Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  I was paying the bill for my Pirate’s Platter when a couple, close to retirement age, stopped at my table.

  “We saw you come in. All on your lonesome in that big sailboat?”

  They exuded an air of comfortable self-possession, like a pair of busy chickadees. Some people are more married than others, and the Schmales (they told me their name within seconds of our meeting) were more married than most. For either of them to use the first-person singular was rare; everything they did, apparently, was done together, and their first concern with me was where I’d left my wife. To the Schmales, it was inconceivable that I might not have a wife.

  “She’s back in Seattle, with our daughter.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Schmale.

  Guided by Mr. Schmale’s flashlight, we walked down through the firs to the marina.

  “We’ve got a Bayliner 25.”

  “We’ve just been tooling around the islands—”

  “We’re in the mineral business—”

  “—in Vancouver. We’ve been away for the week—”

  “We needed the holiday—”

  Theirs was an intercontinental marriage. Her voice was West Country English, his Canadian. Her burr and his twang were their chief distinguishing characteristics, but they sang an identical song.

  Like the Schmales themselves, their boat was short, plump, and cozy. A bottle of Drambuie was found in a locker. We drank it in glasses decorated with vintage-car transfers. I got the Bugatti.

  They had no instruments except a compass. Their only chart was of Vancouver and its approaches. For the last six days they’d been touring the sea with a folded road map of Alberta and British Columbia.

  “Our only problem’s been the fog.”

  “How on earth did you manage to find the entrance here?” I said.

  “Oh, we just sort of bounced our way from rock to rock.”

  “I’m a born seafarer,” said Mrs. Schmale. “I’m from Plymouth, right by the Hoe.”

  “I worked on a towboat once,” chipped in Mr. Schmale.

  I had taken “the mineral business” to mean something to do with gemstones, but it was more prosaic than that. The Schmales dealt in sand. Their chief customers were the golf courses of suburban Vancouver. He did the heavy lifting, she made the calls and handled the accounts. Whenever demand flagged, they ran away to sea and went jouncing, chartless, over the wave-tops in their little white fiberglass cocoon. They liked it best when it was rough, they said, and I saw that their marriage was a boat: tubby, sea-kindly, built for rough weather. I could see them riding out storms and getting off the rocks with barely a scratch. For all their disregard of the usual rules of navigation, they knew how to stay afloat.

  “Go on, have another one,” said Mrs. Schmale. “We will!”

  It was nice to sit on for a while in the warmth of their good marriage. Though I felt a twinge of Vancouver’s “mortification” upon meeting Galiano and Valdés: the Schmales’ slapdash, happy-go-lucky way with the sea took a little of the shine off my own more ponderous expedition.

  Their curtains were drawn when I untied next morning. While I could see no fog, the air was uncannily still. The splash of a belted kingfisher plopping into the cove a hundred yards off sounded as if someone had chucked a brick into the water. A curdled gray sky was draped across the treetops. Moving as quietly as I could, I pushed the boat out; but when I looked back, both Schmales were on the dock, waving goodbye.

  In Malaspina Strait, between Texada Island and the mainland, the sea was covered, shore to shore, by the glossy membrane of its surface film. One could see stretch marks on it caused by the current, but it was distinct from the water on which it lay like an enormous sheet of Saran Wrap. Motoring into it, I made a long ragged tear in the film, and my roiling wake stretched back as far as I could see.

  As the sky began to lift and clear, a hesitant breath of air came wafting up the strait from the south, crinkling the surface tension without breaking it. A minute or two later, a more confident gust drove two lines of ripples angling away on both sides of the wind, creating a crisscross pattern on the water. The film, still intact, now showed as a dimpled mass of small lozenges of light—each one catching something distinct from the sky—and the water was suddenly alive with its myriad of indefinite reflections.

