Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  I was awake again at dawn. Through the ovoid of scratched perspex that served as a porthole, I watched a demented limb of alder trying to detach itself from its parent tree, against a background of sky that looked like cold gray porridge. I twiddled my way through the wavelengths on the bedside radio, but it was as empty of voices as the satellite payphone. Hemmed in by high islands, I was in a radiophonic black hole.

  But the wind snuck through. Fierce squalls raced across the width of the whitening channel and heeled the boat hard against the dock, where it shivered from masthead to keel at each new gust. The fenders squealed. The mooring ropes, sounding thin and taut as ukulele strings, sawed against the fairleads and wrenched at the cleats. Safely tied up, with nothing much to do and nowhere to go, I settled down to enjoy my enforced leisure on this wild morning. I lit the lamps, put the kettle on to boil, and, to counter the noise of the discordant ship’s orchestra, plugged in a tape of Mozart’s clarinet quintet in A—the Amadeus Quartet, with Gervase de Peyer on clarinet.

  First the violins, joined by cello and viola, made a hesitant, exploratory descent into the bass, where they discovered the clarinet, sounding as fresh and wild as the pipes of Pan. In 1789, the clarinet was still a vulgar novelty, and Mozart was breaking new ground by writing such a star part for the instrument. In this piercingly beautiful recording, de Peyer gave every note a liquid, experimental quality, as if sounding out a course through uncharted territory.

  Mozart—just eighteen months older than Captain Van—was another figure living on the cusp of the Romantic revolution. Hearing his music framed by all the noises of the boat in a small gale, I found I was listening to the clarinet as the symbol of that unfettered liberty to which Mozart’s late work seems always to be gesturing, pointing the way to Beethoven and beyond.

  With the saloon full of music and the smell of coffee, I began translating the previous day’s forecast into an intelligible weather map. An intense low (infuriatingly, its depth in millibars wasn’t specified) was bearing down on Vancouver Island from the west, with an associated front trailing southward from its center. The front had been predicted to cross the island, raking it from north to south, overnight; but my barograph was still falling and the wind was blowing out of the east-southeast, which suggested the system had stalled on the outer coast. Once the front passed, the wind ought to slacken off and veer to the southwest, while the drooping arm of the barograph should begin to climb back toward the horizontal. The inked line now touched 981 millibars, and its downward slope gave no hint of having yet bottomed out.

  De Peyer took flight in an arpeggio of woodnotes. The wind harped in the shrouds. I exercised the pretty rule of thumb known as Buys Ballot’s law. If you stand facing the wind (in the northern hemisphere), the low-pressure center lies somewhere between eight and twelve compass points to your right. That put my low in the general direction of Cape Scott—a hungry void spinning counterclockwise, sucking great drafts of air into itself as it came trundling inland from the ocean.

  On a fresh page of the logbook, I sketched the coastline and drew a nest of whorled isobars on top of Vancouver Island, the winds draining into it like bathwater going down a plughole. In a pleasant daze of Mozart and mapmaking, I took several moments to register that an intruder was thumping purposefully on the hull. Bear! I thought, and leaped for the now-open companionway.

  A man in a yellow rainslicker stood by the cockpit: the resort’s owner, demanding the $15 fee for overnight moorage. So certain was I of my solitude here that I could only gape in silence at this Man Friday apparition.

  “I’m sorry. I thought—”

  I mumbled about no-lights-on-in-the-house and didn’t-realize-anyone-was-here, but could see this wasn’t cutting much ice. The man’s eyes were looking not at me but at the cockpit seat, where I had parked my leper’s bell.

  I went downstairs to hunt for my wallet. The trio section had just begun. I switched de Peyer off and resolved to reappear as an ordinarily personable being, in full possession of his wits. But nothing I said seemed to dent the impression made by my bell ringing activities the night before. The man’s expression condemned me as a nutcase, to be handled at cautious arm’s length. His manner, as he wrote out the receipt, was studiedly remote. When I plied him with questions, he answered with uninflected monosyllables. I asked where he and his family had come from before setting up shop on West Thurlow Island.

