Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  Of the Indian villages seen by Vancouver, nearly all were gone, leaving an overgrown shell-midden, like the tumuli that dot the farmlands of southern England, and a few oddly placed boulders on the beach—the remains of the fish-weir, where migrating salmon were trapped by the receding tide. Because the Indians lived closer to the water than the whites, their deserted villages were generally easier to spot. But whites and Indians alike had built in wood; and in the rainforest wood rots as soon as people turn their backs on it. Totem poles, housefronts, mill owners’ balustraded villas, docks, and warehouses all blackened, went soft, and crumbled away, leaving little more trace than the wake of a canoe as it frays to nothing in the water. The surface tension of the forest closed very quickly over the disturbances made in it by mankind. Things turned into corruption much faster here than in drier climates, which gave the landscape, even at its sunniest and most beautiful, a sinister cast; et in Arcadia ego …

  The most stubborn of the ruins was Butedale, at the southern end of Fraser Reach. Tucked into a deep bay, it slid importantly into view, building by building, by far the biggest settlement I’d seen since Port Hardy. One bunkhouse alone, on the hill above the cannery, might have done service as a medium-sized federal prison. The wharves, meant for a fishing fleet, were occupied by a single small motorboat. Though a glance suggested that a plague had struck Butedale, its dereliction didn’t show until I was within two or three cables of the waterfront and could see the gaping windows, the crescents of sky in the bulging walls, the rope-lashings that held doors and tottering walkways just in place. If you found the right spot, and put your shoulder to Butedale, the biggest cannery on the coast would collapse into the waiting sea in a slurry of rotten wood and corrugated iron.

  What Butedale lacked in its manifold desolation was silence. Right by the cannery, a big waterfall came down the cliff in a zigzag staircase of unbroken white. The noise it made—recommended by the pilot-book as an excellent navigation aid in fog—was of a freeway overrun by trucks with broken mufflers. This sound transferred itself to the ruins, giving them the misleading air of harboring some very loud and repetitive industrial activity.

  In Seattle I’d heard about the Butedale lights, which appeared now to have been finally switched off. Long after the cannery was abandoned, the waterfall powered a turbine which generated so much electricity that a caretaker had to be employed to replace the thousands of high-wattage bulbs that blazed, night and day, their only purpose to ease the surging power-current. Fishermen spoke of Butedale as the eerie Manhattan of the western wilderness, at night the finest landmark on the Inside Passage.

  Through binoculars, I searched for the owner of the lone motorboat, and found a man digging what appeared to be a cleared vegetable patch on the hill. He was resting on his fork, shielding his eyes with his hand, and gazing back at me in, I thought, a not unfriendly way. If he had a family or colleagues, I could see no trace of them, though Butedale could easily have held several thousand invisible squatters in its ramshackle honeycomb.

  I wanted to visit, but the word DANGER was spray-painted all over the wharves in badly formed red letters. I waved to the man, and he waved slowly back, yet did not point out a landing place.

  The abandoned settlements were magnets for rainbow-chasers of every kind. The canning and timber companies were glad to be rid of them, and communes of sixties hippies, New Age spiritual centers, or neophytes to the vacation-resort business would move in with high hopes, in promising spring weather. They’d patch up a building, start a garden, build a float, establish a website on the Internet. The idea of creating utopia in the wild is programmed into the far-western imagination, and the Northwest coast was littered with such projects, started by Hutterites, vegans, Indian spirit channelers, survivalists, Christian sects so fundamentalist that even fundamentalists thought them eccentric. To anyone wanting to found a New Jerusalem, Butedale would have looked like a dream waiting to come true.

  These utopias usually had a life of a year or two. Loneliness, rain, and the unwinnable battle against the intrepid brambles and salal soon drove most of the idealists back to civilization. Others went quietly bankrupt. In a decade, each Butedale would sprout ruins within ruins within ruins, as successive bands of hopefuls tried and failed to make a go of it.

  I waved again at the optimistic gardener. Sooner him than me. Even as he leaned on his fork and looked out over the water, the forest was extending its tentacles behind him.

