What do you think?
Rate this book
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss.
"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.Ìý
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.
"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.Ìý
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.
464 pages, Paperback
First published October 12, 1999
199 people are currently reading
2265 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 229 reviews
September 16, 2016
Have gone back and forth on the rating for this one.
I like the writing. A lot, in fact. The author, , is extremely erudite and articulate, and he skillfully intertwines sailing, history, anthropology, art, and nature in a web of words in which the the reader can get lost as in the fogs and mists, eddies and currents of the waters being described.
I also like the author's premise of linking the travelogue of his journey to the exploratory sailings of the eighteenth century Spanish and English, providing a map from which frequent detours are taken only to return to the same waters. This is deftly done.
I also particularly enjoyed his musings on the culture of the native peoples before contact with the Europeans: that the water, rather than the steep, heavily forested, and largely inaccessible land, may have been their "comfort zone" and that the prevalence of lozenge shapes in their art perhaps mirrors the reflections of lights off of the wavelets of their chosen environment.
Based solely on the points addressed thus far, this would be a five-star book.
What did not work as well for me were the personal aspects of Raban's journey. And he had a lot to deal with. And perhaps it was too much, because he appears to have become completely emotionally detached from the people in his life - with the expected consequences. The sea - and its maelstroms - was surely meant to be a metaphor for his emotional state, but this was not effective for me. Perhaps the differences between life, and ruminations, on the sailboat and "reality" back on the mainland in Seattle and England are just too great, because I found these sections jarring (and the person portrayed, the author in his self-assessment, frankly, rather a prat). Or perhaps we are simply in different places in our lives, because the "author" seems to be someone with whom it would be fascinating to spend hours in a pub, letting the conversation and words flow along the detours and diversions as they may, while the author "the person", dealing with the fall-out back on dry land, seems somebody best avoided (unless you know a way to pull him out of his funk - with which he certainly was not going to let any of his family assist).
Last but not least, I would have really enjoyed a bibliography of all of the other books referenced or even alluded to in this work, because they were myriad and seem to have ranged from scholarly works to the poems of Shelley.
So, for me, five stars for the "detours and diversions" and two for the author gives three-and-a-half stars as written (which I will round to four, because I rather skimmed the "mainland" scenes). That's my world, yours may well be different. And yet I can only recommend that you dip in and dip out and move at the leisurely pace of the heavy, dark, strong waters of .
I like the writing. A lot, in fact. The author, , is extremely erudite and articulate, and he skillfully intertwines sailing, history, anthropology, art, and nature in a web of words in which the the reader can get lost as in the fogs and mists, eddies and currents of the waters being described.
I also like the author's premise of linking the travelogue of his journey to the exploratory sailings of the eighteenth century Spanish and English, providing a map from which frequent detours are taken only to return to the same waters. This is deftly done.
I also particularly enjoyed his musings on the culture of the native peoples before contact with the Europeans: that the water, rather than the steep, heavily forested, and largely inaccessible land, may have been their "comfort zone" and that the prevalence of lozenge shapes in their art perhaps mirrors the reflections of lights off of the wavelets of their chosen environment.
Based solely on the points addressed thus far, this would be a five-star book.
What did not work as well for me were the personal aspects of Raban's journey. And he had a lot to deal with. And perhaps it was too much, because he appears to have become completely emotionally detached from the people in his life - with the expected consequences. The sea - and its maelstroms - was surely meant to be a metaphor for his emotional state, but this was not effective for me. Perhaps the differences between life, and ruminations, on the sailboat and "reality" back on the mainland in Seattle and England are just too great, because I found these sections jarring (and the person portrayed, the author in his self-assessment, frankly, rather a prat). Or perhaps we are simply in different places in our lives, because the "author" seems to be someone with whom it would be fascinating to spend hours in a pub, letting the conversation and words flow along the detours and diversions as they may, while the author "the person", dealing with the fall-out back on dry land, seems somebody best avoided (unless you know a way to pull him out of his funk - with which he certainly was not going to let any of his family assist).
Last but not least, I would have really enjoyed a bibliography of all of the other books referenced or even alluded to in this work, because they were myriad and seem to have ranged from scholarly works to the poems of Shelley.
