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Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings Paperback – November 7, 2000
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"A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." —The Washington Post Book World
With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau.
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateNovember 7, 2000
- Dimensions5.2 x 0.96 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100679776141
- ISBN-13978-0679776147
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"Endlessly suggestive.... Nobody now writing keeps a more provocative house than Jonathan Raban." —The New York Times Book Review
"A great book by the very best contempoary writer afloat." —The Oregonian
"Raban is a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. He spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomenal. One of our most gifted observers." —Newsday
From the Inside Flap
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers-- between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class. Along the way, Raban offers captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss.
From the Back Cover
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers-- between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class. Along the way, Raban offers captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Pacific Venturer?" he asked. The late March sun (this was Seattle's first high-pressure, blue-sky day after weeks of low overcast) glittered in the pale stubble on his cheeks. "That's the boat I'm looking for. Pacific Venturer." He spoke the name syllable by syllable, and I could see him in first grade -- a large, vacant, uncoordinated child, already far behind the rest of the class. "You seen that boat, man?"
Three, maybe four hundred boats were moored hull to hull at Fishermen's Terminal. They formed a wintry thicket, over fifty acres of water, of masts, spars, trolling poles, whip-antennae, radar scanners, deck-hoists, and davits. Looking at the names around us, I read Vigorous, Tradition, Paragon, Sea Lassie, Peregrine, Resolute, Star of Heaven, Cheryl G., Cheerful, Immigrant (a green cloverleaf blazoned on its wheelhouse), Paramount, Memories. I saw a Pacific Breeze, but no Pacific Venturer.
"What is it -- a purse-seiner?"
He took it as a trick question, staring at me as if I were an unfriendly examiner. He had Barbie-doll blue eyes. "I dunno. Salmon boat." He consulted the piece of paper in his hand. "Yup. That's a salmon boat -- I heard."
He stank of the road -- of hitchhiking on interstates, diving in Dumpsters, spending nights in cardboard boxes under highway bridges, gargling with Thunderbird.
"I been here since seven."
It was two in the afternoon. Purposeful men were pushing past us, dressed in the local uniform of hooded smocks and black peaked caps, arms full of gear, impatient with the two rubbernecks in their path.
"You better ask one of these guys."
"I asked already."
He shambled off -- "Be seeing you, man" -- up the next finger pier, and I could see his lips moving as he spelled out the words on the sterns of Oceania, Prosperity, Stella Marie, Enterprise, Quandary, lost among these resonant abstractions and women's names. The working men were giving him a wide berth. On his behalf, I kept an eye out for the Venturer; but if it had ever existed at all, it was probably now steaming for Ketchikan and points north.
The boats were fitting out, at the last minute, as usual, for their spring migration to the Alaskan fishing grounds. The resinous, linseed-oily smell of varnish and wet paint hung thickly in the still air of the terminal, and there was the continuous happy racket of electric saws and sanders, hammers, drills, and roaring blowtorches. Diesel engines were being hastily disemboweled, their black innards laid out, part by part, on afterdecks, while their bloody-knuckled owners muttered to themselves as they puzzled over camshafts and clearances. Pickup trucks, laden to the gunwales, were drawn up alongside those boats that were now most nearly ready to leave, and wholesale boxes of Dinty Moore stew and Campbell's soup and plastic-wrapped bales of toilet tissue were being swung aboard on hoists. On the broad plaza of the net-mending area, a man and a woman were "hanging web": threading white, cigar-shaped floats at two-foot intervals along the top of their quarter-mile gill net. The jade-green, gossamer nylon mesh shimmered at their feet like a river.
In Seattle, the city of virtual reality, it was always a pleasure to come to this last bastion of old-fashioned work, with its nets, crab pots, paintbrushes, and carpentering; to its outdoor faces, seamed with experience; and to its long-established family air, generation following generation into the same industry. Grandparents, now too shaky on their pins to make the trip, were still important figures at fitting-out time. They drove trucks, varnished brightwork, repaired nets, tested circuits; unlike nearly all of their contemporaries, their skills had not dated. And beyond the grandparents there stretched the ghostly presences of European fishing communities on the fjords, bays, and sounds of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, Ireland, from where most of the families had come. These, too, were commemorated in boat names: Cape Clear, Stavanger, Solvorn, Lokken, Tyyne, Thor, Saint Patrick, Uffda, American Viking. A clever parodist, tired of the prevailing Scandinavian homesickness, had christened his gill-netter Edsel Fjord.