  In the flooded ravine of Grenville Channel, half a mile wide and a thousand feet deep, I saw a surprising patch of orange in the mess of flotsam that had collected in the eddy just downtide of a blunt rock promontory. I recognized it, with a surge of adrenaline and nausea, as a twin to the Henri Lloyd foulweather jacket I’d put on twenty minutes ago, as the afternoon began to cool into evening. The humped back and shoulders rode well clear of the surface; the crumpled hood floated a few inches ahead, like a large blowsy tea rose.

  With the engine in neutral, I tied a running bowline to the end of the port-side stern line and prepared a noose. I got the boathook ready and crept toward the eddy at tick-over speed, watching the depth-sounder every foot of the way. The eddy was moving faster than I’d thought, and it was hard to steer; I found myself dancing a macabre pas de deux; the body and the boat circling each other, twenty feet apart, at a speed of one knot. At last I got the thing lodged squarely amidships on the port side, then went forward to secure it with the boathook and the noose.

  For this to happen twice in one lifetime seemed a bit much, but my previous experience had toughened me, and my chief concern was to avoid slicing into him/her/it with the propeller blades. I had decided that the best strategy was to tow the corpse alongside, which meant somehow getting the noose over the head and shoulders, tightening it, and making the free end fast to the shrouds. If I kept on running, I could make Prince Rupert soon after midnight. Spending the night at anchor in some cove, the body knocking up against the hull all through the small hours, was more than I could bear. There was an automatic VHF relay station on the summit of Gil Island, a few miles back; with luck, I should be able to raise the Coast Guard in Prince Rupert, and maybe meet them—body in hand, as it were—midway.

  These tactical considerations helped to steady my hands as I leaned over the lifelines and spread the noose wide on the surface of the water. (“Drop three-oh minutes and add one hundred.”) The flotsam was moving in slow gyrations, like stirred porridge. With the boathook, I tried to push the body a little way clear of the hull, so as to slide the noose past it, but met a wholly unexpected, hugely liberating absence of resistance. I snagged the hood and lifted the empty jacket out of the sea. The raised back and shoulders, so lifelike, or deathlike, even at the closest quarters, were a balloon of trapped air. The fabric was torn and soiled; by the look of the knife-slashes on the inside, it had been used for cleaning fish. It was a garment that anyone would have been glad to see the last of.

  Since first sighting it, I hadn’t doubted for a moment that it was a body. Spread out on the coachroof, a harmless piece of garbage, the jacket made me feel foolish and hysterical. No one in his right mind would’ve been taken in as I had been. My trouble was bodies on the brain.

  Breasting a sluggish ebb tide, I pushed on up the channel, the shaggy forest of both walls darkening fast. The skirmish with the orange jacket only confirmed what I already knew: that gallivanting around the world in a small boat is a continuing education in one’s limitless capacity for self-delusion. You mistake deep water for shallow. You confidently identify that headland over there as being this one right here on the chart—and for the next few minutes, you busily assemble every visible landform into the shape of what ought to be, and everything appears to fit. You will soon be in for a big surprise.

  The term “Indian,” applied to the aboriginal inhabitants of the Inside Passage, went back to a heroic navigational delusion, when Columbus stepped ashore on the island of San Salvador with an A
rabic interpreter, hoping to be shown the way to the stone city of the Grand Khan. Captain Van, putting too much faith in John Harrison’s chronometers, put most of this coast dangerously far inland. Shipwrecks are usually caused by someone knowing exactly where he is.

  All first-person narratives are like this. I thought it was a body. You thought it was a body. We were wrong.

  Halfway up Grenville Channel, roughly at the point where I had planned to deliver the corpse to the Coast Guard, a long, deep double bay filled the crevice on the northeast wall of the ravine, between the Countess of Dufferin and the Bare Top ranges. The recommended yacht anchorage was in the second bay, behind the low headland of Pike Point. So at dusk I let myself into this perfectly secluded pool, and found it full of pleasure boats.