  In the making of waves, first the air “deforms” the water, which then begins to “perturb” the flow of air across it; and it is out of this delicate intercourse between the elements that the wave is born. As the ripple turns into a wavelet, its slight convexity gives the wind something to shove against, and soon the wavelet develops a leeward face and a windward back, with a growing differential between the weak air pressure in front and the strong air pressure behind. The unstable air, given these sudden inequalities of pressure, helps the wave (as it now is) to climb: the water’s line of least resistance is to go upward as the energy in the wind is transferred to the sea.

  That morning, after a few experimental zephyrs, the wind blew down the long funnel of the strait with mounting, purposeful acceleration. I had no sooner unfurled the genoa than I was struggling to reef it down to half its full area. Waves barely formed were suddenly breaking white all around the boat. (The toppling crest of foam returns to the air a tithe of the energy given by the air to the water.) It took only minutes for the waves to find their natural periodic rhythm and build into a short, steep, lumpy sea.

  “Lumpy” was the operative word. Seen from the cliffs, the sea might have looked as evenly arranged as the strings on a harp—the lines of whitecaps running parallel at intervals of sixty feet or so. Seen from the wheel of a small boat, it presented quite a different aspect. Each wave in the train carried a multitude of smaller deformities—nascent waves bulging, heaping, trying to break as they rode the back of the senior wave in the system. Many-angled, climbing every which way, they turned each square yard of water into an unruly brew of shifting planes and collapsing hillocks. Wherever the wind found an exposed surface, it raised tiny wrinkles of waves awaiting birth. Big waves have little waves upon their backs, to ride ’em; and little waves have littler waves, and so ad infinitum.

  I couldn’t safely run before the wind, but had to angle the boat so that the wind was securely on the port quarter, blowing over my left shoulder. Under the reefed genoa, the boat fitted itself reasonably comfortably into the waves—or, rather, it seemed, the wave, for I was kept company by the continuous crackle of foam, as a running wave broke around the stern. To the noise of the foam was shortly added the tomcat-yowling of wind in the rigging, which put the wind speed at about 35 knots.

  This was hardly the stuff of Typhoon or Moby-Dick—the waves were four feet high, with an occasional rogue five-footer. The six-mile width of Malaspina Strait ensured that any tempest here would be in a teapot. But it was plenty rough enough for me. I had no choice but to stick to my course. The Texada Island shore was a long unbroken cliff. And to make a dash for the inlets on the mainland side would mean an hour, at least, of serious violence, both wind and sea on the beam: everything on board would get slopped about like cement in a mixer.

  It greatly heartened me to see, about two miles ahead, a small open fishing boat with two men aboard. Mostly they were lost in the breakers, but every so often they were lifted above the level of the horizon. Their black silhouette, rising and falling, became my friend. We were in this together—and if they could take it aboard that walnut shell, then I, on a boat designed for open-ocean sailing, should be thoroughly enjoying myself. I aimed to pass them by close enough to wave. They couldn’t know how glad I was to share the water with them, but I wanted to signal my gratitude to them for being there.

  A mile on, I was in a hugely improved mood. The wind in the stays and shrouds had lost its power to hex. The boat was sluicing through the sea at seven knots under its meager triangle of sail. The sun, breaking through the clouds, shone through the wave-crests at my back, turning
them a luminous Pernod-green in the second before their powdery explosion into white. With my safety-harness clipped tight to its U-bolt on the cockpit floor, legs braced, spinning the wheel to keep time with the waves, I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. I like it here.

  Just as I lifted my hand to salute the fishermen, the sea raised them high into the sunlight on the gathering crest of a big wave. The boat was not a boat but the sawn-off bole of an enormous old-growth Douglas fir. Two man-sized amputated stumps projected from the trunk. Waterlogged, blackened, with a trailing skirt of roots, this serious hazard to navigation could have sunk a tugboat. As I veered away, I saw it go right underwater in a wave-trough and stay submerged for many seconds before it again broke the surface, like a turtle coming up for air.

  You’d never know what hit you.

  When I looked back, five minutes later, there were the fishermen, uncannily lifelike, one at each end of the boat, enjoying their morning at sea.

