Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  “Can you tell me why I’ve been singled out for this sort of search?”

  The officer paused in his excavations. “Just the luck of the draw.”

  I wasn’t so sure. A couple of years before, a friend, dining in a downtown Seattle restaurant, had pricked up his ears when he heard my name mentioned at the next table. A long-haired man in his mid-thirties (I couldn’t identify him from my friend’s description) was telling his companion that he knew me well, and that I supplemented my income from writing by smuggling liquor aboard my ketch to a B.C. Indian reserve. “That’s how he can afford to keep that boat of his.” If this wild flight of fancy had found its way into the computer files of Canada Customs, then I could be grateful that the officers weren’t conducting their inquiry with chainsaws and power drills. One day I hoped to meet a customs man old and wise enough to confide in—but these young zealots were clearly the wrong audience.

  The woman came up from the aft cabin, looking mildly baffled by her researches among the soft toys, charts, pilot books, and assorted works of Dr. Seuss and A. A. Milne. I caught the pair exchanging no luck glances.

  For my eleven bottles, I paid as much in duty as it had cost me to buy them in the supermarket. The boat was given a clearance number. In the end, I was convicted only of coming from the United States, and of being in possession of three elderly American potatoes.

  The light had gone out of the day and the ebb was now running south at full tilt. With the odium of official scrutiny in my clothes and on my skin, jittery and out of sorts, I untied from the customs dock and shifted moorings to a slip on the next pontoon. I would make my escape from Sidney at dawn.

  In the Phoenix, an underpatronized, shoebox-like restaurant boasting “Authentic Cantonese Cuisine,” I poked with chopsticks at a bowl of stir-fried beef and wrangled with myself in the pages of my notebook. The border crossing … the deep but narrow gulf—call it Haro Strait—that yawned between Canada and the United States … that slick, deceptive water, so easily misconstrued, needed careful navigation.

  People liked to say that if America was a melting pot, Canada was a salad bowl. In Canada, immigrants kept their original identities and flavors, while in America they were assimilated into the cultural stew. If you came here as a spring onion, you could stay a spring onion, without anyone trying to turn you into a tomato or a cucumber.

  There was some obvious truth to this. The Chinese cooking at the Phoenix was more authentic than in most of its American counterparts. Newcomers here were under relatively little pressure to “Canadianize,” to adapt their styles and manners to those of the host country; more easily than in the United States, they could go on doing things much as they’d done them at home. The English stayed English, the Chinese stayed Chinese. America was a land of immigrants, Canada a country of émigrés.

  This blunt distinction fitted nicely with a subtler one made by Russell Brown, a Canadian literary critic. Trawling a broad net through American and Canadian fiction, Brown suggested that one essential difference between the two cultures lay in the characters of Oedipus and Telemachus. In the States, a society founded on revolution, the mythic hero was the runaway son, the patricide; Oedipus as Huckleberry Finn. Escape, rebellion, the cult of the new life at the expense of the old, were the commanding American themes. Up north, in a society founded on the refusal to rise up against its parent, the mythic hero was the loyal son of Odysseus, Telemachus; the voyager in search of the lost father. Americans broke with their ancestral pasts, whereas Canadians honored theirs.

  The customs people (I wrote) were right to see through my accent and my passport and nail me as an American from across the water. I was Oedipus, not Telemachus—an escapee, a new-lifer, a rainbow-chaser. An immigrant, not an émigré. Leaving Britain for the United States was an attempt to make a clean break with my past, as going to Canada never could have been. In Seattle, I thought, I could shake off the dust of England and make a fresh start. Late in my day as it was, I heard America’s old cracked siren-call and believed that over there I might yet accomplish something new and unexpected.

  Sirens tempt sailors to their ruin, but we forget the whole story all over again once they start singing. No music came out of Canada for me. I saw the queen’s head on the currency, the frowsy postgothic colonial architecture, the displaced Britishers with their rowing and rugby clubs, their London papers two and three days out of date; a national demeanor of peevish modesty; a public life of reasonableness and fair play. Canada was for realists, and I was no realist. When I took my seat on the plane at Heathrow, I was an aging Huck Finn in search of a territory to light out for. I couldn’t have lit out for Canada; that would’ve felt uncomfortably akin to lighting out for the Isle of Man.