  Since leaving Potts Lagoon, I had seemed to be so alone in these waters that I had taken to waving at captains of cruise ships—man saluting man in the wilderness. Occasionally, perhaps once or twice a day, I saw another pleasure craft in the distance, usually a white trawler-yacht or a red-and-green miniature tug. The current fashion was for faux workboats, motor yachts disguised as fishing vessels or kitted out with merely decorative, banded steam funnels that made them close kin to Theodore the Little Tugboat on children’s TV. The trawlers couldn’t trawl, the tugs couldn’t tug, but their owners, on vacation from their usual perches high in the office towers of Seattle and Vancouver, wore braided captains’ caps and liked to play at being hardbitten old salts. For three weeks, they exchanged “scuttlebutt,” “spliced the mainbrace” when “the sun was over the yardarm,” and went “gunkholing.”

  Nettle Basin was clearly a famous gunkhole. The boats were anchored in line before a pretty tidal waterfall. Salmon steaks were being charcoal-grilled on every stern-rail barbecue. Across the water came the voices of Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, and Elvis Costello from rival stereo systems. One motor-yacht contributed to the racket by running its generator at full blast.

  Ridiculously affronted by the scene, I sought out a spot as far from the waterfall as possible, let my anchor down, hid in the saloon, and got my own stereo system going (Henry Purcell, Music for the Death of Queen Mary).

  “Lice!” my father used to groan when our Bradford Jowett van rounded the last bend in a Cornish lane, only to find more than two cars already parked in the dunes. He would throw the van into reverse and drive off in search of somewhere more consonant with his idea of gentlemanly solitude. This meant that the beaches on which we actually decamped were usually so small, rocky, dangerous, and inaccessible that every sensible holidaymaker spurned them. It was years before it dawned on me that “Lice!” was a surprising epithet for a clergyman to apply to his fellow men. Tasting his word on my tongue, I parted the curtains above the stove and spat it at the happy rally of Bayliners, Tollycraft, and Nordic Tugs. Lice! My fist clenching the handle of a serving spoon, I swirled the spaghetti around in the pan and splashed the back of my hand with boiling water. The pain was intense, if brief. Salutary, too.

  One of the bad legacies of Romanticism was this greedy prizing of one’s own solitude in an increasingly crowded nature. The central conceit of the “traveler,” as distinct from the mere “tourist,” was that he was alone in the landscape; its sole, original discoverer. To this end, the travelers’ books became engines of mass destruction. They exterminated parties of hikers in the Hindu Kush, wiped out convoys of tour buses, disappeared the cheerful caravan of motor homes, assassinated park rangers, and left a world ethnically cleansed of everyone except the writer and his dusky native friends. The Inside Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists. When the time came to go home, we’d each extol the cavernous solitudes we’d discovered and keep mum about tangling anchor chains with other sole discoverers in silly boats loud with silly music.

  I could at least claim to be up earlier than the rest. They slept, wreathed in mist, lulled by the babble of the waterfall, while I sweated on the foredeck, recovering 120 feet of muddy chain. My getting dressed in the dark was compensated for by the sight of Nettle Basin’s primary featured attraction. On the stony beach at the south end of the bay, two bears, hindquarters up and heads low down, were nosing methodically along the tideline. The larger bear looked up, and knowingly sniffed the air. Lice!

  At its far northern end, Grenville Channel opened onto an archipelago of big and little islands at the mouth of the Skeena River, where, for the first time on the trip, I ran into a fleet of gill-netters at work. Each regulation net, sixteen feet deep and up to 1,200 feet long, ran out from the stern winch of the boat in a drifting parabolic curve; it was kept aloft by a line of cigar-shaped white floats, and its end was marked by a colored buoy the size of a soccer ball. With the sun on the water, the floats were painfully hard to pick out of the dazzle. Wearing Polaroid sunglasses helped, but I still found myself swerving away at the last moment from the quarter-mile string of pearls that popped suddenly into view, dead ahead. I nipped and tucked between boats, close enough to say “Sorry!” to one and “Morning!” to the next.

  The hydraulic winch had made this industrial kind of fishing dangerously easy. In the old days, the length of the net was limited by the pulling power of a two- or three-person crew. Now you just put your foot on the button and the net reeled effortlessly home on the drum, while with gloved hands you picked the salmon out of the mesh and tossed each wriggle of silver into the hold. The mouth of the Skeena was blocked solid with trailing curtains of invisible web. Any fish unwise enough to swim within sixteen feet of the surface was likely to find itself thrashing, entangled in gossamer-thin nylon, and headed for the supermarket, not the spawning grounds.

