Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  The posted attractions were mercifully undemanding. The most interesting and significant exhibit was in the Pacific Mariner Memorial Park, a small green play-space on the bluff. Here, beside the swings and slides, the Hecate Strait Rotary Club had restored a battered, barnacle-encrusted boat that had drifted on its own from Japan to the Queen Charlotte Islands. A funny-looking craft, it was 27 feet long, flat-bottomed, and as narrow in the beam as a Cambridge punt; I would have feared for its stability, even on the Cam. On 26 September 1985, a retired civil servant named Kazukio Sakamoto had gone out fishing in it from his hometown of Owase, Prince Rupert’s twin city. The wind got up, and he never came back. Eighteen months later, Kazu Maru, his “beloved boat,” as the plaque put it, was found knocking up against the rocks of Skidegate Inlet.

  The westerly drift of winds and currents in the North Pacific meant that bits and pieces from Asia were constantly fetching up on the beaches of this coast. Long before Europeans arrived, Indians were kept regularly supplied with evidence of alien civilizations. A glass float … a piece of wreckage with iron and copper fittings … sometimes, as with Kazu Maru, a whole boat. These strange intimations of another world, laid at the feet of the Indians by the ocean, gave them tantalizing glimpses of a superior technology. The first white explorers were surprised by the natives’ knowledge of the uses of iron and copper: had they looked more carefully at the tidewrack, the mystery would have been explained.

  Copper, particularly, was very highly valued, and many stories accounted for the origin of this precious metal. In a Tlingit version, copper is discovered by the outcast child of the sons of the sun. He lives alone with his mother in poverty, beyond the pale of the village. When he is old enough to go hunting, his mother makes him a bow and arrow, and he meets with a creature—not to be found in zoology—with feet, fins, and wings. His mother instructs him:

  “When it opens its mouth for you and puts its forefeet up on land run down to it. It is your father’s canoe.” So he went there and it opened its mouth for him. His mother had said, “Shoot it in the mouth,” and when he had shot it, it was heard to say, “Ga,” like a raven. It was as if all its seats had been cut off. It was a copper canoe in which were wide seats. The canoe was nothing but copper and broke entirely up. Throughout the night he carried it into his house to his mother. No person knew of it.

  The boy becomes the copper tycoon and marries the daughter of a great chief. That copper comes from the sea in the form of a canoe puts the story squarely alongside the story of Kazu Maru as another tale of marvelous flotsam, delivered here by the Kuroshio Current and the North Pacific Drift.

  Across the street from Mr. Sakamoto’s boat was a modest museum largely given over to Tsimshian relics. To illustrate Tsimshian mythology, the story of Nagunakas, the whirlpool-being and canoe-swallower, was printed up in large letters on a display board. One detail of this variant was new to me: when Nagunakas returned the fishermen he’d captured, he sent them home in a copper canoe, which flew through the air when struck with a copper paddle. Copper, mysterious in its origins, had magical properties, and the arrival of Nagunakas’s canoe would have seemed to the village like a visitation from extraterrestrials.

  Apart from a magnificent carved frog, which once stood guard over a coffin in an open burial house, the museum had the usual assortment of halibut hooks, cedar-bark vests, and repro ceremonial masks. As in most public collections of Indian culture up and down the coast, one’s trip began with a little printed lesson informing the visitor that the First Nations practiced “a philosophy based on respect for nature and concern for the environment.” Indians—in the new mythology—were the original designers of the eco-friendly life, the first passionate recyclers.

