Learning to go with the floe

WE are cruising northward on the inland passage between Vancouver, Canada, and Skagway, Alaska, picking our way through an ice field on a day as dark as a boiler room in hell.

Rain lashes the bow of the 63,000-ton ship, but that does not deter those who want to be out there in front to experience the weather and get pictures of the blue-tinted chunks of ice that wallow in the rough waters of the inlet.

Among those who brave the chilly day is my wife, the adventuresome Cinelli, who will return pink-cheeked from the slapping of the cold wind, wet from the driving rain and exuberant from the experience.

I watch her from the comfort of a leather chair, my feet propped up on a footstool in a luxurious, glass-enclosed salon, joined by others who, like me, would probably choose not to mush across this glorious land to explore the forests ruled by grizzlies and strange old men who have forsaken civilization for isolation, never knowing the glories of war and Starbucks.

At my side is my good friend Jeffrey, who is 13 and therefore eligible for what the kids know as the Granddaddy Journey. When each of our five grandchildren reaches 13, we let them choose a trip destination within reason. For Travis, it was a week in Washington, D.C.; for Nicole and Shana, seven days in Manhattan. Jeffrey chose Alaska.

Cinelli set up the trip with Holland America, four days at sea and six days skipping through a state of awesome beauty and compelling clumps of nature, a place close to the line that divides life from death, teetering on the edge of survival.

Because it is summer, the days do not end, except for a dim kind of washed-out darkness. I was here in the winter once, in the surreal blackness of afternoons that glistened like midnight, offering only two hours of twilight to remember the sun. Everyone ought to experience that.

I’m not a cruise person. I love being aboard a ship and being lulled by the soft hum of the diesel engines and the gentleness of a lullaby movement monitored by stabilizers. Scenes of snow and mountains slip by like visions from a slide show, and ice floes tumble by like toys at sea.

But cruises are for men with big bellies and big laughs and women with meticulously coiffed hair and a lot of jewelry who eat and drink themselves into a coma at breakfast and lunch buffets piled high with, well, everything. Dinner is a delight, where a guy like me who doesn’t schmooze or say “Howdy, neighbor� can sip an excellent martini and dine on entrees fit for a five-star restaurant.

I will say, however, that I am taken by the efficiency of the operation that manages to keep 1,400 passengers busy and happy and well. To the best of my knowledge, no one has suffered from the maladies that often seem to afflict cruises. This is due to some extent to containers of antiseptic jellies that one is encouraged to rub on one’s hands. You can’t even get into the dining room without doing so.

Jeffrey has just abandoned the comfort of the salon to join Cinelli out there in the weather. I watch them laughing together as a breeze musses their hair and the rain dampens their faces, and the glory of a heading into the wind embraces them as it has others since the first time men went down to the sea in ships.

Our only other deep-water cruise was on a battered steamer in the Greek Islands, where we had to end the trip by leaping across the gap between the cruise ship and a smaller boat to get to shore. It was throw the baggage, then follow it, sprawling to the deck of the tug that took us to a hotel across the aqua Aegean. I felt like luggage.

I have managed to amuse myself on the Volendam by catching up on my reading, which includes books such as Larry Kaniut’s “Danger Stalks the Land,� about the many ways one can die in Alaska: from being eaten by a grizzly to being stuck in the glue-like muck of a river bed while the tide rises and your weeping friends wave goodbye from the safety of the shore.

“Why do you read that stuff?� Cinelli asked when I bought the book. “You’ll end up awake all night dangling from the sheer, icy face of Mt. McKinley, looking down 19,000 feet where a terrible death awaits. I know you.�

That she does. She looks back at me from the open deck at the bow and smiles. Jeffrey turns too and beckons for me to join them. So I put down my book and my coffee and I zip up my hooded, waterproof North Face jacket and slip out the starboard door, into the wind and rain and the whisper of distant peaks that say, “Come north, my son, come to Alaska,� just as Bali Hai once called from an overheated isle in the South Seas.

I stand at a railing and look to the sea, Cinelli on one side and Jeffrey on the other, and I count my blessings as the ship plows forward and the ice scoots by.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.