Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  The holy end was top-heavy with clergy robed like druids. We had a brace apiece of vicars and rectors, a dean, an archdeacon (or was he a suffragan bishop?), a canon or two … I lost count. The choir sat in their stalls. The organist was making heavy weather of a solemn piece by Bach.

  The clergy did their thing, in the variety of Estuary English now favored by the Church of England. I would have liked to have heard the old words:

  Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

  In the midst of life we are in death …

  But all that had gone by the board in the 1960s, when the church tried to endear itself to the people by translating the language of the prayer book into a strained modern lingo whose tone was pitched midway between that of a kindergarten teacher and a tax accountant. But the dignified age of the church redeemed its new form of service.

  As we sang a hymn, I dug into the inside pocket of my funeral suit for my page of typed notes.

  All through my teens, my father and I had been at war. At twelve-going-on-thirteen, I turned on his faith and secretly proclaimed myself an atheist. At fourteen I refused, on conscientious grounds, to take communion. At sixteen I skipped church more or less entirely. The pulpit I was about to ascend—symbol of my father’s moral authority in the village—meant a lot to me, most of it bad. Watching him preach his Sunday sermon, white surplice billowing from his shoulders, I was suffused with envy and resentment when he confidently took the stage. His sermons were good; my indifference to them was more pretended than felt. But his command of the pulpit stood for me as the rigid, unreasonable, intolerant power of father over son. I had many times thought that if ever I got up there, I’d preach a sermon that would make him shiver in his shoes.

  Now I had to step cautiously around his coffin to climb into my father’s ordained place. Following his remembered example, I braced my arms against the pulpit’s curving sides—it was like being up in the crow’s nest of a square-rigger—and gained the parson’s condescending view of his flock.

  It was a good turnout—various in age and type, and just the sort of crowd one might expect at a well-attended reading in an American bookstore. I raked the faces with my eyes, looking for a focus point, and found three Catholic nuns, huddled together in their black habits; aliens in this overwhelmingly Protestant setting, though the church, dating back to before the Reformation, must once have been theirs. My task, I decided, was to make the nuns laugh.

  I quickly raised a smile from Sister #1; a couple of sentences later, Sister #2 distinctly giggled, and I was away on home turf.

  In my own fashion, I had followed in my father’s footsteps, as he had followed in his father’s. I had inherited the voice of an old-fashioned curate. I saw my independent living as a writer in much the same light as my father viewed his precious “parson’s freehold” (which has nothing to do with real estate, but is about intellectual liberty). In the matter of the dusty chaos of the study, where he puffed his pipe and wrote his sermons, I had managed to comfortably outshine him. Most of all, I had learned from him the flexible and eclectic form of the sermon itself, with its exposition of old texts, its stories, its drawing of morals and inferences from everyday anecdotes. “A few days ago, I was walking down Pound Lane …” he might begin, and that incident would lead to the unraveling of some complicated theological point, or to the obligations of the individual in a Christian society. Over the last 25 years, I’d often used this tactic on my own account—though I wasn’t a moralist, or a theologian, or a Christian. Sailing to Alaska, I was really walking down Pound Lane.

  Now I hoped to sketch him as I remembered him most fondly—after I’d left home, after our war was over, when he and I and Colin would sit up in the drawing room of the vicarage, drinking and talking and talking and drinking, often until dawn. “Argufying” was what he called these sessions, when we rambled about politics, sociology, and the problems of his parish—by then a vast, cheerless, council-housing estate on the outskirts of Southampton. He had been promoted to the position of Rural Dean—an ironic title for someone whose daily business lay in vandalized, graffiti-covered, urine-smelling, forty-story tower-blocks to which the most indigent of the industrial population had been consigned. Perhaps some curious streak of Episcopal humor had led the bishop to transfer him from a traditional Hampshire village to this unhappy and impoverished edge-city, but it turned my father into a reader and a thinker.

