Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  … The British were drawing a bead with 25-pounder guns on the Germans across a stream called Fosso della Moletta when we arrived at one coastal farm hamlet.

  They had an observation post upstairs in a bakehouse. A battalion commander was staring out of a window at the Germans in a farm building 2,000 meters ahead. Genially he needled his observer, a young captain called Peter who needed a haircut and smoked a pipe, as he studied the Germans through field-glasses and called signals.

  “Drop three-oh minutes and add one hundred,” said Peter without taking the pipe from his mouth.

  “Drop three-oh minutes and add one hundred,” said a sergeant through the telephone.

  A gun spoke behind us and a few instants later we saw black puffs near the objective.

  “You’re slicing your drive, Peter,” said the colonel. “A bottle of beer you don’t hit the house where the Jerries are having lunch.”

  Peter chewed his pipe and said, “More one-oh minutes, repeat.”

  The gun talked again. Looking along the level, brown and green sea-marshes, we saw one shell drop against the right wall of the house and nestle along the left wall. The house shimmered queerly and changed shape.

  “You won’t need your putter,” the colonel said.

  Beside “Drop three-oh minutes and add one hundred” my father had written, “Makes no gunnery sense at all.” Come off it, Lardner.

  I had never thought of my father as a character in a Hemingway story, and I cherished this snapshot of him, taken when I was nineteen months old and he was 25. He had been rescued by the war and the officer’s uniform that came with it. Rejected as a candidate for university, he left school to go to a teachers’ training college in Winchester. His probationary teaching year, from 1938 to 1939, was a trial and a misery. He couldn’t keep order in the classroom. Yet as a one-pip second lieutenant in the Territorial Army he was an immediate success. The army’s clear divisions of rank and authority provided him with a world in which he felt securely positioned, as he never had in his unruly secondary school, where the boys baited him for his accent and rioted through his over-prepared lessons. Maths had always been his best subject, and he loved the sheer orderliness of calculating a shell’s trajectory. This was his version of longitude-by-lunar-distance.

  A second snapshot shows him in the uniform he wore while I was growing up. In Will This Do?, Auberon Waugh’s autobiography, my very distant cousin Bron worries about whether his Raban ancestors were Jewish, then credits them with passing on their powers of “imagination” to his father, Evelyn Waugh.

  The Rabans undoubtedly had a touch of fantasy. Great-Uncle George, another clergyman, would desert his pulpit to chase imaginary mice round his church with a golf club. The Reverend Peter Raban … I met only once, at George’s funeral, when he was wearing a cloak like Count Dracula.

  This was the cassock inherited by my father from his Uncle Cyril, who must have inherited it from an earlier clergyman-forebear. Appearing to date back to the Church of England’s formation under Henry VIII, it had a greasy antique patina like the sheen on a blowfly, and seemed to be made of some compound of black wool and lead. Sliding from a chairback onto the floor, it made something close to a house-shaking crash. When my father encased himself in this forbidding garment, it fell to his feet in heavy undulating folds like the plush stage curtains in a theater.

  Winter and summer, this was his usual weekday wear, and it turned him into a conspicuous landmark in the district. In my teens, I could spot him from a mile and more away—a black African vulture descended on the Hampshire lanes. His cassock separated him from the rest of humankind, lending him the gaunt authority of priesthood. Even Roman Catholic clergy, in their sparse black-serge outfits, were inclined to defer to my father’s super-cassock.

  It wasn’t a taste for fantasy that led my father to his strange costume; more the fear that, out of uniform, he might not pass muster in the world. He was acutely conscious of his lack of a university degree. Though he made canon, a shot at an archdeaconry, let alone a bishopric, would have been out of the question. At theological college in Chichester, in his mid-thirties, he was old beside his pink boy-graduate classmates; a blue-chinned avuncular type, still known as Major, with a youthful student scarf, his trio of sons, and his ancient sit-up-and-beg bicycle.