So, for me, five stars for the "detours and diversions" and two for the author gives three-and-a-half stars as written (which I will round to four, because I rather skimmed the "mainland" scenes). That's my world, yours may well be different. And yet I can only recommend that you dip in and dip out and move at the leisurely pace of the heavy, dark, strong waters of .
November 29, 2012
A simple recipe: find an interesting subject--location, community, event, person--bring yourself close to it, open your eyes, ears and notebook, and once the story is captured, write and publish.
Yes, it requires an articulate writer, undeterred by obstacles, one able to smell out good stories, locate interesting persons, make them talk, and then frame it all in scintillating prose. Not a job for everyone, but when done right, the results are delightful. John McPhee was a master of this genre, and both Robert Kaplan and Richard Preston were just as good, if not as prolific. Jonathan Raban's "Passage to Juneau" is in their league.
The son of a British clergyman, Raban loves and respects the sea. In "Old Glory" he sailed solo the length of the Mississipi, and here he does the same for the "Inside Passage," the tortuous route through channels and narrow passages from Seattle to Juneau in Alaska's panhandle. This is the route nowadays taken by an increasing number of luxury cruise liners, giant floating hotels, but Raban's view, from a small sailboat, is much more intimate and penetrating. Cruise passengers see snowy peaks, distant cliffs and thick forests, a picture-card scenery unrolling before their eyes--that is, unless rain and fog blot it out, in which case one can always find entertainment below decks. Raban sees dark swirling tides, channeled by rocky mazes to form river-like flows, even waterfalls. Viewed at close range, the forests are gloomy and threatening, confining any settlement to a narrow strip of shore.
It is a harsh country. Scattered settlements survive, and their hard-working men and women scratch an uncertain existence from timber and fisheries. Fishing in particular is hard-pressed, as salmon populations are depleted and canneries close: some villages remain on the map in name only, and when Raban looks for them, he only finds decaying docks and rotting houses, in the process of being reclaimed by the forest. Others hang on, and a few try to tap the new prosperity brought by cruise ships, replacing the rough but honest local culture with gentrified entertainment and a distorted image of the "noble savage."
Unlike the tourists, Raban knows the actual Indian lore as recorded by early explorers. In Indian legends both sea and forest are ruled by terrifying monsters, and those legends rarely have happy endings. They also contain sexual scenes so lurid that anthropologists reporting them switched to Latin, to keep out non-academic readers.
Raban sails here through rugged passages carved by glaciers, surprisingly deep. Yet they also have dangerous rocks to trap the unwary, reaching almost (but not quite!) to the surface. If that were not enough, uprooted tree-trunks wander through the currents, barely visible and a menace to navigation--not to the giant cruise liners, perhaps, but certainly to Raban's little boat, which luckily gets away with just one minor collision. Riding low in his sailboat also allows Raban to understand the tension and uncertainty experienced by the explorers who first mapped these waters, by George Vancouver's 1792 expedition which he describes in parallel with his own.
Poor Vancouver! Raban obviously does not like him very much. He knows the history of that voyage of exploration, because quite a few other participants also kept notes, and later published them. Vancouver had sailed with Captain Cook and his name is now attached to a large, important island and to two prominent cities, one in Canada and one in the US, but Raban reveals him as a chubby man in poor health, who alienated himself from crew and officers alike, and who maintained discipline by frequent floggings. One Northwest Indian, he tells, approached Vancouver and begged to be allowed to accompany him back to England, but later fled in horror having witnessed a sailor being flogged. Yet it was also a dangerous voyage, burdened by the necessity of exploring every inlet and strait, just to make sure (by orders of the admiralty) that none contained a miraculous "north-west passage," a shortcut between Atlantic and Pacific.
Thus the book is a travelogue on many levels--in time as well as across geography, and in other dimensions too, for Raban is a well-read intellectual. Its subtitle is "the sea and its meanings," and Raban also finds time to reflect on the poet Shelley's love of sailing, which led to his drowning in 1816 off the coast of Italy, and on the romantic view of nature. which Shelley had tried to promote and which Vancouver utterly lacked.
And not least, on a personal level. A first-hand account, leading the reader vicariously through a journey, usually keeps the narrator on the periphery, to minimize distractions from the main topic. Personal events which interfere with the planned trip are often omitted, and gaps caused by such omissions are smoothed over. Jonathan Raban chooses to incorporate them into his narrative. Even trimmed and modified, they enrich the book in yet another dimension, and by the end, the dedication in front of the book--"For Julia"--takes on a new, unexpected meaning.
