Watch a Glacier and Wash Your Hands

Things to do in Alaska

It’s Thursday, June 20th, the last full day of our cruise, and we are on a galley tour in the industrial kitchen of the Royal Caribbean’s “Radiance of the Seas.” Grandma and I spent the morning watching the Hubbard Glacier from different places on the ship. We first saw it from the helipad, and then tried our room. We hustled from Steve and Carrie’s room on the starboard side and back to ours on the port side a couple of times before we realized the captain had the ship on a swivel and we just had to stay in one place and watch as it appeared and disappeared. Now that the last exciting cruise thing has ended, the passengers of this floating city proceed to our final port in Seward.

The crew member in charge of leading our group in the galley tour shows us what happens in the dish pit. Most of the people in the group are probably only in it for the bottomless mimosa brunch that will follow. I put up a mental shield of psychic static as he explains which waste products go in which color bins. I’m in the middle of two weeks off, and this feels suspiciously like either day one at a new job or day five-hundred at a job where the staff still can’t figure out that the green bin is compost and the blue is recycling.

He shows us the racks where the servers put their dirty glasses, and the place behind us where the clean racks pile up. He explains that after they unload their dirty dishes, the waitstaff will wash their hands for a full twenty seconds.

Somehow someone in the front of the tour group took that to mean he wanted all of us to wash our hands. There is a language barrier between them. Both men have thick accents, so when our fellow passenger asks if he wants us to wash our hands and the crew member says, “If you want to, you can wash your hands,” it leads to a mass confusion among the 25 people on the galley tour.

One by one the people ahead of us began to line up at the sinks and wash their hands for twenty seconds.

I look up at my aunt, Carrie, and she gestures to Grandma who is lining up behind the rest of them.

“Are you going to stop her?”

Grandma is mentally sharp, but she’s a little hard of hearing and her vision has significantly diminished. She’s the perfect candidate to accidentally join this hand-washing parade that’s going on in the front of the tour group.

I tap her and remind her that we already washed our hands. The half of the group toward the back are dutifully waiting for their turn to wash their hands as the tour guide gently tries to herd us forward while being polite enough not to tell the people who are mistakenly washing their hands that they are holding up the tour group and need to stop it.

The people behind us start mumbling and asking each other whether or not they have to wash their hands, and the man in front of me tells them that they do.

I tell them, “That’s not true.”

I can tell they don’t believe me and am grateful when our guide picks up his pace and leads us out of the bakery and into the dish pit, so they have to abandon all ideas of hand-washing if they want to keep up.

With the oven warm at our backs, we watch the baker knead loaves of bread for 3,000 people, and I fall in love with his forearms while he does it.

“Sewing Lady“ by Hailey Morgan

Grandma buys me this print in Anchorage. She thinks it’s a lady sitting at a writing desk, but she’s working in front of a sewing machine. I think it’s perfect because stories are just as warm as patchwork quilts—and there’s a cat.