Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  The procession wound past Bella Bella Island, Spirit Island, Whiskey Cove, its hullabaloo scaring the birds out of the trees, and made landfall at Shearwater, a fishing resort on Kliktsoatli Harbour. Soon girls with handbags, in all their finery, were taking flying leaps off the boats onto the pontoon. I found a vacant space at the end of the dock, between a coaster and a fish boat, and wormed gingerly alongside. My lines were immediately taken by a stocky young man wearing a loosely knotted, canary-yellow necktie; a surprising accessory, even on a Saturday night, in these parts. In seconds he had me tied to the dock, bow and stern, plus springlines.

  I thanked him and offered him a drink.

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to miss the free beer and food they got up there.”

  The previous year, the resort had burned down. It had been rebuilt with labor from Bella Bella; tonight the white owners were laying on a party for the Indians.

  “You can come,” my helper said. “Anyone can.”

  So I went along, feeling underdressed in sweater and jeans. I told him I’d meant to stop at Namu, but had gotten spooked by the ruined cannery.

  “That was a big thing for us when they closed it—lot of jobs, whole lot of jobs. Everybody worked there in the summer, Indians from bands all over … Bella Coola, Heiltsuq, Haisla … Lot of white people, too.” He laughed. “Most of us were conceived at Namu. It’s why so many people have birthdays in April and May. We’re the Namu babies.”

  The remark made perfect sense when we stepped inside the barnlike resort building, where a buffet supper and kegs of beer stood on trestle tables. I saw Namu babies everywhere. Some of the partygoers looked as if they’d come across the land bridge from Asia just a year or two ago; squarely built, with dark skins, flat faces, and broad noses, they resembled Genghis Khan’s tribesmen. Others, tall, with white-skinned knobbly features and weak chins, would’ve been comfortably at home in an English soccer crowd. Namu, the local melting pot, was the clue to the impressive variety of features—a range only emphasized by the identical black Beatle mop that framed most of the male faces.

  Some of the partygoers were probably descendants of men aboard Discovery and Chatham. The expedition stopped at Bella Bella in 1793, when the village’s painted stilt-houses covered tiny Bella Bella Island so completely that not a patch of bare rock could be seen. Edward Bell wrote in his journal that the vernacular architecture “had more the appearance of one large House than many different ones, they were most curiously painted in all Colours, with the most extravagant grotesque figures of Men, Beasts, and Fishes.”

  My escort with the necktie was named Owen, though he didn’t know of any Welsh connection in his family. His voice was full of Scottish vowels, thanks to the missionaries who’d swarmed across this coast in the 1870s and eighties, setting up schools on the Indian reserves. He wanted, he said, to visit England.

  “Why England?”

  “For a rest,” he said.

  A rock band, imported from Prince Rupert, was getting under way in the bar area—pitch-dark except for two fierce spotlights on the musicians—and couples were taking to the floor.

  Shouting to make myself heard over the din, I said to Owen: “Last time I was at an Indian dance, it was in Washington State—Tulalip. It was ‘spirit dancing,’ and there was only Kool-Aid to drink. This is more fun.”

  “How long did the dancing last?”

  “Forever. All night. On Kool-Aid.”

  “Okay, that was a real Indian dance. Tourist dances, they stop after an hour.”

  “This is a more real Indian dance, I think.”

  He laughed. “Yes, this is real Indian dancing.”

  At the table next to us, a lout with white skin reddened by drink was talking to his dark-skinned, Mongolian-looking wife. “You fock! Get some food on your fockin’ plate!”

  I watched the wife’s face collapse like a wet soufflé.

  “You’re a fockin’ embarrassment!” The husband jerked his thumb at a table far down the line. “Go sit with fockin’ Wendy!”

  She rose, mute and crying, while he smirked complacently at his friends. Moments later, he was laughing loudly and patting the knee of the woman sitting next to him; his insolent, contemptuous face full of beer and unbridled testosterone.

