Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  Mrs. Minstrel recalled that last summer “a Seattle millionaire” came to stay for the fishing. In these parts, Seattle was a byword for extravagant wealth, and anyone from the city was held to be made of money. Mrs. M.’s husband had been this grandee’s guide and boatman. One day, at low water, a grizzly bear was sighted feeding on clams at the edge of the beach. The husband shut off the outboard and let the skiff drift inshore, to give his client a photo-op.

  “They got so close in they could see the blood on the bear’s mouth. He was dripping blood. You know how they cut themselves on the shells … This guy, his hands were shaking so much, he dropped the camera in the sea.”

  The loggers snickered, all eyes on me.

  “Then he got so scared he climbed right into Bob’s lap. Bob thought they were going to both land in the water. The bear was about as far away as you to me.” She took a long drag on her cigarette before coming up with the payoff. “Funny, that. You’d think, coming from a city like he did, he wouldn’t be frightened of nothing.”

  I could see myself, as she did, right there in Bob’s lap.

  Now we were chasing a theme. Everyone had a contribution to make on the alien character, and characters, of the city. We talked of wretched nights in motor inns; of sleep ruined by elevators grunting and groaning in their shafts; of kids on Harleys revving up in the parking lot at 2:00 A.M.; of the grinding of truck brakes; of helpings of food so stingy that you could pay $12.00 for dinner and still go hungry; of muggings, murders, and chlorinated water. “I gag on it. I don’t know how people can drink it. You know what I look forward to most when I come back here? The first glass of water from the well. After city water, that first glass—it tastes like honey.”

  To find myself the designated ambassador of violence, noise, excess wealth, chemical additives, cowardice, and stupidity was an unwelcome responsibility. I put the blame on my shiny jowls and Brooks Brothers jacket, and retreated, chastened, to the boat.

  I had begun to write the story of the millionaire and the grizzly in my notebook when I was interrupted by a hesitant tapping on the hull amidships. The two youngest members of the logging crew were outside, looking unsure of their ground.

  “We just wanted to see what kind of boat it was, that a guy could sail in up to Alaska all by himself.”

  Delighted to see them, I fetched beer and wine and glasses while they poked approvingly around my quarters. Fellers, they’d worked as a pair for more than two years, flying from camp to camp. As long-established couples do, they had grown into the habit of completing each other’s sentences. With the same beard, same plaid shirt and jeans, they were difficult to tell apart.

  They asked what the barograph did; they peered, in turn, into the rubber hood of the radar; they read the labels on the panel of 43 switches. But their serious interest was reserved for the two 1790s framed prints of birds that were screwed to the bulkheads.

  “Rufous hummingbirds.”

  “Tropicbird. Macaw.”

  The fellers were birders. Only last week they’d seen their first spotted owl. “Well, we think. I thought it was a barred owl at first.”

  “They were spots, not bars.”

  We talked bird guides—Peterson versus Audubon Society versus National Geographic. We agreed that painted birds won hands down over photographed ones, which put the Audubon in third place. They liked the clarity of National Geographic; I liked the writing of Peterson, his description of the raven’s “goiter-throat,” or the appearance of a purple finch “like a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.”

  The fellers were now busy destroying the habitat of the birds they loved to watch—a fact that made them rueful about their work, not least because toppling an old-growth forest was a far more skilled and satisfying business than mowing down peckerpoles on a tree farm. I said cheerily that they were in a great ornithological tradition: John James Audubon, a crack shot, had slaughtered the birds of America many times over in order to paint them, each exquisite colored plate requiring a mound of small corpses for its completion. The fellers weren’t much consoled by this analogy.

  “You know the latest craze around here? Hunting grizzlies with bows and arrows.”

  “Like playing at Red Indians?” I said.

  “They’ve got high-tech bows—titanium, graphite, something like that. They go up to the head of Knight Inlet, where there’s a whole bunch of bears in the summer when the fish are running. You have to get inside of thirty feet from the bear to kill it with an arrow … close enough to smell the breath on that thing. Most of them panic and loose off from a lot farther than that.”

  “These guys aren’t regular hunters. They’re, like, bankers. Or they do software.”

  “Testing their manhood. I hate that.”

