Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit

cinnamon and nutmeg shaken in, a small handful of flour for thickener, and a few gentle stirs to mix it all up. I make the crust next, rolling to the left, to the right, toward the wall, toward my belly, rolling this way and that until the dough is a circle bigger than the pan. On the topcrust, I make slits for steam to escape as the berries plump in the heat.
    With the dish in the oven and the timer set, I sink into a chair and call my parents. I invite them over for dessert while slowly the room, the house, even the air outside the kitchen fills with the sweet, hot tartness of blueberry pie.
    A world traveler whose favorite countries visited so far are India, Nepal, and New Zealand, Susan Beeman always returns home to Anchorage, where she is an editor for Alaska Geographic. When on the road she loves to sample local cuisine and has tried everything from “tomato nuddle soup” and “scrumble egg” in New Delhi to ice cream for breakfast in Rotorua, but never again will she eat steak in Kathmandu. She would, though, travel all the way back to Diu, on the tip of Gujarat, for more of Jay Shankar’s fresh fish curry.

TIM CAHILL

The Great White Philharmonic
    Crushed ice, hold the suds; even a beer-ad guy can appreciate Alaska’s glacial symphony.
    Y OU KNOW HOW GUYS IN BEER ADS ARE ALWAYS PICTURED doing stuff you wouldn’t do—or shouldn’t do—when you’ve been drinking beer? In the Beer-Ad Universe guys continually engage in potentially dangerous activities like bungee jumping, or roofing their houses, or talking to women.
    Recently I discovered that I am a beer-ad guy.
    It was a print campaign, and apparently there were posters, along with a lot of those little cardboard tents they put on tables to encourage people to buy beer. The picture on the posters and on the cardboard tents was of me. I was a small speck of a guy in a kayak, surrounded by floating icebergs and dwarfed by an enormous tidewater glacier looming 200 feet above me.
    I suspect the ad campaign was designed to suggest that this beer is as cool and refreshing as a couple million pounds of ice grinding down a mountainside.
    The picture was taken in Glacier Bay National Park, about sixty miles northwest of Juneau, Alaska. A guidebook I readbefore my visit encouraged folks to book mid-summer trips, but it was late September and snowing maniacally when I arrived at park headquarters, at Bartlett Cove, near the mouth of the bay. Here I would hop a boat for the glaciers at Muir Inlet, starting point for a sixty-mile kayak trip back to Bartlett Cove—a journey that serves as a painless course on botany-in-action and is about as close as any of us will ever get to time travel. Throw in calving tidewater glaciers, the northern lights, mile-wide beds of mussels, friendly harbor seals, killer whales, wolves, bears, and bald eagles perched on icebergs, all roaming a seascape ringed by mountains that rise from sea level to 15,000 feet, and you’ve pretty much got the premier North American sea-kayaking trip. Even better: In late September you can have the place completely to yourself.
    The next day I rented a kayak. The concessionaire said there was only one other rented out: Some crazy guy paddling around all alone in the snow. That was my partner, photographer Paul Dix, the future beer-photo entrepreneur.
    I was a day late, but Paul had said he’d meet me in Muir Inlet, near the “snout” of McBride Glacier. Despite the delay, I suspected he’d still be there, waiting, because Paul takes his commitments seriously. Also I was bringing the food. I lugged my kayak through ankle-deep snow down to the tour boat, which would drop me at a gravel bar south of McBride Glacier, a place, I learned later, that Paul had renamed Hungry Point. It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip, and of course it snowed. You really couldn’t see anything. Then the wind picked up.
    The boat dropped me off at the gravel bar. Here,