  Since Bella Bella first came into view, I had been put in mind of the 1960s, and never more so than now. I hadn’t heard a marital exchange like that since the Hull cod-fishing fleet was in port, and I was driving a taxi, carrying reveling fishermen and their wives and girlfriends from pub to pub along the Hessle Road. While male manners had not greatly improved since 1964, in my experience no wife nowadays behaved as this Indian woman had done, weepily accepting her subservience and going obediently to sit with fockin’ Wendy.

  “You see a lot of that, do you?” I asked Owen.

  “What?” he said. He hadn’t noticed, though the husband had been spitting out his lines straight into our faces.

  In Bella Bella’s sorry economy, there were a lot of men whose only bankable asset was their testosterone. The cannery was finished. The fishery, according to Owen, a fisherman himself, was dying fast. In recent memory, two good things had happened: the village dock had been strengthened and extended so that cruise ships could call there; and the Shearwater Resort’s fire had brought a windfall of unexpected winter work.

  “What do cruise-ship tourists do in Bella Bella?”

  “They go to the dump and take pictures of the garbage-bears.”

  I had to fight my way through the dancers to get to the bar, where I stood in the crush trying to signal for two whiskeys. While waiting, I saw the band’s name on the face of the bass drum: the Charred Remains.

  North of Bella Bella, the sea had drowned the land. Long spurs of fir and alder reached out across the water. The trees, in ragged single file, appeared to be afloat. The chart abandoned contour lines in favor of the words “low featureless country.” Judged by the lie of the land, this should have been a swamp, with the boat’s keel scraping bottom a few feet down. But the sea was two hundred fathoms deep, and the floating trees marked the ridge-tops of submerged mountains. A chilly Scotch mist softened every outline and enlarged every distance. Genesis 7 time: And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

  A few other arks were riding the Flood: the lighted windows of a white cruise ship blazed in the gray, and a pair of trollers, like bugs with erect antennae, were moving slowly seaward, keeping close company. All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

  Such waterscapes gave rise to Indian stories of a great deluge—stories later confirmed by the facts of geological history. Within the last nine to twelve thousand years, when people were present to witness such events, they would have seen the sea close over islands as earthquakes rearranged the topography. You couldn’t look at the delicate compromise made here between land and sea without imagining the Flood; and you couldn’t imagine the Flood without inventing a Noah to escape it. The coastal tribes all saw themselves as survivors of a historic cataclysm, in which boats had been their instruments of salvation. In the folk history of Bella Bella, the tribe drowned in the flood, except for a few chosen ones who were carried in canoes to the mountaintop at the head of Rivers Inlet, where they camped out until the waters were dried up from off the earth. This land was dotted with Mount Ararats, on whose peaks fortunate Indians had risen above the floodwaters: Mount Benson, on Vancouver Island; Mount McNeil, north of Prince Rupert; Mount Cheam, east of Vancouver. In the Raven stories, Raven clings by his beak to a cloud during the deluge, and when the huge tide sinks he falls out of the sky into a soft bed of kelp.

  Less than half a mile from shore, I was afloat on more than 1,300 feet of water; the numbers on the chart gave me a touch of vertigo. “I am apt to imagine,” Burke wrote, “that height is less grand than depth … a per
pendicular has more force in forming the sublime than an inclined plane.” He would have been excited to sail high over these profound chasms, so deep that no leadline could find their bottom—and nor could my depth-sounder’s electronic pulse. Confronted by real depth, the instrument registered the alarming figure of 0.9 feet as it searched vainly for something solid to bounce off, and kept on going, and going, throbbing feebly down there in the perpetual darkness, the haunt of octopuses with hubcap-sized eyes.

  Narrow Seaforth Channel led to the mouth of Milbanke Sound, wide open to the ocean—and to a big southwesterly swell. At last there was enough wind for me to get the sails up and the engine switched off, with the boat riding the crest of the swell for minutes at a time before it was eventually outpaced by the wave, and sank back into the trough astern.

