Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  Julia tired of the swing and headed for a slide.

  I walked down the beach to where Jean sat on her dune, picking my way past rusty lumps of mining machinery, encrusted with barnacles and mussel-shells, and twisted rail-lines half-buried in sand.

  She was smoking a brand of cigarette I hadn’t seen before, low-tar-and-nicotine jobs called True. I fished one out of her pack and lit it; it tasted, faintly, of wet straw.

  “Jean—are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  I told her about the mine in whose ruins we were squatting. The Treadwell Mine had been famous, once, in the 1880s and nineties. The steep hill behind Julia’s playground was honeycombed with tunnels. Mr. Treadwell, a handyman-builder from San Francisco, had become a multi-millionaire, then made some bad investments and died bankrupt in a New York flophouse—an American life in the classic mold.

  Jean shrugged, answering the story with a plume of True smoke.

  “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to talk about separating. Like, I wondered if you’ve thought of separating?”

  “Separating?” My stomach went south.

  “I always thought it would be harder to live without you, but since you’ve been away I’ve found it easier, with just me and Julia. We’re happier when you’re not there.”

  “You don’t mean we. You mean you. You’re happier.”

  “Mommy and Daddy! Mommy and Daddy! Look at me-ee-ee!” Julia was a monkey-figure in the climbing-frame. Jean and I each raised a hand and waved in unison. “Great!” I called back across the sand. “Great!”

  “Okay,” Jean said. “I’m happier.”

  “This is what you’ve come to Juneau for? To tell me this?”

  “I wanted to be honest.” The cigarette pack in her lap read like a subtitle in a French movie: True!

  The ebb tide was running hard, and a gill-netter, pushing up-channel to Juneau, was stuck fast in the space of water between the pumphouse and Jean’s head. The boat was throwing up a roiling V of wake but making no visible progress over the ground at all.

  “I have to take charge of my own life. I can’t go on depending on you for handouts like I’ve been doing. I have to get my shit together. Like, get a real job. There’s a job at Microscoft …”

  Her voice was dry, curt, void of tone and color. Jean had many voices. This was her Manhattan voice. A child of the Upper West Side, she was proud of her impatience with good manners. She could revert at will to the rapid, flat, nasal patois of the New York streets, and sounded now as if she were delivering a food-order at a deli.

  “I need to forge a new identity,” she said.

  I was lost. This was all wrong. I wanted to put Jean on rewind, yet the words kept coming, as if memorized by rote, with no inflection at all. She must have rehearsed this speech for weeks—or months? Had she been preparing it back in May, when we were all in England? Somewhere behind the speech I heard a dialogue coach. I didn’t want to know who the coach was.

  “You can forge a new identity,” Jean said. “You’ll be free, too. You’ll have more money to spend when you don’t have to help me out all the time.”

  A new family had arrived on the playground. I saw Julia attaching herself to it. “My mom and dad are over there …” She was effortlessly, ebulliently sociable, making instant friends with large dogs and older children.

  “When you get used to the idea, you’ll see it’s all for the best.”

  I couldn’t speak. She had her script, I had none. There was nothing to discuss: that was plain from the rigid furrows in Jean’s forehead, the jut of her nose, the tight clamp of her lips on the filter of her cigarette. Her eyes, tungsten-hard, refused to meet mine, offered no way in. She had ended our marriage long before today, and now was only going through the wearisome motions of informing me that what was done was done.

  My stupidity. I had thought we were secure. Though much divided us—the abyss of nearly twenty years; her America, my England—we looked at the world through the same dark glass. When misery descended on us, as it had done lately, I thought it circumstantial, capable of being lifted by a change in the weather, by a decent job for Jean, money, a reliable baby-sitter; a fortnight in Alaska. In our worst moments—and some had been dire—I still thought we were so much more like each other than we were like other people that we must be safe.

  And we had Julia, the light of both our lives. Surely two lives lit by one light were meant to consort like moths fluttering in the same beam?

  “Where do you think Julia fits into your big adventure?”

  “Without the tension between you and me, I can be a better mother,” she said, burying her cigarette butt in the tailings.

  “She needs two parents—she needs a family, Jean!”

  “You’ll have visitation rights.”

  “I don’t ‘visit’ Julia. Never, ever.”

  “We can discuss that. We can draw up a parenting agreement.”

  She had become as remote as some government functionary shuffling papers behind a teller’s window. I might have been dealing with Ms. Lopez or Ms. Takimoto at Social Security or Immigration. Yet even as she removed herself from me—the coach, surely, had rehearsed her in this frigid and official style of delivery—I was struck by how alike we were. “Forging a new identity” wouldn’t be my phrase for it, but America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention had always been my theme. Whenever there had been walking-out to do, I was the one who walked. Now Jean had seen a new life and was going for it, exactly as I had done in the past. Her cruel, cold dismissal reminded me uncomfortably of me.

  “She needs a family,” I repeated weakly.

  “When she’s, like, ten, half the kids in her class will have divorced parents.”

  “She’s not a fucking statistic!”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  The fishing boat hadn’t budged. The world had changed, but the gill-netter was in exactly the same place as before, driving at full power into the current and getting nowhere.