  Surrounded by toppling piles of books, on social work, psychiatry, the new theology, urban history, economics; by novels bringing news of working-class life by writers like Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow; by government white papers; by dozens of titles featuring the word “Crisis”—my father, in the late 1960s, argufied himself into becoming a new man. Throughout my childhood he was a reflexive Conservative. In Southampton, he joined the Labour Party and was to be seen near the head of protest marches. He sported the badge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—the same badge that, ten years before, he had ordered me out of the house for wearing.

  Turning fifty, he was suddenly more intellectually avid, quicker to rise to argument, and far more ironically self-aware than the clever university students whom I was teaching at the time. We pitched and dodged and parried through the night in front of the popping gas fire, while the dog at my father’s feet slept and farted, and the supply of Spanish red ran out, and the clink of milk bottles on the front doorstep reminded him that he had an eight o’clock service to conduct in three hours’ time and he’d better get some sleep.

  Stepping down from the pulpit I forgot the coffin, and grazed it with my knee as I went back to my seat. After another hymn one of his younger colleagues in Southampton, an industrial chaplain, climbed the steps to talk engagingly of my father as the diocesan gadfly, the subversive joker in the Anglican deck.

  The service ran longer than planned. Once the church emptied and the coffin was back inside the hearse, my mother was lost to view in a tight throng of people dressed in black. The cremation in Kettering, twelve miles away, was scheduled for 12:15, and it was already three minutes short of noon. Mr. Stamp was twirling his top hat impatiently between his hands.

  I said to him: “Do you think I ought to try and get my mother out of there and into a car now?”

  “Well, speaking frankly, sir, if we don’t get a bloomin’ move on now, we’re going to lose our bloomin’ slot.”

  I winkled my mother out of the crowd, hustled her aboard Colin’s Land Rover, and at last the funeral procession got underway, at walking speed, with Mr. Stamp marching ahead of the hearse and the villagers of Little Bowden removing their hats as the coffin went by. This seemed a peculiar way of getting a move-on; but as the hearse turned the bend past the last cottage on the street, I saw Mr. Stamp jam his topper on his head and take a flying leap into the already open passenger door while the driver gave it the gas.

  Varrooom!

  My father had always been a fast driver and a nervous passenger. He was now being driven by someone who might have been moonlighting from a regular career in formula-one grand prix. The hearse was taking the bends in the country road like chicanes at Indianapolis. Colin, no slowcoach, was fast losing ground to the flying coffin. I drove with my foot hard on the floor, into the fog of brown dust raised by the Land Rover.

  “Someone light me a cigarette, please?”

  Someone—a brother, I think—did. Sucking on smoke, I dared a glance at the rearview and saw a face, much as mine must have looked, contorted over the wheel; and behind that car, a trail of others, battling to keep their places in the race.

  We reached a ring road, hurtled past a roundabout and, at the arrowed sign saying CREMATORIUM, the hearse braked at last, and we were transformed back into a stately funeral procession. After the ritual quarter-mile crawl in low gear, we entered the gates of
a hygienic modern death factory, with its grimly marshaled gardens and walls of white concrete pretending to be marble. The crem. “Simple, no grave to keep up and visit, and a decent way of disposal,” my father had written. His army days had given him a soldierly relish for the spartan, and a crematorium perfectly suited his impatience with anything that smacked of stuff-and-nonsense.

  Under the supervision of Mr. Stamp and his men in black, my brothers and I shouldered the coffin. I took, as it were, the starboard bow, with William to port, and Dominic and Colin at the stern. The weight astonished me. There had seemed so little of my father left when he died, yet now my knees were barely capable of holding up under the pressure of his gross tonnage.

  “Ready?” said Mr. Stamp. “Off you go, then.”

  I couldn’t march, could only stumble, splay-footed, trying to keep upright as the coffin bore down on my shoulder. If I’d worried earlier that William and Dominic wouldn’t know how to keep in step, I had my comeuppance now, with a body that had gone geriatric on me. Why was he so heavy? Or was it, perhaps, the weight of fatherhood itself that we were trying to bear?

