Ketchikan is... Water in Abundance Makes Us Fearless
You are here.
Here we are pilings and wooden walkways, dive helmets and charts. Here many things take a long time to do, because you have to do them yourself. Here life is intrinsically tied to land and water, elements that can't be controlled but that can be learned and worked with. This is why we carry tide books: they serve as maps and testaments to the way the moon rocks us in place.
We are a little city perched on stilts, built on the side of a mountain between fresh water and saltwater. We are surrounded, drenched, saturated, and enlivened by water. Rain blows through town, spouts tumble down the mountains, and impromptu creeks and waterfalls spring up in numbers as great as they must in order to return to the rocking, salty sea.
At the same time, we are entrenched in the world's largest temperate rainforest - a perpetually decomposing and renewing, fern-laden, moss-drenched, shaded land of ancient trees. Life, here, is created with the land. Ordinarily rather simple pursuits, such as walking from one place to the next or building a dwelling, have been, from Ketchikan's inception, riddles of angle, forest, and wet. Here, we must take extra care in order to survive. Elsewhere's protocols aren't necessarily applicable; the land and sea demand a different set of rules. Indigenous communities - here since the beginning of these islands - have developed and preserved a set of knowledge over millennia. When non-native settlers became recipients of this understanding, it allowed them to survive and gather and utilize these resources, sometimes all too well.
The juxtapositions of forest and mountain, land and sea, salt and freshwater, inform the way one acts here, the way one thinks, one's very timing. They suffuse the ways in which we conduct ourselves and the way in which we care for each other, and for you.
For you are in Ketchikan.
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