  The swell quickly subsided. It’s a law of nature that the sea must break in parallel with the coast. Whatever the wind direction, you never see a wave break sideways on a beach. So when a wave-train enters a constricted channel, it refracts, peeling away on both sides to align itself with the shores. The enormous accumulated energy of even the biggest wave-trains is rapidly exhausted by this process of bending and breaking, and a powerful twelve-foot swell loses all heart in a few miles of forced refraction.

  After twenty minutes of roller-coaster sailing, there was no more than a brisk one-foot chop on a flat sea. Running before the wind, under the clearing sky, I sat back and listened to the twiggy sibilance of the bow-wave as it broke from the hull—air and water getting mashed up together like egg whites in a blender. By noon, in fitful sunshine, I was in the riverine steep-sided corridor between Cone and Swindler islands, looking out for the Indian village of Klemtu on its hook-shaped bay.

  The yachting guides warned against staying in Klemtu because the natives were unfriendly. I was about to turn back from the fully occupied government dock when I saw two fishermen waving to me, and creating forty feet of extra space where before there had been none. A skiff was hauled forward and tied up to a gill-netter; then the gill-netter was unhitched and moved farther forward on the float, leaving me ample room to drift in alongside. The fishermen took care of my lines and plugged my electric cable into the socket on the dock. I’d never been met with such a show of smiles and “No problem! no problem!”

  I’d pulled in early in order to make a call before Market Harborough’s bedtime. From the payphone at the dockhead I dialed my parents’ number. At the bungalow it was nine o’clock. Waiting for the ringing tone, I pictured the long shadows of the saplings on the lawn, falling toward the house. The phone was picked up on the third ring.

  “Hullo?” My mother’s voice was very small.

  One of the fishermen tramped up the cleated walkway from the float; passing me, he nodded and smiled again. I waved back, distractedly. What were these smiles about?

  “Well,” my mother said, “I have my good days and my bad days.”

  Beamed down by satellite to Klemtu, her grief had a knifeblade sharpness that made the village drift out of focus. She was standing in the gloom of the hall. As in so many English houses, the telephone was sitting on its own high table, in a drafty passway; you were supposed to stand, not sit, when talking into it, as a further discouragement to idle and expensive chatter. I could hear the emptiness of the bungalow around her, with the TV tuned loudly to the evening news—not a broadcast my mother had followed with any avidity before now.

  Her own news was all of my father. His ashes were to be buried in Oddingley, my grandfather’s old parish. A stonemason in Worcester was carving his headstone. “Just ‘James Peter Caplin Priaulx Raban.’ We don’t think he needs ‘Canon’ or ‘The Reverend,’ do you?” Trying for a level tone, she swooped from word to word in anxious hiccups. “Then ‘Teacher, Soldier, Priest, Scholar’…”

  “I think that sounds perfect.”

  “Do you really, dear?”

  Her voice, across 4,000-plus miles of empty blue, was as high and thin as a chaffinch’s.

  “Saint James the Great,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The church. At Oddingley.”

  When our call was finished, I took the winding boardwalk that led to the ferry dock and general store at the deep north end of the bay, munching on blackberries en route. There was a lot of foot traffic on the boardwalk, since the residential section of the village lay at the shallow south end of the bay, where single-story shacks and houses clustered around the commanding bulk of the wooden church. Everyone I passed said hello. Even a surly-looking teenage boy managed to crack a wan smile in my direction. Something was definitely up.

  I had to squeeze myself flat into the brambles to let a party of tourists go by—twelve or fifteen of them, in slickers and hiking shoes, chaperoned by a young woman from the village, who was in the middle of a story with killer whales in it.

  The store was bare. Under flyspecked bulbs, its shelves displayed dusty cans of beans, some elderly potatoes, a couple of sad cauliflowers. I fossicked about, filling a basket with things I didn’t need or want. The woman at the till, after another large smile, refused to charge me for a carton of freeze-dried chicken-à-la-king (simply add water and heat) because it had “been around here a long time.” Since everything in the store looked as if it had been there for a year or more, I thought she was showing undue prejudice to my chicken; but she solved the mystery of Klemtu’s baffling friendliness.