  Texada Island, long and thin, was roughly boomerang-shaped. At North Point, a little more than halfway along its leading, eastern edge, the island bent away to the west. So far, the wind had been blowing from the south-southeast, following the line of the strait. If this wind continued, shelter should be waiting beyond North Point. Or the wind might bend with the strait, promising a steadily worsening sea for the next eighteen miles, after which I could duck into the shelter of Blubber Bay at the northwestern tip of the island. I tried to form no opinion about what would happen at North Point: having just made friends with a dead tree, like George III in his madness, I had good reason not to trust my own judgment.

  The wind stung. I was soaked through with spray. The boat was beginning to crash into the troughs, going too fast for its own good.

  The motion of a ship in a seaway is conventionally broken down into six components, known as the six degrees of freedom—pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge, and yaw. With the wind pinning the sail to starboard and keeping the boat heeled at a steady 25° angle, its freedom to roll and sway was mercifully inhibited, but it was taking every other liberty on the menu. It yawed, heaved, surged, pitched—serially and in combination. Trying to stay deaf to the pandemonium that was raging downstairs, I heard an odd sound coming from behind me, like the gnawing of a rat behind the wainscoting. I glanced back and saw the jackstaff and ensign being wrenched from their socket on the taffrail; they touched down briefly on the roof of the aft cabin, then made their way over the side, rather to my relief. The unfamiliar snapping of the illicit Red Duster in the wind had been one of the annoyances of the morning.

  As headlands go, North Point wasn’t much: a bluff that slightly protruded from the long straight run of land and blocked the view of what lay beyond. But the wind was incensed by it. Half a mile short of the point, the life suddenly went out of the headsail. It flapped limply in a strange pocket of calm. Two or three minutes passed. Then the wind reappeared in a new guise—a gale-force blast from the west, blowing right off the point, that laid the boat over, flattened the waves, and turned the water into froth. Caught in this aerial whirlpool I yanked the genoa-sheet off its cleat and let it go free, not greatly caring if the wind tore the loose sail to rags.

  I could now see what I had not dared hope for: west of the point was a broad stretch of spitting waves barely a foot high, a sea of white-flecked jade. I could safely cross the shallow bar at the entrance to Vananda, just eight miles farther down on Texada’s north shore.

  The hills around Vananda had been gouged out by quarrymen, and stone-dust from the marble works was in the wind as I came into the cove. Inside the steep rock walls, eddying gusts chased one another around the harbor and I hung back from the dock, waiting for a calm interval in which to go alongside. Two men left their sportfishing boat to take my lines.

  “Thanks.”

  “Right you are?” The voice rose at the end of the phrase, though no question was being asked.

  “It’s rough out there,” said the second man. I took them for brothers; both in their forties, dark, tousle-headed, unshaven. “It’s been blowing a hooligan.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It came out of nowhere. One moment flat calm—the next, it was like someone had switched on a hair-dryer. Whoosh!”

  The man squinted at me, eyes narrowed against the whirling dust. “Where you from?”

  Warned by his tone, I said, “Seattle.”

  “You’re Umurrican?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I mean, originally I’m from”—and thought for a moment before I said it—“London.”

  Additional space had suddenly grown between us. The brothers treated me to a stare of chilly, unamused skepticism and went back to their boat.

  Their accent and mine were ancient enemies. They spoke in the accent of Catholic Northern Ireland, the voice of Derry and The Falls Road. I spoke in the accent of colonial rule. If you listened a certain way, you could hear in my voice the long roll call of English oppressors from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Nothing I actually thought or said about the current situation in the Six Counties would mitigate the bad impression made by the way I pronounced my vowels.

  I had been here before. Leaving a Belfast cinema in 1969, I’d been summoned back by an angry yell from the woman in the ticket booth, who shouted that my offense was underpaying by sixpence. I handed over the coin without argument. The woman, speaking not to me but to her rolls of tickets, said quietly, in a voice of world-weary contempt, “Focken Proddy.”

