3 for the Sea: Jonathan Raban's "Passage to Juneau"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Passage to Juneau. 

Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau chronicles his 1996 trip through the Inside Passage, from Seattle to Juneau and back, traveling solo aboard his thirty-five-foot sailboat Penelope.

It’s an unforgettable journey through a thousand-mile obstacle course, and what makes it unforgettable is Raban’s tremendous descriptive power. He puts us squarely there, in the cockpit with him, as he steers his boat through the Inside Passage’s maze-like world of channels, islands, inlets, rapids, whirlpools, deadheads, fogbanks, and fishing fleets. For example, here’s his description of sailing down Saratoga Passage’s “long reach of growling water”:

The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea – the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

And here’s his depiction of Deception Pass’s chaotic sea:

In the dwindling afternoon light, the water looked as black and thick as tar, its surface lumpy with boils and cratered with eddies. At ten past five, with 55 minutes to go before slack water, I fed the boat gingerly into the stream, running the engine full blast to give it maximum steerageway through the turbulence. It was like driving a car on ice. Each time the boat’s head met a swirl, it went into a sideways skid, and I had to spin the wheel violently to maintain any semblance of control.

And here’s his description of inching through the dense fog of Haro Strait:

A moving blip resolved into the shadow of a fishing boat, faintly imprinted on the fog, but at a reassuring distance of about a hundred yards. Watching the depth-sounder, checking the radar, I felt my way cautiously inside the sheltering arm of Sidney Spit – a mile-long drying sandbar that ran out from the northern end of Sidney Island. Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine, and found that my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. They blundered about in the air, a pair of shaky fists, obstinately declining to take orders from the brain.

That “Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water” is inspired!

One of my favourite passages is this beauty, a description of the water in Cordero Channel:

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 millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.

How I relish that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.” 

Passage to Juneau is structured chronologically, beginning in Seattle on April 1, 1996, ending back in Seattle on or about August 14, 1996. But the narrative is anything but linear. Woven into its intricate fabric is the history of Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploration of the Inside Passage. Raban follows Vancouver’s tracks (e.g., “Following Discovery, I ran up Clarence Strait, close to the mountainous and rock-strewn shore of the Cleveland Peninsula”). He evokes Captain Van’s ships Discovery and Chatham so realistically, it’s almost like they’re right there on the water with him; in a sense, they are.  

Midway in Raban’s voyage, at Potts Lagoon, he takes a break and flies back to Seattle to spend a couple of weeks with his wife and daughter. Here the book takes a fascinating turn. In Seattle, Raban learns that his father is dying of cancer. He flies to England to be with him. Suddenly, we’re plunged into the intimate details of Raban’s personal life – his relationship with his father, mother, and brothers, his father’s death (“No more indignities now. I was glad for him”), the funeral and cremation (“Now began the surreal administrative business of death, ‘the arrangements’ ”). This is the messy stuff of real life. I think most travel writers would likely omit it; Raban includes it, and his narrative is the richer for it. After the cremation, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his trip. But his father’s ghost is with him now, haunting the rest of the voyage (“There was no avoiding my father now”).

From Potts Lagoon, he sails through Baronet Passage, stops in Port McNeill, on Vancouver Island, to buy groceries, continues on through Queen Charlotte Strait, shelters in Miles Inlet, heads for Egg Island, then Whirlwind Bay, passes the entrance to Burke Channel, and then joins a convoy of small boats that sail past Bella Bella Island, Spirit Island, and Whiskey Cove, making landfall at Shearwater, a fishing resort on Kliktsoatli Harbour, where there’s a party going on. Next day, out Seaforth Channel into Milbanke Sound:

After twenty minutes of roller-coasting 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 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.

Then a visit to Klemtu, and, next day, up the Finlayson Channel, past the ruins of Swanson Bay and Butedale, at the southern end of Fraser Reach, then through Grenville Channel, anchoring in Nettle Basin for the night (“The Inside Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists”). Next day, on to Prince Rupert (“I liked Prince Rupert. The city laundromat, full of fishermen and yacht-tourists, was like a big rowdy bar on Saturday night; the liquor store sold Laphroaig whiskey, though at a fearful price”). Next day, past the rocks of Venn Passage, into the lagoon of Metlalkatla, sheltering in Port Simpson for the night. Next day: Dixon Entrance (“In Dixon Entrance at first light, I had white fingers and a hangover”) and Revillagigedo Channel, packed with fishing boats:

The nets were laid across the grain of the new flood tide, and each boat was making constant small maneuvers to keep itself aligned with its own pearl-string of floats. These American nets were longer than Canadian ones – 300 fathoms, more than a third of a mile – and they bulged and kinked in the turbulence of the current. I was playing a game with shifting goalposts: one promising gap abruptly closed while another line of corks swung open like a door. Biting hard on my lower lip, I veered this way and that, sliding past the colored marker-buoys at walking pace.

Revillagigedo Channel leads to the tight bottleneck of Tongass Narrows, “where the long, thin, jerry-built city of Ketchikan stretched out on a ledge dynamited out of the north shore.” Raban spends a couple of days in Ketchikan (“Across the boardwalk was the Potlatch Bar, a raucous cave into which I unwisely stepped for a beer”). From there, he sails through Clarence Strait, then Zimovia Strait, then past the mouth of the Stikine River (“The water here was a milky soapstone green”), to Wrangell. Then through Wrangell Narrows to Petersburg:

The straggle of sheds and houses along the bank at last thickened into the low, pale, floating city of Petersburg, whose canneries and bunkhouses, built out on stilts over the water, were doubled by their reflections in the oily calm. Boats greatly outnumbered buildings. In the half-mile narrows, Petersburg need no sheltering harbor wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating decks, making the town look more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered.

Then up Frederick Sound, through Stephens Passage to Hobart Bay. Then Gastineau Channel to Juneau (“Even in cruise-ship hours – from ten to five – I liked to walk the fringes of old Juneau”). Raban’s wife and daughter fly there to meet him. The reunion doesn’t go well. Raban’s wife tells him she wants a separation (“My stomach went south”). His joyless voyage back to Seattle is covered in just eleven pages. It includes this bleak observation: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than the tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.”

Passage to Juneau describes Raban’s personal experience of the vast, complex world of the Inside Passage in all its smell-taste-touch-sound-sight-thought-emotion-scoop-of-light magnificence. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Passage to Juneau, including its action, structure, imagery, detail, point of view, and humour. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Redmond O’Hanlon’s superb Trawler.