  Colin had come up with the perfect piece of music for the coffin’s entry to the crem: a recording of a choral setting by Elgar, at once tender and grand, sung by the Worcester Cathedral Choir. Elgar was Worcestershire’s own composer. As a boy, my father had gone to King’s, the cathedral school from whose lower forms the choir was drawn. (In my turn, I’d gone to King’s, too, though nothing in my time there gave me any cause for nostalgia.)

  Played earlier on my nephew James’s boom box, the music had made me weep: the voices of the boy trebles, coming in long slow waves like swell breaking on a beach.

  Ecce sacerdos magnus, qui in diebus

  suis placuit Deo, et inventus est justus.

  Behold a great priest, who in his days pleased God, and whose coming is justice. On the crem’s lousy sound system, the music was a thin drizzle of noise in the background, the splendid words inaudible.

  The coffin lurched awkwardly from brother to brother, its intolerable weight giving new life to the phrase about carrying the burden of the world on one’s shoulders. The aisle of the chapel stretched a very long way ahead. Our remote destination: a miniature version of the rollers at the loading bay of a department store. We trudged step by dangerously uncertain step to the faint Latin mutter of the cathedral choir. The cormorant-men, standing to attention on both sides of the rollers, grew slowly nearer, until, at last, they took my father into their professional care and helped to lay him on the conveyor that would take him to the furnace.

  I tottered to a chair next to my mother and, as the prayers began, surreptitiously massaged my bruised shoulder. I didn’t move my gaze off the coffin except once, to turn the page in the order of the service; and when I looked back it had vanished—gone clean through the red plush curtains from which the rollers protruded. Abracadabra! and my father had dematerialized, like a knotted handkerchief or a white dove.

  Back at the bungalow, relatives and friends were all over the lawn, talking with their mouths full, balancing canapés and glasses; it was like a vicarage summer fayre, with everyone dressed in the wrong clothes. I had seen very few of the relatives since I was in my early teens, and I moved warily among them with a bottle in each hand, trying to pass myself off as a waiter.

  “And what are you up to now? Apart from the scribbling?” said an auntly lady in her fifties. It came to me, slowly and uncomfortably, that I’d last seen her on a tennis court, in arousing frilly knickers.

  How old we all were—the children of the 1950s—with our crow’s-feet, bifocals, paunches, jowls, bald heads, gray hair, varicose veins, turkey-wattles, back problems, cancer scares, hearing defects, and all the ills that came with second homes, stock portfolios, Volvos, time-shares in Tuscany, modest gongs and titles and, already, a liberal sprinkling of grandchildren.

  I sought out my godfather, Uncle Peter, hale and bluff at eighty.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve had an interesting-sounding life.”

  So I was past it, even to him.

  Uncle Peter had been a naval officer during the war, and a yachtsman in peacetime. He was the real sailor in the family. We talked boats for a while, but his heart wasn’t in the conversation. He’d had to sell the sloop he kept at Lymington. “The old eyes weren’t up to it. Every time I went out, I was sailing round in a dense fog, and your Aunt Connie had to put a stop to it.”

  I passed Colin, who had also taken to waitering as the safest bet. “Potts Lagoon!” he said.

  By three o’clock, the cars—parked according to my father’s instructions—had begun to leave for all points on the English compass, and the talk was of routes and shortcuts; as obsessive a topic of conversation in this country as the weather.

  “Well, if you take the M45 turnoff for Coventry, you can nip down the A426 until it joins up with the A423, and then you just keep going down to Banbury. But don’t go into Banbury. You need to take the road that just cuts to the side of it, and find the A361 for Chipping Norton.”

  “You must look us up whenever you’re in Cambridge.”

  “Do drop in if you ever go to Bristol. We’re only a lick and a spit off the motorway.”

