Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  This experiment, if it worked, would demonstrate a realistic alternative to the usual Indian expedients of mounting folk dances and selling dream-catchers or fireworks, cheap cigarettes or tribal bingo, to the waterborne carriage trade. It would set Port Simpson apart as a modern fishing village with its own industrial plant; a place rooted to its traditional occupation while prospering from its export-order ledgers.

  Everybody wanted this to happen, but no one really seemed to believe that it would. Even the chief evangelist for the cannery, the band’s administrator, Don Reynierse, couldn’t help hedging his bets. For the scheme to take off, all the grim variables of the fishing industry had to come into precise conjunction, like favorable stars. The examples of Butedale, Namu, and most other canneries on the coast haunted Lax Kw’Alaams Marine Industries from the moment of its conception. In the harbor was a shabby gill-netter named Native Dream. That plucky but wistful and ironic title seemed to naturally attach itself to Port Simpson’s great painted shed.

  A small craft warning had been issued for Dixon Entrance; the morning forecast promised thirty-knot winds from the northwest, and I was glad of the excuse to stay. Only a few stray puffs of wind were reaching the harbor, but charcoal-gray clouds sped low overhead and the mountain range was lost behind a thick curtain of rain.

  Climbing the walkway at the head of the dock, I was challenged by the man standing at the top. “Would you like to fight?” His question sounded so entirely amiable that I presumed I’d misheard him.

  “What did you say?”

  “Fight. Eff, eye …” he paused. “Gee … tee. Fight!”

  “It’s a bit early in the morning for me.”

  The man pointed to a friend sitting on the step of the harbormaster’s sentry-box office. “He wants to fight—he’s just waiting for you to get in the mood.” The friend was seventyish, plump, rubicund, and quite toothless. He gave me a gummy grin and chuckled. “Heh, heh, heh,” I sniggered feebly back. I saw the point of this joke rather too clearly, and resented its implications. The author of the joke, a cheerful pillar of brawn in a plaid shirt, who couldn’t have been more than ten years younger than me, beamed complacently, the cock of the roost.

  Between the dock and the village was a curious memorial park. Though no larger than twenty yards square, it had been laid out carefully, with concrete paths set in dandelion patches that had once been grass. At its center, a rusty oil drum sat half full of garbage. To its far left was a weathered totem, carved in gray stone, supported by the well-sculpted figure of a beaver gnawing on a log. Behind the drum, a conventional marble plinth commemorated Abraham Lincoln: CHIEF OF KITSHEESE TRIBE, DIED AT PORT SIMPSON JULY 1, 1890, AGED 85 years. This was flanked by two ancient brass bells, from a church or a ship. A few yards away, the barrel of a small naval cannon, the date 1833 stamped below its embossed crown, was pointed straight at Chief Lincoln. There was clearly some conscious artistic intent in the arrangement of these objects; and you couldn’t look at them without seeing the beaver-clan totem, the cannon, the bells, Lincoln, and the trash can resolve into a rueful thumbnail history of Port Simpson.

  I walked to the store along the beach, watching the sand at my feet for the glint of trade-beads. The Vancouver expedition hadn’t put into the bay, deterred by the chain of exposed rocks lying across its entrance. Five miles to the north, Captain Van had named Maskelyne Point, on Maskelyne Island, for Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer-royal and chief advocate of the lunar distance over the Harrison clock as a means of fixing longitude. Maskelyne now was remembered, if at all, as the pompous establishment figure who stood in the way of the plain-spoken Yorkshire inventor, and tried to deny Harrison the Board of Longitude’s £20,000 prize. Yet Vancouver’s naming of the point in Maskelyne’s honor reflected his own experience of the continuing longitude problem: two years out of England, and 230° of longitude east of Greenwich, Captain Van was regularly having more success with his lunar distances than with his clocks. The 1907 edition of Lecky’s Wrinkles notes that the problem of longitude was finally solved only by wireless and submarine telegraphy, when ships’ clocks could be synchronized exactly from continent to continent. Maskelyne had a serious point—in the dispute about long-distance navigation, as on the northern tip of his eponymous island, where the sea was now breaking in a ragged skirt of white.

