Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  When he lifted the chalice for consecration and pronounced Christ’s words, “Drink ye all of this, for this is my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins,” the cheap, sweet, Burgundy-style wine changed into the very blood of the Redeemer.

  “Theology,” my father would say in the early days of his ordination, “is the queen of the sciences.” At the altar, with the priest dressed like an Egyptian magician, the laws of physics were miraculously suspended. My father could change bread into flesh and comprehend the divine secret of the three-in-one-and-one-in-three.

  In every other department of life, his instinctive response was to doubt. He never saw a sky in which he couldn’t find a cloud. He was at his happiest when exposing a fly in the ointment, a flaw in the argument. Only in his religious practice was he extravagant. To the council estate where he was a curate, then to the long, straggling village that was his first full parish, he brought a strangely de luxe version of English Protestantism, replete with genuflections, fine vestments, and the mystical paradoxes of such early Church of England apologists as Donne and Hooker.

  In the otherwise indulgent 1960s, he started to apply the carving knife to his own beliefs, shaving them, sliver by sliver, to fit the new England of ring-roads, high-rise blocks, and windblown shopping plazas, where his ministry lay. He read “existential theology”—Tillich, Bonhoeffer—while lamenting that he was a dunce at getting his head around philosophical ideas. In 1963 he read Honest to God by John Robinson, the bishop of Woolwich, a book that raised a storm in the Church and deeply interested my father. I once picked up Honest to God from its permanent place by my father’s chair on the drawing-room floor and saw that the inked annotations in my father’s small, neat hand, with a touch of dandyism in its loops and flourishes, so thickly crowded Robinson’s text that it was nearly illegible. For months on end my father argufied with the rogue bishop, before he came to side with him.

  This was his passage through Peril Strait, in a nimbus of pipe smoke, amidst toppling piles of books, a farting dog at his feet. By the early 1980s he had pared down his creed to its ethical and symbolic bones.

  In our late-night vinous conversations in front of the gas fire, I used to twig him on the subject. “Where do you stand now on things like the Resurrection and the idea of personal eternal life, Peter?”

  “Are we talking literally?”

  The bushy eyebrow, cocked high; the lopsided, toothy smile. That pipe. He squinted at the level of the wine in his glass, as if taking aim along a gunsight.

  “I’d say they were powerful symbols in anybody’s book, wouldn’t you, old boy?”

  “But can you believe in Christianity without believing in a supernatural god?”

  “Well …” He got a great deal into the word “well”; head thrown back, face squinched, a long expulsion of breath. “Of course, I’m suspicious of the supernatural …”

  He wouldn’t be caught, but made it quite clear that between his belief and my disbelief was a fissure so narrow that one would need a micrometer to measure it. Not that he had lost his faith. At least my father certainly didn’t see it that way. Rather, he had refined it, by the same process of rational economy with which he could make a joint last for a week, a pair of trousers for twenty years.

  I did not know what he believed—or didn’t believe—when he was dying, or what death meant to him then. I was reasonably certain that he didn’t view it as the gateway to a bright hereafter. In forty years in the priesthood, most of his time had been spent trying to give consolation to other people; but I doubted if he had found much left in his religion with which to console himself.

  Thinking of my father’s voyage made me forget my own. I was at his bedside in Market Harborough, with shadows of the traffic outside moving in the room where he was lying still, when the boat collided with a log. The crash stopped it dead. The bow climbed high out of the water. There was the same sound that a house makes in an earthquake—the crackling, grinding noise of big trouble in the foundations down below. The log, black with age, two feet in diameter and about thirty feet long, slid past the beam, almost totally submerged. A pencil-line of light where it grazed the surface was its only giveaway. Waiting to catch someone napping, it had caught me fair and square.

  I got the floorboards up in the forecabin and saloon, but saw no alarming trickle in the bilges. The boat wasn’t an oversensitive type; powerfully built, it was designed to take life on the chin. When I bought it, the marine surveyor said, “She’ll put up with more punishment than you can,” and the boat’s toughness had several times saved me from the consequences of my own negligence, as an ark should.

