Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  The extreme rapidity which the waters attained was a phenomenon worthy of the greatest attention. The current of Angostura de la Esperanza in the Strait of Magellan is seven and a half miles an hour near the shore, and its velocity is much greater in mid-channel. Nevertheless, the difference between the two currents, which can be noticed at once, is so great that it is no exaggeration to say that the current in Angostura de los Comandantes has a velocity of twelve miles. The sight is most strange and picturesque: the waters flow as if they were falling from a cascade; a great number of fish are constantly rising in them, and flocks of gulls perch on the surface to the entrance to the channel, allowing its rapid flow to carry them along, and when they have reached its end, they fly back to their original position and repeat the experience. This not only amused us, but it also supplied us with a means by which to gauge accurately the force of the current.

  A few minutes before four o’clock, the Indians paddled ashore to watch the foolhardy Europeans from a safe distance. Galiano and Valdés were over-cautious; waiting for the tide to slacken, they missed the null, and when the brig and schooner pulled into the jaws of the narrows, under oars and studdingsails, the ebb was already running fast. Mexicana hugged the mainland side, and was swept clean through; Sutil, running close to Stuart Island, got caught in an eddy and “was turned around three times with such violence that it made those of us who were in her giddy.” Her hull scraped the rocks on Arran Point. Mexicana clawed her way over to a mainland cove, half a mile from the rapids, and began to lower her anchor, but Sutil couldn’t cross the stream and was carried out of sight, spinning on the whirlpools.

  The continual cross-currents and eddies, sometimes in favour and sometimes against the schooners, now driving them back and now driving them forward, making it always impossible to control them and leaving them at the mercy of the waters, alternately raised and mocked our hopes of making a creek which was very near. The Sutil attempted to reach with the boat a point which was to the east, but at that moment was caught by another violent whirlpool and again carried along, breaking the end of the cable which was just being made fast.

  Skidding wildly in a series of involuntary pirouettes, the ships were flushed through the cauldron of rips and eddies, and out through the long chute of Dent Rapids, from where their shaken captains managed to lead them to shelter, of a sort, under what is now Burnt Bluff. They anchored in forty fathoms, with stern lines tied to trees on the shore. Cardero, half sailor, half artist, was torn between seaman-like concern for the ships’ safety and romantic relish for the sublime aspects of the night that followed:

  Later the wind increased in strength, so that we heard it whistling through the plants above us and through the trees on the mountain. At the same time the violent flow of the waters in the channel caused a horrible roaring and a notable echo, this producing an awe-inspiring situation, so that we had so far met nothing so terrible.

  I reached the entrance to Yuculta Rapids, the southernmost arm of the Y, thirty-five minutes before slack water. In the lunar cycle of the rapids, it was a very tame moment, a day of neap tides, called “soakers” by towboatmen, as opposed to the big “bull-tides” of fortnightly springs. Yet the ebb was still running hard. I turned the boat on the current and motored at four knots, facing back the way I’d come. At this speed I was able to keep a madrona tree on Sonora Island fixed in position between the starboard shrouds. In midstream, the flow was smooth and laminar: the only visible turbulence was my own wake, which trailed out behind the boat, strangely narrowed and attenuated, as the tide swept it away into the distance. When I began to gain on the madrona, I slackened off on the throttle until, at just two knots, the tree held in place. Then I turned and ran with the dying stream.

  Off Big Bay, great curds of yeasty scum marked the sites of rips and whirlpools that were now nearly extinct. A few logs and uprooted kelp stems continued to revolve in patches of broken water. But the surviving eddies were flaccid, and there was no real heart in their attempts to wrench the steering from my hands. The boat sauntered, at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids—a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks.

  Few seaways in the world have been named after artists. Cordero Channel, where I met the infant flood, had been Cardero Channel until Victorian chartmakers, ignorant of his painstaking watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings, took to casually misspelling it. This deserves to be put right. Both as writer and painter, Cardero, a short man nicknamed Pepe, paid closer attention to the arts of the Indians, and was more deeply stirred by the mountains and inlets, than most of the Englishmen on Vancouver’s ships.

