Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  The Chevy sagged on its axles as they made the 2,500-mile drive to Anchorage, then flew on, with their supplies, to Togiak, on Bristol Bay.

  Bristol Bay is the bottom-right-hand corner of the Bering Sea, in the crook formed between the mainland and the long skinny arm of the Aleutian chain as it reaches out across the ocean to Russia. Its eastern shoreline is perforated with estuarine inlets on which squat dozens of roadless fishing communities like Togiak: hamlets in winter, roistering towns in the summer, when fishermen, buyers, and cannery workers keep the bars hopping, and the sky is loud with the continual arrivals and departures of float-plane taxis.

  The barge Munroe and his friends awaited was twelve days overdue; caught in a prolonged storm in the Gulf of Alaska, it had shed much of its cargo, including several fishing boats, in the heavy seas. Unable to find out whether their boat had gone to the bottom, the three Vagabonders slept rough, and uneasily. Meanwhile, the price of herring was in free fall. From $3,000 a ton the year before, it slid below $1,000 and now was dropping quickly through the hundreds.

  When the barge at last came alongside the dock, Vagabond was found to be safe and was promptly craned into the inlet. Supplies were hastily stowed aboard, and with only a few days left to the short herring season, Munroe and his crew headed out into a blustery northwest wind, with a heavy swell running, and began to fish.

  New to the water, they followed the gulls. Their buoyed net ran out off the drum at the stern, and was set across the grain of the tide, its line of white corks glinting on the surface like a quarter-mile string of pearls. The herring, swimming north, came in a thin, straggling procession. “There just wasn’t the biomass there. It was the worst season anyone could remember.” Again and again, the men wound the net in on the drum and found only a measly handful of fish to pick out of the mesh. Vagabond took to tailing other boats at a careful distance. Rival theories flourished as the net came up and was found, yet again, to be nearly empty of fish. They ran close inshore and made a set within yards of a headland, where the tide boiled fast just off the rocks. They motored for miles offshore, in case the herring had grown allergic to the sight of land on the beam. They tried the flood, they tried the ebb, they tried the turn. No dice. Or, at least, shamingly few dice. Working night and day without sleep, they did eventually manage to fill the hold with six and a half tons of fish, harvested from the net in dribs and drabs.

  The price of herring had now fallen to $200 a ton, and $1,300 split three ways fell so short of the Vagabonders’ expectations as to be a joke. But it was the only $1,300 that they had. Somewhere off Cape Constantine, they began the homeward run to Togiak and the cannery. Then the weather broke.

  “It wasn’t just a storm. It was this huge storm.” The boat climbed toppling seas. The wind blew the gulls away and shrilled in the rigging. They didn’t stand a chance of rounding Right Hand Point and making Togiak Bay; instead, they ran before the wind and, grateful and chastened, took shelter in Kulukak Bay, where they dropped anchor below a rocky bluff with an abandoned native village on its summit.

  The wind went on blowing. The ice in the fish-hold was melting fast, and the herring were starting to smell. An undiagnosed leak at the back of the cookstove was steadily dripping diesel fuel into the sack of beans stowed below.

  After three stormbound days, they shoveled their stinking cargo overboard, but the odor of bad fish haunted the little saloon. The beans—their staple diet—tasted gaggingly of diesel. To cheer themselves up, the crew baked a pumpkin pie. As Munroe removed it from the oven, the boat rolled and the pie exploded over the furniture.

  “Pumpkin pie everywhere! It was dripping out of the VHF, it was all over the floor. We sat around eating lecithin powder. That was, like, the nadir.”

  When, finally, the weather cleared and the sea quieted, Vagabond put into Togiak, where the vegetarians abandoned their principles and hogged down plates of steak and french fries. The style and pace of Alaskan life were beginning to get to them. “It was wild. The shit was really flying. Incredible mass destruction. Rammings. Sinkings. Shootings. A midair collision, right over town … Dead guys. A lot of dead guys. People you knew—friends—they’d drown, or get shot, or disappear. But it wasn’t dull, like California.”