  “Gorrenny lie cheesevyu?”

  The voice came from the table over by the door. The speaker was an Englishman, from the stuffed-nose urban Midlands—Walsall, perhaps, or Dudley … not far from where I spent five years at boarding school. He was asking the waitress about dessert, but it took me a moment or two to decode what he was saying.

  “Gorrenny lie cheesevyu?”

  “Wah!” The waitress gave off a small, explosive puff of sound, baring her teeth in an exasperated grin.

  “Lychees!” he said, putting the matter in bold block capitals.

  “Ngha! No!”

  Canadian language difficulties. Enforced bilingualism had burdened Canada with twice as much writing as most nations. Cereal boxes, cigarettes, the tide tables—everything came in parallel texts, English and French. This grossly fattened all official publications; pamphlets became books, books stout tomes, and the simplest notice turned gabby and verbose. Everything was a translation of something else. Far from reinforcing each other, one version tended to cast doubt on the other, making its meaning tentative and provisional.

  On the back of the Canadian $20 bill was a handsomely engraved portrait of the common loon, a fleet of which I’d shouldered through on my way into Sidney. COMMON LOON, it said; and, just above the English caption, HUART A COLLIER. But a huart à collier is a collared diver. There was an English and a French way of seeing the same bird in the same picture. In French, your eye went straight to the collar—an arresting necklace of white feathers interleaved with black—and you saw it dive, a disappearing trick leaving a neat circle in the water where the bird had been a millisecond before. In English, it was the loon’s gregarious commonness that first seized one’s attention, its maniacal laughter, its plump bath-toy figure.

  This kind of thing made one self-consciously alert to the Canadian language—continually on the lookout for contradictions, ambiguities, loopholes. In particular, I hoped to find a brand of Canadian cigarettes that would kill you when smoked in French but only damage your health when smoked in English.

  When I crossed to Canada from the United States, this betwixt-and-between character always struck me immediately. The country seemed disconcertingly prone to drift from its anchorage in space, time, and language; here one moment, there the next. Just a few weeks before, I was dining alone one Sunday evening in a much grander Chinese restaurant in Vancouver, where I was the only Caucasian in sight. The meal, selected for me by a helpful waiter, was full of surprises, all good. The only drawback to this selfish feast was the continuous plastic-canary chirrup of two dozen cellular phones, going off singly and in chorus. Sometimes several male patrons at the same table could be seen engaged in separate conversations, heads averted from their feeding bowls as they snapped and barked into their leather-clad Motorolas.

  This frenetic sociability, at eight o’clock on a Sunday night, was a puzzle easily solved. It was high noon on Monday in Hong Kong, and these expatriate businessmen were enjoying their Canadian family weekend while tyrannizing their office peons in the middle of a Hong Kong weekday. Floating somewhere in mid-Pacific, between time zones and datelines, with these yakking businessmen, I thought that perhaps Vancouver’s low specific gravity was its most Canad
ian attribute. The city was so lightly tethered to its coordinates of latitude and longitude that you could easily imagine you were in Glasgow, or Portland, or Hong Kong. In seven years of visiting the place, I still couldn’t put my finger on its essential Vancouverishness. The city had no smell. When I left it, no picture remained in my mind, and sometimes I wasn’t entirely convinced of its existence.

  After hard-edged America, Canada seemed out of focus. As it resisted ideology and national myth-making, so did it resist definition. In this land of chronic translation, there was no national translation for the American Dream—an idea too grandiose for a country that had inherited the English tradition of pooh-poohing empiricism. Canadian Dreams would be met with the phrase used in the title of Alice Munro’s story collection Who Do You Think You Are? In America, people were expected to get above themselves. Over the border, it was a social transgression, and people learned to mask their ambitions with a show of jokey diffidence, infected by English gentility and nervous English party laughter; which made them seem diffuse and evasive by American standards.

