Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
Jonathan Raban
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 0679776141
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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. The physical distance is 1,000 miles of difficult-and often treacherous-water, which Raban navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat.
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.
the South Seas. Then, in 1985, he quit his job, sold-up, and he and Wendy set off on a voyage to nowhere in particular, sailing up the Inside Passage on a shakedown cruise while trying to decide whether to shape a course for the Sea of Cortez, or Surabaya, or Tahiti. Instead, they’d found their way to Potts Lagoon. He now made a not-too-strenuous living out of other people’s marine mishaps. His welding shop on the raft drew a regular procession of fishing boats with mechanical troubles. He was a
I am.” I took his hand in mine. He looked surprised—and even, possibly, a little frightened. Things were not usually thus between us. I let the hand drop, but said: “You’re setting us all a hell of an example to follow … handling this with so much bravery. We’re all very proud of you.” A sudden, lively argumentative gleam came into my father’s eyes. “Oh, I don’t know about ‘bravery,’ ” he said. He was back in his come-off-it-old-boy voice—the one he’d used to debunk my latest, university-fed
want to miss the party.” Ten minutes later, my youngest brother, Dominic, piloted my father out to the sunroom door in the hideous wheelchair. Though the temperature was in the eighties, he was cocooned in blankets. Below the knees, the legs of his striped pajamas fluttered round ankles that seemed little more than bare bones. The pajamas themselves, with their convict-pattern and extreme thinness, looked as if they might have survived from his boarding school days. He nodded and smiled, the
madness, I had good reason not to trust my own judgment. The wind stung. I was soaked through with spray. The boat was beginning to crash into the troughs, going too fast for its own good. The motion of a ship in a seaway is conventionally broken down into six components, known as the six degrees of freedom—pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge, and yaw. With the wind pinning the sail to starboard and keeping the boat heeled at a steady 25° angle, its freedom to roll and sway was mercifully
could quit his job and cast off for Oceania. “But if I could get up to Alaska, and parlay that into, like, a hundred grand, I’d be fat.” An elderly San Francisco fisherman—nicknamed Joe Shaft, supposedly for sexual rather than financial wolfishness—offered to sell Munroe a wooden gill-netter, Vagabond, only six years old and in fine nick, for $40,000. Ten thousand down, with the balance due at the end of the season. “If we were going fishing in Alaska, we could be trusted. The money was as good