  Out of long habit, he nodded in a southerly direction. “Vancouver,” he said.

  I’d never heard the name pronounced with such a charge of disapproval that “Vancouver” came out sounding like Sodom, Gomorrah, Babel, and the Great Wen rolled into one.

  So he was an urban type, supporting his wilderness retreat by opening it to boatloads of other urban types for three months a year. Not only was I the madman with the bell, but out of season to boot. An unwelcome intruder on his solitude, I felt doubly unpopular.

  “Can you open the store for me?”

  He checked his wristwatch and said, regretfully, “Noon.”

  “Can I mail stuff from here?”

  “Mailplane. Tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  Pining for conversation, I found myself an outcast on the island, where my unsavory reputation had got abroad. A woman on a bike, pedaling between the house and the resort, abruptly changed course at the sight of me and found urgent business to attend to in her vegetable patch. At noon, in the store, the owner stood guard over the till, drumming his fingers lightly on the counter while I browsed through the few items remaining on the shelves. I bought half a dozen bear postcards for Julia, stamps, some food in cans and packets, then begged to make a phone call. The owner let me use his cellphone to access the B.C. Tel satellite system.

  “This is Jean,” lied the comb-and-paper, magnetically encoded replica of Jean’s voice. “Please leave a message.”

  I told the machine I was gale-bound on an island, virtually out of contact with the rest of the world, that I hoped Julia’s bear postcards had been arriving in a steady stream, that I’d call again as soon as I got the chance, that “I so miss you both. I—”

  “Ping-pong,” said the two-tone doorbell chime of the machine, telling me my time was up.

  “Nine dollars,” said the resort owner, who’d been pricing the call with the second hand on his watch.

  Defeated in all my efforts to make contact with another human being, I walked back to the boat to commune with the waves, now breaking in regular formation across the passage. The driving wind remained obstinately in the east-southeast, though I thought I saw a distinct leveling of the barograph needle on the 980-millibar line.

  The waves came hissing at the transom. Only a few minutes old, born as wrinkles 800 yards away across the channel, already they were mature and grizzle-bearded. Blocklike, lumpy, they packed a big wallop for their size. Pale ribbons of dissolving foam streaked the inky water, and the boat was being jostled with sufficient force to make me double-up the mooring ropes. It was now hard to stand upright on the floating dock, which pitched and rolled underfoot like a Boston cakewalk.

  According to Mircea Eliade, the earliest known form of decoration, the zigzag pattern rimming a Neolithic pot, represented a wave train in profile. On this coast, the undulating line of the waves, their interminable cycle of growth and collapse, ran through the art of the Indians as the essential shape of life itself. Waves chase each other around woven hats and baskets. Beautifully chiseled waves edge a goathorn ladle, a wooden feasting bowl, a maple-wood mortar. The swooping calligraphic brushstroke, as it defines the outlines of an extended composition, mimics the curve of the wave, from trough to crest and down to trough again.

  Waves have always been emblems, full of somber meaning. “I hear the waves!” cries out the six-year-old Paul Dombey in his delirium, a few moments before his death. Philip Larkin, at the seaside, meditates on “the small hushed
waves’ repeated fresh collapse,” conjuring a multitude of small hushed lives going to their deaths. Shakespeare, in Sonnet 60, sees in the waves the futile brevity of life:

  Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore,

  So do our minutes hasten to their end,

  Each changing place with that which goes before,

  In sequent toil all forward do contend …

  The wave’s urgent and dramatic expenditure of energy to no significant effect makes it a natural symbol of human self-importance and mortality. Watching waves break is a pastime designed to induce reflective melancholy, and I doubt if the wave processions that march through Northwest Indian art were meant to be any jollier in their significance than their deathly cousins that course through English literature.