Centuries of seagoing converged on Fishermen's Terminal. Though its corrugated steel buildings, painted in pastel blue and beige, were new, the place felt older than the city in which it stood. Like the fishermen, it went a long way back. Its boats, built for the Pacific, were the direct descendants of the trawlers, smacks, and luggers of the North Sea and the Baltic. The high flared bow and steep sheer that had worked well in the Maelstrom waters off the Lofoten Islands were here re-created for service off the Aleutians. The trollers, with their upswept fifty-foot poles of raw fir, were old acquaintances, for I'd seen their ancient Dutch and Danish cousins. At Fishermen's Terminal the past -- and sometimes the far distant past -- was alive and usable, as it was almost nowhere else in the future-fixated United States. For someone my age, there was comfort in that. Most days, I found an excuse to drop by. I liked the boats, their redolent names, their house-proud captains, and the amiable, understated gossip of the sea.
Now, with the sun come back from exile, and the voyage north and the fishing season stretching clear ahead, everyone radiated the nervous elation -- half high hopes and half cold feet -- that marks the start of a big adventure. The weeks to come were full of flawless promise. The reality of the season would take hold soon enough: unforecast gales and groundings, engine failures, fish gone AWOL, lost sleep, lost tempers, and all the rest. In a little while the fleet would be scattered over a thousand miles and more of water, from Dixon Entrance to the Bering Sea. Then each boat would become a stranger to the others; members of the same family, aboard rival vessels, would treat one another as spies. But in the communal ceremony of fitting out, tools and expertise were passing freely from boat to boat, as the moment neared when the last line is cast off, the goodbyes are waved, the screw makes the water boil under the stern, and the passage to Alaska is under way.
I wanted as much of the mood as I could borrow for my own use. For this year I was going too -- not to fish, but to follow the fishermen's route; to go to sea in my own boat for the going's sake. I hoped 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. "Meditation and water are wedded for ever," wrote Melville. So, for the term of a fishing season, I meant to meditate on the sea, at sea.
In the United States, wherever young men hang out together, on college campuses as in homeless shelters, this story went the rounds: if you could get to Seattle and talk your way aboard a fishing boat bound for Alaska, you could make $1,000 a day. Or more. Someone always knew someone who'd taken home $100,000, sometimes $200,000, for just two months' work.
You could turn your life around on money like that -- buy a house, start a business, become captain of your own gold-spinning boat. In the land of self-reinvention, the Alaskan fishery was said to be a magical place where poor men were transformed, at a stroke, into rich ones. Eight weeks was all it took to make a hellacious sum of money.
The young men flocked to Seattle in the spring to make their fortunes. They walked the docks, trying to ingratiate themselves with any captain who would speak to them. They were a pest, this seasonal ragtag band of college kids, druggies, winos, fugitives, unemployed computer programmers, checkout clerks, waiters, pizza-delivery drivers. The sea experience of many of these hopeful applicants amounted to no more than the occasional trip as a passenger on a ferry.
Yet the most persistent "greenies" did eventually manage to get taken on, for a half share (5 percent) or a full one (10 percent) of net profits at the end of the voyage. Of these, a tiny handful finished up with a wad of money within crying distance of the fairy-tale numbers. There were just enough jobs for deckhands, and just enough money, to keep the supply of young men copiously flowing.
The money talked loudest, but the sea talked too, with its antique promise of escape and adventure. Many greenies came from flat inland towns, and the only waves they knew rippled through the fields of standing wheat. But they'd read C. S. Forester, and they pined, in happy ignorance, for the yo-ho-ho of life at sea. In Des Moines, it's easy to dream fondly of the heaving deck, the gouts of freezing spray, the struggle with the net in fifty knots of wind, because nothing like that ever happens in Iowa.
More than that, going fishing in Alaska was the last true western adventure. At the end of the twentieth century, the Alaskan fishery presented itself as a romantic anomaly -- an armed, masculine world of unbridled free enterprise, where a rolling stone, a latterday Huck Finn, on the run from the Widow Douglases of civilization, could still walk tall. For the boys (and some girls) at the back of the class, with no diplomas to their names, the fishery was their last shot at the exemplary American life of travel, excitement, and riches.
Alaska liked to advertise itself as "The Last Frontier," a slogan tinged with self-canceling whimsy since it appeared on vehicle registration plates, courtesy of the state licensing department. If the phrase could now be held to mean anything at all, it belonged to the sea, not the land; and the sea around Alaska was a real wilderness, as wild and lonely as any territory in the American past.