  It was the first week in June. Herring finished, the salmon were about to begin. But a commercial license for salmon fishing in Alaska cost outsiders $60,000. Since state residents and natives were granted special terms, the trick was to find a license-holder to install on your boat for a share of the catch. In the Red Dog bar, Munroe met a man whose Aleut girlfriend had inherited a license.

  For the next six weeks, Vagabond went gill-netting for salmon. The inexperienced fishermen caught fewer fish than most, and the buyers’ price was down to 75¢ a pound. With a haul of 55,000 pounds of salmon, and the money split fifty-fifty with the license-holder and her boyfriend, Munroe and his partners came out with less than $7,000 apiece. It was bad math, and a difficult letter had to be penned to the trusting Joe Shaft.

  Munroe, alone among his partners, was seriously hooked on Alaska. “It was wide-open … no Fish and Game … it was nuts. You really feel free on Bristol Bay, because it’s so dangerous, because of all that stress.” He was excited by the fierce weather and the “weird” changing colors of the sea. “I’d be out there, and I’d think, I don’t want to be anywhere but here.”

  He settled into Naknek, whose rows of canneries fronted the river. “Dead little town. Great place. Four hundred people in winter, twelve thousand in summer.” He spent the winter tinkering with other people’s boats. “Nobody knows how to do anything in Alaska. That was my big discovery. They know how to fish, but they can’t read a circuit or fix an engine. I kept busy.”

  The following season, the fishery was suddenly in sync with the folk legend. Prices went up. Runs improved. Salmon (“pinks”) fetched $2.40 a pound, and Vagabond landed more than fifty tons—enough for Munroe to settle with Joe Shaft, buy out his partners, and, as an Alaskan resident, get a commercial license in his own name. “I made scads of money.”

  For the next ten years, he roller-coasted as the market surged and plunged. By the late 1980s, “the fishing sucked.” The binge-and-bust cycle, which had kept him on an adrenaline high through his first few seasons, yielded its own brand of monotony and depression. When Munroe put to sea on Bristol Bay now, he set his net over a graveyard of drowned friends. In 1991, he sold Vagabond and came back to what Alaskans insist on calling “the Lower 48”—states below the 49th in latitude, excitement, bodily risk, per capita income, and blood-alcohol level.

  “My girlfriend goes on at me for driving too fast. But I lived in Alaska. You can’t get killed in Seattle—it’s a statistical impossibility. People here die of cancer and old age. So I put my foot down and go like hell.”

  His life had revolved in a perfect circle. Nearly twenty years on, he was back to being a jobbing electrician, working out of a villainous blue van with Ocean Currents painted on the side. He charged $35 an hour for squashing himself into other people’s malodorous bilges, daydreaming still of the South Pacific. By now he had saved the money. Next summer, he and his girlfriend would take off for Tahiti, Samoa, the Great Barrier Reef … All they needed was a boat.

  “I’m looking. I want a steel hull. Forty to fifty feet. Probably a ketch. But it has to be steel. If you hear of anything …”

  His head, as it showed above the floorboards, was a boy’s head ravaged by age and weather; a disquieting memento mori. The Bristol Bay years had given him a gunpowder complexion, stretching the skin over his cheekbones until the skull showed through. His eyes were deeply recessed in their sockets. The mouth behind his beard was drawn. Yet the face was young, more that of the Californian dropout than the man in his forties who was its present tenant.

  “Your arm,” I said, “you lost it in Alaska?”