  “Where do you think you’re going to live?”

  “I’ll start looking for a place when I get back. I’ll need some money, and we’ll have to divvy up the stuff in the house. You can have your share.”

  “My share? Jean!”

  But Jean was long gone. The face that turned to me was Ms. Takimoto’s.

  “Mommy and Daddy! Mommy and Daddy!” She was running toward us now, kicking up the barren dust of the gold mine as she came.

  Thirty-six unspeakable hours later, I drove Jean and Julia to the airport, left them outside the entrance, then returned the car to Rent-a-Wreck.

  “Enjoy your vacation?”

  “Yeah, fine,” I said.

  At the harbor, I was ashamed of my conspicuous aloneness. Julia was known to half the people on the dock. I lacked the energy to invent even the feeblest death-in-the-family story, which would require more corroborative detail than I could manage. I ached to leave, to slake my heartbreak in motion for motion’s sake; but a southerly wind of 25 knots and gusting higher was blowing up Gastineau Channel, and predicted to increase during the afternoon. Never had I left harbor in the teeth of a gale forecast, and to do so now would prove only that I was unfit to take the boat south and complete the trip.

  Wearing a mask for a face, I hurried down the dock to the slip (the word “our,” suddenly, was no longer mine to use) and hid in the saloon, fitting the hatchboards in place, closing the hatch, and drawing the curtains on the ports. I could hear Rebecca bickering with her brother next door.

  The bear I’d bought Julia in Juneau was lying on the floor under the saloon table. A half-empty juice carton, its straw bent, was parked beside the galley sink.

  As if made of clockwork, I filled the kettle, lit the gas, chucked the old coffee filter into the garbage, replaced it with a fresh one, and spooned grounds into the basket. While the coffee was brew
ing, I got out a sheaf of paper, enough to pen an epic, and began writing to a friend on Cape Cod.

  Dear Paul,

  Every successful voyage ought to culminate in a major discovery, and at the end of this voyage I feel like Sir Walter Raleigh. Not far from Juneau, I found my own private Guiana, though I wish to God I hadn’t.…

  VIII. KOMOGWA

  I lived by numbers. The days were shortening now, but from the first dull glimmer of dawn, soon after five, to the last of blue dusk, there were still fifteen or sixteen hours in which it was safe to be on the move. With the engine going at full tilt, I could do 6.5 knots—say ninety miles a day; at a stretch, a hundred. I didn’t dare to travel at night for fear of ripping the boat open on a deadhead or a floating log.

  I kept Hansen’s Handbook in the shelter of the doghouse, ticking off the marks and running down the miles. My logbook, which had gone into a second volume, bloated as it was with fancy landscape descriptions, became a model of austerity: columns of scribbled figures—times, distances, windspeeds, courses, barometric pressures.

  I avoided settlements. Provisioned with food and drink for three, the boat had more than enough for my needs. Steering clear of the pretty, enclosed anchorages recommended by yachting guides, I instead searched the channel for unpicturesque bights that offered minimal aprons of shallow water and partial shelter in the lee of headlands. I’d start looking close to sunset. There was always somewhere, and a certain uneasiness at night (is the wind shifting? why is the chain rumbling on the bottom?) suited my mood.

  I learned to read and keep watch at the same time. I had to keep my mind elsewhere, and found I could take in a paragraph—sometimes only a sentence—and hold the words in my skull while studying the water for hazards, checking the course, and fiddling with the autopilot before going back to the book for the next chunk. Chapters advanced rather slowly, but it was a good way of reading: by the book’s end, I could nearly recite it by heart. Alaska and British Columbia turned into a passing blur; on the neutral screen of sea and forest were printed moving pictures from another world.

  I read Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust like this. As soon as I finished the last page, I turned back to the beginning and read it over again. Watching Waugh transform the humiliating disaster of his first marriage into triumphant, grave comedy was a delight. I laughed, for the first time since the Treadwell Mine, over the sly opening’s deadpan portrait of the useless piece of dining-room furniture named John Beaver. Waugh had been cuckolded (his word) by just such a man. While he was writing Vile Bodies in a country hotel, his childish wife, Evelyn Gardner, ran off with a devout London partygoer, John Heygate. At the time, Waugh wrote: “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live.” Three years later, in the winter of 1932, he began A Handful of Dust, turning Heygate into Beaver, a dim savage in the jungle of fashionable London, with his precious collection of crested silver hunting flasks, tobacco jars, and hat brushes. There was revenge in the pages, but it was revenge accomplished with serene craftsmanship, in light, pitch-perfect prose.

  Waugh and his wife were recast as Tony and Brenda Last. Brenda picks up John Beaver as a plaything, an amusing diversion from the boredom of life in the country, and the Lasts’ marriage disintegrates. Their six-year-old son—John Andrew—is killed in a hunting accident. Presiding over the chaos, Waugh wrote better than he’d ever done before, or would do again, mingling mischief and pain in equal parts.

  A friend breaks the news of young John’s death to Brenda:

  ‘What is it, Jock? Tell me quickly, I’m scared. It’s nothing awful, is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. There’s been a very serious accident.’

