and dog emerged unharmed.) 
     It's a five hour flight from New York to Seattle, and a two hour flight from Seattle to Juneau, and even at the end of that exhausting pilgrimage, one is still eighty miles south of Haines, my childhood home.
     There exist two options for closing the remaining gap: a five-hour ride on the Alaska State Ferry, or a forty-minute ride on a single-prop, eight-passenger airplane, the like of which Alaskan mythology is based upon. Though the ferry is my preferred mode of transport, not to mention the cheaper of the two, connection times prevented me from partaking this time 'round, so instead I hopped a veteran performer of the tireless Wings of Alaska and headed north into the 5PM sun.
     We sped off the runway and banked to the right. Seated as I was on the starboard side of the aircraft, directly under the wing, I watched the wingtip cut a line across the body of the sprawling Mendenhall Glacier; watched the balloon tire of the plane's landing apparatus slide past the bottomless blue of the Pacific Ocean and the fishing port that huddles to the north of the Juneau Airport.
     I've flown this route dozens of times in my life, and never failed to find it astonishing in its beauty, but have nevertheless grown at least to anticipate the landmarks of the journey. It would be a straight shot up the salty reach of Lynn Canal, North America's deepest fjord, and a final bank and vulture-like circle to the Haines air-strip at the end of the line.
     Only this time it didn't play out quite like that.
     Our pilot, impromptu-style, dropped the suggestion of a "more scenic route," and when the passengers voiced their adamant support of the idea, we cut west off the Canal and up the Endicott River valley, thereby entering what felt to me like a parallel universe, existing in elusive proximity to the route I knew so well.
     A ridge to our right eclipsed the ocean. Jagged peaks on either side soared to a height half again the altitude of our plane. Ice fields and miniature glaciers spilled over their crowns, and newborn streams, fresh from the ice, rushed down the sides of the mountains, down into the encroaching green of the alder jungle.
     We left the Endicott River and continued north.  Ridges beneath us brought the ground within a thousand feet of our posteriors, and then broke without warning into valleys of mud-brown rivers that quintupled the gap between our plane and the Earth, paralyzing abysses that cut out of nowhere. The white points and thin brown wings of Bald eagles circled at the fridges of visibility, as high above the valleys as we were above them.
     At last we came to the Davidson Glacier, a stunning mass of ice that lurches right to the fringes of the ocean, which throughout my life I'd known only from a distance, and only in small part, and now we flew with the whole of its mass right before our eyes, stretching from mountains to saltwater, our pilot turning us to the east to rejoin the Lynn Canal, banking so the plane stood almost on its side, the wingtip pointing out the fissures in the ice, the blue-on-black, the chasms that reached down into that for-God's-sake-I-don't-want-to-think-about-it underworld where fallen hikers just vanish.
     We landed on the airstrip in Haines, my first time home in two years. Shaken from the abruptness of it all, I stepped out onto the runway, the Davidson Glacier Valley still faintly visible in the distance, the smell of cottonwood saturating the air.
     All and all, it felt like a reasonable welcome.