  On the VHF, Environment Canada had just put out an updated forecast of an imminent southeasterly gale: 35 to 40 knots in Georgia Strait, 50 to 60 knots on the outer coast. The afternoon now had the dead stillness of the calm before a storm. Since lunchtime, the inked line on the barograph had sunk below 990 millibars, and the inert air felt thin and vacuous, as if someone had extracted it from the islands with a pump. Even with the engine going, I could hear birds in the trees—the show-off, quick-fire cannonade of a sapsucker drumming up a mate; the monotonous, squeaky-hinge keening of a chickadee.

  The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimeter or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.

  I went up front to photograph the water ahead of the bow, but the action was too quick for the shutter. For the space of an eyeblink, each wavelet held a distorted scrap of a reflection, then it was gone. There, for a millisecond, was a bit of sky—a bit of tree—a bit of dark-hulled boat—a bit of my own face. The myriad fragmentary images flashed, stretched, contracted, and dissolved. Pursuing them with a camera, I was on a fool’s errand; it was like trying to catch globules of mercury in a shrimp net. But I went on snapping, hoping to take the photograph I needed by accident.

  I was trying to prove a point. The fundamental design unit in the art of all the Northwest coastal tribes is a shape more easily sketched than described:

  In a full-blown composition like a Chilkat blanket, a wall-hanging, or a carved and painted bentwood chest, you can see dozens of these lozenges, sometimes packed as tight as bricks in a wall. They vary in size and shape; they can be stretched out into a long, curvaceous boomerang, or squashed up until they’re very nearly square. Often they contain smaller lozenges, just as the ripples I was trying to photograph contained concentric ellipses of light and shade.

  José Cardero noticed the lozenges, which crop up in several of his drawings of Indian clothing and decoration. The Haida Indians, Judge Swan noted, identified them with the spots on the skin of a young skate. Franz Boas called them “eye designs.” Bill Holm, the leading modern authority on Indian art of the Northwest coast, calls them “ovoids.”

  I’ve watched ovoids form, in their millions, in almost-still water, under a breath of wind, or by the friction of the moving tide. The canoe Indians, living on this water as their primary habitat, saw ovoids in nature every day of their lives; and when they combined them in a design, they made them do exactly what capillary waves do—reflect the world in smithereens.

  The ovoid’s “formline” (Bill Holm’s useful word) typically frames a dismembered body part: an eye, a claw, a jointed wing, the bladelike dorsal fin of a killer whale, the front teeth of a beaver. The whole picture, with all manner of interlinked ovoids, teases the spectator into trying to solve it like a puzzle
. You find yourself instinctively reconfiguring its constituent pieces into a single creature or narrative sequence—yet the winged and finned creature is usually beyond the ken of conventional zoology, and the story proceeds by strange and contradictory leaps and bounds.

  Turn-of-the-century Indian commentators on these designs were wonderfully ingenious and assured in their interpretations, though rarely did one commentator ever agree with another. Franz Boaz achieves a moment of rare comedy in Primitive Art when, trying to decipher the patterns of Chilkat blankets, he consults two ethnologists, George T. Emmons and John R. Swanton, each with his own native experts in tow.

  The blanket shown in figure 203 represents, according to Emmons, a female wolf and young.… According to Swanton the blanket represents a young raven.

  The blanket shown in figure 204 shows, according to Emmons … a brown bear sitting up … According to Swanton the design represents a halibut.

  The blanket in figure 103 represents, according to Emmons, a diving whale and the lateral fields a raven sitting.… According to Swanton the same blanket represents a wolf with young.

