In town, I had to brave the rigid smiles and brush-off manners of people severely overdosed on strangers. In the Valley, I was met with help, advice, and small talk. At Kmart, where with Julia in mind I bought a rod, reel, lures, and fishing license, the man in the tackle department told me how Juneau’s last redoubt had fallen earlier in the year, when Lyle’s Hardware, an institution as old as the city, moved out. No sooner had it gone than Little Switzerland moved in, with watches by Patek Philippe, leather by Gucci, perfume by Givenchy and Dior. The symbolic contrast between Lyle’s honest penny-nails and these luxury baubles was held up as a sorry sign of the times.
The cruise-ship passengers were derided as unwelcome invaders, in the jocose, grumbling way of working locals the world over, from Stratford-on-Avon to Williamsburg, who have to deal with slow-moving crowds of holidaying visitors. They were labeled “tourons” for their brains, and “tourosauruses” for their great age. The Capital City Weekly was running a competition for “The Silliest Question You’ve Been Asked by a Tourist All Summer,” though the entries were lackluster: “How much does it cost to ship your fish back to America?” “Will I have to pay duty on this when I get back to the States?” “How far is Juneau above sea level?” A citizens’ initiative was being placed on the ballot in the November election, proposing that a $7 head tax should be levied on every cruise-ship passenger who disembarked at Juneau.
For all this ritual bad-mouthing, few people really wanted to see the tourist industry decline. The cruise ships were a resource that Juneau was eagerly developing. In wholly Alaskan fashion, the workaday city was packing its bags and moving north and west, leaving its old haunts to be turned into a theatrical simulacrum of Juneau’s gold-mining past, with a hundred gift shops center-stage.
For two days I worked hard on the boat, getting it ready for Jean and Julia. The aft cabin ceased to be a chartroom and was restored to a child’s bedroom, with a new bear on the pillow and new storybooks on the shelf above the bed. I scrubbed the decks and polished the interior woodwork. I got the galley so clean that I didn’t dare cook there. Two sacks of washing, fresh from the laundry, gave us ironed sheets, crisp tea towels, and cushion covers that smelled like fresh bread. A vase of welcoming flowers stood on the saloon table. A family-sized bottle of sunblock was added to the first-aid drawer.
I was in good company. The dock was full of men carrying fids, brooms, paintbrushes, buckets. The old term “ship’s husband,” for the agent who supervised a marine refit, nicely suited these luxurious, houseproud fishermen as they tended to their nets and boats, showing an appetite for fastidious domesticity that must have baffled their wives. They sat on the dock, patiently sewing, or could be seen with yellow dusters, applying lemon-scented Pledge to their boats’ wheels.
My neighbor on the gill-netter to starboard was a fretful Pole who appeared permanently attached to his broom. He had come to America, he told me, in the 1940s, but his English was still fractured. He always went out on his boat alone. He had much on his mind.
“In two weeks, I go to the hospital. For tests.”
Evading the question of what the tests were for, I asked him about the hospital.
“Fred Hutchinson.”
“The Fred Hutchinson in Seattle?”
“Seattle,” he said, pronouncing the name like a death sentence.
His fellow fishermen were doing their best to cheer him up, though their attempts sounded like rough comfort in my ears. A roaring, pale-bearded guy, half the Pole’s age, came by one afternoon, to say, “Hey, Joe! So you got syphilis at last! Too many tricks, man. Too many tricks!”
Joe’s answering laugh was broken-backed. A few minutes later, he said to me, “Is not for syphilis. The tests.”
“I know,” I said, and he and I went back to spiffing up our boats.
Though I had traveled a thousand miles to reach Juneau, it sometimes seemed that I’d only come full circle. Almost every car on the road wore the plates of dealerships in the Seattle suburbs—Auburn, Bellevue, Redmond, Lake City. One evening, after the tourists had returned to their ships, Juneau went eerily silent for the duration of a Seattle Mariners home game. I watched an inning in the Triangle Bar, an obstinately local dive that still survived downtown, perhaps because its shaggy clientele could pass for veterans of the Gold Rush, and any fights in the street outside as part of Juneau’s historic mise en scène. Ken Griffey, Jr., and the Big Unit were the heroes here, and were barraged with advice as they swam like fish across the jumbo TV screen.