  Down in the saloon, I laid the postcards out on the table, numbered them, and tried to write Julia an upbeat story about a wandering bear named Emily. It was tough going. The conventions of talking bears (hats, gumboots, honeypots, etc.) seemed as formal and strict as the rules governing the Petrarchan sonnet. Emily’s dim adventures kept being invaded by bear stories collected by Boas and his colleagues, in which the bears’ sexual intercourse with humans, and its social consequences, usually provided the climactic narrative event. Perhaps A. A. Milne and Michael Bond were similarly tormented, trying to stop Winnie the Pooh and Paddington from molesting children in the nursery. I feared my bear story was broadly comparable, in its entertainment value, to a tale recorded by Boas, entitled “Mucus of Nose” and reading, in its entirety: “It goes down mucus—It goes up mucus—It goes down mucus—It comes out.” Meanwhile the waves went on breaking at my back, plowing into the stern with a crackling-bonfire sound and jolting my living quarters so hard that it was like trying to write on a shunting train.

  Late in the afternoon the wind shifted decisively into the southwest, swinging around the channel until it came off a wooded point within a hundred yards of the dock. The noise of the waves shrank to an amiable chuckle along the waterline; the barograph needle was up to 982; the line of the front had passed overhead on its way inland. Then the rain arrived—a warm downpour that fell into the water like granulated sugar from a chute.

  Clad in full-dress orange stormgear like a member of some chemical-warfare unit, I mailed my postcards at the store, flicking them one by one under the door in the hope they eventually would make it to the mailplane, then went back to the boat and took refuge from the rain and growing darkness in a pile of Indian texts.

  A chief lived in the middle of a very long town. His daughter was fond of picking berries. Once she went for berries with her father’s slaves, and while picking far up in the woods she stepped upon some grizzly-bear’s dung. “They always leave things under people’s feet, those wide anuses,” she said.…

  The offensive bear (“you with the big hole at each end”) changes itself into human form and seduces the young woman. In the grizzly’s den she becomes a bear; and when she tries to return to the human world, she is hunted by the angry grizzly-bear tribe.

  She began crying for her life. She came out on the edge of a lake. In the middle of this big lake a canoe was floating wearing a dance hat. It said to her, “Run this way into the water.” Then she ran into the water towards it. She was pulled in, and it went up with her into the sun.

  It’s another warning story about the fragile and precarious nature of human identity, and the danger of tangling with such forces of the wild as bears and whirlpools. Stay in the town, or on the safe surface of the water. In the depths of the forest, and beneath the sea, false lovers abound. When means of escape present themselves, like the canoe wearing a dance hat, they can be relied on to conduct you from the frying pan into the fire. (When the canoe carries the woman aloft, she is gang-raped and impregnated by the sons of the sun.)

  The moral of these stories would seem merely sensible and commonplace if it were not for the sentimental myth of Indians living in a state of idealized harmony with nature. Nature, as described in their literature, is quick to take offense, vengeful, sexually predatory, and generally ill-disposed to humankind. Civilization—the canoe, the house, the village—exists as a tiny circle perpetually threatened by a greedy and rapacious wilderness, and can be destroyed by one careless move. The bear-woman’s troubles begin with an act of impoliteness, when she rudely makes fun of the grizzly’s big anus.

  The trouble is that the Indians’ oral literature has been systematically eroded by several generations of Dr. Bowdlers and Mrs. Grundys—starting with the first late-Victorian collectors, who tended to flinch at the stories’ bawdy relish for the details of sex and evacuation. Swanton, not an obvious prude, resorted to turning the dirty bits into Latin:

  Bear asked Raven, “What do you use for bait anyhow, my friend?” Corvus respondit, “Testium cute ad escam praeparandum utor.” Ursus aeiebat corvo, “Licetne uti meis quoque?” Sed corvus dixit, “Noli id facere, ne forte sint graviter attriti.” Paulo post ursus aegre ferens aiebat, “Abscide eos.” Tum corvus cultellum acuens aiebat, “Pone eos extrema in sede.” Postea corvus eos praecidit, at ursus gemens proripuit circum scapham et moriens incidit in undas extreme cum gemitu.*

