Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  A roll of low cumulus grazed the water in the channel and hid Gravina Island from view. Nearby, the gray water was moving seaward in looping arabesques. I watched it stream out from a piling like a long braid of thick hemp rope, raveling and twisting in the current.

  “I can’t wait,” I said.

  “Me neither,” Jean said. “When I put Julia to bed last night, she suddenly sat bolt upright and shouted ‘I—need—my—daddy!’ She really misses you.”

  “She’s getting my cards?”

  “They’re in every mail. Sometimes two at once.”

  Though it was long before sunset, lights were on all over Ketchikan. With the smell of woodsmoke and the premature encroaching darkness, it felt like a late-November evening.

  Buoyed by Jean’s news, I went to a supermarket north of the town center and filled my cart. Since almost everything came up from Seattle by plane or ship, the bill at the checkout was arrestingly large; never before had I managed to spend $231 in a supermarket in one visit. That was another measure of Alaska’s condition as a client-state of the Lower 48: a box of cornflakes, or a stick of butter, was a luxury import. Almost the only locally manufactured goods I could find were six-packs of beer at the neighboring liquor store.

  In the cab back to the boat, Gloria, the driver, told me that she’d first come to Alaska with her husband.

  “He was a jerk. He was a good provider, but a real jerk. The grass was always greener … Know that type?”

  “Don’t I just?” I said.

  After her divorce, she’d taken her two children back to Los Angeles. But California city life was “too scary.” Gloria got her license as a nurse, then worked her way back to Alaska via Seattle.

  “You ought to come to Ketchikan in winter. You can’t see it now, but this is a real nice, safe, small town. It’s a backyard place—we all talk over our fences—and just great for kids. I’ll die here, I guess. It’s just in summer that it looks bad. In winter it’s real cozy—you should see.”

  I could imagine. In the dark and cold and rain, Ketchikan would be a warm and neighborly huddle on its rocky ledge, squeezed tight between the forest and the water. Down south, small towns had lost their self-containedness to the web of interstate highways, but here there’d be nowhere at all to go except Ketchikan. For months on end, it would be like living aboard a ship at sea.

  The winter would bring auditions for The Sound of Music with the First City Players, performances by Ketchikan’s amateur ballet company, classes in pottery and printmaking, ice fishing, the Build-a-Snowman Competition, fish art by Ray Troll at the SoHo Coho Gallery, quilting bees, meetings of the Writers Guild at the Parnassus Bookstore at the far end of Creek Street …

  An outgoing sort would not find it hard to be cozy in Ketchikan.

  After breakfast at the Pioneer Cafe, where a fight broke out between two women (“That was my trucking husband, bitch!”), I pushed off under a leaky sky, draped between the tops of Ketchikan’s tallest buildings and the trees on the far side of the narrows. Sweatered, gloved, and creaking uncomfortably in foulweather jacket and trousers, I zigzagged through the traffic of cruise ships, tugs, and fishing boats. Columns of steam at the pulp mill—now threatened with imminent closure—appeared as the stalks from which the overspreading gray sky was blooming.

  “Thick and rainey weather” had been the rule when the Vancouver expedition called here in August 1793. Discovery and Chatham had anchored in sixteen fathoms in Port Stewart, a deep bay just around the corner from the north end of Tongass Narrows. According to Archibald Menzies’s journal, something happened that gave an abrupt new twist to the relationship between Indians and whites. His entry is short and matter-of-fact:

  28th. One of [the] Natives was during this time very anxious in his solicitations to go with us to England & Capt Vancouver seemed inclined to indulge him as it was his own voluntary request, but on the 28th punishments were inflicted on board the Discovery of a very unpleasant nature, on seeing which all of the Natives left the Bay, & he that was before so solicitous to go with us now went away without taking leave of us & never afterwards returned to the Vessels.

  There are many white accounts of the barbarous customs of the Indians; but none of them are matched in grotesquerie by the English tribal ritual that routinely took place aboard Discovery—the man strapped to a grating, the bosun’s mate with the cat-in-the-bag, the flesh ripped open to the bone, the full-dress ceremonial of the occasion, all the ship’s company standing at attention while the victim screamed. What can the Indians have thought they were witnessing? How was the story told as it traveled up and down the coast? No wonder the natives fled the bay in panic after the show.