  Back in the here and now, I kept a careful lookout. I got the sails up, thereby killing the wind. The boat ghosted for a mile or so on the diminishing air, then its sails fell limp, and it began to turn in sluggish circles on the current. Reluctant to break the windless silence, listening for animals in the brush along the shore, I let the sky revolve overhead and watched an eagle soaring on a thermal like a scrap of charred paper against the blue.

  The channels here were crevices between bare-skulled mountains. They appeared entirely landlocked until, at the last moment, a granite cliff would slide aside to disclose the next reach. In the narrowest crevice of all, where Zimovia Strait shrank to an islet-studded tidal river not much more than half a mile wide, was a deserted Tlingit village. Even in 1933 the place had been long abandoned. But one could still see where the Indians had rolled boulders away on the beach to make a sandy canoe-launching ramp; and though the houses had rotted back into the forest, an obstinately human, domestic atmosphere clung to the site.

  It was tucked deep out of harm’s way, this pretty, small-scale refuge from the big, wild country that surrounded it. The water was shallow—only five and six fathoms in the buoyed channel—and perfectly sheltered. A full gale would do no more than ripple it. Willows and alders grew on the gently sloping banks, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves made speckled, pleasantly Augustan glades. Captain Van, who saw the entrance to Zimovia Strait but did not investigate it, would have approved of this sequestered pool, with its half-dozen miniature islands and level, curving lawns.

  The early explorers viewed the Indians as creatures of whatever landscape they happened to inhabit. The natives were as much a part of the fauna as bears and wolves. The farther north the Vancouver expedition sailed, the more the Indians appeared to grow darker, dourer, more granitic and hostile, borrowing their character from the terrain in which they were encountered. The “treacherous,” “jabbering” Tlingits (Menzies’s words) were the fiercest and most alien tribe that the whites had met so far. They incorporated in their persons all the bad weather of the summer of ’93, the frustrating, many-branched nature of what is now the Alexander Archipelago, the forbidding cliffs and impenetrable black forest of the wilderness. Had the travelers found them in settings like Zimovia Strait, the Indians would surely have been seen in a more favorable light.

  In fact, Vancouver’s men were in far greater danger from the natives of Tahiti and Hawaii. But the English tourists, then as now, had fixed ideas about the character of people from the warm south and attributed to the Pacific islanders an essentially sunny disposition, a love of pleasure, an un-English appetite for sex in the afternoons. Even when murder was in the air, the English sailors clung to the notion that Tahiti and Hawaii were run on the lines of an eighteenth-century Club Med.

  The Tlingits were northerners, living on the same latitude as the citizens of Aberdeen. Parsimony and joylessness were what the English always expected of people of the north, and they were quick to nail the Tlingits as surly, mean, and rowdy. It was as if Discovery had made a three-quarter-circumnavigation of the world only to discover a race of grim, half-naked Scotsmen with lip-ornaments and bows and arrows.

  Past the last islet, the strait opened out into a U-shaped valley whose mountainsides exhibited massive,
angular clearcuts and the vertical mud-chutes down which logs were tumbled to the sea. The water here was a milky soapstone green—glacier-melt from the Stikine River, or so I guessed. Flecks of dust and pollen were riding on the surface, which was as smooth and thick-looking as paint.

  Laboring hard against the tide, the boat seemed stuck fast in this unlovely stretch. I could see Cemetery Point across the miles of eerie green water and slash-littered hills, a smudge on the starboard bow that grew no closer, though the engine was running at full tilt. An hour passed. Two. Then, at close to four o’clock, Wrangell slid into view from behind the point: a big fleet of fishing boats tied hull to hull in the harbor and, behind them, a low, shambling wooden town under a mile-long pall of industrious steam.