  “No. That was in my wild days. When I was in college, jumping freight trains.”
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  When I first saw the boat, the nautical stuff above-decks was less interesting to me than the dozen yards of teak bookshelving, with fiddles, that lined the walls of the three cabins. I endured the yacht broker’s routine hearty patter about downhauls and Cunninghams, staysail halyards and self-tailing winches, because this boat could house a library. In the six years since, I had allowed the shelves to fill of their own accord as I poked around the southern end of the Inside Passage in Washington and British Columbia, and made some cautious excursions into the open ocean off the west coast of Vancouver Island. The collection started with George Vancouver’s account of his surveying expedition of 1791–95, in the four-volume, blue-cloth-and-gilt Hakluyt Society edition. Among other early arrivals were Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Way of the Masks; several college textbooks on physical oceanography; the Odyssey, in Robert Fitzgerald’s verse translation; the life (long and intimidatingly productive) of Lord Kelvin, the Victorian inventor of the tide-prediction machine and the piano-wire deep-sea sounding apparatus; W. H. Auden’s The Enchaféd Flood; Fishing with John by Edith Iglauer; Between Pacific Tides by Ed Ricketts, the original of Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row; Heavy-Weather Seamanship by Adlard Coles; and James Gleick’s Chaos, with its pictures of Lorenz attractors and Mandelbrot sets.

  The books kept coming. They reflected a promiscuous addiction, to the sea in general and to the one on my doorstep in particular. I dipped and skimmed, jumping from the physics of turbulence to the cultural anthropology of the Northwest Indians, to voyages and memoirs, to books on marine invertebrates, to the literature of the sea from Homer to Conrad, trying to wrest from each new book some insight into my own compulsion. I looked the sea up in Freud and, more usefully, in the Book of Revelation. In Dombey and Son, Dickens (a fellow addict, whose idea of a holiday was to park himself on a windy shore and watch the waves) has a child, dying in a Brighton boardinghouse within earshot of the surf, beg of his older sister: “I want to know what it says. The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?” My question exactly.

  I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike at my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbor. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea.

  Yet for the last fifteen years, every spare day that I could tease from the calendar has been spent afloat, in a state of undiminished fascination with the sea, its movements and meanings. When other people count sheep, or reach for the Halcion bottle, I make imaginary voyages—where the sea is always lightly brushed by a wind of no more than fifteen knots, the visibility always good, and the boat never more than an hour from the nearest safe anchorage.

  When I moved from London to Seattle in 1990, the sea was part of the reason. The Inside Passage to Alaska, with its outer fringes and entailments, is an extraordinarily complicated sea-route, in more ways than one. In continuous use for several thousand years, it is now a buoyed and lighted marine freeway, a thousand miles long, and in places choked with traffic, as fishing boats, tows, barges, yachts, and cruise ships follow its serpentine course between Puget Sound and the Alaskan Panhandle. Parts of it are open ocean, parts no wider than a modest river. Some bits, like the Strait of Georgia, are small, shallow, muddy seas in their own right; others are sunken chasms, 1,500 feet deep. Where the tide is squeezed between rocks and islands, it boils and tumbles through these passes in a firehose stream. Water wasn’t meant to travel at sixteen knots: it turns into a liquid chaos of violent overfalls, breaking white; whirlpool-strings; grotesque mushroom-boils. It seethes and growls. On an island in midstream, you can feel the rock underfoot shuddering, as if at any minute the sea might dislodge it and bowl the island, end over end, down the chute.

  Its aboriginal past—still tantalizingly close to hand—puts the Inside Passage on terms of close kinship with the ancient sea of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. A nineteenth-century Kwakiutl or Tsimshian Indian would have found it easy to adapt to Homer’s sea, with its reigning winds and creaturely powers. He simply used other names for them. For homicidal tricksters like Zeus and Poseidon he had had such counterparts as Raven, Killer Whale, Halibut. He could identify keenly with Ulysses in the Straits of Messina—though he might have found Charybdis a little tame after the canoe-guzzling whirlpools of his home waters.

  High mountains and impenetrable forests crowded in on the coastal Indians and kept them within yards of the sea. The water was safer, more easily traveled, more productive, than the surrounding land. The Indians lived in an exclusively maritime culture, centered on the lavishly painted cedar canoe. Babies were rocked in miniature canoe-cradles; the dead were despatched in canoe-coffins. In their masks, rattles, boxes, woven blankets, and decorated hats, they created a marvelous, stylized, highly articulate maritime art.