You might have guessed by now that this is not a book to be skimmed in a hurry. It is best savored in small portions, allowing its encounters, emotions, scenery, atmosphere and history to sink in. If you plan a tourist cruise on the Inside Passage to Alaska, this is one to take along. Or, much better, read it beforehand, which will leave you more time to observe the landscape through which you pass. Then, as you stand at the railing and watch this land--forbidding, yet rich in overtones--you will begin to understand what you see.
Yes, it requires an articulate writer, undeterred by obstacles, one able to smell out good stories, locate interesting persons, make them talk, and then frame it all in scintillating prose. Not a job for everyone, but when done right, the results are delightful. John McPhee was a master of this genre, and both Robert Kaplan and Richard Preston were just as good, if not as prolific. Jonathan Raban's "Passage to Juneau" is in their league.
The son of a British clergyman, Raban loves and respects the sea. In "Old Glory" he sailed solo the length of the Mississipi, and here he does the same for the "Inside Passage," the tortuous route through channels and narrow passages from Seattle to Juneau in Alaska's panhandle. This is the route nowadays taken by an increasing number of luxury cruise liners, giant floating hotels, but Raban's view, from a small sailboat, is much more intimate and penetrating. Cruise passengers see snowy peaks, distant cliffs and thick forests, a picture-card scenery unrolling before their eyes--that is, unless rain and fog blot it out, in which case one can always find entertainment below decks. Raban sees dark swirling tides, channeled by rocky mazes to form river-like flows, even waterfalls. Viewed at close range, the forests are gloomy and threatening, confining any settlement to a narrow strip of shore.
It is a harsh country. Scattered settlements survive, and their hard-working men and women scratch an uncertain existence from timber and fisheries. Fishing in particular is hard-pressed, as salmon populations are depleted and canneries close: some villages remain on the map in name only, and when Raban looks for them, he only finds decaying docks and rotting houses, in the process of being reclaimed by the forest. Others hang on, and a few try to tap the new prosperity brought by cruise ships, replacing the rough but honest local culture with gentrified entertainment and a distorted image of the "noble savage."
Unlike the tourists, Raban knows the actual Indian lore as recorded by early explorers. In Indian legends both sea and forest are ruled by terrifying monsters, and those legends rarely have happy endings. They also contain sexual scenes so lurid that anthropologists reporting them switched to Latin, to keep out non-academic readers.
Raban sails here through rugged passages carved by glaciers, surprisingly deep. Yet they also have dangerous rocks to trap the unwary, reaching almost (but not quite!) to the surface. If that were not enough, uprooted tree-trunks wander through the currents, barely visible and a menace to navigation--not to the giant cruise liners, perhaps, but certainly to Raban's little boat, which luckily gets away with just one minor collision. Riding low in his sailboat also allows Raban to understand the tension and uncertainty experienced by the explorers who first mapped these waters, by George Vancouver's 1792 expedition which he describes in parallel with his own.
Poor Vancouver! Raban obviously does not like him very much. He knows the history of that voyage of exploration, because quite a few other participants also kept notes, and later published them. Vancouver had sailed with Captain Cook and his name is now attached to a large, important island and to two prominent cities, one in Canada and one in the US, but Raban reveals him as a chubby man in poor health, who alienated himself from crew and officers alike, and who maintained discipline by frequent floggings. One Northwest Indian, he tells, approached Vancouver and begged to be allowed to accompany him back to England, but later fled in horror having witnessed a sailor being flogged. Yet it was also a dangerous voyage, burdened by the necessity of exploring every inlet and strait, just to make sure (by orders of the admiralty) that none contained a miraculous "north-west passage," a shortcut between Atlantic and Pacific.
Thus the book is a travelogue on many levels--in time as well as across geography, and in other dimensions too, for Raban is a well-read intellectual. Its subtitle is "the sea and its meanings," and Raban also finds time to reflect on the poet Shelley's love of sailing, which led to his drowning in 1816 off the coast of Italy, and on the romantic view of nature. which Shelley had tried to promote and which Vancouver utterly lacked.
