Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  Perched on a razor-slashed barstool, waiting for a lull in which to holler my order, I listened to a man at my left shoulder telling a friend about his recent purchase of a pickup truck. Swapping the word “truck” for “fuck,” and vice-versa, the story went roughly as follows: He’d got the trucking fuck from a truck way the truck up a trucking mountain; but the trucking transmission was trucked—he’d put the trucker in trucking third trucking gear, and truck!… he’d trucking gone back to trucking kill that mothertrucker for trucking with him. Etcetera.

  “Shit,” said the friend.

  There was no attempt at elegant variation in the scatological stream: “truck” was used, impartially, to connote people and things, and to qualify every noun and every verb. When I tuned out of one conversation and into another, it was the same. From end to end, the Potlatch Bar was filled with trucks and trucking.

  The bartender at last chose to notice me: I got a trucking beer out of her, drank the trucker, and got the truck out of the trucking place. This was, after all, trucking Alaska.

  Back on the boardwalk, a drunk was trying to nap on a picnic-table bench. Each time he got himself more or less horizontal, he rolled off; a sack of insensate flesh. To me it seemed a vain ambition—he should’ve settled for the ground long ago. But he seemed determined to achieve the dignity of the bench, and I watched him clamber groggily upon it for the third time, find momentary equilibrium, then collapse back onto the boardwalk, where he lay spreadeagled, face down, and, for a minute or two, quite motionless.

  There then appeared a cyclist, on an early-evening workout, in black spandex shorts, green spandex top, and a white banana-style helmet—a figure common in Seattle but looking strangely displaced in Ketchikan. The gender of this gleaming creature was indeterminate, though the white socks were distinctly girlish. At the sight of the body on the boardwalk, the cyclist dismounted and, from a posture of conscientious social concern, bent toward the drunk and said something I couldn’t hear.

  The drunk’s head lifted an inch or two from the ground. “Truck you!” he said, with surprising force and volume.

  I could see his point. To be awakened from a sodden coma by a giant pale-green grasshopper would be just the kind of thing a drunk most fears.

  The cyclist shot me an And what do you think you’re staring at? glare, then pedaled off. I crossed the road to where an elevator, gouged into the cliff-face, promised instant transportation to a world of elegant fine dining and panoramic views. The glass cage took a long time to climb above the unruly city of tin roofs and cluttered masts. At the end of the ride, I stepped out into a hotel lobby empty but for light-orchestral Muzak and potted palms. After the boardwalk and the Potlatch Bar, this seemed as close to an ascension into heaven as Ketchikan was likely to offer.

  I took a seat in the largely empty dining room, whose enormous windows looked out over Tongass Narrows to the blackened mountain ridge of Gravina Island. Ketchikan was beneath the picture frame, though two white, beaked cruise ships, moored at the town center, just scraped in. I smoothed open my notebook, asked for a glass of Hogue Cellars Merlot from Washington State, and settled down to write.

  I hadn’t enjoyed such height and space in weeks, and the dining room seemed a good perch from which to survey the voyage so far, and to try to see if anything resembling a pattern or a story was discernible in its tumble of places and events. Not much, not yet. While a number of wispy narrative strands had begun to emerge, I knew that journeys hardly ever disclose their true meaning until after—and sometimes years after—they are over.

  I had just finished specifying to the waitress exactly how I wanted my steak cooked—“on the rare side of medium-rare, please”—when a man at a neighboring table raised his right hand in a ridiculous stiff-armed military salute.

  “Hail, fellow Brit,” he said.

  An Englishman, as Mr. Yorick said, does not travel abroad to meet other Englishmen. I gave the man a crooked and, I hoped, deterrent smile, then made a show of scribbling intently in my notebook.

  He was not deterred.

  “I think I’ve heard you on the BBC.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Radio 4. The Valium of the middle classes.”

  I wrote: “Everyone in Ketchikan is drunk.” This one was in the early, uninhibited, loquacious stage. In a matter of seconds, he and his girlfriend had established themselves at my table. Both smelled of fish. He was full of aggressive bounce; she was pale, stringy, and moved like a sleepwalker, making vague swimming strokes as she came toward me. They were nearing the bottom of their second bottle of wine, though her glass looked untouched.