  The shelf at the front of the forecabin, where I slept, became the Art section of the boat’s library: the driest place to store $75 and $125 books (made browser-proof with cellophane wrapping) on the art of the Salish, Kwakiutl, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit Indians. The designs represented creatures of the sea and coast—some familiar, like whales, bears, frogs, halibut, sea lions, cormorants, octopi; some unknown to natural history, fantastic sea-dwelling composites like the Tsimshians’ Nagunakas, who reached up from the bottom of the sea to grab a canoeful of fishermen, then held them prisoner for four years in his octopus’s garden.

  The more I looked at these pictures, the more I saw that Northwest Indian art was maritime in much more than its subject matter. Its whole formal conception and composition were rooted in the Indians’ experience of water (a fact that seems to have generally eluded its curators). The rage for symmetry, for images paired with their doubles, was gained, surely, from a daily acquaintance with mirror-reflections: the canoe and its inverted twin, on a sheltered inlet in the stillness of dusk and dawn. The typical “ovoid” shape—the basic unit of composition, used by all the tribes along the Inside Passage—was exactly that of the tiny capillary wave raised by a cat’s-paw of wind, as it catches the light and makes a frame for the sun. The most arresting formal feature of coastal Indian art, its habit of dismembering creatures and scattering their parts into different quarters of a large design, perfectly mimicked the way in which a slight ripple will smash a reflection into an abstract of fragmentary images. No maritime art I knew went half as far as this in transforming events in the water itself into constituent elements of design.

  The Indians spoke most directly through the paintbrush and the chisel. Plenty of examples of their art were collected by the early explorers, between 1778 and 1800, before the artists had had a chance to be influenced by their invaders. But their stories were nearly all transcribed much later, toward the end of the nineteenth century and after, when colonization, Christianity, and tourism—a mighty influence on native art—had so eroded the culture that little was left except rags and tatters. The translations of local languages into German and English were crude; the eager-to-please Indian tellers were already familiar with imported Bible stories and European folktales; and when the collectors were faced with strange disjunctions, they provided transitions and linkages that gave these narratives the smooth shape of something by Aesop or the Brothers Grimm.

  Even so, such collectors as Aurel Krause, John Swanton, and Franz Boas put together an enormous native literature of the Inside Passage. Their books filled several feet of shelving with stories full of strange transactions between humans and clams, bears, devilfish, and the other creatures with whom the Indians shar
ed the water.

  The saloon of my boat was dominated by the eighteenth-century white explorers—intruders from the Age of Reason, for whom measurement, with quadrants, chronometers, and magnetic compasses, was a form of taking possession. They squared up the Inside Passage with a graph-paper grid of longitudes and latitudes derived from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Equator. As part of the century’s great communal project of Linnaean taxonomy, they went fossicking for specimens of plants, birds, mammals. They covered their emerging charts of the sea with names: naming it after themselves, their ships, their patrons, their national historic dates and occasions. The animist sea of the Indians was reinvented by the Europeans in the image of their own age. Besides Vancouver, I had on board Captain Cook, Peter Puget (Vancouver’s lieutenant), Archibald Menzies (Vancouver’s official naturalist), and, from Spain, Alessandro Malaspina and Alcalá Galiano, together with the journal of the Spanish expedition artist, Tomás de Suria. Each had his own voice and, looking at the same stretch of water, saw it in strikingly different terms from the others. To travel with these men, in their tight knee-boots and frogged waistcoats, was to be in on a continuous, sometimes quarrelsome, seminar about the character and significance of the new sea.

  By accident, in an unrelated attempt to brighten the saloon, I’d hung prints from the same period as these explorers. A 1792 plate of assorted New World birds, evidently drawn from their pinned-out corpses, went up first, on the forward bulkhead. A cartoon of George III—poor, mad, kindly Farmer George—was Velcro-taped aft, alongside the VHF radio. A pair of hummingbirds (1789) perched above the barograph. The prints had come in a job lot, and it took me a while to notice how aptly they chimed with the swelling library: by losing the American colonies, the king had put a high premium on British acquisition of the as-yet-undiscovered coast of North America; while the bird prints neatly embodied the imperatives—shoot! classify! name! describe!—of eighteenth-century discovery.