  “Then they turn them into sausages. That’s the big thing—get the guys from the office round to breakfast and feed ’em grizzly-bear sausages. ‘I killed that bear, with my bow and arrow.’ ”

  “It’s an ego trip. Killing to prove yourself. I don’t think it should be legal.”

  “They wound more than they kill. The guide’s supposed to kill a wounded bear, but it all happens so fast the bear’s usually back in the brush with an arrow sticking in its gut.”

  Their beards were suffused with yellow lamplight. I liked the men’s seriousness. Living out of a kit bag, working in the forest, always moving on from job to job had given them a distinctly higher specific gravity than most people their age. An enforced detachment from the daily chatter of TV and magazines had left them free of the usual idées reçues. They were comfortable with solitude, and their unfashionable expertise (not so unlike my own, which also entails the destruction of trees) set them at an oblique angle to the rest of the world, and they seemed content with that.

  “You could go a long way in this …”

  While we were talking, I’d watched the younger of the pair taking possession of the boat with his eyes: the books and pictures; the ICOM radio; the stainless-steel cooking stove in its gimbals; the perfectionist Swedish joinery; the brassbound clinometer by Kelvin, Bottomley and Baird of Basingstoke; the handbearing compass on its customary hook; the chart on the saloon table, folded back to expose the approach to Minstrel Island and weighted down by the navigational protractor. With his arms stretched wide across the top of the settee and his ruddy outdoors tan, he seemed an altogether more plausible captain of this boat than me.

  “I wouldn’t go to Alaska, though. I’d cross the ocean. I’d sail to …” He rolled his eyes, recollecting his geography. “Borneo!” he said, with pleasure and surprise.

  Groping, fog-headed, in the dank chill of just-past-dawn, I was slow to take in the implications of the latest marine forecast. I listened to it twice, making careful notes and drawing an isobaric sketch-map in the log. The map looked like the whirlpool of Getemnax, roving free across the North Pacific. A new “intense low,” actual depth unspecified, was spinning eastward over the ocean, the Queen Charlotte Islands its likely destination. When it touched land, it was predicted to stall, and to dominate the weather for the foreseeable future, bringing storm- or gale-force winds to all sea areas. For Environment Canada, the foreseeable future meant five days. There’d be good sailing for the next 24 hours, with a wind out of the southeast at fifteen to twenty knots. Thereafter, all I could detect in the meteorologist’s indifferent, Scottish-accented voice was horizontal rain and rearing, hollow, flint-gray seas.

  I had a thoughtful breakfast. I was now just one day away from making the crossing of Queen Charlotte Sound, the short stretch of open ocean between the top of Vancouver Island and the bottom of the next string of protective coastal islands. This morning, the sea in the sound (“combined wind-wave and swell heights,” as the radio announcer said) was running at four meters, which would translate into a forbidding amount of pitch, roll, yaw, heave, surge, and sway. Tomorrow, as the cyclone neared, the sea would start to climb. The waves would be as high as
houses.

  I’d hoped to get halfway to Juneau—to Bella Bella, B.C., at least—before parking the boat and flying back to Seattle for a couple of weeks, to prove to Julia that she still had a father more or less in working order. The vile forecast put paid to that. Within the next few hours, I had to find a snug berth for the boat, someone to keep a friendly eye on it, and passage home for myself, before the coming storm swept through the archipelago.

  I was in luck. A chance conversation with a woman named Wendy, her radio call to her husband (how I envied the casual ease of that), and I was on my way to Potts Lagoon on West Cracroft Island.

  The entrance from Clio Channel (named after yet another British warship) was so narrow as to be invisible until the last heart-stopping moment, when a jagged sliver of light showed in the solid wall of foliage and angular gray rock. Trusting the chart rather more than my senses, I crept through the gap, trees brushing against the rigging, and came into a forest-girdled pool, silent except for a warbler of some kind that was singing in the branches overhead. Though it was blowing hard in the channel, the lagoon was smooth as oil, so sheltered that a hurricane would have barely ruffled it.

  On the southern shore, a long raft of massive logs supported a cabin and half a dozen small outbuildings. Wendy’s husband, John Walders, was waiting for me at his front door.

