Ice sizzle & totem poles.

SOME THINGS should be understood before embarking on an Alaskan cruise. On the Inland Waterway in "Southeast," as Alaskans call the long, thin appendix tbat skirts Canada's west coast, it will rain, it will be dank, it may even in full summer be cold. The first towns you come toKetchikan, Juneau, Skagway, Hainessaw their heyday ninety years ago during the Gold Rush and have been in decline ever since. But the wooden sidewalks, the rainbeaten shingle and log houses, the steep staircases leading from one street level to the next, the towering, encompassing mountains, make the world of Bret Harte and Jack London all the more believable.

At Prince Rupert, north of Victoria, we board the Exploration Starship, a bright, airy, commodious cruiseliner with spacious cabins and well-decorated public rooms. The crew is of many races but as one in courtesy and helpfulness. And the programs the ship offers are diversified: city tours, lake fishing, floating trips, nature walks, helicopter flights something for every taste.

We are threading our way through Misty Fjord when I wake the next morning. Mist and clouds and spitting rain can't totally blot out cascading waterfalls, steep hills, and granite cliffs that spill down to the water. The slim spruces, dark on this dark morning, are survivors like so much else in Alaska, their girlish figures belying their hundred years.

At Ketchikan, "Gateway to Alaska," it drizzles, but more off than on, practically good weather in a town that logs 13 feet (feet!) of rain a year. We stroll down Creek Street, Ketchikan's showplace: small ocher, brown, and grey frame houses built on pilings along a salmon run, all self-deprecating save one, Dolly's House, dressed to kill in a coat of bright turquoise, now a museum, it was once the place of business of Ketchikan's leading madam. This is late August, the last trip of the short summer season for the cruiseliners. Two weeks from now, these small Southeast towns will start their long winter hibernation-except Juneau, the unlikely capital of the nation's largest (in area) state, a capital that cannot be reached by road or rail.

As we sail in to Juneau we don't see the mountains that envelop the city: at the moment, they are enveloped in clouds. On the cliffside above the town sits a burned-out, derelict structure that was once a gold mine. But there is no melancholy in the greeting we get from my old and wellloved friend Louise Dibble, awaiting us at the foot of the gangplank: petite, smiling, aristocratic, dressed for Alaskan weather in a flowing cape and a hat that on anyone less well turned out would be called a sombrero. She has rented a car and we head down an impressive four-lane highway for the Mendenhall Glacier. As we come around a bend in the road, we see Mendenhall, looking like a frozen white-and-blue Niagara Falls, caught in a single frame of a movie camera. It is immense, a gigantic river of ice and rock. As we watch, a strip of ice falls off its face into the cloudy glacier-green waters below. This process is known as "calving."

After a quick tour of tbe town, Louise takes us to a salmon bake, which is to an Alaskan what a barbecue is to a Texan. It's served in a rough-hewn log dining room with a fire blazing in one corner. A young man in a white apron cooks marinated salmon steaks over a fire of alder logs. He dishes out the salmon, short ribs, and fried halibut, adds a dollop of baked beans, and we help ourselves to fresh-baked cornbread. A sturdy California red served in glasses more jellyjar than Baccarat completes a wonderfully satisfying meal. It may be the best salmon any one of us has ever tasted.

Skagway is the northernmost port on the inland waterway. From here gold miners headed for the Yukon and the Klondike, climbing or later taking a train over White Pass to Benedict and Whitehorse Junction. Some years back this spur of the railway was shut down, and Skagway is dying,

In 1887 the population of Skagway was two; in 1889, it was ten thousand, among them a desperado named Soapy Smith. We are greeted at the dock by an amiable young gentleman in frock coat driving a bright yellow 1920s Dodge touring car. He conducts the City Tour, which is quickly done -a half-dozen streets with small rough houses, a stream running through a backyard, in which we can see the spawning salmon leap. And then to Gold Rush cemetery on a shady hillside outside town to see the tombs of Soapy Smith and deputy Frank Reid, who shot it out one night back in '89. A granite monument attests to the fact that Frank Reid "died for the glory of Skagway."

We're in luck. It is only the second time this season that Starship has been allowed into Glacier Bay National Park, where traffic is tightly restricted.

It is a bay carved out by advancing and retreating glaciers over the centuries. It is bordered by rain forests and is rich in aquatic life. Rosa, a Park Ranger, faces frigid passengers on the observation deck in their by-nowfamiliar foul-weather gear. Rosa comments that Thoreau once wrote, "If I wished to see something beautiful in nature I would go to it in foul weather so that I would be there when it cleared up." Groans. Crystal-ball stuff. The rains stop and the clouds part. As we sail out of Glacier Bay to Adelphus Point this afternoon to watch the humpback whales feted, the setting sun will catch the peaks and clusterings of mountains and long silver stretches of water, and highlight-irradiate-stands of spruce and the yellowing alders.

We pass John Hopkins, five tidal glaciers all in a bunch, and come to Pacifica, which is a disappointing dirty brown. But all eyes are already turning to Marjorie, an astonishing blue and white tapestry of ice capped with rugged peaks and juts. Every shade of blue: sapphire, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine. Flocks of kittiwigs swoop low after the larger calvings to feed on the fish that float to the surface, stunned by the falling rock and ice. These are all immense glaciers, but they are underachievers compared to Hubbard, which is still ahead.

Hubbard is U-shaped and so widesix miles-that it seems to wrap itself around Starship. It is three to four hundred feet high-that's thirty or forty floors up in a skyscraper-and 92 miles long, an immensity of snow, ice, rock, and pulverized glacier dust. If you listen carefully you hear a continuous background cracking sound. This is known as "ice sizzle," or less euphoniously as "berg seltzer." We pull up to maybe 150 yards from Hubbard and mosey around slowly for a couple of hours; the harbor seals sitting on pan ice and recently liberated bergs in front of Hubbard pay us no mind. A roar, a cracking, a thunderous rumble and it looks as if the whole face of Hubbard is moving. This will be a major calving. Three hundred feet of ice and dirt tumble forward into the water, setting up a tidal wave, pushing the seals and the free-floating bergs before it.

Sitka, our last stop, is different. It was born a hundred years before the Gold Rush, a fur-trading post that became the capital of Russian Alaska. It has a settled look, unlike Ketchikan, Skagway, and Haines. We visit St. Michael's Russian Orthodox Church (recently rebuilt after a fire), take a botanical tour of the countryside, and enjoy a performance by the Archangel Russian Folk Dancers. Sitka is beautifully situated, cradled by crested mountains and fronting on the longdormant volcano Mt. Edgecome, about which a story. The winters can be long here, and Sitka's merry pranksters, the Dirty Dozen, on a cold New Year's Eve not so long ago, hauled tires to the summit of Mt. Edgecome, poured gasoline over them, and lit them, staging a mini volcanic eruption. Panic in Sitka, followed by a night in jail for the chief prankster.

At Sitka's fine little Sheldon Jackson Museum there is a twenty-minute Totem Walk through a rain forest where totem poles brought from deserted Indian villages are spotted here and there in the woods. One of them is passing strange. It is capped not by the traditional eagle or raven, but by two overcoated gents with top hatsrepresenting night watchmen.

"You will see a great deal of nature in Alaska," Dave Barry, the humorist, wrote after a recent visit. Nature, to be sure, but much more besides in this bleak and beautiful land where the call of the wild remains as strong as in Jack London's day.