Passage to Juneau Read online

  To put oneself afloat on a sea-route as old and heavily traveled as the Inside Passage was to join the epic cavalcade of all those, present and past, who’d found some meaning in these waters. In an average day’s sailing, one might have to alter course to give way to a Holland-America Line cruise ship; a squad of family gill-netters; a NOAA research vessel full of scientists doing fieldwork; the garbage scow, piled high with crushed cars, fridges, filing cabinets, on its regular fortnightly run between Juneau and Seattle. I always suffer from mild delusions when I’m alone for long at sea, and it would be no great surprise to find myself hauling the wheel to starboard to get clear of a survey-pinnace, under a yellowed lugsail, from the Vancouver expedition, or, skirting a fog-cliff, a red-and-black-painted Haida canoe, laden with Chilkat blankets, going south to trade.

  In their versions of the sea, none of the people aboard these craft would agree on very much. The vacationing realtor from Omaha and Lieutenant Peter Puget could well find more to talk about than the ocean physicist, developing a theoretical model of how heat is exchanged between a breaking wave and the atmosphere, and his contemporary, the captain of the garbage scow. Each ship might as well be sailing a separate ocean. My conceit was that I could listen and talk about the sea to all these people, and somehow mediate between their rival images.

  I had a boat, most of a spring and summer, a cargo of books, and the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle. Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul. Other people’s reflections, as I thought then. I wasn’t prepared for the catch I eventually made.

  I topped up the gimballed brass lamps with oil and made a new shock-cord harness for the barograph, whose inked needle was making a steady horizontal line along the 1,025-millibar mark. Blue-sky-and-zephyr pressure. An Alaska-bound fish-processing ship, heading west down the Ship Canal, sent a breaking wake through the moorings. The books shuffled softly on their shelves, the boat creaked against its fenders, and impish scraps of lamplight skedaddled back and forth around the saloon. That evening, at home, it was my turn to cook, and I had only a few minutes left. John Munroe had gone off, an hour before, to check out a steel ketch I’d seen rigged as a troller at Fishermen’s Terminal.

  For my trip, I’d bought three ringbound sketchbooks to keep notes in, plus two ruled logs in which to record meteorological and marine details of the voyage. I wrote “Passage to Juneau I” on the cover of a Grumbacher sketchbook, and copied onto the first page a passage from the last chapter of The Way of the Masks.

  The myths thus put two codes in a relationship of correspondence: incest and the rejection of or dissatisfaction with procreation, kinds of antisocial behavior, have their equivalent in the natural order where extreme modalities of turbulence and immobility can also be observed.

  Lévi-Strauss’s French prose is notoriously difficult to translate, and this particular translation made him sound even more impenetrable and cranky than usual. But the essence of his argument rang clearly through the mechanical translatorese. Writing of the many stories about whirlpools and their way of sucking human beings into the maelstrom, Lévi-Strauss recognized that this kind of turbulence was intimately linked to turmoil in society and the family.

  The water on which the Northwest Indians lived their daily lives was full of danger and disorder; seething white through rocky passes, liable to turn steep and violent at the first hint of a contrary wind, plagued with fierce and deceptive currents. The whirlpool—capable of ingesting a whole cedar tree, then spitting it out again like a cherry pit—was the central symbol of the sea at large, and all its terrors.

  Upwellings, swirls, overfalls … one moment of inattention would lead to capsize. Living like this provided the Indians with a natural model for social conduct. The tribe was a fragile canoe, and one had to be on perpetual guard against anything that might upset it. Disruptive human behavior, such as sleeping with your sister or killing your brother, was like fooling with a whirlpool; it jeopardized tribal stability. The ship-of-state metaphor, usually rather a fancy notion, applied with peculiar literalness to the culture of the Northwest Indians, for whom the imperiled canoe was both a daily fact and, in their myths and stories, a figurative means of defining their society. The great protective web of customs, rules, and rituals that the coastal Indians spun around themselves was a navigational system, designed to keep the canoe of the family and village from drifting over the lip of the maelstrom.

  I made some notes along these lines, blew out the oil lamps, locked the boat, and walked up to the house to cook dinner for my wife and daughter.

