Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
Author	Jonathan Raban
Publisher	Picador
Publication date	1999
ISBN	ISBN 0-679-44262-6

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings is a 1999 travelogue by Jonathan Raban. Alongside an account of Raban's own trip by boat from Seattle from Juneau, the reader is presented with the voyage of Captain George Vancouver in 1792 and his encounters with the sea-going natives living along the coast.

1 Plot summary
2 Sources

[edit] Plot summary

Raban takes the reader along with him on his 35-foot sailboat - described as his 'narrative vehicle' - as he single-handedly traverses the entire 1,000 miles of the Inside Passage from Seattle, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska. On the voyage, Raban reflects on the history and character of the territory he is sailing through, the art of navigation and what the journey will ultimately mean for him as he describes the breakup of his marriage in the final two chapters. As Raban himself says:

“

I knew from the beginning it was going to be a book about turbulence. I wanted to use that Indian sense of navigation of a boat as metaphor for the navigation of a soul through life. I then had granted to me two pieces of extreme turbulence in my own life which I could not have possibly predicted. I found plenty of turbulence to write about, the equivalent of two major hurricanes coming a month apart."

”

As the author makes his preparations for the voyage in the Fitting Out chapter, he mentions he is following in the salmon gill-netters' route, 'not to fish ... but to lay some ghosts to rest and come to terms, somehow, with the peculiar attraction that draws people to put themselves afloat on the deep, dark, indifferent, cold, and frightening sea. .. For the term of a fishing season, I meant to meditate on the sea, at sea.' He is also following in the footsteps of the short, rotund, balding, bug-eyed and highly temperamental Captain Vancouver whose ships, the Discovery and Chatham, sailed the Inside Passage on a surveying expedition of 1791-5, later described in Captain Van's four-volumed account the Voyage.

As he sails along his route, Raban also devotes a large part of his story to the canoe-Indians and their relationship with the sea - the Kathlamet, Kwakiutl, Salishan, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian - interspersing his narrative with stories gleaned from Franz Boas' monumental collection of their tales. To a certain extent, the story is about the loss of their language, traditions and culture after the arrival of the white man, and the 'prettification' of the wild landscape for the benefit of the large cruise ship and their hordes of 'lice-like' passengers who swarm over every port of call.

Interwoven into the travelogue are accounts of the two personal crises which grip Raban on his voyage. The first is the terminal illness of his father, Peter, described in the Rites of Passage section. Raban returns to England, like a foreign visitor, for a rather uncomfortable reunion with his family and, above all, his father with whom it seems he has had a troubled relationship. He attempts to reach out to him in his illness but it is difficult for them both to bridge the emotional divide that separates them. Raban gives his reader a highly personal - although at the same time dispassionate - account of the period leading up to his father's death and his father's response to it: 'Sometimes I saw the fear in his eyes, but it would be gone in a flash; he was boxing it away from public view, as a good priest must.'

The second crisis is the breakdown of his marriage to Jean, a dance reviewer for The Seattle Times and twenty years younger than himself. Having read the book once before, I looked out more closely for the indicators of this the second time round. In Ketchikan, Raban makes a call to his wife and is buoyed up by the news that she has booked flight tickets to Juneau. In Meyers Creek, he starts to indulge in a happy mental shopping list of things he will buy for his wife and daughter, Julia - candied ginger (his father's favourite) for the seasick, Beanie Babies, matzohs, Travel Scrabble, M&Ms and herbal tea. Whilst sailing up the Gastineau Channel, the approach road to Juneau, he thinks five more days until their arrival.

However, he is troubled by Jean's sharp and irritable manner and finds her mood hard to fathom until she reveals, on an innocent outing to a playground near an old deserted goldmine, that she wants a separation - 'To forge a new identity,' in her own words. Thirty-six unspeakable hours later, Raban drives his wife (now the tungsten hard-eyed Ms Takimoto) and daughter to the airport before taking the boat back south to Seattle to complete his trip.

In the last section, Komogwa, the whole tone of the book changes as he tries to submerge his grief in his reading of Evelyn Waugh, William Cowper and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Waugh provides some consolation through the transformation his own disastrous first marriage into triumphant, grave comedy in A Handful of Dust. Raban also copies a quotation into his logbook; 'Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.' Loss is a strong theme in the narrative and Raban himself describes the themes of this beautifully crafted travelogue in his own inimitable, self-deprecating fashion:

“

This book, like two or three others of mine, is really an attempt to write a kind of nonfiction novel. The grist of the material is factual - a narrative with people whose names you can look up in the phone book or who have historically verifiable existences - but it's fiction in the sense that it's heavily patterned and plotted; it's structured like a novel. There's a reason why it opens with a lummox on the first page, the fool on the dock. The whole book is about somebody who turns out to be a lummox, himself. It's the story of a traveling fool."

”

However, neither he nor his reader is fooled by the depth of his heartbreak as his solitary, highly courageous adventure finally ends at Marine Seattle and his moorings on Ewing Street in sight of his house on the hill, ready to face the troubled waters that lie ahead.

Aida Edemariam makes some perceptive comments about the book and Raban's psyche in her 2006 Guardian interview with the author in his hometown Seattle:

“

... the whole book builds towards eight quietly exact pages of loss. When my wife and daughter left ... I returned to the beach with my notebook." His [Raban's] gaze, out of a long, stubble-blurred face, is disconcertingly, brightly direct. He watches for a reaction to each word, between each word; at the same time another part of him seems to be watching, judging, as his sentences hove into view.

I was just writing down details about exactly what one could see, how the water looked." This might seem calculating, but "it's the great consolation of the writer, I think. You're given these catastrophes - and they're gifts. I mean, your father dies and your wife leaves you, all in a couple of months. There was a bit of me that was thinking, 'God, this is going to be good for the book.

”