Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  At Nanaimo, we dipped into the sea to refuel and clear Canadian customs. Then we were up to 4,500 feet, flying at 128 knots, with the shadows of isolated clouds looking like Rorschach inkblots on the green water below. The clouds began to thicken underneath us as we neared Desolation Sound, where the mountaintops came crowding in from the east: splintered pinnacles of bare black rock, ledges and rifts of blinding snow. Alastor territory. The plane bounced and slewed on the boils and whirlpools of unstable air. The pilot, sitting next to me, called “Hang on to your hats!” over the din of the engine, and I watched the altimeter needle jiggering up and down on the dial.

  The pilot found a convenient cloud-window over Knight Inlet, and dove neatly through it. When we splashed down off Minstrel Island, the water felt thick as glue under the floats and the plane came to a stop within a second or two. I was the only passenger to disembark at the dock.

  I watched the plane wheel jauntily away and make its roaring, skiddering takeoff from the wave tops. Then I sat on the stern of an upturned dinghy, seabag at my feet, and tried to get my bearings. After only nine weeks—I counted them off on my fingers—I felt like the returning Rip Van Winkle. I wanted the landscape to somehow confirm my absence from it, but in this country of evergreens, an overcast July 1st looked no later in the year than a sunny April 20th, and nothing about Minstrel Island marked the passage in the voyage that had led to England and back. I stared at the tarred pilings, the rotting cabins, the sheltering hulks. They looked like last night’s view—no further away in time than that.

  I found one of the men who’d been at dinner—a son of the resort—tinkering with a skiff, and gave him $20 to run me down to Potts Lagoon. He gave me a look of offhand recognition, as if he, too, remembered me from last night, and we set off at speed down the Blow Hole and into Clio Channel.

  I sat up in the bow, with the boat slamming from wave to wave in the brisk easterly—the same wind that had been blowing back in April. The 75-horse outboard limited our conversation to a few hoarse yells.

  “That your sailboat down at Potts?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Thought it were!”

  Trailing a great rooster-tail of wake, we roared through the outer islands and into the narrow entrance to the lagoon.

  The boat was exactly as I had left it, tied up in front of the Walderses’ floathouse. No one was home. I hoisted myself aboard, found the keys in their usual place, and removed the hatchboards. The air in the saloon was fresh—not a whiff of the pickled smell I’d expected. The bilges were dry, the batteries fully charged. Apart from a few splashes of dried gullshit on the coachroof, I could find only one sign of my having been away.

  While my father had been dying, the boat had been growing a green hula-skirt of weed that descended from its waterline and cloaked its nether parts from sight. In the still, unruffled lagoon, algae ran as wild as in a neglected aquarium. On the exposed port side, where photosynthesis had gone on unimpeded, the tendrils of weed hung down six or seven feet deep. Metastasis again.

  It came off easily enough when attacked with a deck-scrubber, and I spent half an hour hauling myself around the boat in the dinghy, getting myself covered in chlorophyll-green slime. I was glad of the work, for the reassurance it provided that my spell in England had not been a mere eyeblink back here in British Columbia.

  I was up in the cockpit drinking coffee when John Walders and his dog arrived by skiff, towing two good $150 logs. He cut the motor and drifted in to the raft.

  “Hi! We were just beginning to wonder what had happened to you.”

  VI. THE CHARRED

  REMAINS

  Awake at first light, I had two thoughts. The first was that the aching soreness of my left shoulder, imprinted by the weight of my father’s coffin, wasn’t going to go away and that I’d probably carry it for the rest of my life, an honorable stigma. The second was that the interior of the boat itself was constructed on the model of a top-of-the-line coffin. Before, I’d always thought that the Swedish passion for dark varnished carpentry, grain matched to grain, in teak and mahogany, made the inside of the boat look like an old-fashioned London club. Now it made me think of Mr. Stamp, canoe burials, and the nineteenth-century habit of calling a ship a coffin if it was crank or leaky.

