Sometimes things go wrong and there’s no way understanding it, except to adjust and learn perhaps, in the adjustment, why things crash to begin with.

 

One day in June (I was doing pick-ups from the airport), June 2nd, the cruise ship whose name shall remain anonymous, crashed right into Dock Three. Just right into it.

To witness what I’m talking about:

Skip ahead to 1:27: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEPNfLmcUO0

A month after season started, the cruise ship just crashed right into the city and put our work- my job as a dock rep- and the tourism industry here in Ketchikan on three legs.

Say we want to load a trip from Berth 4, and there is a ship on Berth 3 and Berth 4, we have to tinder in folks from the small tinder boats and anchor the ships out into the harbor.

If we want to load a trip from Berth 4 and we have a ship on Berth 4 and Berth 2, we would normally dock our ship at 3, but Dock 3 is broken so we can’t use it! So we then have to bus people over from Dock 2 or Dock 4 because there is a long distance between the docks, and the passengers are usually…. old.

 

 

The days are early, they start in the 6 o’clock hour and we are trying to get tours off on time. We have to load the buses in 30 minuets and, while most of the tourists are pleasant, some of them are grumpy because they though the catamaran held up to 30 people (who told them that?), or they want to know why they had to walk 5 minutes, or they don’t know why we use a bus (why can’t they walk?) or we gave them awful directions (except: they didn’t listen…)

On the other hand, on Dock 2, at the end of June, there was a group of over 300 people from East India who donned shades of green and, for lack of a better term, were boisterously clucking around the dock. I assumed that they were waiting for a tour that wasn’t ready to leave. Several of them checked with me about where their tour was (see the post on Tourists to know what THAT’S like EVERY DAY). The busses could not get through on Dock 2, which is usually a very tame dock, But after what felt like a century, I saw a separate gangway lower and two distinguished men in sparkling white robes descended from the Celebrity Millennium.

What. in. God’s. name. is. happening.

 

People are looking at this man with complete aww, splendor, enthusiasm: hushed tones, pictures, but everyone seemed to keep a respectable distance, which is perhaps why this man decided to wear white robes because I was wearing green too and they were all up over me.

But in spite of my annoyance, I had to stop for a minute and realize what a special day this what for these people.

I asked a man, gazing on, to my right who this man was. He said without taking his eyes off the man that he was a spiritual leader.

People from the ship leaned over the railings to see this man and catch his attention. They yelled “Papa! Papa! We love you Papa!”

Needless to say, we did not get our tour out on time.

 

Tourism, man. What a trip. Not nearly as much of a trip as our own lives, but maybe almost.