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dead?’

  He nodded.

  She sat down on a hard little Empire chair against the wall, perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap, like a small well-brought-up child introduced into a room full of grown-ups. She said, ‘Tell me what happened. Why do you know about it first?’

  ‘I’ve been down at Hetton since the week-end.’

  ‘Hetton?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? John was going out hunting today.’

  She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying.

  “John … John Andrew … I … oh, thank God …’ Then she burst into tears.

  I read that passage aloud to the trees.

  In his bravura ending, Waugh posts Tony Last from the chattering roosts of Mayfair and its feral inhabitants to the real jungle of the Amazon basin, where he joins Dr. Messinger, an explorer in search of a mythical Inca city. Bratt’s Club and the Old Hundredth give way to howler monkeys, tree frogs, bats, spiders, alligators, iguanas, and cabouri flies. The transition is imperceptible. The same law obtains in both worlds. Lost in unmapped territory, Tony falls into a delirious fever in which England and Amazonas are scrambled in his waking dreams, while Dr. Messinger goes off, alone, to get help from the Indians. The river he travels by canoe is the turbulent essence of the jungle—muddy, swirling, full of rapids and cataracts. He is quickly drowned.

  Looking up from the book to check the course, I saw my own jungle close at hand: swift, tidal water riddled with small whirlpools; mossy stumps; the creeping, many-tentacled salal; the hunchbacked eagle, perched on the dead limb of a lightning-struck fir.

  I had breakfast in the dark: coffee and a bowl of Froot Loops.

  My early rising was rewarded with many sightings of bears. Getting up the anchor, I’d see a black boulder suddenly ripple into motion as it went truffling for seafood on the beach. Every bear caused a pang. Sometimes I’d go below and fetch up my camera, but showing Julia the pictures would be a dismal substitute for what I’d daydreamed of showing her, true-life.

  Five days out of Juneau and safely past Dixon Entrance, I ran into a spell of vile weather. A long trough of low pressure had raked the Queen Charlotte Islands, then stalled over the Inside Passage, bringing a wild and gusty southerly wind and slanting rain squalls that clattered like gravel on the doghouse windows. In Princess Royal Channel, the sea was ribbed with close-packed three-foot waves, the ragged clouds were at masthead-height, and the mountainous shore to starboard was a streak of mottled darkness in the enveloping gray. The waves and wind had slowed the boat to less than three knots, though the tide was with me and I was making nearly five knots over the ground.

  My reading (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold) was interrupted by the snarling engine of a floatplane close behind me. The pilot was trying to fly below the clouds, but the clouds were pinning him nearer and nearer to the water, which was too rough, I figured, for him to make a touchdown without losing his plane. He had to climb a few feet to clear my mast, then thundered overhead in a panic of noise. Though I knew nothing about flying, he looked to be in dire straits, with the visibility closing down to zero and the twisting, precipitous walls of the channel only a mile or so apart. Hoping he knew what he was doing, I listened to his engine as it faded into the clatter of the rain; and for the rest of the day I kept half-expecting to come across his floating wreckage.

  But I, beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he. The passing of the floatplane pilot had put into my head the final couplet of William Cowper’s last and best poem. I got out The Oxford Book of the Sea to reread “The Cast-Away”—the most despairing poem in the English language, though Cowper’s four-beat line, ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum, gave it a subversive jauntiness; at least it did whenever I tried speaking it aloud.

  Cowper was 67 when he wrote “The Cast-Away” in March 1798, and he was dying in exile from the Methodist faith to which he had become a passionate convert in his twenties. He believed he was “damned,” in the strict sense of being a stranger to the knowledge and love of God. Cowper, like many retiring, stay-at-home types, was an avid consumer of armchair adventures, and found an analogy to his own miserable situation in the pages of
Lord Anson’s A Voyage Round the World. Anson’s ship, Centurion, had run into a violent storm off Cape Horn, where the order had been given to “man the shrouds”—a terrifying business in which all sail was taken off the ship, and seamen climbed aloft to give the wind purchase and the ship steerageway. One seaman lost his footing and was thrown into the icy South Atlantic. Unable to turn the ship around, Anson and his crew watched impotently as the bobbing figure disappeared among the waves. Anson wrote, and Cowper read:

  Notwithstanding the prodigious agitation of the waves, he swam very strong, and it was with the utmost concern that we found ourselves incapable of assisting him; indeed we were the more grieved at his unhappy fate, as we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and conceived from the manner in which he swam that he might continue sensible, for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable situation.

  So it was with Cowper in old age. The ship had left him behind. He longed for death, which showed no immediate sign of arrival.

  In “The Cast-Away,” Cowper turned Anson’s account into verse, then moved, in the last two stanzas, from the seaman’s plight to his own.

  I, therefore, purpose not, or dream,

  Descanting on his fate,

  To give the melancholy theme

  A more enduring date;

  But mis’ry still delights to trace

  Its semblance in another’s case.

  No voice divine the storm allay’d,

  No light propitious shone;

  When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,

  We perish’d, each alone;

  But I, beneath a rougher sea,

  And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.