  They worked in the cannery at the foot of the cliff, and this meal was their treat for having survived the first month.

  “Know what my last job was?” the man said. “The House of Commons. I was —— ——’s assistant. Know him?”

  I did, at least by reputation: a veteran Labour M.P., and parliamentary spokesman for Israeli interests in Britain.

  “House of Commons to the fish cannery,” said the man complacently. “What do you make of that?”

  He’d gone to school at Dulwich College in south London, and taken a degree in political science at Southampton University. Now he was sorting salmon species on the wharf; shoveling the cohos, sockeyes, pinks, kings, and chums onto their separate conveyor belts. He, at least, was in the open air all day; his girlfriend was employed doing something nasty in the bowels of the cannery.

  “Where are you from?” I asked her.

  “You won’t have heard of it. Park City, Utah?”

  He earned $12.50 an hour; she earned $10. They lived in the cannery bunkhouse, and usually spent nothing. Working nineteen-hour days, they hoped to come away with around $10,000 apiece at the end of two months—enough to travel for a year, so Simon said. “We’ll be rich tourists.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Ladakh.”

  As he talked numbers, I saw that money was the least part of the story. The pay was lousy. If one wanted to explain this couple’s presence in Ketchikan, you’d have to look elsewhere—to winter mornings on the Tube between Westminster and a shared flat in Stockwell; to the stringencies of life in Park City, pop. 4,468; but most of all, to Alaska’s mythic reputation as the land of swaggering freebooters. Trying to freeboot on $12.50 an hour would be damned hard going, but they saw themselves as having arrived in the right state, at least, to kick over the traces, go on the lam, and scare their families sick with their postcards home. In Surrey, as in Park City, the Alaskan postmark on the stamp would be enough to raise a flutter of parental disquiet.

  The cannery, Simon said, was a Babel of languages. There were Russians, Romanians, Hispanics, Chinese …

  “Monique—she’s French,” said the girlfriend, in a rare burst of articulacy. Her head was beginning to sink toward her plate.

  My steak arrived. Not so much grilled as cured and tanned, it would have made a fine sole for a prospector’s boot.

  Glazed with drink and exhaustion, Simon began to rant, turning the heads of the handful of elderly couples who were our fellow diners. With a glance at his fading girlfriend, he took on the American educational system.

  “A university degree in this country—it’s fucking meaningless. It’s like ‘O’-Levels in England. Everybody’s got one. She’s got one—”

  “What did you major in?” I asked her.

  “Education,” she said sleepily.

  “It’s fucking laughable,” Simon said. But he wasn’t laughing. He was challenging me to a fight. When I ducked this issue, he produced another.

  “I hate English.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s a wanker’s language. It’s like the English are—polite and refined, and dishonest.”

  He means me, I thought.

  “If I want to express myself, I can’t do it in English. There’s only one language I can really
say what I feel in.”

  “Really? What’s that?” I said, politely living up to his definition of Englishness.

  “Hebrew. I can express myself in Hebrew.” He paused, swallowed half a glassful of wine, scrunched up his face, sawed the air with his hands, and began to shout at me in what might well have been Hebrew. His performance reminded me strongly of someone giving witness in a Pentecostal mission. He was speaking in tongues.

  He now had the full attention of the dining room. The waitress was backed into a corner. The expressions of the elderly couples were frozen, as in a game of statues. Someone was having a coughing fit. And I was, too obviously, being held responsible for the behavior of my dreadful charges.

  The girlfriend, who’d been dozing with her head on her side plate, came briefly awake. She didn’t appear to understand Simon’s Hebrew any better than I did, but the noise of it was clearly familiar to her.

  “You see?” Simon said, in a voice suddenly mild and inquiring.

  “ ‘Can you please show me the way to the railway station?’ ” I said.

  “What?”

  “What you were saying, in Hebrew.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I thought for a moment he was going to cry.