  Winston Churchill epitomized the eighteenth-century navy with the phrase “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” Captain Van was addicted to the lash. The official logbooks for Discovery are lost, but Peter Puget happened to copy out ten days of entries into his own journal, and they suggest that Vancouver ordered a flogging every three or four days. Between 30 May and 8 June 1792 (the happy period in which Captain Van explored the promising and fertile landscape around Puget Sound), three men were punished.

  Wednesday 30th … Punished Willm. Wooderson Seaman with 24 Lashes for Insolence …

  Saturday 2d … Punished Jos. Murgatroyd Seaman with 12 Lashes for disobedience of orders …

  Wednesday 6th … Punished John Thomas with 36 Lashes for Neglect of Duty …

  Even for the 1790s, these punishments were extreme. It looks as if at six bells in the forenoon watch, eleven o’clock, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Vancouver would single out some cheeky seaman and have him flayed to within an inch of his life.

  Menzies’s distaste for these violent assertions of authority rings through his journal. The naturalist and the captain were now utterly at loggerheads.

  Sir

  It is really become so unpleasant to me to represent to you verbally any thing relative to the Plant-frame on the Quarter-Deck that I have now adopted this method to mention to you all the alterations or rather additions which I wish to be made to its original plan, for the security of the plants within it, together with the occasional aid that may be required to look after it, in my absence; that my solicitation for its success may not subject me to such treatment …

  His letter’s frigid tone says much about the atmosphere aboard Discovery. Menzies, a civilian, was alone among the gentlemen of the quarterdeck in being able to stand up for himself against Vancouver, whom he had come to regard as an irascible self-exalted madman. Writing to Sir Joseph Banks, Menzies would represent his captain as a pompous figure of fun.

  I forgot to tell you that our Commander has already perpetuated his name on this Coast, for the great Island we circumnavigated last summer of which Nootka is a part, is modestly named Quadra & Vancouver’s Island.…

  Captain Van retaliated by denying Menzies the use of a small boat for his botanical expeditions. Humored to his face, abused behind his back, the friendless commander could take comfort only in his rank and the displays of arbitrary power to which it entitled him.

  Indian chiefs demonstrated their power by embarrassing their neighbors and rivals with gifts so lavish that they couldn’t be reciprocated. Captain Van resorted to the horrible ceremony in the waist of the ship. It was a much less subtle form of public humiliation than the potlatch, but both rituals served the same end, and trumpeted the status of the man who laid them on for the edification of the crowd. Vancouver was short, fat, sickly; and the more his body deteriorated over the course of the voyage, the greater his need to remind his audience that he was still the chief, the holder of a royal commission from King George.

  For several generations, at least until the 1850s, when Judge Swan came to the Washington coast, white visitors were called by the Indians “King George men.” So it seems that Captain Van made the impression he desired.

  Following Discovery, I ran up Clarenc
e Strait, close to the mountainous and rock-strewn shore of the Cleveland Peninsula. The names on the chart reflected Captain Van’s drift of thought that August, as he claimed the wilderness for the House of Hanover. He named the continental shore New Hanover, though the title failed to stick. The water on which I was motoring was

  the most spacious of [various channels], which … in honor of His Royal Highness Prince William Henry, I have called THE DUKE OF CLARENCE’S STRAIT; it is bounded on the eastern side by the Duke of York’s islands, part of the continent about Cape Caamano, and the isles de Gravina. Its western shore is an extensive tract of land, which (though not visibly so to us) I have reason to believe is much broken, and divided by water, forming as it were a distinct body in the great archipelago. This I have honored with the name of THE PRINCE OF WALES’S ARCHIPELAGO.

  Cloistered in his private quarters, in unhappy exile from the social life of the main cabin, Vancouver kept lordly company in the pages of The Royal Kalendar. By the end of the voyage, he had bespattered the coast with viscounts, earls, and dukes. The great families of eighteenth-century England—the Spencers, Portlands, Binghams, Cokes, Lucans, and many others—still grace the windy capes and ice-cluttered inlets of Alaska with their names.

