A luxury cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage turns into a savage reckoning with climate denial and tourist self-delusion.

The voyagers aboard the Sea Glass believed they were ordinary.

Not true.

As people who bought entire wardrobes from Patagonia at full price, they were hardly that. Outdoorsy whites, they called themselves, chuckling, trading travel tales of polar bear safaris in Manitoba and gorilla trekking in Rwanda.

Ted expected a smooth sailing through Alaska’s Inside Passage. He and Hillary joined the others in the ship’s lounge each night, swiveling in blue velour bucket chairs, balancing drinks on round marble tables. The naturalists droned on. Something about seagrass meadows. Too few salmon spawning. Old growth forests vanishing, regulatory oversight melting faster than the glaciers.

Of course we need to be more aware. However. This is my vacation.

The Galapagos was educational, but you didn’t feel everything was your fault.

The food’s awfully good, though, isn’t it?

That night a midnight sun poured its last drop of light into the bay. The passengers chose between pistachio-encrusted coho in cream sauce and miso-marinated black cod.

Are we moving?

Hard to tell.

It was the salmon they noticed first, its layers of moist pink flesh rising, throwing off the cream sauce like a blanket. The cod came next, slithering free of its charred skin, flapping across the tables before landing on unsuspecting linen trousers. The ship swooned and the glaciers gathered themselves.

I thought the glaciers were receding.

Look at your pants, they’re ruined.

Clan of ancients, the glaciers turned their chiseled faces and white beards toward the Sea Glass, pressing icy cheeks against walls of glass until they shattered. The kelp crept in first, ribbons of green and brown swirling, wrapping the passengers in a rubbery embrace. In the state rooms bright orange life vests floated up from under beds and slipped out balcony doors flung open by housekeepers. The sea lions slid from icebergs and grabbed the flotation devices between massive flippers, barking as they watched the Sea Glass crack like an egg. Ted and Hillary pushed past other passengers who raced not toward lifeboats but toward the bar, where they stood knee deep in sea water and beseeched the frozen bartender for a final round of expresso martinis.

Katy Abel

Katy Abel's short fiction intersects political currents, cultural history and personal memory. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Fourth River, Litbreak, October Hill Magazine and other publications. A veteran of broadcast news and state government, she is at work on her first story collection.