  “You found us all right, then.” He took my lines.

  “This is wonderful—it’s like The Secret Garden.”

  At the back of the raft, a cleared patch of forest held an orchard and a few rows of vegetables. Apart from a live-aboard crabber and his wife, the Walderses had the entire lagoon to themselves. Their closest neighbors were the black bears who raided apples from the orchard and sometimes boarded the raft in pursuit of leftovers from the Walders table, when they were shooed off by the family dog, a limping black lab.

  I followed Mr. Walders inside. Bare but cozy, the house might have been a homestead from the century before. Waterlights danced on timber walls. A crocheted rug of many colors brightened the floor. The furniture was old and well cared for, exuding an air of austere yet reliable domestic comfort—the outward and visible form of a good marriage.

  A dozen years before, John Walders had been working as a welder in a Victoria shipyard. “I was thirty-five—I had my mid-life crisis early.” He disliked the city, and the noise and monotony of his job. “I used to look at the older men and think, ‘That’s you in twenty years.’ All the life was gone out of them. They were zombies.”

  He spent all his spare time outfitting the sailboat in which he and his wife planned to escape. Escape was an intransitive verb—they didn’t know where they might escape to. Walders—a reader, the cabin was full of books, in prettily carpentered shelves—lost himself in antique stories of adventure on the South Seas. Then, in 1985, he quit his job, sold-up, and he and Wendy set off on a voyage to nowhere in particular, sailing up the Inside Passage on a shakedown cruise while trying to decide whether to shape a course for the Sea of Cortez, or Surabaya, or Tahiti. Instead, they’d found their way to Potts Lagoon.

  He now made a not-too-strenuous living out of other people’s marine mishaps. His welding shop on the raft drew a regular procession of fishing boats with mechanical troubles. He was a diver, expert at liberating seized-up propellers from crabtrap lines and fishing nets. As a tugman, he hauled broken-down vessels out of harm’s way, and went beachcombing through the islands in search of escaped logs. Every few weeks he’d tow a pile of valuable driftwood over to a mill on Vancouver Island. Ten or fifteen logs—the beginnings of a new boom—were marshaled at the west end of the raft; easy money, if you could find it.

  Fuel came from the forest; water from the roof, funneled into a great galvanized tank by the front door; electricity from a generator in a nearby shed. The Walderses lived handsomely on fish, game, and whatever they could grow in the garden they shared with the bears. A trip to the bank, the supermarket, the hardware store, the hairdresser, meant a three-hour boat ride, in calm weather, to Port McNeill, 26 miles to the southwest—as long as it takes to fly from Seattle to Los Angeles.

  I saw Walders, with his narrow, beaky face, his smile full of teeth, as Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. He might easily have been the source of the line that is Ratty’s contribution to the language: “There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” A few strands of hair, like moldy straw, clung to his skull. He had busy, avid eyes. Beachcombing suited his temperament, for he was a passionate collector, continually on the lookout for unnoticed treasures.

  Every shelf in the cabin displayed the Indian artifacts that Walders claimed lay all around, in the soil and on the sand, but which were mysteriously invisible to everyone else, including his wife. There were stone arrowheads, beautifully flaked into shape; a powerful chisel made of malachite; a large quern; stone awls; bone halibut-hooks; a club, its handle gouged into the outline of an eagle’s head. Many of the stone pieces looked as if they dated back to a period well before the arrival here of Cook, Vancouver, and the fur traders. As a twelve- and thirteen-year-old, I used to tramp in early spring along the edges of gull-patrolled fields in Sussex and Hampshire, looking for neolithic relics turned up by the plow. Occasionally, an odd glint in the wet soil would lead to a flint axe or the fishlike tip of a ancient Briton’s spear. But the workmanship was inferior to that of John Walders’s trove.

  There were European artifacts, too—trade-beads that the early white visitors had brought in sackfuls to this coast. Walders poured several dozen into the palm of my hand. Most were tiny, like snip-pings of the plastic insulation sleeve on electrical wire, but translucent and still as brilliant in color as they had been in 1792. Emerald, crimson, azure, primrose … They felt strangely cool on my skin.

  “Venetian glass,” Walders said.

