Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban [1999, Random] offers the reader powerful writing, immediacy of detail, and a seamless blend of history with personal experience. For a non-sailor reader, it has been a revelation of the attractions, dangers and disappointments of Raban’s solitary sea pilgrimage.
The subtitle, A Sea and Its Meanings, reveals the
wealth of information Raban already had from his previous sailing and from a
lifetime of reading. A reader ignorant of seamanship, of the shapes and changes
of the ocean’s surface and color, of the vagaries of wind, and of the
complexities and inaccuracies of ship’s instruments, cannot help but be taken
in and taught to appreciate Raban’s situation.
He started out alone in his "floating cottage," a cruising ketch built in Sweden in 1972. He had bought it six years before because he saw in the varnished mahogany and teak interior the space for a library. His working vessel, his "narrative vehicle" had three rooms, a shower/toilet, lockers, an engine compartment, a center cockpit, a wraparound deck, two masts and a suit of sails. He called it by its Washington State registration numbers: Whiskey November Eleven Ninety-six Romeo Bravo.
From Seattle where he lives, he sailed up the Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Juneau, Alaska so he could face the mysteries, the riddles, of the sea. He had read as inspiration and guide many books about Indian art and myths, the journals of Captain Vancouver, poetry of the sea, seamanship, and the physics of waves and turbulence. He was following the path of George Vancouver in 1792 as he explored this thousand-mile long, winding, deep sea path and faced its whirlpools, eddies, rips and races.
This day by day account of the weather, the shoreline, the various settlements, alive or abandoned, and the wide range of people he met, sailors, fishermen, storekeepers, children, is interwoven with his parallel musings on Vancouver’s progress into these same places. All of his writing is energized by his eye for detail, his fluent writing style, and a mildly self-deprecating and a frank recognition of his own moods, weaknesses, and fears. He is working on his old memories of his father as well as on his unsettled marital state even as he gathers the material for this book. All of it is of one piece.
His figurative language is often strikingly poetic. "...great curds of yeasty scum marked the sites of rips and whirlpools...now nearly extinct...a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks."[p.201] And "Then the rain arrived - a warm downpour that fell into the water like granulated sugar from a chute." [p. 213]
His view of Alaska: "The richest state in America had a hobo mentality. Alaska traveled light... lived for the moment, sowing the wind, reaping the whirlwind. Watching the unlovely shoreline slide past... I felt a kinship...to the thick streak of nomadism in my own makeup...all my slovenliness, my taste for the temporary and the makeshift, my weakness for crazes...Were I ever...to construct and populate an American state, it would look a lot like Alaska; and I wouldn’t care to live there."
Raban has written nine other books as well as edited a book of sea poetry. This book makes me want to read more by him. That’s my highest recommendation.