  After a while Raven said to Cormorant, “There is a louse coming down on the side of your head.…”

  If that had to go into Latin, one wonders how much of the story must have been unprintable in any language. Later folklorists, trying to gain a larger, younger audience for Indian “myths,” bled the stories dry of all remotely unseemly references, until all that was left behind was a milk-and-water residue of Native American Spirituality and a cast of animal characters who would not disgrace themselves in The House at Pooh Corner. The popular books—Ella E. Clark’s Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, for example—were so thoroughly permeated by the wholesome tradition of folktales-for-children that their versions bear almost no relation to the harsh, startling, and scatological narratives heard by Franz Boas and the other early anthropologists.

  As my own trip took me deeper into a region that looked, at least, a lot like wilderness, I found that Indian art and stories were becoming daily more meaningful, losing their tophamper of exoticism and grotesquerie and gaining a melancholy realism that was rooted in the physical landscape through which I was traveling. It was easy to feel a personal resonance in the many stories about the bad things that happen to people who wander away from home. Loneliness was a dominant theme. Characters were constantly being driven to madness or suicide by the death of a spouse or the desertion of their friends. A man loses his family to a deadly epidemic; alone, he entertains pieces of floating ice to a ceremonial feast. When a man’s wife dies, he commissions the village’s best carver to fashion her image in red cedar, which he then dresses in his wife’s clothes and takes with him everywhere; the wooden statue begins to move, but only slightly, and never learns to speak.

  No fate was worse than being an outcast or exile. The literature was rich in grim examples of people who, by bad luck or selfish actions, were excluded from the sustaining warmth of village and family life. Causes of exile included laziness, jealousy, offense to a powerful being, poverty, contentiousness, and having sex with the wrong person—or animal, as in the case of the young woman whose unseen lover turned out to be a dog, and who gave birth to a litter of puppies. The sole consolation of exile was that solitary people occasionally came into possession of shamanistic powers. Such rare, fortunate outsiders could enrich themselves with great hauls of fish or supplies of copper, and return to the village as persons of consequence.

  The stories harped on the terrors of the unknown—the lonely island, the dark forest, the undersea grotto of the giant devilfish, the sky-domain of the thunder-eagle. You had only to dive a little too deep, walk a few steps too far, climb one hill too many, and you’d cross into the habitat of creatures to which the firelit masks at winter dance ceremonies offered a scarifying field-guide.

  I was beginning, at la
st, to put all this in its proper context. The stories reflected an imperiled social world, in which humans were laughably puny in relation to 200-foot conifers, impassable 10,000-foot mountains, and tidal rapids resembling horizontal Niagaras. Here people were hugely outnumbered and outweighed by carnivorous wild animals.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss once suggested that the 1,000-mile-plus stretch of coast between Puget Sound and southeast Alaska once held a population of around 150,000 Indians. The figure has been subsequently criticized for being too high, and 75,000 is probably nearer the mark—a good crowd for a baseball game, but tiny when set against this long straggled terrain of inlets and archipelagos. Coastal tribes lived in scattered villages, some of which, like the “very long town” of the bear-woman, were very big indeed. Vancouver wrote of “upwards of a hundred canoes” putting off from a single village to trade furs with the visitors.

  Both the Spanish and British explorers sailed for days on end without seeing a sign of human life or habitation; though in some areas, around the Arran Rapids, for example, and along Johnstone Strait uptide of the Seymour Narrows, they met with large concentrations of population. Turbulence meant life as well as danger. The best fishing was where the tide ran fast; and the rapids attracted all the other creatures that fed on fish, from gulls and eagles to bears and sea otters. Between these magnet-centers lay great stretches where a grizzly bear might pass a lifetime without setting eyes on a human being.