Pappa Hardy's Musings on Life.

Cruising to Alaska familiarizes the cruiser with an area of water called the Inside Passage. Instead of being out on the ocean proper, you sail amidst islands and up and down Fjords. The water is calmer than the ocean, and the scenery is devastatingly beautiful. The islands, of which there are many, are pretty and green, and passage is very deep, in some places more than 1000 feet deep. This area was carved out by massive sheets of ice (glaciers) that covered this area up to 1 mile thick during the last major ice age. It is just a beautiful place on the Planet Earth.

Today was one of those experiences in your life that you will never forget. At about 7am we entered what is called the Tracy Arm Fjord of the Inside Passage in Alaska, with the object of sailing up to and almost touching the Sawyer Glacier. We sailed up the Fjord seeing incredible cliffs and mountains, and what they call hanging glaciers. The site was not unlike Yosemite National Park. It was incredible. Toping it all off was sailing up within a mile of (it seemed much closer, like ¼ mile) the Sawyer Glacier. It was a site I shall never forget, a glacier, the mountains, the icebergs, and the natural high that we experienced.

Tonight my whale watching finally paid off, and very much by accident. Whale watching is a hard job. When they say it is a whale of a job, that means it is hard work. Whale watching hasn’t been much different. I spent a lot of time trying to see them, and up till now have only been rewarded by a fin here, a blowing of air there, but nothing more than just a little bit of flesh.

Tonight we were sitting waiting to go to dinner on Deck 5 in a bar (now don’t think anything bad, I was drinking a Diet Coke) when I noticed everyone looking out the window. I looked out and saw not only one, but several whales surfacing and moving around. I immediately notified Bonnie and we saw them, and a lot of fish. It was really quite a site. Then, that was finished off by seeing another even bigger animal surface and show its stuff. It was really cool. It has been a long hard week and finally it has paid off. I have seen my whales. It has been a whale of a time.

When you voyage on the ocean, you realize just how much of this planet is water. You read that there is 70% water and 30% land. When you are on the ocean, looking around you in a 360 degree direction and see no land, then you begin to get a feeling for just how much of this planet is water, and just how big the dog gone planet is. It is just amazing to see all of that water and to contemplate the size of it all. I don’t why it is the case, but my mind keeps coming back to a stupid movie made several years ago by Kevin Costner called Water World. I can no begin to understand how crazy a man would go if the whole planet was water covered, and if he came to dry land, how crazy it would be to walk on land that doesn’t move.

I have come to Seattle so much now that I almost call the city my own. I lived and went to school at the University of Washington on beautiful Lake Washington in Seattle, for a total of 6 weeks spread over to 3 years.

I remember one of the most incredible sites of my life being a beautiful, clear, sunny day followed by a sunset in which I saw Mt. Rainer off in a distance, across Lake Washington, and watched the mountain as it changed to many different shades of a golden hue as the sun set. Following that was the rise of a full moon over the beautiful lake. It was a tremendous site.

This trip, I have been seeing the beautiful country side and greenery and thinking, you know, despite the rain and the clouds, I could live here. It is a real beautiful place.

With the radical change that has occurred in the price of non-renewable energy sources such as oil (over $4 a gallon at the pump) this last summer, other sources of energy are becoming more and more important to the people of this country.

The best example of this is the wind machine. It used to be when we first lived in Cheyenne that there were some of these giant wind mills located around on the way to Salt Lake and Payson. Over the years, there have come to be a ton of these things located on the way. There are now hundreds and hundreds of them, and as the coast of fuel increases, it will become increasingly important to have them.

On the open sea, if you somehow had a way to transmit the energy and float the darn things, we probably would be able to provide all the energy needs of this country. Well, at least you can dream and think of the possibilities can’t you?

Recently I have been cruising on the Atlantic Ocean in the Crown Princess. Usually I was no more than a 100 to 150 feet above sea level. On the Grand Turk island, I was all of maybe 10 feet above sea level (you could easily see the ocean on both sides of the island as we approached the island on the ship.

The thing that is hard to believe is that I also saw a picture I had taken in Kingman, Arizona. That sign said, “This spot is 3333.33 above Sea Level. It is so interesting to realize the variety of landscapes, the differences in altitude, and the differences in plants and animals that inhabit this good earth.

I recently engaged in a brand new, at least to me, activity that I had never been engaged in before. I attended a Community Planning Seminar in North Salt Lake and I started thinking a lot about things that I had not considered as much, like the number of exits from a subdivision, roads, there width, and so on and so forth.

This seminar went through a lot of the things that really needed to be defined and handled as you develop a community, and as I have since gone about my “Planning Commission” business, I have realized that there is more to building a community than erecting buildings. I am really in awe of all of the things that should be considered and used in making planning decisions.

I was reminded the other month when we visited Cheyenne that there is hot, and then there is hot. Cheyenne, in the end of July, can get hot. It was hot enough that if you were in a room, and had no air conditioning, and the wind was not blowing (an unusual event), then it was feeling uncomfortable. Of course, that brought back feelings of an earlier time, when it was truly hot. It was truly hot in Las Vegas, when taking a stroll at 10pm in the evening was like visiting the neighborhood oven. A breeze felt like someone was opening the oven door. I guess that I am never going to feel that comfortable when I visit that state. I like Cheyenne. It is a nice place to be, particularly in the dead of summer.

In school we learn about the Great American Desert. As a resident of the Great State of Utah I am also aware of the fact that we live in a desert. However, I don’t think it gets driven any more forcefully than when you drive across the states of Utah and Nevada. We recently drove to Yosemite National Park across Nevada, and it was amazing how you could drive what seemed like thousands of miles (actually maybe 150) non stop, and hardly see a soul. There were no bathrooms, no nothing. There were very little in the way of plants. That is a sobering thought. I have seen the Great American Desert.