And not least, on a personal level. A first-hand account, leading the reader vicariously through a journey, usually keeps the narrator on the periphery, to minimize distractions from the main topic. Personal events which interfere with the planned trip are often omitted, and gaps caused by such omissions are smoothed over. Jonathan Raban chooses to incorporate them into his narrative. Even trimmed and modified, they enrich the book in yet another dimension, and by the end, the dedication in front of the book--"For Julia"--takes on a new, unexpected meaning.
You might have guessed by now that this is not a book to be skimmed in a hurry. It is best savored in small portions, allowing its encounters, emotions, scenery, atmosphere and history to sink in. If you plan a tourist cruise on the Inside Passage to Alaska, this is one to take along. Or, much better, read it beforehand, which will leave you more time to observe the landscape through which you pass. Then, as you stand at the railing and watch this land--forbidding, yet rich in overtones--you will begin to understand what you see.
August 30, 2024
“I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I'm at sea. 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."
This book is a blend of memoir, history, travelogue, and nature writing. It chronicles Raban’s solo journey by sea in a thirty-five-foot sailboat from Seattle to Juneau via the Inside Passage. The work combines personal reflections with analysis of history and literature. The historical segments pertain to Captain George Vancouver’s voyage on the ship Discovery along the same route in 1792-1793, Vancouver’s encounters with the First Nations people, methods of exerting control over his crew (the lash), background, and “discoveries.� Raban recounts his own stops along the journey and encounters with the local people. In his travels, he notes changes that have occurred in the area, including the region’s economics, alterations in their ways of making a living, and the reasons behind these changes.
It turns very personal toward the end, when a family crisis causes him to take a break in his voyage, including a trip to his former home (where his parents still live) in England. He plans to bring his daughter and wife from Seattle to join him toward the end of his trip, but all does not go according to plan. Raban also frequently refers to his ship’s library, including many quotes and relating the contents to what he is experiencing on his journey. He obviously loves literature. The descriptions of the land, sea, weather, wildlife, and obstacles are vivid. Occasionally, I felt there were a few too many long quotations, but overall, it is one of the best written travel memoirs I have read. It not only describes a sea journey, but also a journey of the intellect and the interpersonal. Like the best travelogues, by the end, the reader understands the impact of the travels on the life of the traveler.
4.5
This book is a blend of memoir, history, travelogue, and nature writing. It chronicles Raban’s solo journey by sea in a thirty-five-foot sailboat from Seattle to Juneau via the Inside Passage. The work combines personal reflections with analysis of history and literature. The historical segments pertain to Captain George Vancouver’s voyage on the ship Discovery along the same route in 1792-1793, Vancouver’s encounters with the First Nations people, methods of exerting control over his crew (the lash), background, and “discoveries.� Raban recounts his own stops along the journey and encounters with the local people. In his travels, he notes changes that have occurred in the area, including the region’s economics, alterations in their ways of making a living, and the reasons behind these changes.
It turns very personal toward the end, when a family crisis causes him to take a break in his voyage, including a trip to his former home (where his parents still live) in England. He plans to bring his daughter and wife from Seattle to join him toward the end of his trip, but all does not go according to plan. Raban also frequently refers to his ship’s library, including many quotes and relating the contents to what he is experiencing on his journey. He obviously loves literature. The descriptions of the land, sea, weather, wildlife, and obstacles are vivid. Occasionally, I felt there were a few too many long quotations, but overall, it is one of the best written travel memoirs I have read. It not only describes a sea journey, but also a journey of the intellect and the interpersonal. Like the best travelogues, by the end, the reader understands the impact of the travels on the life of the traveler.
4.5
August 17, 2015
Perfect read for a ferry trip from Bellingham to Juneau!
July 1, 2018
(I read this on my trip but mailed it home to myself with pages marked; placeholder for now.)
April 24, 2013
Great book. Superficially a description of the author's 1,000 mile solo boat trip from Seattle to Juneau, the book is so much more than that. It started well, for me, with the author describing how he had chosen his boat primarily because it had mahogany bookshelves inside, shelves which he then populated with old books about the route he plans to follow. He then expands the writing format to stitch together his own cruise with that of Captain Vancouver in the 1790's, discussing the customs of the original Indians at the same time. (Vancouver had been sent by the British Admiralty in the 1790’s to definitively map the Pacific Northwest and equally definitively dismiss the possibility of the fabled North West Passage).