  The store was bare. “There’ll be a lot more stuff later on, when the boat comes in—if they can make it in this wind.”

  I trudged back to the harbor, where, through the morning, a dozen boats swung in looking the worse for weather. A Fisheries and Oceans patrol vessel—not one of Port Simpson’s favorite callers—tied up just ahead of me. Its captain stood on the dock in the bowlegged half-crouch of the seaman who feels solid ground rearing dangerously under his feet. “It’s blowing like hell off Dundas,” he said, and whistled. Seeing him climb cautiously back aboard, I remembered how I’d fallen flat on my face in a Howth car park at the end of a rolly crossing from Port St. Mary in the Isle of Man: grown used to the motion of the Irish Sea, I was felled by the billows of asphalt that raged between the moored boat and the pub.

  A troller came alongside. “We shouldn’t have gone out. It broke my coffee pot and scared the shit out of the wife. Scared the shit out of me. It was all right till the tide turned. It’s the tide that does the damage.”

  We were at springs, and the ebb was running hard out of Portland Inlet and into Dixon Entrance, where it met a wind of forty knots and gusting higher. The collision of tide, wind, and ocean swell was raising unnaturally steep, close-packed, hollow seas, in which any fishing boat was liable to founder.

  The owner of the troller showed me the local test for a bad sea. From the cannery wharf, you looked for a spot on the northwestern horizon midway between Finlayson and Birnie islands, where the Pointer Rocks broke the surface in mid-channel four and a half miles off. If you could see nothing, Dixon Entrance was okay; if you saw white there, you should stay in harbor. First I saw nothing. Then a sudden pale exclamation mark appeared in the sky—an exploding gout of surf that must’ve been as tall as Port Simpson’s church spire. The danger signal hung motionless in the air for two or three seconds, then collapsed. There was a surprisingly long interval before the next exclamation mark rocketed up from the sea. was as graphic a navigation-warning as any I’d ever seen.

  During the afternoon, the front passed, the wind slackened, the tide changed, Pointer Rocks ceased transmission, and the harbor emptied. Every hour counted when the fishery was legally open, and people lived in a communal high fever, forcing aside seasickness and lack of sleep in order to get their nets out, or trail their plastic-squid lures, in any conditions short of the plainly suicidal.

  As afternoon turned to evening, and the low sun at last lit up the painted west wall of the cannery, the supply launch trundled into harbor. With its cargo piled in lumpy mounds under sea-splashed tarps, the boat looked like a bulging Christmas stocking, and a crowd of people quickly assembled on the dock to meet it. First out from under the tarps was a king-size mattress, shrinkwrapped in plastic. Next came a new gas range. A child’s shiny red bike. Two boxed TV sets. A Yamaha home organ. Once it was copper kettles and brass buttons for sea-otter skins; now it was home entertainment for sockeye salmon.

  For the stores came crates of soft drinks, boxes of vegetables and canned foods. A long line of helpers balanced these goods on their heads up the walkway to a waiting pickup truck, Indians walking in Indian-file. It was nearly dark when the truck drew away, climbing the hill in a swirl of dust, with four happy children riding on the tailgate.

  Back at my boat, I found a gift on the chart table—a sockeye, about seven pounds, already cleaned, in a plastic shopping bag. The giver hadn’t left his name.

  I dined on poached salmon and a complex British Columbia chardonnay, whose long finish left a powerful taste of kerosene on the back of the tongue. Checking the tide tables for the morning, I realized that today was 15 Ju
ly, that my father had died a month ago, and that I’d missed his birthday on the 4th, when he would’ve turned 78. “Only seventy-eight,” people said, as if septuagenarians now weren’t properly qualified to ride in coffins.

  He had become my genie-of-the-lamp. I could summon him at will. As the level in the bottle of vile wine sank—plenty fast enough for two—I was argufying with my father about Port Simpson as if it were a troubled parish. The night was loud with voices, footsteps, engines, the squishing of fenders against the dock, the road-drill sound of the generator on a big purse-seiner (no bedtime for fishermen during an opening). Sprawled on the settee, evading unwashed dishes in the sink, I became aware that my lips were moving as I phrased my thoughts. I was talking to a ghost. I supposed that I’d go on argufying with him until my own time came to die, and that this was as close as people ever really came to enjoying a life after death. Sometime Julia would find herself talking to my ghost as I was talking to my father’s. I hoped so, anyway.