  II. DEEP WATER

  On April Fools’ Day, I sat with my daughter at the top of the stairs and heard myself talking in a voice I despised.

  “It’s okay, Julia. I’ll come home again to see you in twenty-one days. In a floatplane. I’ll bring a special present for you.”

  That overstressed singsong, those audible hyphens between syllables … The lines sounded to me like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” tapped out, uncertainly, on a toy xylophone.

  “Twenty-one days!”

  “Jaybird, that’s not long—”

  Plink-plonk. Plonk, plonk. Plink.

  Traveling always entails infidelity. You do your best to mask the feeling of sly triumph that comes with turning your back on home and all it stands for; but disappearing into the crowd in the departure lounge, or stowing your bags in the car at dawn, you know you’re a rat. I was an experienced deserter, but never until now had I been squarely faced with my treachery.

  The colors in Julia’s face had run together. Lower lip thrust forward, eyes brimming, she stared down into the carpeted green depths of the stairwell; she seemed suffused with her own powerlessness. She didn’t have a vote on this, and at three and a half, she had no idea of how to gain suffrage.

  Then, suddenly, she found a voice—a tone-perfect echo of my own. Matching my singsong delivery, cadence for cadence, she said: “I don’t mind, I won’t miss you. I love Mommy more than you.”

  “Julia—”

  She was constantly quizzing us about the limits and dimensions of the place she called “our world.” “Are there real bears in our world?” “Is New York City in our world?” Now, through her eyes, I saw our world coming adrift from its regular orbit—a small planet, unbalanced by my departure, wobbling off into the dangerous blue.

  She squirmed behind me on the top stair and pressed her face into the small of my back. “I kiss you,” she said, measuring each word, “because I love you. But I won’t mind when you’re not here. I’ll be glad.”

  She was talking like a grown-up, her words at war with her face. I’d always known that it would come, of course, but never thought it could come so early—this milestone moment when parent and child first find themselves speaking to each other through protective masks.

  “Julia, I have to go. It’s my work—it’s what I do so we all can live here in this house. I’ll be thinking of you every day, and I’ll be home soon. I promise.”

  She gazed back, bleakly skeptical, knowing otherwise.

  “Will you be home on my birthday?”

  From behind us, in the kitchen, Jean called: “Julia! It’s time to eat your cereal!”

  “My birthday is November twenty-six.”

  For her sake, I had arranged a going-away party down at the boat; two of Julia’s friends and their parents were meeting us at noon for soda pop, champagne, cheese, and brownies. Before we left for the dock, I gave her a stuffed animal—a gray kitten she immediately named Juliette.

  “I’ll always look after her. I won’t lose her. Ever.” She had the righteous glow that comes with possession of the moral high ground.

  We piled into the car. The ridge of high pressure had collapsed the day before, and a front was moving in from the ocean. Under a spongy sky, a thin precipitation, more mist than r
ain, furred the outlines of Phinney Ridge and Queen Anne Hill. The windshield wipers squeaked noisily against the glass, while Julia kept up a low monologue of confidences addressed to her kitten, and her mother and I talked household bills. Julia said, “Mommy, what’s ‘inconsiderate’?”

  At the boat, Julia’s glum mood was instantly erased by the sight of her friends. She became the proud curator of a cabinet of wonders. “We’ve got a toilet on our boat,” she announced, and led Zoe and Natalie downstairs to admire the yawning porcelain bowl, the fine pump handle, and the screw-top inlet valve that took two hands to turn it. Under her instruction, the children flushed the head a dozen times—rapt hydrophiles, engrossed by the swirl and gurgle of water in the bowl. Then they set up camp on the double bed in the forecabin, smearing the sheets with chocolate brownies, and leaving behind them a faint musk, like the smell of bruised apples, that lingered in the cabin for days afterwards.