His writing is in some parts opinionated, which is not a problem for me, indeed it makes the book more attractive, though one has to remember that these are opinions and if one wishes to remember them as facts, one should explore them further. One of the insights I noted was that his idea that, for north-west Indians, the sea is the normal state of being, land being abnormal. They could not get lost at sea, and found forests frightening places. He describes how native artwork continually shows mirror images of things, as in reflections on water, and often split images, as might be viewed via waves. He also postulates that Indian culture and myths as seen by us today may not be what they were prior to “discovery� by Europeans, e.g. large totem poles may not have been made till there were iron implements to make them with. Even today, he says, native culture as presented to tourists has been resurrected from research, not directly passed down through generations.
The narrative is interrupted almost exactly half-way through by death of the author’s father; even then he intertwines the death story with the story of the poet Shelley’s death (on a boat). While describing the weeks leading up to his father’s death and funeral, the book gives the author's impression of Britain as he goes back after a long time away; almost like a second tourism book. And then he brings reminiscences of his father back to the interrupted cruise, even comparing his boat to a coffin (both made of wood) and wondering if coffins were originally meant to resemble boats, as some Northwest Indians buried their dead in hanging boats.
The story is sad in many ways. Apart from the death of his father, his personal relationships also founder while he is navigating the inner passage. And the sadness continues as he discusses the effect of tourism in Juneau and Ketchikan and other towns, where the people have a love-hate relationship with tourism and tourists, who he observes arriving and leaving in waves (pun intended). In Juneau, the center of town has been left for the tourists and the outskirts are where the locals shop and live, while the salmon try to move upriver against an impossible concrete dam.
As he sails up the coast, traversing from the US to Canada, he makes observations on the differences between the Canadian and US sides of the water. He then moves into Alaska, and makes observations on the temporary nature of industry in Alaska - it always seems to be easier to abandon a cannery or whatever and move on to the next piece of land with natural resources, as they seem to be endless. And the abandoned factory is soon obliterated by nature anyway.
The book is great on so many levels � as a tourist guide, as great writing and just a good absorbing read that I will come back to, to re-read his descriptions of some of the places and people he has been. Superb.
His writing is in some parts opinionated, which is not a problem for me, indeed it makes the book more attractive, though one has to remember that these are opinions and if one wishes to remember them as facts, one should explore them further. One of the insights I noted was that his idea that, for north-west Indians, the sea is the normal state of being, land being abnormal. They could not get lost at sea, and found forests frightening places. He describes how native artwork continually shows mirror images of things, as in reflections on water, and often split images, as might be viewed via waves. He also postulates that Indian culture and myths as seen by us today may not be what they were prior to “discovery� by Europeans, e.g. large totem poles may not have been made till there were iron implements to make them with. Even today, he says, native culture as presented to tourists has been resurrected from research, not directly passed down through generations.
The narrative is interrupted almost exactly half-way through by death of the author’s father; even then he intertwines the death story with the story of the poet Shelley’s death (on a boat). While describing the weeks leading up to his father’s death and funeral, the book gives the author's impression of Britain as he goes back after a long time away; almost like a second tourism book. And then he brings reminiscences of his father back to the interrupted cruise, even comparing his boat to a coffin (both made of wood) and wondering if coffins were originally meant to resemble boats, as some Northwest Indians buried their dead in hanging boats.
The story is sad in many ways. Apart from the death of his father, his personal relationships also founder while he is navigating the inner passage. And the sadness continues as he discusses the effect of tourism in Juneau and Ketchikan and other towns, where the people have a love-hate relationship with tourism and tourists, who he observes arriving and leaving in waves (pun intended). In Juneau, the center of town has been left for the tourists and the outskirts are where the locals shop and live, while the salmon try to move upriver against an impossible concrete dam.
As he sails up the coast, traversing from the US to Canada, he makes observations on the differences between the Canadian and US sides of the water. He then moves into Alaska, and makes observations on the temporary nature of industry in Alaska - it always seems to be easier to abandon a cannery or whatever and move on to the next piece of land with natural resources, as they seem to be endless. And the abandoned factory is soon obliterated by nature anyway.
The book is great on so many levels � as a tourist guide, as great writing and just a good absorbing read that I will come back to, to re-read his descriptions of some of the places and people he has been. Superb.