For groceries, for major-league games, for cancer tests, cars, ship repairs, clothing, Juneau was dependent on Seattle. Like the parent of a toddler still in diapers, Seattle took care of Juneau’s copious waste-products. I watched the fortnightly garbage scow being loaded with junked cars, bedsteads, fridges, washing machines, about to be towed down the Inside Passage to a scrapyard on the Duwamish Waterway. It seemed not unlikely that my Rent-a-Wreck Datsun would find its way back to Seattle before I did.
I dug an old Mariners cap out of my closet. Wearing it made me look—or so I hoped—as if I came from Juneau.
Even in cruise-ship hours—from ten to five—I liked to walk the fringes of old Juneau. A little above the gift shops, it became a steep town of alleyways, narrow contour-hugging lanes, long flights of steps, and banked wooden cottages with gardens in full bloom. A climb of fifty to a hundred feet was enough to put one well clear of the tourist trade, alone with the hummingbirds and honeysuckle. I took to dropping in on Mrs. Longenbaugh’s antiquarian bookshop on Second Street, which was just one block too high for most casual visitors. The shop, full of dusty corners and unsorted boxes, reminded me pleasantly of a secondhand bookseller’s in an English cathedral town.
I bought an engraving, razored from the first edition of Vancouver’s Voyage, of “VILLAGE of the FRIENDLY INDIANS at the entrance of BUTE’S CANAL,” based on a sketch made by Midshipman Thomas Heddington on a survey-expedition when Discovery and Chatham were anchored in Desolation Sound. I would dearly have liked a copy of the Voyage in its original four-volume edition of 1796, but it had been so plundered for its charts and engravings that it was now a rare book, at a price of around $15,000. Mrs. Longenbaugh hadn’t seen a copy in a long while.
I paid $90 for the 1901 edition of Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, and counted it a bargain. Slocum in life was a cantankerous piece of work, a “bucko” merchant captain hated by his men. He went on trial three times, for wrongful imprisonment, murder, and child molestation. He couldn’t live in the same house (on Martha’s Vineyard) as his wife—a powerful factor in his decision to take to the ocean alone in a small boat. He was not particular about baths or changes of underwear. But in the pages of his book, he was modest, funny, sweet-tempered; the best possible company. So it often is with writers.
From a cardboard box I fished out a tattered Penguin edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, because its identical twin lived on the shelves in my father’s study and I was curious to find out what had drawn my father to the Stoic emperor.
But that could wait. For now I sat out in the cockpit of the boat with Rebecca and her six-year-old brother, reading Clifford the Big Red Dog and Madeline and the Bad Hat. Though my father was never far away. In Juneau, as in Petersburg and Ketchikan, he kept cropping up on the far edge of my field of vision: long-faced, gaunt, with tangled silver beard and a shock of home-barbered hair swept back from his widow’s peak, he ambled down the dock holding a fid or paintbrush in his hand.
A quarter-mile from the harbor, Gold Creek emptied into Gastineau Channel. The silt of the creek had once made Juneau rich and famous, but recently the city had turned Gold Creek into an ugly open drain plunging straight from the hilltop to the tideflat below: a bare concrete duct, with a steep, unvarying gradient. Water dribbled down its corrugated face, barely an inch deep. At anything above half-tide, the last thirty yards or so of this algae-infested spillway were the site of
a desperate and pathetic enterprise.
Several thousand chum salmon milled around the foot of the duct, trying to make the impossible climb to their old spawning grounds. The water was packed solid with them, their humpbacks riding proud of the surface as they jostled for the chance to make the run. When their turn came, they hurled themselves out of the channel and onto the concrete, wriggling up it on their bellies like frenetic eels. From the outset, the fish were in bad shape. They were a sickly olive-green marked by large, irregular blotches of bubble-gum pink. Their scales were falling off in clumps, their tails and fins in rags, their jawbones protruding obscenely from their skulls. They were only just alive enough to spawn and die.