  I paid the bill and made my way up Sidney’s modest main street. The night was mild and damp. A halo of refracted light bloomed from each street lamp. The street itself was gimcrack-western, with single-storey businesses constructed of cinderblocks and timber lining a too-wide carriageway. At the grocery store, spotting jars of Marmite on the shelves, I added one to my basket. That fierce-tasting sandwich spread, gluey and mahogany-colored, staple of the English nursery tea, had never made the border-crossing into the States, and I was glad to see that it was thriving still in Canada. I bought three grizzly-bear postcards, and mailed them to Julia at the post office.

  Sidney was Alice Munro territory. Several of her stories were set on the urban southern tip of Vancouver Island, between Sidney and Victoria. At the center of each was a woman stifling like Emma Bovary in a dull, prosperous marriage. The women did things on the fringes of the arts, worked in bookshops, starred in amateur dramatics, wrote, gave talks on local radio; they escaped into hazardous sexual adventures with unsuitable men. And here the border came into play. Seattle figured prominently in Munro’s stories as a reliable source of treacherous lovers, including a friendship-wrecking, red-haired deep-sea diver; an all-American Pan, with the oddly un-American name of Miles. In another story, set in the Kootenay Mountains, a character called Dorothy “had a lover in Seattle, and she did not trust him”—a nice piece of grammar, in which the man’s hometown is turned into a sure-fire guarantee of his interesting untrustworthiness.

  I slightly knew Alice Munro’s first husband, who owned the handsome, dark-paneled bookshop, once a bank, on Government Street in Victoria. I enjoyed spotting him, or bits of him, in the husband-figures in her fiction. At his gray-stone house on a hill overlooking Juan de Fuca Strait, I had, or so I fancied, met many of the women characters, 25 years on; gray hair swept back and tied with Indian scarves; ruefully bright talkers. They still did things on the fringes of the arts; and as I sat smoking in a wicker armchair on the porch, the black strait glittering below in starlight, I wondered if they still looked south across the border for their dangerous men—like Miles, showing up from Seattle on his motorbike, a human bomb designed to blow marital life apart in tame Victoria.

  Across the street from the post office, a bookstore was still open. A pale and dusty shadow of Munro’s, it nonetheless had a few new books from England, as yet unavailable in the U.S. I browsed through them, searching for the work of friends and acquaintances. I bought The Times—for its crossword, which I missed—and a reprint of The Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, Captive of Maquinna, the ghostwritten tale of an English seaman taken prisoner by the Nootka Indians in 1802, which also went under the jaunty title of White Slave of the Nootka. It was a book I’d been hoping to add to the boat’s library for some time—a strange concoction, in which the romantic embroideries of Jewitt’s ghost, an untraveled Connecticut journalist named Richard Alsop, were at least as interesting as the dubious memoirs of Jewitt himself. Paying by credit card, I was grateful for the clerk’s glance of recognition as she filled in the slip.

  “I heard you read last year at the festival,” she said. “What are you doing in Sidney?”

  “Sailing to Alaska. Slowly.”

  And “slowly” would be the word for it, I realized, when I stepped out to the empty street. At the top of the hill was an ominously swollen glow, from a stoplight that hung in the sky above Sidney like a fuzzy green moon.

  I walked back to the boat, the Marmite jar clinking in my shopping bag, The Times tucked under my arm. Arrival in Canada had made me feel, as I hardly ever did in the United States, suddenly and painfully in exile.

  By 6:00 A.M. the fog had enclosed the boat in dense, clammy, frogspawn-gray. Waking to the electronic beeping of the alarm, I could hear the hollow, unrequited blare of a diaphone, a long way off on some rockpile. I sat up and peered through the cabin window into the gloaming: the customs dock, at sixty feet, was vague but recognizable; beyond it, nothing existed. The wooded cliff, the marina, and the town of Sidney were gone.

  The process of advection, which had gone on steadily overnight, had not missed the opportunity afforded by the clothes I’d left hanging in the saloon. There was fog in my shirt, fog in my trousers, fog in my socks. I fired up the cabin heater, set the kettle to boil for coffee, and found a CBC station on the radio. The morning news was fittingly dismal.