  Boas then turns to bentwood chests; and here he is able to draw on the firsthand experience of the Haida artist, Charles Edenshaw, who obliges him with a frame-by-frame (or ovoid-by-ovoid) reading of the four sides of a painted box. This is Boas’s drawing of the box in question:

  And Edenshaw’s gloss:

  The design [shows] four interpretations of the raven as culture-hero. The upper right hand rectangle of the first side he claimed to represent the head of the raven surmounted by the ear; the large eye to the left of it, in the left hand upper corner, the shoulder and under it the wing and the tail. The design in the right hand lower corner he interpreted as the foot; the toes are clearly visible in the lowest right hand corner of this field. He claims that the head turned upside down in the left hand upper rectangle of the second side represents the head of the raven and under it the hand; the raven being conceived as a human being.…

  Forewarned by the Emmons-Swanton controversies, Boas wrote of this exegesis, “I consider it entirely fanciful.”

  The point, surely, is that these compositions are infinitely amenable to interpretation, no version of which can be counted final and authoritative. With marvelous stylistic assurance and control, the Indian artists have rendered a world inherently fluid, fragmentary, elusive, and chaotic. Look, it’s a bear; look again, it’s a halibut. This is nature as one meets it in the distorting mirror of the water. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Boas’s drawing of the painted chest bears an uncanny resemblance to the photograph I was trying, and failing, to take of the marbled, endlessly shifting, random chiaroscuro of Cordero Passage.

  The maritime art of these mostly anonymous Kwakiutl, Haida, and Tsimshian craftsmen appeared to me to grow directly from their observation of the play of light on the sea. Trailing through the museums of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria, then, later, through the Northwest Indian galleries of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Menil Collection in Houston, I saw a water-hauntedness in almost every piece. This was an aspect of the art the descriptive literature ignored. Thousands of pages were given over to discussion of its shamanistic symbolism, and, since Bill Holm’s landmark Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965), its abstract design. What I found, touring the museums, was an art in thrall to ripples and reflections.

  The simplest way of retrieving order from chaos is to hold a mirror to it. The scraps of colored plastic in Julia’s kaleidoscope, given a random shake, yielded a perfectly symmetrical pattern. In the sheltered inlets of the Northwest, the Indians faced constant daily evidence of the mirror of the sea as it doubled and patterned their untidy world; and it’s no wonder that their art is possessed by a rage for symmetry. It’s full of spatchcocked animals—ravens, wolves, whales—sliced down the middle and laid out flat so the left half of the creature is an exact reflection of the right. In most boxes and blankets (Boas’s chest is atypical in this respect), an invisible seam runs from top to bottom down the center of the composition, the two sides mirroring each other like a butterfly’s wings. Totem poles, at least viewed from the front, have the same rigid, reflective symmetry.

  Sometimes, especially in early morning, the water of the inlets is as still as a pool of maple syrup, its surface tension unblemished by wind or tide: then it holds a reflection with eerie fidelity, with no visible edge or fold along the waterline. Capturing the Indian sea in this mood, my amateur photographic efforts were a lot more successful.

  The previous year, I’d been up at 5:30 A.M. in a lagoon-like nook, deep among the fjords on the west coast of Vancouver Island. At high-water slack on a spring tide, about two feet of earthen bank showed above the water. A welter of roots and rocks protruded from the dark soil, and the whole length of the bank lay on its exact reflection. Moving carefully in the cockpit so as not to make ripples, I took a dozen pictures. The long, low bank and its watery double came out perfectly, with no giveaway seam showing where earth stopped and reflection began.

  Turned sideways, the photographs showed precisely what I’d seen: a pillar of strange faces. Doubled, every random feature of the bank took on meaning and expression. The curved root became a pair of eyebrows; the narrow wedge of rock, lodged slantwise in the earth, turned into a grinning mouth; a stone was the flared nostrils. In a few yards of crumbled bank one saw a jostling crowd of gargoyles.

  I framed four of the pictures and hung them on the kitchen wall—four blackened pillars standing in a jungle of greenery. Whenever a visitor eyed them, I supplied a single clue: “The paint’s worn off—they’re very old.”

  “Oh, I see. Totem poles.”