  After he was ordained, Great-Uncle Cyril’s cassock enveloped him like a destiny. It covered all the anomalies in his résumé. Robed in black, he was pure priest: ageless, serious, “a man of the cloth.” I can still smell that cloth, ripe—especially on wet days—with the odor of the several generations of priests who had lived inside it. At boarding school, my housemaster, Major MacTurk, would single me out as “Raban, Son of the Cloth,” as if the dreadful cassock itself had fathered me—a notion that sometimes struck me as not at all unlikely.

  Late in the 1960s, my father took to wearing the cassock only for funerals, and let his beard grow wild in a fleece of tight black and ginger, silver and gray curls. The badge of my father’s new calling as a radical, for a while it coexisted with a black stock and low clerical collar; but before long the dog collar followed the cassock into exile, and the beard’s reign was unchallenged. Flashing his unruly whiskers, my father became a thorn in the side of the episcopal hierarchy, and began to speak up on behalf of (as people on the left were starting to call them) the unwaged. It was as if his suddenly piratical appearance emboldened him to think and talk along lines that would have been inconceivable just a few years before.

  The beard belonged to the strange new world my father now inhabited, of multi-story blocks of council flats, where the Church of England, if it ranked at all, was filed somewhere alongside Morris Dancers and Robin Hood and his Merrie Men. But he was not about to concede its irrelevance. His intransigent beard, striking out in every hue and direction, bespoke his determination to establish a place for his church in the alien landscape to which he’d been posted by his bishop.

  My father would have been happiest in a small community with a common cause, where he could put to good use his soldierly appetite for battle. Somewhere like Klemtu would have suited him perfectly. He would have turned himself into an expert on treaty rights, trained his guns on Ottawa and the provincial parliament in Victoria, been the first to volunteer for a fishing-boat blockade. I saw him striding the boardwalk in his beard and plastic parka—the vicar, at last, of a parish he could thoroughly comprehend.

  I awoke to voices. The VHF radio on a neighboring boat was turned up loud, and two fishermen were gossiping over the airwaves. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying in this exchange of laconic growls, punctuated by bursts of gruff laughter. Pulling my right wrist from under the bedclothes, I looked at my watch: 5:40. Magnified voices trading incomprehensible punch lines tortured me out of bed. Groggy with lost sleep, resentful of my inconsiderate neighbor, I dressed and slid the hatch-cover open.

  The village was blanketed in mist, the water as still and gray as sludge. No one appeared to be up on any of the boats nearby. The radio voices belonged to two ravens, perched on adjacent pilings, who continued to natter to each other, oblivious to my movements ten feet below.

  Exactly as Roger Tory Peterson described, the ravens had goiter throats and Roman noses. It was impossible not to see such human-sounding birds in anthropomorphic terms. Even after realizing my mistake, I couldn’t stop trying to decode their conversation. Maybe they were talking in some lost Tsimshian dialect, but they were definitely talking; and if I couldn’t make sense of their vocabulary, I could clearly hear their grammar, as in Noam Chomsky’s famous demonstration-piece, the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Peterson, so vivid on the raven’s appearance, hardly did justice to its voice: “A croaking cr-r-ruck or prruk; also a metallic tok.” Had he listened to the Klemtu ravens, he would have heard the mordant chuckle; the tone of sly, disdainful irony; the taste for talking, like William F. Buckley, in sentences extende
d by multiple dependent clauses; the habit of raising rhetorical questions and immediately answering them; the Bertie Woosterish what? what?; the old-womanish tut! tut!; the chronic grumbler’s repertoire of nagging complaints and self-justifications.

  In the stories, the raven is cleverest of all the animals: a master of disguise, a brilliant con man and thief, a gourmand and lecher, an inveterate survivor. Among his many adventures, Raven steals the box containing daylight from an old man, gets control of the tides from the tide-woman by sticking porcupine needles in her bottom, makes the waves, has sex with a princess by pretending to be a shaman. In Swanton’s version of the Tlingit Raven cycle, a great deal of what Raven does has to be printed in Latin. In some stories, Raven creates the world.