February 13, 2008
A watery, foggy, mildly adventurous book about a small boat trip from Seattle to Juneau. Raban covers the history of naming the geography on the coast between Seattle and Juneau, the legends of local indians, how the water shaped the people who lived on it and all kinds of other interesting things. This is not a one-sitting kind of book. It's best read over a period of months in small portions, otherwise it can become too slow - which is why I skipped the fifth star.
July 23, 2017
This is the best travel book I have read this ear (and I read a fair number of them). I am contemplating a trip up the Inside passage to Alaska -- though not aboard a giant cruise ship -- to see a number of the places that author saw on his solo voyage from Seattle to Juneau.
Although I do not care a fig about sailing, I love what Raban did with . We think of travel as something separate from life. On Raban's trip, grim reality intrudes twice -- once as he had to interrupt his trip to fly back to England because his father was dying, and once when, having achieved his goal, his wife and child fly to Juneau, only for his wife to announce they are separating because she wants to forge a new life for herself.
Raban does not stint on the pain that both events cause him, though his separation from his wife does not come as a surprise. He is a bookworm like me, and when bookworms go a-questing, their womenfolk turn down at the mouth and search for greener pastures.
Raban examines the journals of Captain George Vancouver, who produced a detailed survey of the area for the British Crown, quoting even from the journals of Vancouver's midshipmen. We see the many Indian peoples, then and now, and see how the Inside Passage has been inundated with cruise ship passengers in their thousands.
I read a library copy of this book, after which I immediately ordered a copy for my own library. This book is a keeper!
Although I do not care a fig about sailing, I love what Raban did with . We think of travel as something separate from life. On Raban's trip, grim reality intrudes twice -- once as he had to interrupt his trip to fly back to England because his father was dying, and once when, having achieved his goal, his wife and child fly to Juneau, only for his wife to announce they are separating because she wants to forge a new life for herself.
Raban does not stint on the pain that both events cause him, though his separation from his wife does not come as a surprise. He is a bookworm like me, and when bookworms go a-questing, their womenfolk turn down at the mouth and search for greener pastures.
Raban examines the journals of Captain George Vancouver, who produced a detailed survey of the area for the British Crown, quoting even from the journals of Vancouver's midshipmen. We see the many Indian peoples, then and now, and see how the Inside Passage has been inundated with cruise ship passengers in their thousands.
I read a library copy of this book, after which I immediately ordered a copy for my own library. This book is a keeper!
August 10, 2011
Beautifully written. Raban is a renaissance man with an unparalleled vocabulary, magnificent command of history, and a subtle appreciation of the nauances that separate the American, British, Canadian, and Native cultural and class landscapes he traverses. Raban, is, like the sea, very serious. Despite its linguistic artistry, the book is oftimes hardgoing for non mariners. Several surprises, keep the reader interested, with a somewhat foreshadowed ending to his journey and the book. For personal reasons, I sailed on, ever anxious to arrive in Juneau to understand a dearly beloved friend who needs must live, and strike a claim (pose), in the Last Frontier. Should be mandatory reading for all cruisers up the Northwest Passage. I wish I had read this book before and/or during a recently taken cruise to Juneau aboard the floating bourgeoise kindgdom of Holland America, and paid more attention to the unpredicatable waters, and the ghosts of intrepid explorers who had plyed these environs with virgin eyes more than 3 centuries ago. The midnight buffet, and getting an updo for formal night, pale in comparison to the dramas that have been played out in the dark and foreboding mansions of sea and mountain of the Northwest Passage.
June 14, 2012
One of my favorite books. I love the encyclopedic knowledge of the sea, the travel story and the history. And I had a young daughter and was traveling a lot when I first read it. Great book, made me a follower of Raban.
April 25, 2025
Boooooooooooring
June 28, 2017
Slow starting and then too, sailing esoteric for me.
November 11, 2024
So far up my alley it’s crazy. Perfectly tailored to everything I could want out of a book. Gonna start yelling “I loved your book!� at geezers I see in Ballard.
November 22, 2024
An unexpected gem, that we happened across, maybe at a library book sale. It’s been sitting around for a while ( years?), part of that pile of books that you’ll maybe get to someday. Then Deb read it and commented on it being a good book, so I thought why not? One of my top reads for the year. It’s a heartbreaking tale of loss, although it is a detailed and fascinating story of the sea, traveled alone along the coast from Seattle to Juneau, details of ebb and flood tides and the salmon and the creatures of the native tribes and Vancouver (the man) and� so much more. The depths are real and unmeasurable.
