Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  Poor Cowper, whose whole adult life was lived on a roller coaster, with short flights of religious mania punctuating long passages of suicidal depression, had always been inclined to see himself as a hapless seafarer. His actual experience of seagoing was confined to one trip on a small sailing boat on the Solent, not far from Southampton, but he plundered the great eighteenth-century voyages for metaphors for his own condition. Sometimes he saw himself as a sinking ship:

  Me howling blasts drive tedious, tempest tost,

  Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost,

  And day by day some current’s threatening force

  Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.

  When a friend safely returned from Ramsgate, after a trip from Calais in a Channel packet, Cowper wrote him:

  Your sea of troubles you have passed

  And found the peaceful shore;

  I, tempest-toss’d, and wreck’d at last,

  Come home to port no more.

  To the same friend, he described his work on a verse translation of Homer as giving him “some little measure of tranquillity” in “the performance of the most turbulent voyage that ever Christian mariner made.”

  A lifetime of sea-reading and sea-metaphors crowded behind the writing of “The Cast-Away”—and surely Cowper must have felt a moment, at least, of jubilation as he found the words of the poem’s last two lines. There was triumph in such a pure distillation of misery. Cowper lived for thirteen months longer and wrote nothing more. The final couplet passed into the language of popular quotation. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsey declaims it at every possible opportunity; it is his signature tune. And, for a day or two, I made it mine, chanting, with unseemly gusto:

  “But I, be-neath a rough-er sea,

  And whelm’d in dee-per gulfs than he.”

  On the sixth day, I left Center Cone Island to starboard in Finlayson Channel—according to Hansen, the halfway point between Juneau and Seattle. The Cocoa Puffs I tried for breakfast were even worse than the Froot Loops. Then I sampled my father’s book—the Penguin Marcus Aurelius—and before long my text for the day jumped out at me from page 51:

  In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion.

  Following Heraclitus, Marcus saw all of human life in terms of the turbulent motion of fluids. Time was a river, “The resistless flow of all created things,” the Primal Cause “like a river in flood; it bears everything along.” If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.

  For Marcus, unquiet eddies and coursing waters weren’t merely a convenient figure of speech. In spring and autumn, the Tiber grew from a noxious trickle to a storming flood in just an hour or two. Containing the river was a major enterprise of Roman civilization, and it was hemmed in with stone levees by the time of Augustus. When Marcus Aurelius became emperor, in A.D. 161, the city had spread over to the west bank; so even as the great marble walls of imperial Rome closed around it, the turbulent and brimming Tiber remained as an ungovernable wilderness in the heart of the Eternal City.

  I saw how congenial Marcus’s Meditations must have been to my father, who was always a small-s, stiff-upper-lip stoic. His thrift, modesty, and increasingly ascetic style of religious practice were Aurelian virtues, and sometimes Marcus seemed to speak to me in my father’s own voice.

  You cannot hope to be a scholar. But what you can do is to curb arrogance; what you can do is to rise above pleasures and pains; you can be superior to the lure of popularity; you can keep your temper with the foolish and ungrateful, yes, and even care for them.

  Old boy … He would have knocked out his pipe-dottle on the edge of the hearth, then drawn himself back into the folds of his cassock.

  I realized he must have known the Meditations’ translator—another Rural Dean, Maxwell Staniforth, whose bailiwick was Blandford in Dorset, just 35 miles west of my father’s rural deanery of Southampton. It interested me that Anglican clergymen, laboring through the long decline of the established church, should find spiritual comfort in the astringent philosophy of a pagan Roman emperor. Yet facing rows of empty pews, with no money in the kitty for repairs to the church roof, one might well find more of relevance in Marcus than in the epistles of Saint Paul.

  I broke my new rule, copying two quotations into the logbook:

  Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

  There is a doom inexorable and a law inviolable, or there is a providence that can be merciful, or else there is a chaos that is purposeless and ungoverned. If a resistless fate, why try to struggle against it? If a providence willing to show mercy, do your best to deserve its divine succour. If a chaos undirected, give thanks that amid such stormy seas you have within you a mind at the helm. If the waters overwhelm you, let them overwhelm flesh, breath, and all else, but they will never make shipwreck of the mind.