  I held one between forefinger and thumb, tilting it against the sun. It was the color of a kumquat, and glowed like a small sun in its own right. The travels of this bead were worth reflecting on: from the factory on Murano to a haberdasher’s in London, to Cape Town, to Australia, to the Northwest coast, to John Walders’s floathouse and my hand. This bead might well have come on Discovery or Chatham, part of a scoop of treasure ladled out by Peter Puget or Captain Van.

  Trade-beads were showered on the Indians in such vast quantities that they quickly lost their value. One 1790s fur trader reported that he’d seen dogs in Indian villages decked in beads from head to tail. Thrown like confetti at the launching of a canoe, they suffered from the same hyperinflation as German marks in the Weimar period—you’d need a full wheelbarrow to pay for lunch.

  John Walders told me of a beach where I could easily find beads for myself. “There are thousands there. You just have to walk, close to low water, on the ebb, when the sand’s wet. Stand in one place and look down at your feet. You’ll see them there, if you’ve got good eyes.”

  I thought of Puget, trying to woo the Indians with pretty things, when what they really wanted were saws, chisels, copper, iron. In 1778, Cook wrote of the Indians of Nootka Sound:

  Nothing would go down with our visitors but metal; and brass had by this time supplanted iron, being so eagerly sought after, that, before we left this place, hardly a bit of it was left in the ships, except what belonged to our necessary instruments. Whole suits of clothes were stripped of every button; bureaus of their furniture, and copper kettles, tin canisters, candlesticks, and the like, all went to wreck.

  Yet expeditions continued to dispense trade-beads. They were the chief symbol of the universal white assumption about natives, that they were childish and feminine; irrational lovers of worthless trinkets, governed by their foolish eye for anything that sparkled. In turn, the Indians gave the beads to their dogs or used them to court the favors of the irrational creatures of the sea.

  I pored for a long time—too long, perhaps—over John Walders’s collection, and finally put the littl
e kumquat bead back among its several hundred fellows.

  “You can keep it if you like—”

  “This is the right place for it. I’d like to remember it here, on your windowsill.”

  “Not many people take an interest. When the yachts come in here in the summer, it’s always, ‘Are you Mr. Potts?’ Then, ‘Do you live here year-round?’ Then, ‘But what do you do, all that time? What do you do?’ What do I do? I do—this!” He spread his arms wide to include in their ambit the woods, the rocks, the sea, the sky—a life too large and various for any summer visitor’s comprehension.

  I saw the archipelagian bush-telegraph in action when John Walders arranged for me to be airlifted out of Potts Lagoon to Port McNeill. He radioed his wife; his wife radioed the postmistress on another island; the postmistress telephoned the seaplane outfit; and word came back by radio that an air-taxi would pick me up from the raft by five o’clock if the weather held.

  Walders rode off in his skiff with his dog to go log hunting. I tidied the boat, doubled the lines, packed my seabag and sat on an upturned fish crate, watching the winking ovoids in the water assemble themselves into Kwakiutl designs.

  With nothing to do but wait for the plane, I pursued a wistful daydream. If only I were better with my hands. If only I weren’t so wedded to the comforts of university libraries and Italian restaurants. If only Jean and I could bring up Julia in a floathouse on a Potts Lagoon—just for a year or two … just, say, between now and the time she goes into first grade.

  Julia, born to the Northwest, lived within easy reach of a version of nature, and of a regional past, that was utterly remote from most people’s everyday experience. Visiting the wild as a tourist, it would be a mere spectacle, like going to the zoo. But a two-year stay—that would involve isolation and depression, sure; much difficulty and inconvenience for everybody. But there would also be, laid down in the cellar of memory, a reserve of knowledge on which she could draw for the rest of her life. She’d know, not just have seen, the mountain goats and bears; the runs of salmon—cohos, kings, pinks, sockeyes; the protean sea in all its moods. We’d gather winter fuel to feed the tyrannous wood stove. Rain and wind would sock us into our cabin for weeks at a time; and that would be part of it, too. We’d find trade-beads and decode the meaning of rotting totems in the forest. We’d fish for our supper. The only team I ever made at school was for rifle shooting; we’d have venison.