  Yet this sort of statement could be made only because the systematic extermination of Indian languages, customs, and beliefs, carried out by zealous Christian ministers and government agents, had been so shockingly successful that no present-day Indian could possibly know what his great-great-great-grandparents had really believed. So it was now easy to attribute to the ancestors almost any belief that was thought desirable for them to have possessed. Most popular books about the Northwest Indians claimed that they had been monotheists, believers in the Great Spirit, a kissing-cousin to God the Father and Jehovah. There was no serious evidence for this—though the early missionaries certainly peddled the Great Spirit notion in an attempt to bridge white-Christian and Indian concepts. Likewise, the “respect for nature and concern for the environment” line is hardly confirmed by the oral literature and surviving art of the Indians. That little or no trace remains of a belief in the supremacy of man over the natural world (the stories tend to suggest the reverse), that no Indian text parallels Genesis 1:26 (“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”) doesn’t—or shouldn’t—imply that the Northwest tribes were protoecologists, dedicated to the postmodern cause of environmental conservation.

  Like John Muir Indians and Fenimore Cooper Indians, these museum Indians were unreal in their milk-and-water nobility. Their art and stories were so full of complex life, so shot-through with grim humor, so of-their-own-kind, that it was insulting to the Indians to cast them, in their current starring role, as people who apologized to salmon before killing them, who hugged the trees before turning them into war-canoes, like good children of the 1990s, following Mother Nature’s rule book.

  Far better to turn away from the preschool digest of Tsimshian “philosophy” and gaze instead at the inscrutable depths of jovial malignity gouged into the features of the great wooden frog.

  Next morning, people were dematerializing at forty feet on the Prince Rupert Yacht Club dock, and the harbor sounded like a stockyard of distressed cattle. I watched the show on radar—twenty or so white blips, moving in every direction across the screen but never, quite, colliding. According to the pilot-book, Prince Rupert was socked in by fog 17 percent of the time in July and 20.6 percent in August. In high summer, the offshore waters were warmer than those inshore, so air moving inland from the west quickly cooled as it hit the frigid inlets and, as it chilled, thickened into woolly fog. The pilot had depressing news: “The fog persists through day and night even with moderate winds … visibilities at or near zero persist over several days.” I steeled myself to face some long afternoons in Charley’s Lounge and Dillon’s Country Bar.

  After mailing a batch of story-postcards to Julia, I monopolized the dockhead phone for an hour. Jean, fighting a deadline on a dance review, was fogbound in her own fashion.

  I was, I said, within ten days of reaching Juneau. “When you come, I thought we’d go up to Glacier Bay, then down and around to Sitka, at least. You could get a flight out from there. There’ll be icebergs, whales, and bears for Julia—I can promise her that.”

  “Great,” Jean said. “I really have to go now.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” she said, and left me listening to the dial tone.

  I was saved from Charley’s Lounge by a sudden, spectacular, barred sunbeam that might have disclosed an annunciation in an Italian painting, but instead had lit on a raft of disreputable-looking fishing boats clustered around a single anchor in mid-harbor. The fog disintegrated in minutes, leaving ragged cottonballs snagged in the trees. I left Prince Rupert by the back door, worming my way past the rocks of Venn Passage and into the lagoon of Metlakatla, an Indian reserve whose fishermen’s sheds and floathouses were sprinkled over the looking-glass water.

  Too little daylight now remained for me to cross the open bight of Dixon Entrance and find shelter in Alaska before nightfall, but another Indian settlement, about 25 miles north of Prince Rupert, looked interesting. On one chart it was named Port Simpson; on another, Lax Kw’ Alaams. Boxed in by reefs, with an approach too s
hallow for cruise ships, it was given short shrift by the yachting guides, though the pilot-book made it sound a place of substance. A muddy panoramic photograph showed a large village spreading out from the high spire of its central church. To me it looked like the Cornish seaside villages my father used to seek out on our summer holidays. Abhorring such tourist favorites as Mevagissey and Polperro, he considered himself the Columbus of Portloe. Each year he’d groan that Portloe was being “discovered,” and eventually moved us all deep inland. Our tents would be put up in the lee of hills of powdery china clay, and our faces would go as dusty-white as any miller’s. The landscape was memorably ugly, but to my father’s eye it had the enormous merit of being as yet undiscovered by the holiday Vespuccis and Magellans in Morris Oxford estate cars.