  I read Swanton’s Tlingit Myths and Texts. “The Woman Who Was Killed by a Clam.” “The Woman Taken Away by the Frog People.” “The Man Who Was Abandoned.” “The Monster Devil-Fish and the Cry-Baby.” Stories of serial misfortune, of minor transgressions and major punishments, of the whimsical and malevolent humor of Nature, most of them began with someone leaving the house—to go for a walk in the woods, or gather clams on the beach, or set off on a hunting or fishing expedition. Then more or less inexplicably, shit happened.

  I had been familiar with these tales for six years now. So what did I expect—that a friendly godling would rubber-stamp my plans and wave me on my way? Running for shelter over the cold gray ocean swells of Queen Charlotte Strait, I distinctly heard the gurgling, undersea laughter of Komogwa.

  The weather cleared on the morning I passed through the Yuculta and Dent rapids and made for Desolation Sound under a fathomlessly high blue sky. To the south, in vacationland, sailboats and motor cruisers zigzagged from inlet to inlet, trailing fishing lines; water-skiers towed by nippy white runabouts were making figure-eights around the slow-moving anglers. With only a few gallons of diesel left in the tank, I needed to put in at the seasonal marina in Refuge Cove.

  The floats were chockablock with pleasure craft, and the place reeked of suntan lotion. Kids in lifejackets pelted up and down the dock. On decks and flybridges, the bodies of young mothers were laid out under the sun on striped towels. I took on fifty gallons of diesel, then went below to drain the fuel filter.

  The last time I’d filled the tank had been at Klemtu, and lately the engine had missed a beat or two whenever the boat rolled, a sign of water in the fuel. I unhooked the companionway steps and pulled them back to get at the mechanical guts of the boat.

  The engine compartment was suffocatingly hot. With diesel fumes in my eyes and on my tongue, I unscrewed the drip-valve at the base of the inverted glass dome of the filter to let the accumulated water out. Droplets of polluted fuel trickled slowly into a paper cup, and it was several minutes before a thin stream of violet diesel followed the nasty, emulsifying gunk. Whatever the cause, I found myself sobbing and vomiting at the same time. Feeling foolish and displaced, I wiped up the mess and fled the marina.

  The pleasure boats dwindled as I came into the open water of Georgia Strait, where a light northwesterly ruffled the sea’s surface and, for the first time since leaving Juneau, I switched off the engine and pulled up the sails. For the next three hours, I forgot myself. I was on a leisurely summer vacation. No more reading. I sat at the wheel, playing the boat against the shifting angles of the wind, watching the knot-meter, trying to squeeze 4.3 knots up to 5.0, until
the sun sank behind Vancouver Island and I turned into the strange, Irish-accented harbor of Vananda.

  Thirteen and a half days out of Juneau, I was back in Ballard Locks.

  A familiar-looking lock-keeper took my lines, scrutinizing the boat and its captain. For the first time in my life, I had a mahogany tan. I weighed less than I had done in years.

  “You been away?” he said.

  “Up in Alaska,” I said, aiming for a tone of proper nonchalance.

  “Good trip?”

  “Yeah, great.”

  The lock-gates opened. Marine Seattle crowded in on the Ship Canal. Even in August sunshine, the welders’ torches dazzled. The air was gritty with particles of rust as they drifted over the water from the shipyards. Most of the ships were turning into scrap—ancient freighters from Archangel, Vladivostok, Okhotsk, tugs and fish-processors from Anchorage, Juneau, Ketchikan. The city, large as London, took me in.

  I tied up at the moorings on Ewing Street, flung a handful of essentials into a duffel bag, and went ashore, feeling the dry land roll unreliably underfoot. Above and beyond the brick buildings of the Bible college, I could just see the tree-shrouded, white-balconied top story of our house on the hill. Crossing the tracks of the disused railroad, I took a deep breath before I climbed the last suburban quarter-mile and faced the rougher sea.

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