  The gray sea was stippled, the cat’s-paws of wind playing across it too fluky to justify the hoisting of a sail. The sodden air threw the world into pearly soft focus. I got my camera and photographed a flock of sandpipers flying north, wing-to-wing in close formation. Trying to catch the moody iridescence of the light, I took more pictures of a passing troller, Peggie Ann, out of Ketchikan—a cobweb of wet rigging, its four reined-in trolling poles scraping against the bank of cloud overhead. In the viewfinder it looked a strange creature, bred to the Inside Passage by some Darwinian process of selective adaptation: part insect, with long, probing antennae; part bird; part fish; and part snug family homestead.

  I called Peggie Ann over the radio and got Mrs. Nic Nebl, very pleased to hear that I’d been taking snapshots of her boat.

  “We’re so proud of her. We’ve always wanted a picture of her at sea.”

  Weeks later, I sent the Nebls an enlargement of Peggie Ann, white with gray trim, afloat in what appeared to be a troubled sky, like a descending thunder-eagle or a double-headed flying sisiutl. At Christmas, a large parcel came from Ketchikan; a reciprocal gift of smoked sockeye salmon.

  An escort of chuffing porpoises saw me through the entrance to Meyers Chuck, tricky with submerged offlying rocks. Despite all indications to the contrary, this wasn’t really the flipper of friendship, extended by mammals to humankind: our divergent interests merely happened to coincide at the entrance-channel, used by salmon and boats alike. So, with no fish to chase, the porpoises were keeping themselves in shape by chasing me. But the tight-muscled swoop of them, as they torpedoed past the cockpit and went scissoring ahead of the bow, gave a shine to my arrival; when tying up to the float, I realized that the weight of the journey was suddenly gone. Four days short of Juneau, I now could see beyond it to our floating family holiday … Julia and the porpoises … Julia and the icebergs … Julia and the bears. We’d need a fishing rod—buy it in Juneau. We’d need more kids’ books for bedtime reading. We’d need a ton of macaroni, and the hideous yellow cheddar considered by Julia to be the only cheese worthy of the name.

  Before Meyers Chuck, I hadn’t dared think like this. Now I indulged myself in a happy mental shopping list. Better get sunblock—tangerine soda—Kleenex—matzohs—candied ginger for the seasick—Beanie Babies—peanut butter—tunafish in water—Travel Scrabble—crayons—M&M’s and herbal tea. Just framing the words in my head made me smile, and my elation spread to include everything in the little settlement.

  Chauk was a Nootka Indian word for “body of water.” Whites had borrowed it as a jocular term. West Coast Canadians—especially those who wrote for the yachting magazines—liked to call the sea “the saltchuck,” a usage I found irritating in its whiskery old-fangledness. But I liked the way the word worked here. Meyers Chuck, walled off from Clarence Strait by a wooded island and a reef, was like a glassy monastic pond, with herons wading in its shallows and a belted kingfisher dive-bombing out in the middle.

  The twisted tracks of an old marine railway and a few rotted stumps in the ground were all that remained of the machine shop and blacksmith’s mentioned in the 1933 pilot-book. Meyers Chuck’s 37 present residents lived in secluded gingerbread houses set a little way back from the water and linked by a winding muddy path, riddled with tree roots and curtained by trailing vines. Nothing was chichi or self-conscious in the place’s prettiness: it seemed in contented retirement from the world, its only intruders a trickle of summer pleasure boats like mine. There was a small fishing lodge on the east bank, a tiny Catholic elementary school, a couple of commercial fishing boats; its post office was a padlocked shed, whose rare and eccentric opening hours were tied to the arrival of the weekly mailplane, where I disbelievingly slid a bear-postcard into the box.

  I saw no one on my walk, though I heard my passage being telegraphed from barking dog to barking dog.

  The only signs—hand-lettered shingles, nailed at odd angles to the firs—pointed the way to the Art Gallery, which turned out to be in a treehouse at the end of the path. The strange quiet of Meyers Chuck was explained by the exhibits inside. The villagers evidently kept busy indoors stringing jewelry, bottling preserves, doing poker-work, throwing pots, stuffing felt birds-of-paradise, carving driftwood, painting watercolors (and some of them weren’t bad), grinding and polishing lumps of purple and green rock; crocheting, embroidering, whittling, varnishing, glazing, and creating whimsies out of seashells, silver foil, twigs, and glue.