  The character of the guileful Raven was grounded in the everyday habits and behavior of the ravens that were to be seen in any village. Anecdotes about real ravens needed only a little tweaking to be transformed into the happy extravaganzas of the Raven cycle. There is a perfect continuity of theme and character between the Indian stories and those told by Lawrence Kilham, the great popular expert on corvidae and author of The American Crow and the Common Raven. Kilham’s first experience of ravens was in Iceland in 1933, when he fired at one with his 20-gauge shotgun. A single feather drifted down from the sky while the raven, “seemingly undisturbed,” continued to circle.

  The raven was back sooner than I expected. Just as I looked up he took a shot at me. A large, purplish splotch (the raven had been eating crowberries) landed on the front of my hat. I took it off and gazed in astonishment. One can say that it was all fortuitous. But that is not the way it seemed to me. The experience left me with a feeling that ravens in addition to being sharp mentally, may have a sense of humor.

  In Kilham’s book, a raven distracts some young wolves from their kill by pretending it has a broken wing, so its mate can steal food from behind their backs. A mute swan is similarly distracted, and three ravens rob its nest. Ravens dive-bomb gorillas, for “deviltry,” and reduce them to paralyzed terror. Ravens take turns tobogganing down a snowbank on their fronts. Tame ravens attempt to court and mate with their human masters.

  Painting the raven as a devious trickster, comfortably able to outwit grizzly bears, killer whales, and men, the coastal Indians had to invent very little. Most of what Raven does—short of actual fornication with an actual princess—is found in Kilham, not as legend but as natural history. Like the stories of the Flood, the Raven chronicles were essentially true to the observed facts of life on the Northwest coast, even as they nudged their material into the domain of the mythical and the marvelous.

  Watched, without interest, by the gossiping birds, I undid the boat from the dock and pushed off.

  It was a fine morning to be out early. Shafts of weak sunlight lit the breathlike spirals of mist on the water. The tide ran in lazy swirls and fingerling whirlpools. I drove through a tide-meet of flotsam—a sinuous, unbroken line of stray logs, green branches, yellowed chunks of polystyrene packing, soft-drink cans, condoms, fish crates, frayed rope-ends, old boots, half-eaten apples, a broken caneback chair, a rubber ball. Wherever two tidal currents come into collision, they form a long thin floating junkyard, to which all superfluous items in the neighborhood eventually gravitate. These trailing windrows suggest to the eye the natural affinity of the unwanted: all the local orphans collect here, jostling together in a buoyant democracy of abuse and neglect. I passed through every tide-meet with care, always hoping to rescue an abandoned fender, a Japanese glass float, or any of the other useful and decorative things that sometimes showed up in these anfractuous garbage dumps. Nothing this morning. The gulls were having a good time of it, though, picking over such delicacies as the triple-decker club sandwich that most likely had been tossed by a sated cruise-ship passenger.

  I worked my way north up the Finlayson Channel, following Vancouver’s track in June 1793, on his second surveying season. By now, even the dedicated Romantics on board had seen enough cascades, precipices, snowcapped peaks, and witchy fir forests to last them their lifetimes. The weather was monotonously wet and windy. This stretch of coast had already been explored and partially mapped by English captains; both Charles Duncan, in Princess Royal, and John Meares, in Felice, had sailed through five years before. Vancouver had copies of their charts: his dispiriting job was to verify their accuracy and fill in the blanks.

  The ships pushed on, under Admiralty orders, in a fog of boredom and discomfort. The journals of the young gentlemen on the quarterdeck report none of the explosions and confrontations that had punctuated the 1792 season. Little happened. Each new dead-end inlet looked very much like the one before. Small incidents loomed large. Near Restoration Cove, James Johnstone, recently promoted to lieutenant, treed two bear cubs and dispatched them with a rifle-shot apiece. Their meat was greeted as a delicious change from the regular diet of oily Pacific salmon. On 4 June, the king’s birthday, the officers on Discovery enjoyed a “sumptuous feast” of bear steaks, stewed eagle, and roasted mussels, washed down with “flowing bowls of Grog.” Brass buttons and copper kettles were traded for sea-otter pelts. These were rare high spots, at a time when the coastline seemed interminable, and the voyage a forced march through a landscape grown so familiar that the men had come to see it as a vast evergreen prison.