March 31, 2019
What promises to be an exploration of geography, history, symbolism, and the writer himself quickly reveals itself to be a venue for Raban to air his narrow and overly-critical opinions. While his prose is undeniably beautiful, after a couple of pages the flowery descriptions turn florid, and I found myself skimming paragraphs, waiting for Raban to get to the point.
He doesn't. Other travel and exploration writers I've enjoyed begin their journey from an untenable position--a tragic loss, the end of a relationship, or just serious case of wanderlust--which they seek to resolve by setting out on a journey. At the beginning of the narrative, Raban appears to be living a happy and contented life which he leaves for the sole purpose of providing an atmospheric backdrop for what would otherwise be a straightforward history book about the Inside Passage.
The contrived nature of his trip is all the more frustrating because Raban repeatedly criticizes the people and places he encounters for not being pure, genuine, or natural enough for his taste--though he doesn't say so in as many words. In one case, a Native American dance to which he is invited is criticized because it takes place in a modern building and incorporates Christian borrowings. In his eyes, the ritual is polluted and fake because it is not identical to those described in his anthropological texts, as though Native culture should have remained as static as a museum specimen for last few centuries. Later, he scathingly compares a view of the San Juan Islands to a Bob Ross painting, deriding the acknowledged beauty of the scene as being "too manicured and self-consciously pretty." Raban seems to feel the islands have betrayed Nature because of the vacation homes tucked discretely into the trees--neither entirely developed nor entirely wild, the entire vista is written off as shallow and fake. The continuous cranky harping both depressed me and raised my blood pressure.
Over a hundred pages in, I found only a single passage I liked: an thoughtful discussion of the way Native American culture viewed their relationship to land and sea opposite to the way Europeans viewed their own relationship. 10 out of 110 pages is too low of a like-to-dislike ratio for me, so I put the book down.
He doesn't. Other travel and exploration writers I've enjoyed begin their journey from an untenable position--a tragic loss, the end of a relationship, or just serious case of wanderlust--which they seek to resolve by setting out on a journey. At the beginning of the narrative, Raban appears to be living a happy and contented life which he leaves for the sole purpose of providing an atmospheric backdrop for what would otherwise be a straightforward history book about the Inside Passage.
The contrived nature of his trip is all the more frustrating because Raban repeatedly criticizes the people and places he encounters for not being pure, genuine, or natural enough for his taste--though he doesn't say so in as many words. In one case, a Native American dance to which he is invited is criticized because it takes place in a modern building and incorporates Christian borrowings. In his eyes, the ritual is polluted and fake because it is not identical to those described in his anthropological texts, as though Native culture should have remained as static as a museum specimen for last few centuries. Later, he scathingly compares a view of the San Juan Islands to a Bob Ross painting, deriding the acknowledged beauty of the scene as being "too manicured and self-consciously pretty." Raban seems to feel the islands have betrayed Nature because of the vacation homes tucked discretely into the trees--neither entirely developed nor entirely wild, the entire vista is written off as shallow and fake. The continuous cranky harping both depressed me and raised my blood pressure.
Over a hundred pages in, I found only a single passage I liked: an thoughtful discussion of the way Native American culture viewed their relationship to land and sea opposite to the way Europeans viewed their own relationship. 10 out of 110 pages is too low of a like-to-dislike ratio for me, so I put the book down.
November 14, 2012
first off, I have absolute no experience with boats, boating, the ocean, etc...as a result my "review" may not be that informative...that said I did enjoy this book. The first 40-50 pages were a bit of a slog/took me a bit to get into the store, etc, however, from there it was enjoyable and extremely informative. Not an easy read in the sense it took some time to get through everything (book wrecked my 2012 reading pace a bit!). I found the author's writing to be really good and his explanations/anecdotes to be fascinating, I definitely want to read some the books, poems he discussed. What was tough with the book is that the parallels between his journey and Captain Vans were derailed with about 100 pages left, not necessarily the author's fault as his was going through personal issues that were incorporated in the book. However, and unless I missed it the end of Captain Van's journey is kind of left up in the air, not really resolved. The ending kind of reminded me of the whirlpools/sea analogies used, i.e. turbulent, not necessarily a pattern as it jumped all over the place. This may have well have been the author's intention (I'm not disputing his knowledge), but it still kind of felt incomplete. Again, the author had a number of personal issues that may have changed his original plan and he did work them into the story. Probably more of a three and a half star book than a four star book. I'd definitely recommend this book if you are into boats and/or planning on exploring the region discussed.