  The air was ripe with the smell of incense sticks and lavender bags. Whenever I moved, I set another bunch of wind chimes tinkling. Looking forward to domestic life on the boat after Juneau, I bought, at metropolitan prices, a quilted pot holder and a jar of homemade jam.

  During the afternoon, two families in motor cruisers came in, tied up, and took the posted trail to the gallery, from which everyone came back with something. So the cogs of the Meyers Chuck tourist economy turned at a pace that could inflict no serious injury to the life of the village. That evening, I sat out in the cockpit watching over the family high jinks on the dock. The two parties were amalgamating: barefoot children scalped each other with shrimp nets; husbands traded wisecracks over the barbecue grill, as wives emerged wrapped in towels, fresh from the shower, holding bottles and glasses. Everyone was deep in the temporary Gypsy bohemia of a summer vacation on the remote fringe of the real world. I was the uninvited ghost at their feast.

  Never mind. Not long to go now. My turn next.

  In the morning, just as the sun scraped clear of the snowcaps to the east, and in a breeze that had sprung up from nowhere, the flat water was as yellow and coarsely granulated as a sweep of raked gravel. Clarence Strait was empty. Huddled under the doghouse roof, warming my hands on a mug of coffee, I had nothing to do but monitor the course and listen to the monotonous donkey hee-haw, hee-haw of the autopilot as it sent corrections to the wheel. I’d woken at five, thinking of my father and me; his lifelong caution, my reactionary impulsiveness. Strangely, considering his profession, it seemed to me that he was the born skeptic, I the rash believer.

  I turned the compass-rose on the autopilot’s control box to clear Misery Island. The previous day I’d passed Bittersweet Rock. A feature of the American West, at sea as on land, was that much of it had been named at a period when Pilgrim’s Progress, in the umpteenth small-print edition, was on every family’s short bookshelf, between the Bible, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and—here, at least—the tide tables. There was a Bunyanesque ring to many of Captain Van’s names, like Desolation Sound and Deception Pass. The settlers had continued that tradition, signposting the sea with names of moral and emotional states. One could write a pilgrim’s, or a rake’s, progress from the chart. The in
fant hero would be born at Incarnation Point, with Hardscrabble Point the first milestone in his babyhood. His course would take him past Sunshine Island, Luck Point, and an early trial at Liar Rock. Trouble Island would lead to Seduction Point and a rough passage through Peril Strait, past Grief Islet and Ford’s Terror, braving Point False Retreat and coming through the Eye Opener, where Cape Decision loomed through the mist, Point Escape hard by. For the shriven pilgrim there’d be Port Conclusion, with Harmony Islands, Happy Cove, and Paradise Flats. Given names like these, the wilderness became a three-dimensional allegory whose plot (depending on your route through it) changed continuously. Today I was bound from Misery Island to Cemetery Point.

  As a child, I’d been in awe of my father’s Sunday-lunchtime performances with the carving knife. First there was the ritual swordplay with the sharpener, then the deep hush in which the meat was carved—shaved, rather, as each slice had the mottled transparency of a photographic negative. The knife was ancient. Like most things in our house, it had come down through the family, and a hundred or so years of weekly sharpening had reduced its blade to the narrowness of a rapier point. With this my father could make the smallest joint last until the next Saturday.

  Growing up in the Depression had prepared my parents for a lifetime of saving, skimping, making do. My father wore his clothes to shadows. Great Uncle Cyril’s cassock conveniently hid turned cuffs and collars, and gray flannel trousers worn to the shiny thinness of silk.

  His one great luxury, in the austere 1950s, was his faith. Like his father and uncle, he was a high-churchman, an Anglo-Catholic ritualist. For the communion service he would robe himself with white and gold, in chasuble and stole. Only the low-church leanings of his churchwardens and parishioners stopped him from using incense. Up at the altar, his back to the congregation, he presided over the holy mystery of God making Himself manifest in wafers of bread and the silver goblet of Vino Sacro wine.