The Gulf of Alaska is a weather-kitchen. Pacific depressions, drifting over the ocean from the far southwest, hit the gulf, stall there, and intensify. As the atmospheric pressure at the center of the system sinks, the winds spinning around the hub speed up, to fifty, sixty, eighty knots. The waves build into untidy heaps; the sea goes streaky-white. Made steeper and impeded by the powerful tidal currents that pour out of the narrow passages between islands, the wave-trains turn near the coast into a short, precipitous, hollow sea of rearing fifty-foot crests and ship-swallowing holes in the water. These storms are a regular assignment for Alaska fishermen; for the greenie, they offer a crash course in retching misery and terror, keenly sharpened by the knowledge that every year boats go down in seas like this, all hands lost, due, in the standard phrase, "to stress of weather."
It was a last frontier in another sense, too. The great bonanza fisheries, from the Dogger Bank to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, were dead or dying, wrecked by overfishing, pollution, and disease. The local inshore fishery of the Pacific Northwest, on the Oregon and Washington coasts, had been exploited to exhaustion. In some areas, the chinook salmon -- which used to pack the rivers and inlets wall to wall -- had been nominated as an endangered species. At Fishermen's Terminal, dozens of little gill-netters, too small to make the Alaskan trip, lay abandoned, rotting at their moorings, with faded for sale notices in their wheelhouse windows. Their owners were on food stamps now, the boats -- and the once-valuable licenses that went with them -- going at yard-sale prices. Yet the Alaskan fishery went on. It was now more closely regulated than it had ever been, with a maze of small print governing season openings, boat lengths, net materials, and mesh sizes, an increasingly bridled free-for-all. But by comparison with what was happening elsewhere, the fishing in Alaska was still the Big Rock Candy Mountain of far-western fantasy, like the Comstock Lode, or the miles of virgin forest ripe for the chainsaw.
Greenhorns walking the dock, hoping for a piece of this action, would find a frontier that was all but closed. True, you could make $1,000 a day long-lining for halibut. But the halibut season had been squeezed down to a few days, and the captains of the halibut schooners were able to pick and choose from a throng of experienced hands. No chance for the greenie there. Most gillnetters, and trollers, too, were family boats, husband-and-wife or father-and-son concerns with no room aboard for a stranger. A big crabber . . . maybe. A purse-seiner would be the greenie's best bet; though the boats themselves were small (58 feet the maximum length permitted in Alaska), the encircling net was maneuvered in the water by a big, slab-sided aluminum skiff with a 350-horse inboard motor. Crewing the parent boat and its skiff required at least four people, and sometimes six or seven; so purse-seiners sometimes took on an extra hand from outside the circle of family and friends.
As the saying went, 10 percent of the fishermen catch 90 percent of the fish, and the crack purse-seiners in the fleet were known to everyone. When they hired extra hands, they chose people they knew.
There remained the "shit-boat": a floating catastrophe, its captain on the sauce, its hydraulic power-gear on the fritz, its nets riddled with holes, its bronze sea cocks crumbling away with electrolysis and turning into waterspouts. Shit-boats took on greenies.
On the dock, I was summoned by the captain of the Glenda Faye, a 58-foot purse-seiner. "You want to see a living miracle?" He had a paintbrush in one hand, a bottle of phosphoric acid in the other.
"Watch this -- "
He brushed a swath of acid across a nasty-looking fish tray that had taken on the appearance of an old, brown, badly oxidized oil painting. As the brush touched the surface, the rust dissolved and the original white metal showed through. "Magic! I never used this stuff before -- "
"You could serve it up with a dash of soda and a slice of lemon."
"They do that -- in Cana-nada."
The Glenda Faye looked like a crack boat: built of steel and massively deep-drafted, the hull freshly painted in maroon with black trim. It carried more electronic gear than most, the wheelhouse roof fairly bristling with antennae. Through the galley window I could see mugs and dishes newly washed and neatly stacked to dry, spotless teak cabinetry, the wink of polished brass. A tidy ship.
Last year's season had been good, the captain said. In one day, they'd netted $5,000 worth of "pinks." That was their red-letter day, but they'd come close to matching this haul several times as the boat worked round the inlets north of Dixon Entrance. He and his cousin ran the boat together. Each season they took on a crew of two or three. "College kids. Hard workers. No drugs, no smokes." Always family, or family friends. Last year, at settlement time, when the cost of fuel and grub had been deducted from the gross, each kid pocketed nearly $11,000 for his two months' work -- big money for a student's vacation job, but a far cry from the legends of instant wealth that kept the greenhorns coming to Seattle.