  “I want to go back to the bunkhouse.” The girlfriend’s voice was a groan. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  Abruptly, surprisingly, Simon was restored to sober solicitude. “She’s not strong,” he said. “She’s tired.” He helped her to the bathroom, giving me my chance to settle my bill and escape to the elevator.

  Descending the bluff, watching the constellation of lights on Tongass Narrows, I thought that as long as the world had people like Simon in it, Alaska would never be short of migrant labor. He was made for the place: the prototype of that legion of young men whose rootless discontent made Alaska a transforming idea. Simon should have been here for the Gold Rush. I was sorry—almost, but not quite, to the point of paying for his dinner—that he earned only $12.50 an hour.

  On the boardwalk, I was stopped by a young woman dressed from another age: fishnet tights, stiletto heels, black leather microskirt, fluffy pink sweater, and a lacquered bouffant hairdo. My own teenage years came back to me in a melancholy rush.

  “Yawannadate?”

  “No thanks.” But I was glad to have been asked. The streetlamps were dim, and she cannot have seen the crow’s-feet around my eyes.

  She resumed her patrol, heels clicking on the boardwalk. There was rain in the air.

  I woke to the bedside radio, which had been left on all night. On the local NPR station, someone was talking about the problem of garbage-bears. Ketchikan, she said, was afflicted more than any other Alaskan city by bears roaming through backyards, upending trash cans, diving in Dumpsters, and harassing old people on their way to the post office. Authorities were trying to chase them away with noisemakers and rubber bullets. Repeat offenders were being shot with anesthetic darts and transported by barge to remote islands, from where they quickly found their way back to the Ketchikan honeypot. One bear, fitted out with a radio collar, had been exiled to Foggy Bay, 45 swimming miles away; three weeks later, it was back in the city eating leftover pizzas and french fries. “People create garbage-bears,” was the slogan, and locals were being urged to incinerate their garbage and help drive the junk-food addicts back to the wild.

  “It’s a typical summer day in Ketchikan this morning,” said the announcer. “Chance of precipitation—one hundred percent. The weather’s clousy. Now back to ‘Morning Edition’—”

  I raised the forehatch and looked out. A cruise ship, moving slowly past the breakwater, was a faint shadow on a screen of dirty gauze. Visibility was down to about a hundred yards. I was glad of the excuse to stay on. I liked what I’d seen of Ketchikan, and wanted more.

  One had to watch one’s feet on the dock, dangerously slippery in places where puddles of yellow vomit had been spilled by revelers the night before. On this dank morning, Ketchikan revealed itself as a town adapted to the needs of men far from home, blessed with an unlikely abundance of pawnshops, tattoo parlors, and payphones. The payphones, in every available nook and corner, were of a design new to me, incorporating fold-up plastic seats and generous Plexiglas umbrellas to deflect the rain. Even this early in the day, most were occupied by wrinkle-browed husbands calling distant wives. Walking past a half-dozen phones, I kept hearing the same half of the same conversation—that muttering, serious tone, those anxious inquiries, that halting recitation of dates and times, interpolated with ifs and buts. My turn at the conversation would come later in the day.

  In the Pioneer Cafe, sitting at the counter for breakfast, mine was the only pair of forearms bereft of tattoos, and the trucks were out in force again; trucking-this, truck-that, I told the truck … It seemed that in this town rigorous profanity was an official male duty, like taking out the trash or raking the fall leaves. You failed at manhood if you neglected to insert at least five trucks into an average sentence. In a lifetime as an occasional barfly, I’d never heard such a flood of casual, routine obscenities as drifted past my ears in Ketchikan.

  By the time breakfast was over, the cruise ships had let their passengers go off to play and a bee-swarm of couples was out in the streets, everyone clad in the same pale-gray diaphanous plastic mac, of the kind you could squinch into a fist-sized ball and stow in a pocket or a handbag. The macs must have come with the compliments of the cruise line. They made the crowd rustle as it moved—if movement was the word for its lethargic shuffling from storefront to storefront.