  The guided tour was an experiment, the first of its kind. B.C. Ferries—which in summer operated as a cut-rate cruise line, advertising its scheduled passages as wilderness excursions—had arranged, as of today, to stop at Klemtu long enough for the village to sample the tourist business. Primed to be nice to strangers, everyone this afternoon was wearing a compulsory smile.

  One had only to glance into the store to see that tourism was Klemtu’s best chance. Before long, the villagers would be mounting ceremonial salmon barbecues-with-tribal-dancing, and selling miniature totem poles for souvenirs. If Klemtu wanted to turn itself into a tourist trap, it had fine material to work with—the picturesque sweep of the bay, the half-mile-long boardwalk, the church and village, which required no more than a coat of whitewash and a few traditionally painted housefronts to make it alluringly quaint. There were garbage-bears at the dump; the deep woods held the rare albino black bear, known as the kermode, or spirit bear, and usually described as “legendary.” All the villagers had to do was to turn their society inside out and become actors in a folk pageant. With a Blackfish Hotel, native crafts shop, war-canoe races across the bay, and First Salmon ceremonies, this community of mostly unemployed loggers and fishermen could tap into the mounting flow of summer money that was running past its door. Today, with the B.C. Ferry’s lengthened stop, was the first day of Klemtu’s new life.

  One fisherman was still working on his sick engine when I got back to the boat. I asked him about the Kitasoo Nation, of which Klemtu was the tiny capital city.

  “People here came from all over,” he said. “The government moved them out here. Not just Tsimshian people, like the ones who were here before. Some of them came from other tribes, way inland. They’d never seen the sea. Spoke different languages. That’s why everyone had to talk in English—it was the only way they could understand each other.”

  As any tourist would, I had taken Klemtu for an ancient, local, organic society; it turned out to be another swirling North American melting pot. That part of its history would have to be glossed over in the pageant.

  Late in the day, I had a visitor, a tall, loose-limbed marine biologist in his thirties who lived aboard the white sloop moored nearby and was director of the Klemtu fisheries program. The native fishery was dying: though most families still went fishing for subsistence, only two commercial boats now worked out of the harbor. “It doesn’t pay for the license.” His job was to teach villagers to monitor the diminished populations of abalone, shrimp, herring, salmon, clams. “It’s counting
critters. Hardly rocking science.”

  So the government employed ex-fishermen as naturalists, paying them to observe their former catch. A fully trained technician with five years’ experience could earn $11 an hour, Canadian; $7.50 in U.S. dollars, say, or about half the going rate for casual domestic help in Seattle. In Klemtu, it was big money, and people competed eagerly for this prospect of a settled career.

  “It’s not rocking science,” the biologist said again. “But they’re such good people. They’re used to hard work. I’m here because I love the village. I love to come back …”

  Each fall he returned to his base on Vancouver Island, then sailed up to Klemtu in the spring. Living in the village, his one anxiety, he said, was that he was invited everywhere by people who couldn’t afford to entertain him. “I sometimes feel I’m taking the food out of their mouths.”

  “You’ve read the cruising guides on Klemtu?”

  “They have attitude, the guys who write those things. It offends people here. It offends me. Klemtu’s always been the nicest reserve on the whole B.C. coast.”

  I told him about the hellos and the smiles.

  “That’s how people are. Anytime. Any year. They’re not putting it on for the tourists.”

  I asked him to dinner, but he had a prior invitation in the village. So I sat down to eat alone, with my father’s ghost.

  Four days after the Allied landings in Anzio in 1944, a group of war correspondents was taken to see my father’s unit in action. Weeks later, in an Italian farmhouse recently occupied by American troops, my father came across a scuffed copy of Newsweek (14 February 1944), which included John Lardner’s “Vignettes from the Italian Front.”