  Away to the west, a long white bolster of low cloud lay north-to-south down Hecate Strait, but in my neck of the woods the morning was full of dewy brilliance in perfect visibility. I could see Alaska ahead, fifty or sixty miles off, a line of squat purple blisters on the horizon—a sight that made my spirits leap. I got out the chart for Prince Rupert Harbour and began threading my way through the maze of sunlit rockpiles that dotted the suddenly shallow sea. The depth-sounder, confident now, was bouncing around the 100-foot mark—deep by the standards of the North Sea or the English Channel, but very thin water for this coast.

  I passed the Lawyer Islands, with Bribery Islet and Client Reefs close by. Looking back, puzzling over their names, I saw that the cloud I’d noticed before was fog, and the fog was making large strides toward me. A great cliff, as sharply chiseled in the sun as the cliffs of Dover, it filled the western horizon end to end; lemon-colored shadows gave it spurs, buttresses, chimneys, and overhanging crags.

  I could see the buoyed channel leading to Prince Rupert, but it was thick with gill-netters and hedged with sunken rocks. I saw the cliff of fog, now towering right above me, swallow the Lawyer Islands in one gulp. At 2,200 revs, I plowed through the water at 7.5 knots, as fast as the boat could go, pursued by monstrous cotton-candy pillars of advection. I weaved and dodged past the floating nets. A deadhead, five feet across, surfaced just in front of the bow, like a fat trout smashing at a fly. I missed it by inches. The fog marched hard behind me, taking the Kinahan Islands, West and East, then half the fishing fleet. It stalled—miraculously—over Digby Island, and stood as a massive alabaster precipice along the western edge of the channel that led into the city.

  Each time I snaked a glance behind, I saw the fog closing over my wake. Another sixty seconds and the boat would’ve been engorged. I’ve rarely been so grateful to make port as when motoring past the long and busy wharves of Prince Rupert, with its hotels, stores, restaurants, still in sunshine, on the bluff above. “Back in the fleshpots!” I scribbled in my log. “Rupert’s a metrop!”

  Yet fresh from the ruins of Namu, Butedale, Swanson Bay, it was hard to view even a settlement as big and self-important as Prince Rupert without a tinge of Tiresias-like skepticism. I felt as if I, too, h
ad sat by Thebes below the wall, traipsing along this coast of falling cities. Prince Rupert, with its large, ice-free, deep-water harbor, its trans-Canadian rail and road links, had every expectation of a long and happy life. Its port authority claimed it as “Canada’s closest marine gateway to Asia, 30 hours nearer than its nearest North American rival.” Fog permitting, you might peer beyond the western horizon and almost see Tokyo. What the port authority refrained from noticing was that Prince Rupert was so very far from anywhere else of real importance in Canada, or the United States, that its handy proximity to Tokyo might not be quite the godsend it seemed. But for now, given all the talk of the coming Asian Century, Prince Rupert could preen itself on its geographical good luck.

  With Tiresias’s eyes, I squinted up at the shopping mall, Philpott Evitts, the Highliner, the Coast Hotel, and saw fir trees poking through their roofs as over the horizon the yen went into free fall. All the wooden cities of the Northwest had this provisional, gimcrack quality, as if they might easily topple into sudden desuetude. Most of them had started life as a logging, fishing, mining, or army camp; a hundred years later, they still had the lingering air of camps that could be struck immediately on impulse, upon the receipt of a bad-news telegram. It wouldn’t take much for Prince Rupert to go back to forest.

  For a pleasant moment, though, the city could yield a table overlooking the ships and fishing boats maneuvering down in the harbor, salmon cooked en croute, and a bottle of lightly chilled Pinot Gris—metropolitan fleshpot luxuries. (Though when I returned, only weeks later, the restaurant was gone.)

  I liked Prince Rupert. The city laundromat, full of fishermen and yacht-tourists, was like a big rowdy bar on Saturday night; the liquor store sold Laphroaig whiskey, though at a fearful price. In the Safeway, I kept seeing Julia and her mother, always at the far end of an aisle, and always gone when I arrived.