  The only journey not discussed, it seemed, was the one taken by my father. We’d get to making that one in our own time, on B-roads yet to be discovered.

  “So you’ll be going back to America?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Well, jolly nice to see you. Let’s keep in touch.”

  Few of us, I thought, would show up for one another’s funerals.

  Dominic and Ruth, his girlfriend, were staying with my mother overnight. Colin was heading back to Sheffield, William to London. The caterers had taken care of the ruined plates of canapés and the half-empty glasses parked on every available rock and ledge in the garden. I drove to the pub at Great Oxenden, packed my bag, and sped south, thinking of my father—a little pile of ashes now, in a jar on a shelf, with a plastic tag on it, waiting for pickup.

  At the outpost of Harrods at Heathrow, I bought a teddy bear and ran to catch my plane. Sitting in club class, I forswore the free drinks and sank bottle after bottle of mineral water. I made vows of abstinence from almost everything. Nicking the Arctic Circle, we flew over the north of Hudson Bay—a world of empty ice, soothing to contemplate from the snug of the cabin, 39,000 feet up. In the middle of the afternoon—nearly midnight, Harborough time—we crossed the raw and splintered peaks of the Cascades.

  “Look, the Rockies!” said an assured English voice from the seat behind me.

  Beyond the customs hall, Jean was waiting with Julia asleep in her stroller. A few hours earlier, it would have been a push-chair; and I was happy to be back in the American language.

  “God, you look awful,” Jean said.

  “It was like a long string of Lost Weekends,” I said.

  Jean drove. I sat in the back with Julia as, now awake, she made friends with her new bear.

  Julia said, “Is my Grandad Peter really dead now?”

  “Yes, Jaybird. He’s really dead.”

  “I’m sad.” She toyed with her bear for a moment. Then: “Can we go to Coe Park now?”

  For the next few days, I plunged back into family life—into cooking dinner, Disney movies on video, Lego, swings and slides, A. A. Milne at bedtime, singsongs.

  Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.

  They thought they had a ship that the water could never get through.

  So they had a big surprise when the water came inside—

  It was sad when the great ship went down.

  It was sad, it was sad, it was sad, it was sad;

  It was said when the great ship went down.

  Oh, uncles and aunts,

  Little children lost their pants.

  It was sad when the great ship went down …

 
; I dug a hole leading down to the bottom of the world in the sand of Golden Gardens beach, and visited the Malayan sun bears at the Woodland Park Zoo.

  The salmon season was in full swing, and there were now scheduled flights from Seattle to the fishing camps of British Columbia. Early on a Monday morning, the three of us drove to the floatplane terminal at the head of Lake Washington.

  “Just four more weeks, Jaybird. Then you and Mommy will fly up to Alaska, and we’ll all have a vacation together. We’ll catch fish from the boat and have them for supper. We’ll see real bears in the wild. We’ll see whales. We’ll sail to a magical island and dig for treasure. We’ll find families with kids for you to play with …”

  But the futures market is not one in which three-and-a-half-year-olds can be persuaded to invest with any confidence.

  “You’re always going away, Daddy.”

  “Look, Julia! See the floatplanes?”

  Unfaithful to my daughter for the third time in three months, I rode off into the sky again, feeling like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Flying low through gin-clear morning air, the plane followed the route of the Inside Passage. It was mid-ebb on a big tide, and the water surface was creased and pleated by the drag of the tidal streams as they ran out to the Pacific. In narrow passes the current was braided, like heavy rope, and breaking white. In the open Strait of Georgia, one could see the serpentine outlines of eddies, miles in diameter, containing strings of smaller eddies; faint pencil doodles on the skin of the sea. The general drift of things was clear enough: the whole body of water was traveling south and west. But for every current there was a countercurrent, and the view through the Plexiglas window of the plane was of a map of confusion, all scrolls and curlicues. I was reminded of the famous remark (made in 1932) by the physicist Horace Lamb, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science: “I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am really rather optimistic.”