  By non-Alaskan standards, Ketchikan was village-sized. If the streets were empty, it would take three or four minutes to walk the city center end to end. In summer, it suffered thousands more strangers than it could reasonably bear: logging crews, cruise passengers, seasonal cannery workers, commercial fishermen, sport fishermen here for the charter fleet, boat tourists like me. The little town was bursting with us, and we were all in a bad temper with one another, crushed, haunch to haunch, like cows in a corral. We squeezed into an alleyway of gift shops, pushing and shoving, saying “Excuse me!” in voices that threatened rather than begged pardon.

  Standing guard on either side of a gift-shop doorway were two teenage boys with acne-inflamed faces and golfball adam’s apples. Dressed in fake-fur busbies, red tunics, and black pants, they shouldered wooden dummy rifles. Both looked painfully embarrassed when the video cameras came out from under the plastic macs and the ratchety purring of the motor-drives began. The idea of dressing the boys up as Buckingham Palace guardsmen had presumably sprung from the same brain that had brought the London bus to Tongass Narrows. What next? Pearly kings and queens? A mock-up of Big Ben? The gift shops sold the usual assortment of Indian souvenirs, from knitwear to dream-catchers, pint-sized totem poles, and “trade-beads” of doubtful provenance.

  A woman in the crowd said to her husband, “We really need another day. There’s so much to see!”

  Excuse me!

  I wriggled through.

  It was no-go at the little one-story Tongass Museum. That had been stormed long ago, and a line of couples trailed far down the sidewalk, queuing for admission. My view of Ketchikan was quickly changing: I found myself beginning to think fondly of the Potlatch Bar as a civilized haven from the slow-crawling mob.

  I reached Creek Street, the southernmost point of tourist Ketchikan before the cannery workers and fishermen got the town more or less to themselves. The creek was a walled-in tidal drain overhung by a row of nondescript wooden cottages, once bars and whorehouses but now reclaimed for the picturesque by several coats of white, pale-blue, and coral-pink paint. Most were gift shops; one, Dolly’s House, had become a museum of quaint, old-time prostitution.

  All the videocams were trained on Dolly’s House, which was meant to conjure rambunctious times in Historic Alaska, when whores weren’t whores but ladies of the night. Its modern occup
ants, making come-hither gestures from the windows, were waxwork dummies, decorously swathed in crinoline, taffeta, and lace. Though Creek Street had in fact been a full-service combat zone well within living memory, the proprietors of Dolly’s House managed to suggest that its heyday had been a century or two ago, when the tricks were probably cross-gartered and wearing powdered wigs, so you could show your video to the grandchildren without a blush. Dolly’s House belonged to the colorful tapestry of “heritage”—history wiped fastidiously clean of the last speck of grubby meaning.

  Had the cameras swiveled through 135 degrees, they would have found that Creek Street, far from being dead and gone, had merely relocated its businesses a few yards to the south. Instead of filming waxworks, the cruise-ship passengers could easily have shot the real thing, in unalluring close-up. For $50 or so, they could’ve got laid. That would be a worthwhile story. “When your grandpa went to Ketchikan …”

  I wondered how long it would take—ten years? twenty?—before the Potlatch Bar went the way of Creek Street and was refurbished as a tourist site, charmingly evoking the lost world of fin de siècle alcoholism and prostitution.

  I missed the exact moment in the afternoon when the whistle blew or the clock chimed; but suddenly Ketchikan was empty. The performance finished for the day, with the mac-people back in their staterooms and the ships sliding crabwise across the ebb tide, leaving behind a ransacked city. Tomorrow, another 4,000 middle-class invaders would be let loose on the town, but overnight we low-life visitors would be in the ascendancy, fighting and drinking and trucking.

  I found a vacant payphone on the city wharf and called home. Julia was still at preschool, but Jean was in. She’d booked their flight; they’d be arriving in Juneau at 8:25 A.M. on 1 August. She was coping with single parenthood, she said, and with the dance season winding down had to write only one or two reviews a week. She and Julia were off to a party this evening. She sounded happy, and in confident control of things.