They thrashed, flopped, squirmed, and slithered on the concrete, catapulting themselves up into the air only to fall back with a smack on the same spot. Blind to everything except the need to multiply their kind, they threw themselves against the duct until they died. Bit by bit, over a period of many minutes, their contortions slowly weakened, until their inert hulks slid back over the algae into the channel. Eager newcomers flung themselves past the dead and dying, some walking on their tails as they gained the fresh water and scented the ancestral hills.
No salmon ever made it. The water wasn’t nearly deep enough for them to breathe, and the slimy concrete offered no purchase. A heroic few somehow managed to cover the two hundred yards to the second bridge; most were washed back within the first twenty yards.
There must once have been dozens of holding-pools and rapids, allowing salmon to ascend Gold Creek on a gentle staircase. This horrible man-made, piscicidal drain astonished me. I asked my neighbors how it had come about, and was told that people used to complain about the smell of dead fish after spawning. Residents hated living with it, and it put off the tourists. So Gold Creek was regraded and lined with concrete.
On the flood tide, putrescent salmon corpses drifted north into the harbor, where they lodged between boats. Rebecca and her brother liked to poke at them with sticks until they fell to bits and sank in a gaseous pink cloud. In the bed in the forecabin, reading late at night, I could hear the soft thump of their bodies as they knocked against the hull, caught in the current that eddied through the floats.
These chum salmon were said to be the result of an accident in Gastineau Channel a couple of years before, when a container of hatchery-fry broke open and released the fish on Juneau’s doorstep. I wasn’t persuaded. This story represented the fish as alien visitors, mere salmon tourons. But the fish I saw knew exactly where they had to go—to their family gravel beds on the upper reaches of Gold Creek.
On Tuesday morning, after laying in the last of our provisions from the Valley, I drove over to Auke Bay, where Universe Explorer was being detained. Before the ship was allowed to sail to Vancouver for repairs, the Coast Guard required the crew to perform a satisfactory fire drill. Two drills had been held so far, both failures. The Juneau Empire reported on its front page:
Lt. j.g. Lindsay Dew of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office said fatigue, communications problems and lack of crew knowledge probably led to the drills’ failure.
Dew said today the drills went “very poorly,” explaining that during the first drill he notified a crewmember that a fire had broken out in the ship’s pantry.
The woman, who spoke good English, did not know how to contact the bridge to report the fire or where any fire alarm boxes were located, he said.
Dew flagged down another crewmember, who reported the fire to the bridge, but because both the crewmember and the bridge crew had heavy accents and were from different European countries, the wrong location was reported.
The ship was anchored well out in the neck of the bay, with a Coast Guard cutter a short distance off. The sun was up. The still water was frosted, here and there, with vagrant cat’s-paws. I stood under the drooping boughs of a hemlock to take a picture. Down on the beach, a mink scampered from rock to rock. I got the ship in focus and clicked the shutter on an advertisement for an idyll.
It took forever for the ground staff to maneuver the swaying, accordion-pleated tunnel into position around the aircraft door. Julia, one of the first out of the chute, bulleted into my arms with a happy shriek. Jean was several passengers behind, lugging a pair of bags, her face tied in a knot of exhaustion.
“I was working till three. We had to get up at five to catch the plane.” She attempted a smile, but it was not a great success.
I laid my free arm across her shoulders. “You can sleep on the boat. I’ll take Julia off. There’s no shopping to do. We have all we need.”
“I’ll be okay.”
Passengers arriving in Juneau were met by a stuffed, somewhat moth-eaten grizzly bear. It reared up on its hind legs, eight feet tall, like a giant boxer, claws extended, jaws agape. The bear was a kissing cousin to Balloo in Disney’s version of The Jungle Book—the psychotic cousin with unfocused glass eyes and tawny fangs, the one the other bears never mention.
Clinging tightly to me, Julia braved Ursus horribilis with an undeceived yet not quite certain grin. “Are there real bears in our world?”
“Lots of real bears. We’ll see real bears from the boat.”
“For true-life?”
“True-life. Alaska is the best place in the whole world for real wild bears.”
“Dad—dy,” she said, in her come off it voice. “Are we in Alaska now?”
“Yes, Jaybird, you’re in Alaska now. What do you think of that?”