  Finlayson Channel ended at a T-junction: to the right, a broad inlet led eastward between two 3,000-foot mountain ridges; to the left, a crooked and much narrower channel ran out to the northeast. Vancouver took the left turn, but sent two boats to follow the large inlet to its inevitable ending. On the morning of 15 June, the boat party stopped at a cove at the head of the inlet, gathered mussels from the beach, and roasted them for breakfast. Thomas Manby’s journal has the best description of what happened:

  The last week had given the Blue Devils to everybody on board. The sun during the whole time had not once beam’d on us his Cheering ray. No view offer’d, to gratifie the imagination, a dull insipid Green colours the lofty Mountains that everywhere surround us, Whose presumptuous heads arrest the progress of the journeying Clouds, creating a weighty atmosphere and perpetual Rain. The same inconveniences attended our Boats, during their excursion and a scene of horror took place on the 15th, which threw a gloom on every countenance when they returned on board. The party stopt to breakfast in a small Cove, that produced an abundance of Muscles, in these they made their repast, without perceiving any difference, either in appearance or taste, to those we had always been in the habit of eating, since our arrival in America. In a few minutes, the whole were seized with convulsive pains, unusual swellings, and every other symptom produced by poison. A Kettle of Water being on the fire, fortunately gave relief to many, but dreadful to relate, one seaman died in an hour and three others are brought to the Ship, with scarce a hope of recovery. The Rocky inhospitable shore not affording sufficient Earth to receive the remains of our departed Countryman, the Body was consign’d to a watery Grave, and to commemorate the name of the deceased, this inland Navigation was call’d after him Carter’s passage.

  In Manby’s telling of the story, the poison mussels are deeply embedded in the larger description—of a rocky, sunless, rainswept landscape of insufficient earth, burdensome air, and presumptuous mountains. The outbreak of paralytic shellfish poisoning is seen as yet another malign and inhospitable aspect of nature on the Northwest coast. Here nature kills, wantonly and on the instant, by tempting the innocent stranger with a dish of seafood. Manby, afflicted by the Blue Devils, puts the blame for Carter’s death on the dripping, dark, hostile character of a country he was coming to hate.

  If there was a reddish tinge to the water, caused by a bloom of the toxic dinoflagellate plankton, alexandrium, it would have been hard to see in such rough and lightless weather; and the boat party probably would not have read a warning in it anyway. The first sign of trouble would have been a sense of numbness in the lips, followed by a swelling of the tongue, ma
king it hard to pronounce words clearly. According to my on-board medical book, The Waterlover’s Guide to Marine Medicine, “you become dizzy, lightheaded, and nauseated, your teeth feel loose, and you have a devil of a time speaking and swallowing as paralysis sets in. You may become totally paralyzed and die of asphyxia, remaining awake and alert to the bitter end.”

  The sick men rowed back with Carter’s body to the junction with Finlayson Channel, where a bay on the north shore promised a decent burial site. (For the eighteenth-century seaman, Marcus Rediker observes in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, “a marked grave was considered essential to peace and eternal rest.”) But wherever the men tried, their shovels rang on hard rock. The corpse, sewn into a sail-canvas parcel and weighted with stones from the beach, was tumbled over the gunwale of the launch into thirty fathoms of water. Lieutenant Johnstone, the senior officer present, bareheaded in the rain, recited the words of committal from the seaman’s prayer book.

  “We therefore commit his body to the Deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the Body (when the Sea shall give up her Dead) and the life of the World to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ …”

  I swung to port, as Discovery had done, just short of Carter Bay. Every few miles I sailed past the relics of great projects that had come to grief. A tall brick chimneystack, deep in the trees, was all that remained of Swanson Bay, once a mill town with a crowded wharf. The bricks of the chimney were coming apart; in a year or two the trees would topple it and it would go to dust. There was hardly an indentation in the shoreline without half a dozen tarred stumps, leaning any-old-how, to show where the docks had stood—and, beyond them, the houses, sawmill, or canning factory. Had I been here ninety years ago, the whole landscape would have hummed with industry, the channels thick with tugs, barges, fishing boats, and steamers. The forest had made a fine job of burying the lot.