  Shoehorned into the saloon because of the weather, the adults sat elbow to elbow around the table, nipped warily at the Veuve Cliquot, and made station-platform smalltalk. Only Natalie’s father, David Shields, kept out of the conversation, head swiveling on his shoulders; a spotted owl on watch for mice. I saw his eyes blink from the barograph to the clock, to the cartoon of George III, to the VHF radio, to the titles of the books on the shelves. He spotted one of his own, Remote, lower shelf, port side, and gave it a slight, involuntary nod. He stared past me at a framed photograph of Julia in forsythia raingear, and at the fire extinguisher bolted to the bulkhead above it. Then he said, in a rush, “Your house is all clutter, but this has such … clarity. There’s a use for everything, and all the books look chosen. It’s, like, the perfect space—just the right size and shape for reading and writing. It’s so habitable. You must be able to have thoughts here—water thoughts—that you could never have on land.”

  Pleased, I said, “It’s the only place I can be tidy in.”

  “It’s amazing!” David said, clearly thinking of the turmoil of my study, its snowdrifts of books and papers, its perpetual air of having just been inexpertly burgled. People looked inside and wanted to dial 911. “And all this beautiful wood, it’s how I imagine the office of an Oxford don …”

  I thought of Shields’s office. He worked in a concrete bunker beneath his house, by anglepoise lamplight. A long wall was lined with black filing cabinets, each one labeled with a theme related to his books. I thought his office forbiddingly severe, a likely sanctum for a puritanical chief inspector. His computer was always turned off when I visited, his notebook closed. I like to spy on other people at work; Shields, a spy himself, took careful security precautions. His office gave nothing away. I was interested that he should warm so to my boat. Perhaps it was because it gave everything away with its candid exhibition of the people I loved, the books I liked, the bits of equipment, like the course-protractor and the pair of brass dividers that went with my odd, late-flowering passion for being afloat.

  The children tumbled, roaring, from the forecabin. “We goed to Alaska! We goed to Alaska!” Julia said.

  With difficulty—a lost shoe, a missing pacifier, a hunt among the bedclothes for abandoned stuffed animals—we shifted the farewell party onto the dock, where the precipitation had hardened into drizzle. I got the engine going, unwrapped the ropes from their cleats, kissed Jean and Julia goodbye, and eased the boat astern. From the cockpit, I reached down into the saloon for my camera, to snap this knot of people waving in the rain.

  “Bye, Daddy!” Julia, aloft on her mother’s shoulders, had much the loudest voice of all the callers on shore. I found her in the viewfinder and zoomed in: a happy face, eyes and mouth wide, both arms up in the air, like a football fan cheering a last-minute goal. As I pressed the shutter, I heard her shout, “Byeeee!”

  Many weeks later, in Juneau, I had the film processed, and was thrown by the print of this shot. Though it’s in crisp focus and Julia fills the frame, her hands are clasped around her mother’s head, and her mouth is closed in a dubious Gioconda smile.

  More heartsore than elated, I motored down the Ship Canal. The canal was maritime Seattle’s Main Street, a long, wide boulevard of ships and sheds, drydocks, cranes, riggers, marine railways, and fish-packing outfits. The uniform wash-gray was punctuated by splashes of surreal light from arc lamps and welders’ blowtorches. In the watery nooks and crannies between the big yards, white-bearded pirates, all known as “Captain” and suffering from emphysema, ran eccentric trading enterprises from lopsided floating shacks. You wanted a diesel manifold, a power winch, an old radar, a 48-inch left-handed propeller, you had to go see Captain Mac, or Captain Don, or Captain Sorenson. The captains each had a stake in the junk that came off the ships that put in here for refit or to be broken up for scrap. The ships themselves had the names of ports as far apart as Anchorage, Vladivostok, Panama City, Lima, and Manila painted on their rusty flanks.

  Seeing the city from the Ship Canal, you’d think Seattle’s only business was to go to sea. On the north shore, Ballard, the Scandinavian fishermen’s suburb, came crowding to the water’s edge. The flags of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark flew over Market Street, and the Olsons and Johnsons could buy lutefisk at the neighborhood deli. For months on end, Ballard was a place of absentee fathers. In house after house, there was the picture of Dad’s boat on the wall; the weekly phone call, patched through by radio; the eking-out and scraping-by until settlement day and the father’s return.

