Waters Rough and Smooth

There is in our midst an interesting new form of travel writing. The literature of exploration, which was such a staple of 18th and 19th century narratives, chronicling both true and invented journeys (think “Robinson Crusoe”), has been succeeded, in recent years, by the literature of re-exploration. In the literature of re-exploration, the traveler carries as many books and notebooks as compasses and sextants. He is equally traveler and reporter, observer and researcher, detective and historian. He writes as well as he sails (or hikes or mountain climbs); his aim is not to discover a place--a virtual impossibility, after all--so much as to rediscover one.

This modern traveler often sets out to retrace a famous journey from the past and interleaves his retelling of the explorer’s original account with an attempt to set the adventure into some historical context and perspective; a compare-and-contrast assessment of the way the same landscape or seascape looks and is used (or more often, abused) today; regional issues (the fate of fish, forests, Indians, artifacts); portrait sketches of fellow travelers or colorful “local folk”; and, depending on taste and inclination, introspective asides that make full use of the metaphor and the lived, transforming experience of travel to explore issues relating to his personal life and story, so that, by the end, the contemporary traveler will have completed a journey that is at once actual and interior and is potentially much richer for being a combination of the two. “I meant to go fishing for reflections . . . [o]ther people’s reflections, as I thought then,” Jonathan Raban says near the beginning of “Passage to Juneau,” his contribution to the genre. “I wasn’t prepared for the catch I eventually made.”

Suggestive though these sentences are, the personal, as it turns out, is not Raban’s strongest area of inquiry in this book, but all the rest, the retracing, the contextualizing, the questioning, the reporting, the observing, the nature-watching, the sea-studying and the character-sketching, bring forth much elegant writing and incisive thinking from Raban, who also wrote “Bad Land: An American Romance,” an account of his travels through the Great American Desert in Montana and the Dakotas. Although Raban follows such re-explorers as Ivan Doig, who looked over the shoulder of the mid-19th century Northwest settler James Swan in “Winter Brothers,” and Timothy Egan, who used Theodore Winthrop’s “Canoe and Saddle” (1853) to lead him through the Northwest in “The Good Rain,” “Passage to Juneau” is very much unto itself, as these books so often are.

Built on the frailest of connective plots--in Raban’s case a sailing trip north from Seattle though the Inside Passage to Juneau, Alaska--such accounts succeed or fail largely on the writer’s acuity, curiosity, skepticism, powers of perception and ability to engage in the moment. Raban possesses and sustains all of these and manages to keep his 35-foot ketch afloat besides.

Capt. George Vancouver, a fellow Englishman, is the earlier explorer who presides over Raban’s travels. He was charged in 1792 with the task of proving--or, as likely, disproving--the existence of the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and he guided his ship, the Discovery, along the same coastline Raban follows here. Burdened with a volcanic temper, a strong tint of money-grubbing vulgarity, an uninspired, fogyish and decidedly un-Romantic way of looking at the sublime (and in the Romantic sense, Sublime) Northwest landscape, Vancouver was nevertheless a gifted navigator and a powerful personality, and Raban invokes the explorer as devotedly and sometimes as impatiently as he might an actual rather than a borrowed ancestor, which Vancouver becomes in all but name. Raban’s recapitulations and interpretations of the unhappy dynamics on the Discovery, which was filled with spoiled young gentlemen on an unusual version of the Grand Tour, “a finishing school on an epic and glorious scale,” frame, populate and serve as a foil to his own more solitary travels and allow us to see the Northwest from a pair of perspectives, one late 18th century, the other late 20th.

“I’m . . . a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea,” Raban declares early on. He is afraid--that is, suitably respectful--of the sea, “the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave . . . the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool . . . the sheer abyssal depth of the water,” yet “for the last fifteen years, every spare day that I could tease from the calendar has been spent afloat, in a state of undiminished fascination with the sea, its movements and meanings.” The touch of paradox is characteristic of the way Raban thinks, and it makes him a fresh and probing cicerone in the various landscapes and seascapes through which he steers himself, his boat and his readers.

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Raban accepts almost nothing at face value; this and his impatience with cant and accepted dogma are to “Passage to Juneau” what well-drawn characters are to a novel; they make the book breathe. Consider his approach to the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, which is thoroughly de-sentimentalizing. He disputes the idea that they lived in pure peace and utter harmony with a “region of unparalleled abundance--until it was violated by the white intruders.” Reading their folk tales and examining their artifacts, he sees instead a “justified terror of living cheek-by-jowl with creatures larger and more powerful than oneself.” He finds harshness, humor and scatology where other people find only reverence. He sees a people as water-haunted as he is, creators of “an art in thrall to ripples and reflections.” They are a people who live on the sea; the sea is their neighborhood, their agora; its surrounding land “mere undifferentiated space.” Of their technology, he reasons that by the late 18th century, when Vancouver went sailing by, “they had pretty well exhausted the possibilities. . . . They fell on the tools, firearms, nails, iron, copper, and cloth as necessities long overdue.”

How refreshing; how rounded; how real: Vancouver is neither hero nor villain, the Indians are neither innocents nor figureheads hardened and impenetrable as their totem poles. He regards both the past and the present Northwest with a similar sharpened perspective. Of the Northwest school of literature, he says its dominant tone is “solemn, lyrical, minutely observant. . . . [A]fter a few pages I grew restless and began to ache for more profane company.” Indeed. Of the remarkable landscape, and its analogue in Europe, which were so powerfully embraced by Romantic writers and painters, he says: “Two centuries of Romanticism . . . has blunted everyone’s ability to look at waterfalls and precipices in other than dusty and secondhand terms.” His responses are never manufactured, always candid: “That [the landscape] had been a scene of such heightened emotion in the past only made me feel more keenly my own absence of feeling in it.”

Time is a central theme of “Passage to Juneau.” Everywhere Raban goes, he is aware of its transformative powers. He visits villages where the failure of canneries and sawmills has turned boom towns into ghost towns. He probes into the issue of the mysteriously diminishing salmon runs, discovers that they have been fluctuating for thousands of years and speculates that Indians honored the first fish of the season because there was a genuine chance that they might not come back in sufficient numbers to feed the tribe. He recognizes that in 200 years, Vancouver’s rough, pristine, sparely inhabited, tempestuous coast has turned into a “soothing, therapeutic wallpaper for cruise-ship passengers.”

Time transforms Raban’s own life too. Halfway through his travels, he learns that his father is dying of cancer. He leaves his boat with Wendy and John Walders, an eccentric couple who live in enchanted isolation on Potts Lagoon on West Cracoft Island (the Walderses are among a dozen finely rendered chance encounters in the book), and setting off on a journey within a journey, he flies home to England to sit by his father’s deathbed, console his mother and negotiate a difficult calm with his brothers. He captures, and conveys, his father’s rectitude, dry humor and attempts at comforting his future mourners before he dies. Yet there are an obscurity and an obliqueness, perhaps even a lack of rigor, in the way Raban draws these family relations, and it reappears in his writing near the end of his journey, when he learns that his marriage is dissolving. Leaving so much unsaid or half said is, of course, is an author’s choice and his right, but it is a notable haziness in a book otherwise filled with so much precise detail and thoughtful self-regard. It would seem that, ultimately, Raban is more comfortable capturing journeys through waters rough and smooth, and through landscapes contemporary and historical, than he is capturing journeys of a more interior nature.

On the whole, though, Raban lives up to a remark of Melville’s, which he cites before he sets out on his travels: “Meditation and water are wedded forever.” In Raban’s mind and life, as we experience them in his delightful “Passage to Juneau,” this is certainly one marriage that will last.