"Did you talk to the blond guy with the bedroll who was here a bit ago?"
"Which guy? There's a hundred like that."
"Would you ever take on someone like him -- a stranger, walking the dock, looking for a boat?"
He laid a lick of magic acid on another fish tray. "Most of those guys? I wouldn't use 'em for bait." Swiveling on his haunches to take a closer look at me, he guffawed at what he saw. "Hey, mister, you ain't looking to be taken on? Oh, boy!"
Happy to contribute to the mirth of his afternoon, I shrugged and went off to do my shopping.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Later Printing edition (November 7, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679776141
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679776147
- Item Weight : 13.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.96 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #320,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #546 in Travel Writing Reference
- #712 in Pacific West United States Travel Books
- #1,034 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- Customer Reviews:
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I think the first point to make is that the writing mirrors the, by turns, eddying, chaotic, reflective quality of the sea itself, leading one deeper and deeper into the author's own meandering introspections about life and, yes, water in a very (to this reader anyway) seductive style, a style which is nothing if not allusive, reflecting Raban's own lifelong fascination with and profound love of literature. The account of Captain Vancouver's voyage along this same passage, taken from many sources, while certainly the most superficially parallel and certainly the most discursively ongoing of the allusions, is not in the end, the most significant and profound. That award must surely go to Raban's recounting of Shelley's last days and ultimate demise in the chapter entitled "Charred Remains", striking a parallel, in a much more profound manner than those accounts of Vancouver's voyage, to the last days and death of Raban's father and to the unsurpassed final chapter in which he invokes Cowper's "The Cast-Away" as a metaphor for his crumbling marriage and his own mortality.
Perhaps one, like Raban, has to already have a love of and familiarity both these poets to see what a feat he has pulled of here - though Raban provides the basic biographical background for each. To stick with the last chapter---Cowper isn't a poet much read anymore. But he's always been one of my favourites. One really has to be familiar with his intensely unbalanced life and mind to fully appreciate his poetry. In any event, by this last chapter of the book, we know what it's like to walk in Raban's shoes, to be in his boat, to wander through his mind and heart and to know how much he loves his family. When the hammer falls at the end with his wife and daughter deplaning in Juneau, we feel how crushed he is by it. And Cowper's "The Cast-Away" is the perfect poetic expression of the way we feel he feels, drowned not by the "real" sea he's been traversing, but by Cowper's metaphoric sea of despair. I frequently return to Cowper's "The Task"-A poem given him as a sort of assignment to ward off one of his mental fits-as well as "The Cast-Away" as two of the greatest poems in the language. I NEVER thought I'd see a modern author apparently effortlessly bring the despair of the all but forgotten poet back to life, but......Raban does.
So, yes, readers looking for a "sea adventure" yarn had better look elsewhere. How to know if you will fancy the book? Do you love history, English literature, introspective depths? Above all, do you know the feeling of being drowned by despair? Can you relate to Cowper's couplet?
"But I, beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he."
In short, do you know that INNER Sea? If so, this book will not disappoint.
Like most of Raban's books, Passage to Juneau, is written in two layers. The first is an account of his preparations and execution of a solo sailing trip from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. The second level is an entertaining and well-researched historical account of the travels and travails of Capt. George Vancouver aboard HMS Discovery during his four-year exploration of the northwest coast of North America.
But it isn't really a story about a routine sailing adventure similar to that undertaken by dozens of boats every sailing season, is it. It is a poignant story of a successful writer who in late middle age looses first his father (to cancer) and then his wife (to neglect and absence of common focus) and is left alone facing old age in disconsolate apprehension and confusion. The reader is given an early clue to the direction the book is about to take when Raban, early on in his voyage, meets a married couple who seem to cling to each other like the two sides of a Velcro patch and makes the mildly derisive comment, "some people are more married that others," leaving us with the feeling that he isn't very married at all. This is reinforced throughout the book by his obsessive preparations for a planned visit by his young daughter, where he is looking forward to showing her the bears, with only passing mention that his wife will be coming along also.
Raban is an excellent writer who doesn't hesitate to bare his soul to the reader and does it with a refreshing lack of maudlinly and only a trace of sentimentality. He records his varying responses to his surrounding with an honest and only slightly judgmental way that lets the reader understands what is going on without feeling the need to interfere or change things. This interested-but-detached view is particularly apparent in his interactions with the members of the First Nations tribes he encounters, and in his slightly cynical take on the ceremonies he is invited to attend. It is like he is letting the reader share his view of the world through one of the portholes in his boat.