  Wrangell was in trouble, and full of afternoon-men. Moon-faced, hands deep in pockets, they scuffed their heels around the docks; sat in the cabs of stationary pickups, playing the radio with the windows down; pushed infants in strollers up and down a main street on which half the businesses were closed and up for sale. In the smoky fug of the Diamond C. Cafe, I read a ten-day-old Wrangell Sentinel and got the story. A sawmill had recently shut down, putting 250 people out of work. More closures were on the way. The curbs on logging in national forests, imposed by the Clinton administration, were seen in Wrangell as a vindictive attempt by the federal government to destroy the town, now a fortress of militant Republicanism. Four months before the election, the VOTE DOLE placards were out, planted in every front yard like so many saplings. In the Diamond C. Cafe, the president was known to all as Trucking Bill.

  Wrangellites were not mollified by the $32 million of federal money, payable over four years—a grant from the Economic Disaster Relief Fund—but the city manager was pleased. The Sentinel quoted him as saying, “We have to spend $7.5 million a year—it’s a good problem to have.” It seemed a lot to me: $3,000 per annum for every man, woman, and child. But the Diamond C. patrons, in bush-hats and seaboots, were complaining that “the Money,” as they called it, had already been woefully misspent, even before a cent of it had been seen in town. The mood in the cafe was gnarly and corrosive; I thought it smart to keep my head down and ask no questions while the diners derided the stupid trucking projects of trucking City Hall.

  A poster was stuck to the window: WE SUPPORT RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT JOBS. The words “logging” and “fishing” had largely disappeared from the political discourse—a measure of the conservationists’ victory in the rhetorical war. Now the fishing and timber industries had to take cover behind a smokescreen of tortured euphemisms. Netting a salmon run or denuding a mountain of its trees was called “wise use” or “resource development.” When the Sentinel referred to the ban on logging in national forests, it did so in the slyest terms, calling it “Congress’s failure to open more land for timber production.”

  License plates proclaimed Alaska the Last Frontier; and given the state’s long history of cheerful rapine, the new restrictions were construed as an affront to liberty itself. Wrangell, harder hit than most towns on the coast, was enraged. Every house enjoyed a view of great stands of timber that Washington, D.C., had put out of bounds, for reasons considered vengeful and capricious.

  Class had much to do with it. The wilderness—which by rights ought to be used as a tree farm—was being artificially preserved for merely aesthetic reasons, to provide a scenic backdrop for the enjoyment of tourists, a word pronounced with venom. People in Wrangell were losing their traditional livelihoods because liberal politicians in Washington were playing to a gallery of kayakers, hikers, cruise-ship passengers, bird-watchers, and other know-nothing urban intruders like the putty-faced Englishman in baseball cap and Docksiders reading the paper in the corner.

  For a picture of Wrangell daily life, I turned to the Sentinel’s police blotter:

  3:09 P.M. Bear Complaint. Citizen reported a Mama bear and two cubs in the back of the Forest Service parking lot.

  3:40 P.M. Bear Complaint. A citizen reported a bear in their garbage at Bloom’s Trailer Court.

  10:33 P.M. Disturbance/Disorderly Conduct. Three people yelling on Grief Street.

  11:38 P.M. Disturbance/Fight. Two men fighting between First Bank, Benjamin’s, and Parking Lot. A misunderstanding over who was the owner of a vehicle.

  That evening, Compass Rose, a sloop registered in Victoria, tied up alongside me. Beside my boat, Compass Rose, with its coiled lines and scrubbed decks, looked as if it were slumming. Its owner was kitted out to match, in yachting cap, guernsey sweater, and yellow oilskin trousers. His pepper-and-salt beard appeared to be a summer experiment, not a permanent fixture. Though beefily built, he was quick on his feet and danced adeptly from bow to stern, flicking lines onto cleats as he lashed our boats together. His traveling companion, a slight, elfin woman, hung back in the cockpit, deferring to his expertise. I saw the muscular effort that her determined smile was costing her.

  They introduced themselves. Derek’s voice had the sonorous deliberation of someone used to being listened to. Linda’s had the hasty, apologetic note of someone expecting to be cut off in the middle of her next sentence. As a couple, they had evidently spent a few days too many inside the emotional pressure-cooker of a 34-foot boat. I knew the feeling.