  VII. ON THE BEACH

  In Dixon Entrance at first light, I had white fingers and a hangover. The sea was tarnished silver, the swell flaccid and sleepy. Out to the west, off the port bow, was an unobstructed view of windless, empty ocean. After so many islands, so much contained water, it was exciting to come face to face with the sheer absoluteness of the open Pacific: seemingly the end of the world, with nothing beyond the interminable horizon except sea, and more sea, and more sea after that.

  When Indians found strange things washed ashore by the currents, they cannot have easily imagined that the piece of wood with metal fastenings, or the glass float, had come from another landmass. Every instinct would tell one that such objects came from the depths of the sea. Their stories of Komogwa and Nagunakas told of a technologically advanced, submarine civilization; both were associated with the possession of copper (an alternative name for Komogwa meant “copper-maker”), and their wealth and power derived from skills and materials beyond the Indians’ reach. The usual museum label for these beings is “sea monster”—a misleading term, given their enviable human attributes and interests. What they do closely resemble is a pair of fat undersea emperors. In effect, the Indians had dreamed Japan into being, but located it, like Atlantis, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

  With the nearest available shelter 25 miles away, I searched the sky for signs of coming weather, but it was a uniform wash-gray, not a blotch in sight. If the sea had an unpleasant surprise in store for me, it was playing its cards close to its chest. That was the style of Nagunakas and Komogwa. Their mercurial temperaments, quickness to take offense, and taste for brutal jokes were aspects of the ocean itself. In Port Simpson, Curtis—the ambitious father of daughters—had told me that his father used to say of the sea, “He don’t have no pity for nobody”; and the personification of the sea as masculine was probably a relic of an earlier Indian way of thinking about nature. This morning, though, he seemed to be dozing, breathing evenly in his sleep, a sated shogun.

  Just south of the Lord Islands, at 54°42′N, the boat crossed the pecked line on the chart and entered Alaska. In the far distance, I could see the daunting armada of the American gill-netting fleet. The entrance to Revillagigedo Channel, nearly ten miles across, was blocked solid with small boats. From where I was, it looked as if a swarm of bugs had settled on the water, like blowflies on a carcass.

  As I came closer, the sea frosted over with a light breeze out of the south; more drifting air than wind, but just enough to give me steerageway under sail. To work slowly through the fleet with the engine off would be safer, since I wouldn’t become inextricably wedded to a floating net if I blundered into one. With the genoa out and the water rustling softly past the hull, I began to thread the boat through the gaps between the serpentine lines of white dots.

  The nets were laid across the grain of the new flood tide, and each boat was making constant small maneuvers to keep itself squarely aligned with its own pearl-string of floats. These American nets were longer than Canadian ones—300 fathoms, more than a third of a mile—and they bulged and kinked in the turbulence of the current. I was playing a game with shifting goalposts: one promising gap abruptly closed while another line of corks swung open like a door. Biting hard on my lower lip, I veered this way and that, sliding past the colored marker-buoys at walking pace.

  The boats were all Seattle-registered. I spotted some familiar names from Fishermen’s Terminal, the fleet’s winter quarters. Tree Point, as people called this place, to save themselves the tongue-gymnastics of “Revillagigedo,” was Ballard-in-summer-exile. The boats were family concerns, crewed by brothers, husbands and wives, fathers and sons. On this calm morning, in the middle of an unexpectedly good season, the gill-netters might have been out on a happy floating picnic.

  “When did you leave Seattle?” a woman called as I ghosted past her elbow.

  “First of April,” I said. “April Fools’ Day. But stuff happened.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Juneau.”

  “For Christmas?”

  I heard her retelling the joke to her husband as I drew out of earshot.

  Two or three larger boats, with hand-painted signs saying CASH hung in their rigging, cruised the edges of the fleet. A gill-netter could spend the day fishing and selling, fishing and selling, without moving from its chosen pitch. Gasping salmon, picked from the mesh as the net came inboard, were being translated into dollar bills even before they died of asphyxia.