  Or was it, rather, that coffins were deliberately designed to look like boats? In most societies, from Anglican England to animist Kwakiutl or Haida villages, death was seen as a solo voyage to a new world, and the coffin was the ultimate single-hander’s vessel, solidly built for the long and stormy passage to the hereafter. All the early voyagers to the Northwest found canoes, hung in the trees, containing human remains and supplies for a voyage. Peter Puget, in Discovery Bay, saw “a Canoe suspended to a Tree with a perfect Skeleton in the Inside & others in a forward State of Decay—There were likewise Square Boxes, Bows & Arrows Fishing Implements and a stick or two of Clams laid by them.”

  I thought of my father in his open boat, dressed for the outdoors, artfully chilled, the waxwork mariner, as I dressed myself for the clammy cold of dawn on Potts Lagoon. The kettle came to the boil. I made a Thermos of coffee and, moving quietly so as not to wake the Walderses, undid the bowlines I’d tied nine weeks before, and pushed the boat out from the raft, letting it drift a good distance before I started the engine. Not a leaf was moving on the madrona trees. The water was black and mirror-smooth. Even at tick-over speed, the noise of the engine was an affront to the deep silence of the forest and the sea. I crept out of the lagoon at a bare three knots, getting used to the feel of the boat again and trying not to fracture the eerie, suspenseful calm of a day yet to be born.

  The tide ran earlier here than in Georgia Strait, and the ebb was already nearly at an end. The wet rocks, from which the water was shrinking, looked lacquered. The iodine-smell of seaweed gave a bitter tang to the air. The boat slid down Baronet Passage, between Harbledown and West Cracroft islands, under a luminous overcast through which the sun was just beginning to cast long shadows.

  Passing a broad half-moon of stony beach on West Cracroft, I saw a shifting shadow in the stillness and turned to look more closely. A black bear was foraging along the water’s edge, then another shadow shifted: the bear’s mate, following at a fifty-yard distance. I stealthily turned the boat around and drifted inshore.

  No stealth was needed. The bears were intent on their breakfast; hindquarters up, heads down low, they disdained to notice the boat, even as I brought it right alongside the first bear, in six feet of water. I could see the individual hairs of its fur, the ripple of muscle beneath the coat, its big, watery brown eyes. It lifted its head briefly, only to gaze straight through me, then resumed its search for shellfish.

  The myopia of bears gave them their gullible character in Indian stories, where they were always being conned by smarter creatures like the raven. At thirty-something feet, I apparently was invisible to the bear. Maybe it had registered the blurred boat as a drifting log. Maybe the stench of seaweed masked my human smell. There was, after all, some truth in the schoolboy rephrasing of the Easter hymn “Gladly my Cross I’d bear” into “Gladly, my cross-eyed bear,” sung in Worcester Cathedral with heathen gusto.

  Small stones crunched underfoot as the bear extended its investigations. With one paw, it tipped over a boulder the size of a domestic gas stove with a shocking, hollow clonk: the bear didn’t grunt or sigh; the motion as effortless as a man turning over a pebble. It wedged its long muzzle into the shallow pool left by the boulder and chomped down some small but evidently satisfying morsel of seafood.

  Moving slowly, I reached for the camera on the shelf in the saloon and ran through the dozen remaining exposures. When the film came back from the processors in Juneau, weeks later, I found some fine pictures of two boulders. The larger was black, the smaller gray. Showing them to Julia, I had to point out which one was the bear.

  “True-life?” she said, with skepticism and disappointment large in he
r eyes.

  “True-life,” I said. “Look, there’s its nose, and you see the eye here?”

  I watched the bears for twenty minutes; then, as the tide turned, they came together and shambled back to the woods. Though black bears don’t often attack people, except to defend their cubs, I thought a lot about the power of that enormous stone-rolling paw and vowed never to knowingly share a beach, however big, with a bear of any color.

  By mid-morning I was in Port McNeill, on Vancouver Island, lugging sacks of groceries down to the boat and filling the tanks with diesel and fresh water. The next proper town would be Prince Rupert, about 275 miles to the northwest; I had to stock up for a week or ten days of isolation, with anchorages in remote inlets. As soon as my goods were stowed, I was away again under headsail and engine, moving west along Queen Charlotte Strait.

  On the radio, a vessel named Trianna reported finding a body floating in the sea. The caller, a man, sounded like a pleasure-boater, his voice breathless and squeaky as he described his gruesome discovery. On the other end of the line, the Coast Guard officer at Comox was languidly matter-of-fact.