“You’re not joking me?” She searched my face. I was apt to spot pterodactyls perched in the trees around our house, so she had reason to treat all information got from me as suspect.
“No, truly. You’re in Juneau, Alaska.”
“Mommy!” she called across the arrivals lounge. “This is Alaska! We’re in Alaska!”
On the drive to the harbor, Julia prefaced her every remark with “Mommy-and-Daddy … ?” I watched her in the rearview mirror: she couldn’t keep the smile off her face, in her pleasure at regaining the correct number of parents.
“This is your rental?” Jean said as we weaved through the Valley.
“It was all I could get.”
“You should have gone to Hertz.”
“I did. All their cars were booked.”
“It’s a wreck.”
At the boat, I buckled Julia into her new Kmart lifejacket, then introduced her to Rebecca while Jean went down to the forecabin for a rest. Julia was quickly swallowed into family life aboard the motor cruiser.
“We’ll take care of her,” Rebecca’s mother said, and I went below to talk with Jean before she conked out. The interior of the boat was hot, and full of voices and footsteps from the dock.
“It’s smelly in here.”
I’d stopped noticing the tang of dead chum salmon in the harbor air. I said, “We’ll be out of here tomorrow. We could leave this afternoon—”
“No,” Jean said with sudden sharpness. “I haven’t seen Juneau yet.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m just tired. I had four pieces to write. And then I had all the packing to do. I just need to lie down. Give me an hour, okay?”
I sat up in the cockpit, listening to Julia’s voice carrying from behind the tarp next door. She was having too much fun for me to reclaim her. From under her bed in the aft cabin, I got out the chart that would take us to Glacier Bay and penciled in our course, around the northern tip of Admiralty Island and into Icy Strait.
Jean came up after 45 minutes, saying she felt better. Her face was still knotted, but the knot looked looser than before. With Julia, we joined the tourist procession through downtown, trailing past gift shops and eating an overpriced lunch in a waterfront restaurant, where Jean picked at a Caesar salad while I babbled about icebergs, bears, whales, and anchorages so isolated that we would seem to have all Alaska to ourselves. Julia, having found a friend, was alr
eady desolate at the prospect of leaving her behind, and suggested that we should take Rebecca too.
We drove to Sheep Creek, to watch salmon mobbing the entrance and leaping from pool to pool. We stood on the rocks, the fish at our feet oblivious to everything except their rage to climb upstream and drop their spawn.
Julia stared at their protuberant jaws and weird colors. “I don’t like them. They’re scary.”
“They just need to lay their eggs and hatch their babies.”
“Will they die?”
“Yes. But they’ll leave thousands and thousands of babies behind. Then the babies will swim down the river and out to the ocean, where they’ll grow into big fish like this, before they come back to lay their eggs.”
“They make me sad. I don’t want them to die.”
“You want to go to a playground?”
“Yes!”
I had spotted a good one during my prowls in the wreck. It lay across from Juneau on the Douglas side of Gastineau Channel, where the tailings of an abandoned gold mine formed a big sandy beach, with swings, slides, and a jungle-gym up at its top end.
“She ought to take a nap,” Jean said.
“After the beach. Let her get some exercise first.”
The pulverized rock of the tailings was grittier than real sand, but Julia sprinted through it, shedding socks and shoes as she went. I put them in my pockets and followed her to the swings.
“Higher! Higher, Daddy!”
The chains creaked and muttered in their ring-bolts. The sun shone. Feeling the live heft of my daughter in her seat was pure balm; though, not for the first time, I found Jean’s mood hard to fathom. Pushing my daughter, I watched my wife.
She had lit a cigarette and was sitting on a low dune, forty yards down the beach, looking out over the channel. Lines of stakes and pilings ran out ahead of her toward a small tower that stood a little way out on the water, among the interlocking tongues of the receding tide. Coming into Juneau in the boat, I’d taken it for an abandoned lighthouse, but it was the last remaining building of the gold mine: a pumphouse, whose tin roof had rusted to the color of Tuscan tiles, and whose concrete walls had weathered to the texture of old gray stone. Close-up, as I’d found the previous day, it was a homely derelict; from this distance, an ancient, picturesque folly.
Passage to Juneau Page 46