  I uncorked a bottle of wine, glad to have company, and intuiting that Linda and Derek would welcome the distraction of a stranger. But Derek took charge, giving a lecture-demonstration of the electronic wizardry aboard Compass Rose: the laptop computer on the chart table, with all the charts for Alaska encoded in a CD-ROM, the autopilot and GPS interfacing the chart display, so that the boat could sail itself around the world while Derek kept an eye on the computer screen. He pressed buttons, talked chips and bytes. Linda confessed to seasickness and fright.

  “This is all very new for me.”

  “Click on that icon,” Derek said. “See?”

  “Derek likes gadgets,” Linda said.

  Derek gave her a puzzled stare, then said, “Is there a Federal Express box here?”

  I said that I doubted it. Wrangell didn’t strike me as that sort of town.

  “I have to Fed-Ex some papers.” Derek nodded significantly as he said this. He turned to Linda. “If we can’t do it here, we’ll have to do it in Petersburg. Tomorrow afternoon. At the latest.”

  Take that down, Miss Pennyfeather.

  “I shall talk to the harbormaster,” Derek said.

  I couldn’t fathom him. Linda had let drop the fact that in her other life she was a schoolteacher, but Derek and I were being careful to play our cards close to our chests. Meeting as sea captains, we were reluctant to own up to any other occupation. After the interesting topic of the Fed-Exed papers had come and gone, we talked weather and tides; and not lightly, for Derek had the gift of imparting gravity to his every passing fancy. When he said, “I was thinking of going to Sitka,” it came out sounding as if he meant to send a task force there to take the place by storm.

  Close to my age, he came from Victoria; his beard was a temporary disguise; he was accustomed to being taken very seriously. By the time we said goodnight, I had settled with reasonable certainty on the notion that he was a member of the provincial parliament in Victoria, if not of the federal one in Ottawa. Did the Canadians have a minister of war?

  I slept late, for once. The tide in Wrangell Narrows, where both Compass Rose and I were bound, wouldn’t begin to run in our favor until the afternoon, and Derek and I had agreed to leave together around 12:30. Over breakfast I listened to the local radio news. The human remains found by a roadside were, in the opinion of the police, a bear-kill. An armed loner was still on the loose in the wilderness area of Dundas Bay; he had threatened to kill a charter-boat captain with a .44 Magnum, asking him, “Do you know what a .44 can do?” Icicle Seafoods was branching out into sophisticated value-added products including microwaveable chum salmon in teriyaki sauce. The University of Alaska was offering new extension courses in “The Vi
sitor Industry”—another too-delicate phrase, which showed how tainted the word “tourist” had become. As tourists had wrecked the economy of Wrangell, so visitors now promised to revive it.

  There followed a slew of “radiograms”—messages for telephoneless people on islands and up inlets. The Robertses, to Harold Bergman: “We’ll be over Thursday, on the morning high tide.” “Sharon Evans—please contact the Wrangell Police Department.” “Will the Crabtrees please get in touch with Denise at Cripple Creek?” The announcer made it sound as if he knew everyone concerned, and perhaps he did. It was true here, as elsewhere in the West, that the tightest, most intimate communities were also the most isolated and scattered; and the Wrangell radio station was the nerve center of an extended watery village that stretched up the Stikine River and through the archipelago.

  Derek tapped on my hatch. He had breakfasted, he said, and solved his Fed-Ex problem. His guidebook noted that there were Indian petroglyphs on a beach to the north of town; he had ordered a cab to take him there. Would I care to join him?

  “And Linda?” I said.

  “Linda,” said Derek, sorting his words carefully, “has things to do on the boat.”

  Our driver was a wrinkled nut of a man, his face engulfed by a Santa Claus beard. He insisted on first taking us to see Wrangell’s chief tourist attraction, the dump. Among the junked fridges, bikes, busted furniture, and old crab traps were dozens of mauled kitchen bags, with nasty-looking leftovers leaking through the gashes. But we saw no bears.

  “There’s always bears here,” the driver said in an affronted tone.

  The watchman came over from his hut, carrying what looked like a .44 Magnum. “Haven’t seen one all morning,” he said.

  The driver clearly felt that his honor was being impugned. To the watchman he said, “Every time I come here there’s bears.”

  “Not now there isn’t,” the watchman said.