  “You got the lat-long coordinates on that?”

  The man on Trianna kept the Transmit button pressed down as he and someone else aboard—his wife, I guessed—scrambled to read the numbers off the GPS. He reported the latitude as longitude, and was duly corrected.

  “Is that a male or a female? Any name on the clothing?”

  I’d been shown more sympathetic interest by the same station when back in April I reported a large deadhead in Johnstone Strait. But a human body couldn’t be considered a hazard to navigation; just a tedious pile of paperwork on some poor sap’s desk. I wondered if the couple would continue their vacation, or if the sight of the corpse would turn them, shaken, back toward home.

  In the spring of 1980, while idling an afternoon away in the newly purchased motorboat I kept at Hammersmith, I found a body spreadeagled on a mud bank in the tidal Thames near Chiswick. As I reported to the police over the phone, twenty minutes later, the body was that of a very plump teenage girl. She was wearing a pair of brand-new knee-length leather boots. When the police launch arrived, I led them to where she lay, beached by the falling tide; once the police had her in view, I ran for Hammersmith, and didn’t take the boat out again for a month.

  The body did not belong to a teenage girl. At the coroner’s inquest, where I was called to give evidence, I found out she was a woman in her sixties, slenderly built. Several days’ immersion in brackish water had blown her up like a balloon, removing every wrinkle and restoring her to a grotesque, tubby youthfulness. She had been treated, repeatedly, for depression. Leaving a long, incoherent letter on her dressing table, she walked to the river and threw herself in. The pathologist who examined the body recited a grim list of cuts and contusions on her hands and arms.

  The coroner said: “All these are consistent with drowning, in your experience?”

  The pathologist agreed; most people who drowned in shallow water injured themselves in just this way.

  So death by drowning was not a peaceful leave-taking, in which one’s life passed before one’s eyes, a sepia-tinted period movie. Even determined suicides clutched and scrabbled for survival, tearing their hands on sharp rocks, the outraged body fighting to repudiate the desperate reasoning of the mind.

  When Shelley was washed ashore at Viareggio, after ten days in the sea, he must have resembled an obese child.

  “Trianna, maintain your present position, please. A patrol vessel will be on its way there shortly.”

  After the reliable deeps of the labyrinth, Queen Charlotte Strait was a tricky piece of water on which to be afloat. Twelve to fourteen miles wide, it was dotted about with shallows, reefs, drying rocks, and islets no bigger than the average four-bedroom house. The depth-sounder was all over the place, 300 feet suddenly giving way to thirty or less. The chart was a tangled bird’s nest of blue contour lines, as the cartographers sketched the holes, trenches, plateaus, and pinnacles beneath the surface.

  Six miles to the north of where I was sailing, the Vancouver expedition nearly came to an early end when Discovery grounded on a submerged reef. All through the foggy morning of 7 August 1792, Discovery and Chatham had drifted on the tidal currents, barely able to make steerageway. When the sun burned through the fog, soon after noon, they found themselves in Queen Charlotte Strait, in hazy visibility, with the shore to the southwest still lost behind white cliffs of fog, and the steep, unfriendly mainland coast bending widely away to the northwest. For the first time since April, they had a misty glimpse of open ocean ahead.

  A light offshore breeze from the north-northwest blew up soon after the fog lifted, and the two ships began to make slowly to windward, Discovery in the lead. Soundings were tried for—first with the fifty-fathom, then with the deep-sea line—but no bottom was found. Under full sail, Discovery was making three knots through the water when, at four-thirty, as Vancouver wrote, “we suddenly grounded on a bed of sunken rocks.… A signal indicating our situation was immediately made to the Chatham, she instantly anchored in fifty fathoms water, about a cable and a half [300 yards] distant from us, and we immediately received all her boats to our assistance.”

  In Thomas Manby’s account:

  The Ship struck on a reef of rocks, every effort was made to disengage her, unfortunately the Ebb tide was running strong, which soon left her immoveable. The yards and Top Masts were struck and got over, in hopes of preventing her tumbling over. Our fears were too well founded: after laying upright for half an hour, a terrible crash ensued, that brought the Ship on her broadside. Fortunately the Breeze died away, and a Calm following, cheered our spirits up with the enlivening hope [that] the flowing tide might again float her, if the Rocks had not pierced her bottom. Seven long and tedious hours we sat on the Ship’s side, without the ability of giving her any assistance, but that of carrying out an anchor and three cables, ready to heave upon at high Water.