  My father would’ve enjoyed coming into Lax Kw’Alaams. In fine visibility on a rippled sea, it was a nice exercise in careful coastal navigation. I ran from buoy to buoy, skirting rocks and outlying sandbars, making close turns round islets, watching my wake for signs of tidal drift. The entire coast north of Prince Rupert was marked as Indian land, and appeared quite uninhabited. Not a louse to be seen.

  Nor, when I made the last turn, past the FUCK YOU spray-painted for visitors by village delinquents in large red letters, was there a pleasure boat in sight. Along with three purse-seiners and a big crabber, the local gill-netting and trolling fleet had the place to themselves. My father greatly approved.

  I pulled up alongside two men who were repairing a gill net on the dock. While I was fastening my lines, one of them lifted the net to show a hole that a Morris Oxford could comfortably have driven through.

  “Fish!” he said.

  “That’s a serious project,” I said.

  A gill net, fully loaded, with corks and a weighted leadline, cost about $5,000 to put together, plus several days of tedious dockside labor. The web alone cost $3,000. Sunlight, salmon, and the strain of being winched out of the water every sixty minutes or so quickly weakened the nylon mesh. Prosperous fishermen renewed their nets each season. The others made do by patching half-rotten nets, at the end of every outing, with a spool of green nylon and a mending-needle. The old, darned nets were said to fish much less efficiently than new ones, so the poorer fishermen caught fewer salmon, made less money … the usual story.

  The men talked as they worked, but turned down my offer of Laphroaig. “Half my friends now are on skid row,” one said.

  “How do you pronounce the name of this place?”

  “Port Simpson.”

  “No—I mean that one,” I said, pointing to a sign saying LAX KW’ALAAMS MARINE INDUSTRIES INC. on the gray hangar-like building above the docks.

  The man made gargling and spitting noises. “Like that. Kind of.”

  The village had changed its name ten years before. Lax Kw’Alaams was Tsimshian for “place of roses,” but it hadn’t caught on except in official circles, for there were few people still alive, outside anthropology departments, for whom the words meant anything.

  “My father, he knew some of the old language. His mother used to talk Indian to him when he was a kid, and his grandparents, they spoke it all the time.”

  “What about the old stories? Does anyone still tell them now?”

  “All the people have passed away. I should’ve made a tape. The young ones now, they don’t give a damn.”

  Something of the original Tsimshian survived in the talk of both men. Their vowels were Scottish-missionary, but their voices popped and clicked with the glottal stops of the ancestral language, like the Cockney bo!-l for “bottle” or pi!-ta bi!-er for “pint of bitter.”

  The younger of the two, Curtis, told me he had four daughters, aged between five months and nine years old. All his ambitions were invested in these girls. “I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them working at the cannery. I want them to be doctors and engineers—like white people. I tell ’em, ‘You got to learn four languages. You got to speak Japanese. You got to speak Spanish. You got to go to school till you’re sick of it!’ Right now, I’m educating ’em up at home with flash-cards and computers.”

  Compoo!-ers.

  I said I had a daughter, too.

  “What you want her to be?”

  This was a question I’d never been asked, and never addressed. I reached for the nearest available word on the shelf and said, firmly, “A scientist.”

  “You have to push ’em, John. Push ’em hard. It’s pushing does it.”

  I saw Curtis, like an Olympic shot-putter, trying to lob his daughters, one by one, out of the reserve and over the mountains to heaven-knew-where: Vancouver, maybe, or Toronto; somewhere far enough, at any rate, for improbable dreams to come true.

  Soon after seven, Curtis’s wife brought the men’s supper down to the dock. As darkness fell, the two were still at it, weaving away at the rotten web with their mending-needles. They must have spent more time repairing their net than they did fishing it.

  Port Simpson wasn’t quite off the beaten track. A ferry called there twice a week; the new school had a helipad in its yard; floatplanes regularly put down into the bay and taxied over to the cannery wharf. There was a plan to eventually cut a road south to Metlakatla and Prince Rupert. By boat, in gentle weather, the run to Prince Rupert took four hours, so it was possible—just—to shop in town and get back on the same day. Eleventh- and twelfth-graders went to the high school in Prince Rupert, boarding with Indian families there, which kept Port Simpson in continuous close touch with big-city life. The gang slogans on the wharf (for the Toyas) came up from Rupert along with the groceries and portable CD-players.