  It worked every time. The experiment proved nothing in particular about totem poles, but it did show how instantly legible a random string of marks becomes when doubled with its mirror image. Boas thought the taste for symmetry in primitive art was “difficult to understand,” but surely it wasn’t difficult in the Northwest, where, more days than not, at dawn and dusk, everything on land was rooted to its watery reflection. The split creature—a favorite motif—was a simple fact of visual life: the wading heron joined by the ankles to its twin; the twinned loon; the black bear at the edge of the lake, lapping up its own image with its tongue.

  Water plays tricks on whatever lies within its reach. It distorts and dismembers, then restores an extravagant wholeness, making two of one—which is exactly what the Indian artists of the Northwest were doing in their designs. Living on water, as aquatic in their habits as sea otters, the coastal tribes couldn’t help but see in the water’s playful games a true reflection of their own instinctive worldview. Rippled surfaces exposed a restless and inconstant nature, in which things continually swapped places and sudden, mysterious transformations abounded. Carving a box or painting a muslin curtain, the artist was, in effect, re-creating scenes from the water’s never-ending picture show.

  At twilight I reached the summer resort on Blind Channel, its line of finger piers deserted. Preparing to pull into a slot, I saw the tide was swirling through the piers like a river in spate. The fenders gasped as the water pinned the 14,000-pound weight of the boat against the dock, and the protesting chuckle of the current against the hull was loud in the dead air.

  The picture windows of the waterside restaurant framed bosomy snowdrifts of furniture, dust-sheeted for winter. The shop-cum—post office was dark, and no lights showed in the nearby house. The only sign of life was the drone of an electrical generator in a whitewashed shed. In the gloaming, it took a little while to detect the object of my visit, a B.C. Tel satellite payphone shrouded in bushes up a dirt path.

  Most likely, the owners were sunning themselves on the beaches at Waikiki and that evening I was the only inhabitant of West Thurlow Island. My big problem was the distance—no more than a hundred feet—that yawned between me and the phone, on which I had promised to call Jean and J
ulia.

  I’ve always been scared of large mammals—in England, cows; in the Northwest, bears and cougars. West Thurlow, out of season, looked to me like prime bear country. My instincts were to stay with the boat, but I meant to keep my promise.

  One of the U.S. Coast Guard’s many antiquated regulations was that every vessel above a certain length was required to carry a ship’s bell, for use in fog. I unhooked my bell from its mounting on the coach-house roof and advanced slowly up the path, clanging the bell like a medieval leper and listening, between each mournful tintinnabulation, for the sound of heavy crashing in the brush. A panicked wren fled a patch of salal. The only other wild inhabitant I met was a fat banana slug.

  At the phone I dug into my pockets for change with one hand and shook the bell at the wilderness with the other, thinking as I did so that this was probably not quite how Barry Lopez or Richard Nelson would handle the situation. Like a triton shell, the phone had the sound of the sea in it. I fed a fistful of quarters into the slot and punched in the 12.06-billion number of home. The surf continued to break on the faraway coast.

  “Hello? Operator?”

  But no one was hiding in the static.

  I tried again a dozen times and got nothing but the lonesome sea. I walked back to the boat, jangled the bell morosely and cursed B.C. Tel, as Blind Channel lived up to its name and the water darkened to the color of the surrounding fir forest. Remembering stories of how bears in these parts regularly boarded boats, lured by the tantalizing scent of domestic garbage, I slid the companionway hatchboards into place and locked the hatch against ursine burglars.

  The wind arrived at midnight, waking me with the sudden, urgent hammering of a loose halyard against the mast and, inches from my left ear, the brushlike sound of waves collapsing against fiberglass. In the drumskin interior, the vibrating halyard took on a thunderous resonance. With each gust it whanged louder and faster, until I was forced to fix it. Throwing a parka over my naked shoulders, I went out barefoot with a knife and a coil of shock-cord. Stubbing a toe on the steel cleat amidships, I added a wolfish howl of my own to the varied noises of the night.