  Small wonder, then, that the boats at Fishermen’s Terminal had homesick names. The man who named his boat after his wife could take her name, at least, to sea, where it would daily be on many people’s lips. So the growly male voice, calling over the VHF, “Gilda? Gilda? This is Bettijean, Bettijean,” was making a necessary assertion of the survival of the intimate world of the family in the face of the rising wind and climbing sea.

  I was in good company: ships and boats are instruments of separation. The wharves along the Ship Canal were dotted with solitary figures. Russian and Filipino seamen—stranded here a long, long way from home—stood smoking, killing time, watching the westgoing current slide past as sluggishly as hours.

  At Ballard Locks, the boat had to drop twenty-plus feet to reach the tidewater of Puget Sound. As it sank in the dripping echo chamber of the small lock, I chatted with the attendant overhead.

  “Out for the afternoon?”

  “No, I’m off to Alaska.”

  “All on your own? Getting away from the wife, huh?”

  “No, I’m on a job.”

  “Delivery job? I could do with a job like that. Except I’d have a divorce on my hands.”

  “I know the feeling. There was a touch of frost in the air at home this morning.”

  “Yeah. Breakfast in the Ice Age …” He laughed—that complicit, American, male laugh, in which every man supposedly is married to the same motherly scold. But I wasn’t a member of the boys’ club.

  The lock-gates wheezed open, admitting the sudden salt smell of the sea.

  “Have fun, Cap! Get laid in Ketchikan for me, will you?”

  For him, as for so many men of his place and generation, Alaska was the land of lost youth, where you had money to burn and wild oats to sow. As the years passed by, the remembered money multiplied at a giddy annual percentage rate, and the oats of yore grew ever wilder. When I told men over fifty that I was going to Alaska, I might have said that all my hair was growing back, and that I was looking forward once more to my twenty-second birthday.

  Beyond the locks, the sky was beginning to brighten. A small sun showed dimly through the cloud, like a tarnished dime, and the water ahead was silvered with light. A fitful southerly breeze was wrinkling the sea into wavelets that peaked but did not break. At the fairway buoy, I killed the engine and unrolled the headsail, letting the boat drift north on the wind at a speed that could have been comfortably outstripped by a very old lady on a bicycle.

  The interest he
re lay not on the surface of the water but in what was happening underneath. The depth sounder, bouncing ultrasonic impulses off the seafloor, was the thing to watch. At the fairway buoy, it showed 46 feet. Then it began to spool through the numbers—71 feet, 98 feet, 103 feet, 127 feet, 165 feet … With every boat-length traveled through the water, the bottom fell away, a ragged underwater cliff. Close to two hundred feet, the depth sounder lost contact with the ground and, pleading helplessness, gibbered random numbers at me until I switched it off. The chart took over now: half a mile from shore, I floated over the fifty-fathom contour; another half-mile, and the hundred-fathom line was crossed. Six hundred feet.

  A hundred fathoms are the conventional mark of the edge of a continental shelf, where ships equipped with hundred-fathom leadlines “came into soundings.” Sailing east into the Atlantic from New York, one would have to traverse more than a hundred miles of ocean to reach that depth; sailing west from Land’s End, in Cornwall, about 200 miles. And still the bottom kept on falling. After ghosting along under sail for less than half an hour, I was in 150 fathoms, and the sea still deepening. Like a bug planting its feet on the skin of the water, the boat was precariously aloft above a drowned rift valley.

  The lie of the surrounding land gave no inkling of the sea’s profundity. Suburban hills, low and rolling, sloped gently to the water’s edge. The woods had been cut down to make way for looping crescents of identical $500,000 homes, pastel-painted ranch-style bungalows, built of cinderblock and Sheetrock, clad in color-coordinated vinyl. Through binoculars, I could see their barbecue grills and picture windows; striped sun-loungers on decks; buzz-cut lawns terminating in a meager strip of rocky beach. With a little imagination, I could see further: past the picture window to the Sears, Roebuck telescope on a tripod; nautical lamps, port and starboard of the open hearth with its electric logs; a faux-brass sign proclaiming the kitchen “Galley” or “Slave Quarters”; the Navajo rug, the Pilchuck glass, the open copy of the Discovery Channel magazine, the love seat, the ceramic tub of dried bulrushes, the snoozing, short-haired dog.