  A plane carrying Ron Brown, the American secretary of commerce, was missing in Croatia. Trying to land at Dubrovnik in heavy rain and near-zero visibility, it had lost contact with the airport and was presumed to have crashed somewhere in the mountains of Dalmatia.

  In Moscow, President Boris Yeltsin denied that his troops were overrunning the Chechen Republic, which wasn’t the story from Grozny, where there were reports of Russian tanks and sniper fire in the streets.

  In Britain, the price of beef had been slashed in an attempt to win back customers frightened by Mad Cow Disease.

  In British Columbia, the provincial government had announced a scheme to buy back the licenses of commercial salmon fishermen, in order to cut by half the already diminished B.C. fishing fleet. An industry spokesman explained that the collapse of Canada’s west-coast fishery, from the Fraser River to the Skeena, on the Alaskan border, had been caused by the reckless greed of the United States. American fishermen, stationed off the Washington coast and around Dixon Entrance, were ambushing millions of salmon born in Canadian rivers and trying to return from the ocean to their homeland.

  Talks between the governments on this issue had broken down. The Canadian Coast Guard promised a clampdown on American fishing boats transiting Canadian waters. Seattle-based trollers and gill-netters using the Inside Passage would be seized for any technical infraction of Canadian regulations. A vessel that failed to stow all movable fishing gear below decks, or to report on the dot as it crossed the frontier, would be taken into custody by armed patrol boats. Canadian fishermen were planning to blockade the American-owned passenger ferries that ran between Prince Rupert, B.C., and Alaskan ports. In this war I wanted to claim neutral status.

  Stowed in the bilges was a can of midnight-blue enamel for touching up biffs and scrapes on the hull. I thought I might usefully spend part of this fogbound morning painting out the name of the boat’s port of registration. I also had a ragged, sun-bleached Red Ensign rolled up at the back of the cutlery drawer. I rarely flew a flag of any color. The precise and delicate legal position of a seagoing vessel is that it is a detached fragment of the nation under whose flag it sails. I was pleased by the notion that by going flagless I could pass the boat off as an independent political entity—a sloppy, liberal, bookish, agnostic republic of one. In Canadian waters just now, the last thing I wanted was to be a floating chunk of the U.S.

  From the bottom of a cockpit locker I dug out an old jackstaff, left there by the boat’s previous owner; tied on the British en
sign; and mounted it in the holder on the stern taffrail. While this would cut no ice with officialdom, it should deceive the average passerby. While I set up the flag, the customs dock faded out of sight. All around the boat, helical twists of vapor drifted like puffs of smoke, as the air, chilled by the sea, mutated into water-dust.

  That the region wasn’t more permanently fog-shrouded surprised me, for a dominant feature of the local weather was the Pineapple Express: moist, warm air from the subtropical Pacific, blowing from the southwest over the frigid channels of the Inside Passage. The gauzy stuff that now festooned the rigging came hot from Honolulu, air with a dewpoint so high that a minimal drop in temperature changed it instantly to water.

  The crossword offered half an hour’s distraction. Crouched over the saloon table, in thick fog, in a far-western outpost of the Commonwealth, under an illegal British flag, it was nice to find that the cricketing allusion required to turn “Bring down deliveries worth circulation (9)” into “overthrow” still came readily to hand. “Language once spoken in Yorkshire or Kent areas? (5)” was “Norse,” of course. And “sound transport poet provided for birds (9)” was “lorikeets.”

  I was roused from “Nymph involved in more adventures (5)” by the sound of heavy footsteps on the dock. At the end of the pontoon stood a burly, shaven-headed man in an oilskin jacket. Eyes moving intently from left to right, he seemed to have found something worth studying in the nothingness.

  “It will burn off by noon. So they say.”

  He spoke English with a ripe French accent. Built like a hooped cask, nut-brown, seventyish, he exuded an infectious, gloomy hilarity. He and his English-born wife had sailed to British Columbia in their catamaran from the Isle of Wight, via South Africa, the West Indies, the Panama Canal, and Hawaii. They, too, were headed for Alaska. A lifetime as a wheat farmer in France, he said, had turned him into a philosopher when it came to weather.