  In fact, more was done to help the ship than Manby suggests. Vancouver took as much weight off Discovery as possible, jettisoning the supplies of fuel and fresh water, along with much of the ballast from the bilges; he then ordered his men to shore up the ship’s fallen side with spars and topmasts.

  During this time, Zachary Mudge and Joseph Baker—neither of them a very competent artist—repaired in one of the small boats to sketch the wreck in their logbooks. Both drawings show Discovery careened hard over on her starboard side, the bow of the ship rearing skyward, the windows of Captain Van’s private stateroom grazing the sea. In the foreground, two canoes full of rubbernecking Indians stand off at a safe distance from this scene of white men’s folly. In the engraver’s improved version of Mudge’s sketch, the Indians are shown tactlessly holding up sea-otter pelts for sale.

  “A very irksome and perilous situation,” in Captain Van’s words. By nine o’clock, at low water, “the ship’s forefoot was only in about three and a half foot water, whilst her stern was in four fathoms.” According to Manby, “the fate of the Ship appeared to be inevitable for three hours, and had she gone to pieces, we had the pleasing satisfaction of being rescued from the Wreck by our Consort the Chatham.” Manby’s phrasing here suggests that the loss of Discovery would not have made him too unhappy. To save the ship is every seaman’s instinct, but among the young gentlemen on Vancouver’s quarterdeck, there ensued some mixed feelings when, at 2:00 A.M. Discovery at last came upright on the flood tide and was hauled off the reef by the stern, without much apparent damage, leaving the expedition to continue, as Vancouver wrote, “the adventurous service in which we were engaged.”

  After such a close shave, Captain Van had the “inexpressible satisfaction” at having been saved from the humiliation of losing his ship—a humiliation over which the juvenile Honorables Pitt and Stuart would have crowed unmercifully, and which would certainly have put an end to Vancouver’s naval career.

&n
bsp; Between the top of Vancouver Island and the bottom of Calvert Island lay a forty-mile stretch of ocean coast, a lee shore, swept by a continuous and sometimes very high westerly swell. Waves begun in storms off Japan would fetch up here as glassy rollers, steepening sharply as they felt the drag of the shallowing seafloor. The usual jumping-off point for the hop across this nasty corner of the North Pacific was Hurst Island, one of a string of small islands off the northeast tip of Vancouver Island—a lump of rock and forest barely a square mile in size.

  The yachtsmen’s pilot-book for the area warned one to stay clear of the perfect shelter of Harlequin Bay on the east side of the island—partly because of its rock-strewn entrance, and partly because of its unfriendly inhabitants.

  One is advised against hiking to the east side of the island. Former residents have sighted a “hairy man,” and strong evidence points to the existence of a Sasquatch family on the island, perhaps centred on Meeson Cone above Harlequin Bay. Indian residents of nearby Balaklava Island have had similar experiences, and now refuse to go ashore at either place.

  The book, John Chappell’s Cruising Beyond Desolation Sound, was otherwise dryly informative; useful but dull. The sasquatch paragraph was by far its liveliest moment. Chappell might as well have described the perils of getting too close to Komogwa, with appropriate lat-long coordinates.

  He recommended a U-shaped crevice in the island’s west side, and a good three-quarters of a mile from the sasquatch lair on Meeson Cone. When I entered God’s Pocket at five that afternoon, none of the fishing boats and yachts I’d expected were waiting to make the early-morning crossing to Calvert. I tied up at the empty float belonging to the little resort at the head of the inlet. The owners’ extended family were the only guests in the handful of cabins overlooking the water. They’d come here for their annual reunion over the long Canada Day weekend, and at supper I found myself sandwiched between hearty great-grandparents—all older than my father—and a quartet of quarreling heat-struck toddlers. The presence of the children stopped me from asking the grown-ups about the hairy neighbors on the hill: I could too easily imagine Julia’s nightmares if she believed that a sasquatch tribe lived a few blocks up our street.