Passage to Juneau is a recommended read for anyone interested in maritime history, for present-day sailors traveling on sailboats, and to anyone wanting a poignant yet free-from-moralizing story about the personal passage of a late-middle-aged man facing an uncertain future.
Top reviews from other countries
Eigene Biografie und fremde Biografien wechseln sich mit launigen Geschichten ab, locker und humorig mit viel Selbstironie geschrieben, manchmal ins nachdenklich grüblerische, lyrische abgleitend aber immer anschaulich und interessant.
Ein Auszug:
“The sea was smooth as a pool of molasses. Twists of smoke rose from its surface in the chilly early-morning air. My propeller left a thick braid of wake that trailed from the stern for a quarter-mile, where it faded into mist”
Poetisch, bildhaft ohne gekünstelte Metaphern, der Autor versteht es mit Sprache Bilder zu malen.
Der rote Faden ist eine als Ein-Hand Segler unternommene Tour mit seiner 35 Fuß Ketsch (Zweimast-Segelboot) von Seattle entlang der Inside Passage bis nach Juneau in Alaska. Es beginnt mit einer Betrachtung von Seattle, dem Fischereihafen, den Leuten dort, ihren Hoffnungen und Lebensumständen. Er gewährt auch Einblicke in seine eigene Lebensweise, in die Gründe für diese besondere Reise und ihrer Vorbereitung. Ganz nebenbei tauchen in einigen der Kapitel jede Menge Tipps zur Literatur von und über das Meer, der alten Entdecker und Abenteurer, auf. Er erwähnt Titel und Autoren, zitiert alte Texte und Tagebucheinträge; eine Anregung für alle Interessierten sich weitere Werke vorzumerken. Sein ständiger Begleiter sind die Aufzeichnungen der ersten Expedition von George Vancouver in dieser Region, dem was gleichgeblieben ist und was sich durch das Eintreffen der Europäer bis zur Unkenntlichkeit verändert hat.
Einen großen Raum widmet er den Schicksalen von Menschen denen er begegnet. Gerade unter Fischern und Helfern findet er echte Typen, deren Lebensgeschichten jede für sich einen eigenen Roman ergeben würden. Auch den seit Jahrtausenden in dieser Region lebenden Menschen (gebräuchlich als Indianer, moderner als First Nations bezeichnet) kommen zu Wort – ihrer Kunst und Kultur, dem Eins-Sein mit dieser besonderen Landschaft zwischen Meer, Wald und Gebirge.
Seine Erzählung wimmelt von nautischen und fischereitypischen Ausdrücken, sodass auch ein geübter Leser englischer Originale ein gutes Wörterbuch benötigen wird. Dieses ist natürlich bei den meisten E-Book Readern dankenswerterweise integriert. Schreibstil und Wortschatz sind recht anspruchsvoll und ich war erfreut beim Recherchieren im WWW bei Google Books auf die deutsche Ausgabe „Passage nach Juneau“ übersetzt von Sabine Hedinger zu stoßen, leider ist die gedruckte Auflage vergriffen und nur recht teuer gebraucht verfügbar. Google Books bietet die Gelegenheit das erste Fünftel der deutschen Ausgabe zu lesen.
Einige kleinere Ungenauigkeiten, bezüglich Geografie und Handhabung des Segelbootes haben mich etwas irritiert, dies aber nur weil ich selbst mit Booten und Schiffen zur See gefahren bin und die Erzählung so faszinierend fand, dass ich die Reise des Autors mit Hilfe von Google-Earth verfolgt habe. Als Beispiel möchte ich auf einige öffentliche Videos verweisen, u.a. auf youtube.com/watch?v=gOarEdfJQ2w zur Passage „Cruising through Deception Pass”. Man erkennt, dass die Fahrt nautisch anspruchsvoll aber längst nicht so dramatisch wie geschildert ist.
Fazit: Schöne Sprache, im Original und der gelungenen Übersetzung, kurzweilig und doch nachdenklich erzählt. Als deutscher Leser erfährt man vieles über diese ferne Sehnsuchtsregion, das man so noch nicht gekannt haben dürfte. In einigen Passagen neigt der Autor ein wenig zu sehr zu tiefenpsychologischen Betrachtungen und der Vermittlung seiner ganz persönlichen Befindlichkeiten, hier hätte die Erzählung für meinen Geschmack etwas gestrafft werden können, es bleibt aber ein sehr gelungener Bericht über die Besonderheiten dieser Region und ihrer Bewohner. Knappe 5 Sterne für mich.