  This was a landscape of spoliation. The surrounding hills were tonsured like monks: though their lower slopes were thickly furred with second-growth timber, above about a thousand feet they displayed great bald skulls of gray rock, where the new pines had yet to find a footing. Since 1867, when the United States bought the territory from Russia for two cents an acre, Alaska had been continuously beset by transient hunter-gatherers equipped with harpoons, dynamite, shovels, axes, backhoes, gold pans, oil drills, chainsaws, and fishing nets. Few of these people had any intention of settling the land they came to plunder. Home was far elsewhere. They had no interest in farming the Alaskan soil: in 1958, when statehood was granted, only 20,000 acres were under cultivation. All their supplies came by sea, from Seattle; even in the temperate zone of southeast Alaska, people lived as if they were on an offshore oil rig or a research station in Antarctica; feckless clients dependent on the Lower 48 for their simplest needs.

  Alaska was regarded as an inexhaustible treasury of natural assets, to be looted for the nation’s benefit. One of its great attractions was its remoteness; and things could be done there that would not have been tolerated in Washington or Oregon. Young men could run profitably wild in Alaska without damaging the social fabric of their staid hometowns. In the dog days of peacetime, Alaska held out the promise of all the noise and excitement of a major foreign war.

  It had been ransacked and abused. Anywhere else in the world, such punishment would have left a permanently wrecked ground zero. But the climate here was astonishingly forgiving; 160 inches of rainfall a year are a great healer of wounded landscapes. In Alaska, the wilderness quickly grew back to cover mankind’s ugly depredations. It wouldn’t be long now before these bald-pated hills were green again. Salmon still ran—amazingly—in sufficient numbers to support the greedy fleet on Revillagigedo Channel. In 1886, when Hubert Howe Bancroft published his epic History of Alaska, he wrote that “[Alaska’s] resources, though some of them are not yet available, are abundant, and of such a nature that, if properly economized, they will never be seriously impaired.” The wonder was that Bancroft’s claim had not yet been rendered laughable, after more than a hundred years of heedless logging, mining, hunting, and fishing.

  I had on board the 1933 edition of the United States Coast Pilot for Alaska. Even then, half the sawmills and canneries on this stretch of water were described as “not functioning,” “abandoned,” or “in ruins.” In this country of easy pickings, people were quick to give up
and move on. There was always another bit of Alaska’s 7,000-mile coastline where ravaging would take less effort. The scale of the wilderness encouraged even its most predatory attackers to snack, nibble, and look elsewhere. To put down roots, clinging to the land until it was exhausted, had never been part of the footloose Alaskan ethic.

  Revillagigedo Channel led to the tight bottleneck of Tongass Narrows, where the long, thin, jerry-built city of Ketchikan stretched out on a ledge dynamited out of the north shore. The first sign of civilization was an old red double-decker London bus, parked on an apron of rock along with half a dozen trucks and parts of trucks. The exiled bus, with its patina of rust and grime, looked like a good idea whose time had come and gone. According to the chart, Ketchikan at its fattest had three streets: the prospect of riding around them on a London bus had evidently not been the irresistible tourist-draw that some hopeful entrepreneur must have envisioned.

  Big canneries overhung the water on tarred stilts, and the Narrows were crowded with the gill-netters, trollers, purse-seiners, and buyers’ tenders that jostled for position around the cannery wharfs. I pulled into Thomas Basin among the fishing boats and called U.S. Customs from the payphone at the dockhead. The duty officer took down my details, gave me a clearance number, and asked me how I was enjoying my trip.

  “How far you going?”

  “Juneau, Glacier Bay, Sitka—then back to Seattle.”

  “Wish I was going with you.”

  Across the boardwalk was the Potlatch Bar, a raucous cave into which I unwisely stepped for a beer. Apart from the light over the pool table in the far distance, the place was pitch-dark. The wooden floor throbbed to the bass and drums of a rock group hyperventilating on the jukebox. Superimposed on the deafening music were fifty separate conversations conducted in shouts and yells. After quiet British Columbia, the Potlatch Bar had all the noise, violence, and energy of America trapped inside a single room. Groping tentatively toward the counter, I told myself I was glad to be back.