  So, on the dock at Vananda again, I found myself a focken Protestant; or, worse, a snooping Englishman, with the likely ring of Sandhurst and the Army in his voice. I went below, to restore the fallen books to their shelves and sweep up the remains of two smashed glasses and a broken dinner plate. Then, wanting to show the brothers I had nothing to hide, I left the boat unlocked, its companionway open to inspection, and set off to find a bank and grocery store.

  Vananda, pretty in the spring sunshine, was a village of looping paths and dirt roads, lightly sprinkled with wooden cabins. Flowering shrubs ran wild over the common ground. Every garden had an upturned boat on chocks, hummingbirds at the feeder, and a collection of auto parts on the lawn. From the open door and windows of one cabin came a further blast of Ireland—a fiddle, a pennywhistle, a concertina, and a recorded voice singing—

  The pig is in the mire and the cow is in the grass:

  A man without a woman through this world will sadly pass.

  Me mother likes the ducks, and the ducks like the drakes,

  And little Biddy Mulligan, I’d die for her sake …

  Whoever lived here was apparently trying to broadcast his national affiliation to the Canadian mainland on the far side of Malaspina Strait. Only the profoundly deaf would be able to tolerate the noise of the record inside the house.

  Acushla mavourneen, married we will be,

  And be happy in the valley

  Winding down to the sea.

  The song’s many choruses followed me up hill and down dale, along the forking paths of Vananda.

  The bank was located in a trailer, where my accent went down a great deal better than at the dockside; the teller was from Chipping Sodbury, in Gloucestershire, and we had a moment of reminiscent Englishness as she counted out my money.

  “You seem to have quite a contingent of people from Northern Ireland here …”

  Her hands stopped moving on the bills.

  “You get people from all over on Texada Island,” she said.

  Around the next loop, a very large Irish tricolor was flying from an improvised pole set in the front yard of a ramshackle cottage, on whose roof a trio of other flags—German, Swedish, and Norwegian—rippled in the breeze. A roughly lettered shingle proclaimed HENRIETTA’S LAND. Henrietta herself—or so I assumed—was tending several small piles of burning rubbish in the road. The smoke from her activities made it hard to see the paving. I climbed the grassy verge, trying to keep out of the w
ay of the smoke, which smelled putrid.

  “I’m just doing my recycling,” Henrietta said.

  “That’s okay,” I said, hurrying on.

  “Don’t I know you?”

  On second glance, I thought that perhaps we did know each other—or had done, long ago. She was my age and, in the phrase, my type. She was wearing a mini-length wool-knit dress, filthy now, but once expensive; it might have been King’s Road, circa nineteen-sixty-something. Her bony legs were bare, grazed with scratches, soil-stained. Her gray hair, lately blond, looked as if she cut it herself, with garden shears. Years of bad sleep showed in the bruise-colored bags under her eyes, yet her face still held something of the koala-like coquettishness that she must have had when last we met, if meet we ever did. She put me suddenly in mind of Lulu, the English pop singer, long forgotten, at least by me, until that moment.

  “How do you like our new country?”

  The crazy shingle, the fires, the flags, the ruinous cottage were irrationally, unexpectedly depressing to me. It was as if we really had known each other and, thirty years on, I’d stumbled on her living in this squalor. I was afraid that she would speak my name. I hunted for a Henrietta in the junkroom of my memory, and came out empty-handed.

  “I do know you,” she said. But her face was vague; she was looking beyond me, at someone else altogether. “I’m being harassed by the government, you know.”

  “Which government?”

  “The B.C. government. The provincial government,” she said. “This road—look here, it encroaches nine inches on my land. I’ve got the title deeds. I’ve proved it to them. But they sent their agents here. Last week. They shot my goat …”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s in there.” She pointed through the smoke. “I want to give him a proper burial. I need to cremate him. But I’m not strong enough to carry him, you see? Now, you—you’re strong. If you could just—”