  Yet it felt remote. The grid of dirt streets at the foot of Town Hill, sunbaked and dusty, turned to gluey mud in the autumn rains. The two stores were wooden shacks, indistinguishable from the village houses. The main current of tourist money passed by about ten sea-miles to the west, and there appeared to be no way of diverting it—though a local artisan had become the object of envious amazement when he carved a thirteen-foot totem pole and sold it for $3,500.

  Fishing was still Port Simpson’s biggest business. A hundred boats worked out of the harbor, taking their chances on capricious salmon runs, yo-yo fish prices, and the arcane pattern of closings (long, and getting longer) and openings (short, and getting shorter) imposed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Just now, the mood on the docks was one of dazed high spirits, for the Skeena River fishery was having its best season in years. The early prediction was for a strong run of sockeye salmon, at least three million; but the run had started early, the fish were crowding thickly off the estuary, and the marine biologists had upped their estimate to seven million or more. Boats were coming back to Port Simpson low in the water. I’d watched a small troller off-loading at the cannery, where a crane let down a white plastic tub the size of a bath. The tub came up, time after time, brimming with fish—an act of legerdemain, the little boat serving as the magician’s bottomless hat.

  I had passed so many ruined canneries that it was a surprise to find Port Simpson, of all places, in possession of a brand-new one; a massive prefabricated aluminum shed, painted pale gray on three sides to match the prevailing color of the sky. Though everyone called it “the cannery” out of habit, no fish were canned there. The Tsimshians were aiming at a narrower, more expensive, niche of the market, by producing frozen fillets, boxes of high-grade roe for the Japanese trade, and jars of low-grade roe for anglers’ bait. In a nice match of tribal tradition and commercial opportunism, the next planned move was to build a smokery and make gourmet-quality smoked salmon.

  The interior resembled the kind of hospital in which you’d hope never to find yourself a patient—a maze of conveyor belts, white operating tables, and concrete drains running with small rivulets of blood. It smelled more strongly of disinfectant than of fish, and its midwinter temperature made me eager to leave almost as soon as I’d set foot inside.

 
; Yet this cold, gray, government-financed project was a cherished experiment. The Northwest Coast Indians had been producers of raw materials; they chopped wood and caught fish. Or they made souvenirs—from exquisite carvings in argillite in the nineteenth century to miniature totems, usually crudely done, today. But big profit always resides in the value-added component of the product, and all the canneries and pulp mills were owned and managed by whites, who employed Indians only as menial labor. At the Port Simpson cannery, Indians were adding their own value to the fish, and the profits—if and when they came—would flow back into the reserve. Much hope and anxiety was focused on whether the shed on the wharf could become self-supporting, and so light the way ahead for other villages on the coast.

  On the seaward side, its long metal wall was painted with a giant trompe l’oeil mural showing the landscape immediately ahead. The bay was bright blue, and the mountain range rose from the far shore in a swathe of emerald-green. The clear sky was lightly streaked with mare’s-tails of high cirrus.

  Some days the colors of the painting must have coincided with those of reality, but when I was there, the cannery wall stood in violent contrast to its surroundings. The real clouds were low nimbus, the mountains purple verging on black, and the water of the bay like ribbed, gray fish glue.

  At present—at the height of a startlingly good season—the cannery had ninety people on the dayshift, and seventy on nights. Pay was $10 an hour; less than at the cannery in Prince Rupert, but here on the reserve the money was tax-free. People like the tribal administrator, whose tinted specs and clipped mustache brought an unexpected touch of business-school fashion to Port Simpson, were crossing their fingers and touching wood that this near-miracle would hold. For now, at least, what was going on inside the shed was living up to the sunny optimism of the painting on its wall.