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by Clyde W. Ford  Now Geo-Enabled! Click to learn more. |
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban.
Every summer thousands of boaters voyage along the Inside Passage between Seattle and Alaska. I’ve cruised these waters for almost twenty years myself, and thus with great interest and anticipation, I cracked the spine on Jonathan Raban’s journey up the Inside Passage, Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (New York: Random House, 1999). Raban and I have a lot in common. He’s a Brit who fell in love with the Pacific Northwest after a ferry ride through the San Juan Islands, then packed up and moved to Seattle. I’m a New Yorker who, after a ferry ride through the San Juan’s, packed up and moved to Bellingham, Washington. Raban and I are also both authors who love to in his words “to take off for the nearby scribble of islands and let go the anchor” in order to pursue our craft.
I began this passage with Raban while in Desolation Sound one summer sitting out a nasty southeast blow at anchor in Drew Harbor off Quadra Island. I immediately enjoyed his gift of the English language and his obvious love of words. Fair warning, a dictionary is recommended safety equipment if you cruising with him though you can almost always catch the meaning of his words even if some are unfamiliar. I also liked the basic scheme of Passage to Juneau. Raban traveled from Seattle to Juneau pretty much following the route that Captain George Vancouver took two hundred years earlier. Using written descriptions from Vancouver and senior members of his party, the author presents what the Captain found on his way north and what he, Raban, found along the same route two hundred years later. Into the mix, Raban throws tidbits of Northwest coast native lore and a healthy dose of his own inward brooding.
Raban and I made good headway until reaching Desolation Sound. There, a little more than a third of the way through the book, a williwaw blew over the waters and through the text. It had been building for some pages, but when it finally hit it howled for the remainder of the passage. At the time, I sat in Teakerne Arm, a huge inlet cut deep into West Redonda Island, where a hundred-foot waterfall crashes down to the sea from a mountain lake. My partner Chara and I were lucky to find a spot amidst the steep-to cliffs shallow enough for a stern-tie. Little wind blew and the sun shone brightly as we climbed up the side of the waterfall to swim in Cassel Lake. Breath-taking--that’s how I would describe it.
But not Raban, who says, “[t]he tidal atlas advised that here the tides were “weak and irregular, a fair description of my response to Desolation Sound, as I flipped a cigarette butt into it and made an anxious calculation as to whether I could still make slack water at the Dent and Yaculta rapids, fourteen miles ahead.”
Raban never saw the Desolation Sound I’ve seen. And the acidic tone with which he “flipped a cigarette butt into it” not only insulted me as a boater who loves that area, but increasingly dominated the remainder of the book. He called the recreational boaters he came across in Grenville Channel “lice,” and tells us he “spat it [the word lice that is] at the happy rally of Bayliners, Tollycraft and Nordic Tugs…”
Raban came across as a man who journeyed over the sea with his head but not his heart. Though adept at describing the voyage to Juneau as others experienced it—Vancouver and his party, the Spanish explorers Galiano and Valdés, northwest coastal natives—his anger got in the way of his own experience of the passage.
The early warning signs of Raban’s ill wind are actually found in the discrepancy between information on the jacket cover and in the first few chapters. On the jacket we learn he lives in Seattle with his daughter (no mention of a wife), but he speaks often in the early part of the book about Jean, his wife. Right from the beginning you get the feeling that divorce will be the bitter end to Raban’s passage, which it is. His father also passed away during his journey, and he left his sailboat along the Inside Passage for two months to fly back to England to attend the funeral.
I’m sorry for Raban’s losses and even sorrier still that they insulated him from experiencing the beauty and grandeur of his voyage. Passage to Juneau is a good read for the historical information about George Vancouver and the exploration of the Pacific Northwest coast. However, if you’re looking for inspirational writing about voyaging on the seas, what you will find here is a book which charts the course of one man’s voyage on the seas of his discontent.
Some of my favorite anchorages in Desolation Sound:
Von Donop Inlet
Prideaux Haven
Pendrell Sound
| Clyde W. Ford is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, who has written articles for PassageMaker Magazine. His Charlie Noble Novels, Red Herring and Precious Cargo are nautical thrillers set along the Inside Passage. And his latest nonfiction book is on environmental boating, Boat Green: 50 Steps Boaters Can Take to Help Save Our Waters. For the past decade he’s cruised the Inside Passage in his 30-foot, 1977 Willard trawler, Mystic Voyager. | 
Mystic Voyager in Bella Coola, British Columbia
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