March 18, 2013
As the one star indicates, I did not like this book. While the premise is good, in which the author takes a boat trip up the coast from Seattle to Juneau, while also interweaving bits of regional history (mostly focusing on the initial explorations by Vancouver), the writing is just...lacking somehow. I've read many of book with a similar mix of history and current travel and usually their seamlessly integrated. This one it's just jarring and confusing as he switches, seemingly at random, from present to past to relatively recent to not so far past and back to the present again. And then, halfway through the book his father dies and at the end, his wife leaves him. However, there's so little personal backstory that you read these tragedies with complete disinterest. And his description of his own travels is bland. Every tiny port is, guess what, tiny. Stuff is overpriced. The locals (when on rare occasion they're discussed) are either eccentric or offensive (in his mind). The sea is an unending procession of whirlpools, weird tides, bad winds and cold weather.
This book was a slog through.
This book was a slog through.
March 16, 2020
I probably shouldn't have ranked this as high as I did. It has it's good qualities: some helpful info about history and the sea, insights, and thought provoking at times. But in general I found it a depressing read by a depressed man. It is cynical, bent on myth busting about the romantic Canadian/Alaskan coast and its native American as well as modern inhabitants. He meets many people along the way, none of whom he likes, and if he were to like them he thinks their lives are pathetic. He father dies of cancer in England during the journey, and he gives much detail about his last days, funeral, and cremation. His father had been an Anglican churchman but lost his faith to Bishop Robinson and Honest To God. Raban is a religious skeptic. His marriage dissolves in Juneau and he spends most of the lonely journey home to Seattle reading Marcus Aurelius and the later William Cowper. I recommend the book to anyone wanting to come down from a manic high. I finished the book only because I started it and it was highly recommended. I'm glad it's over. Now to find something to lift my spirits.
July 23, 2017
I purchased this book on my first cruise to Alaska in 2002. As with many of my books, it was still awaiting me when I pulled it and began reading as I prepared for my second cruise to Alaska this month. It was a worthy companion to this trip. In it, Jonathan Raban describes a solo sailing trip from Seattle to Juneau and devotes time to discussing a trip made in 1792 by Captain Vancouver who left so much of the landscape imprinted with British names. It is also a journey into himself and an examination of the natives and their view of their environment. Fascinating read which left me much to ponder. It certainly was enhanced by being able to view the landscape of which he wrote as I read the words.
December 26, 2022
A rather literary travelogue that isn’t wholly a travelogue. I mean, it certainly is a travelogue, about the author sailing in a motorized sailboat from Seattle, Washington to Juneau, Alaska, along the way visiting a number of small towns, interacting with the locals, encountering ships at sea and sometimes interacting with the sailors and passengers at length, of recounting what the sea, the sky, the land, the fauna, and flora look like. Author Jonathan Raban talked at length about the history and culture of the region, about Native American art and mythology, about the loss of Native American culture and attempts to preserve or recreate it, European explorations of the region, early European settlements, the rise and fall of various resource extraction industries (notably fishing), the history and character of various islands, ports, and towns along the way, about how different places are dealing with the decline of fisheries or local timber harvests and how they are (or aren’t) embracing tourism, which was on the rise. I learned a bit about Wrangell (depressed, jobs lost and people angry about curbs on logging local forests thanks to the Clinton Administration; the book is copyright 1999), Petersburg (suffering from a labor shortage, unable to find enough people for a burgeoning salmon fishery), and Juneau in Alaska (with its love-hate relationship with tourism). In Canada, you spend some time in Vananda (a town with a lot of Northern Irish and the author’s English accent and background didn’t make him always welcome), Bella Bella (a largely Native American village with a cannery that was finished but hopping to attract cruise ship passengers to see Indian dances and the bears eating garbage at the town dump), and Klemtu (another Native American majority town, a melting pot of different tribes who made their way there or were dumped there by the government, some local, others from far inland) among other places, all places I was completely unfamiliar with. His musing on Native American art and mythology were quite interesting, as well as the compare and contrast with how early Europeans saw the region and the fragility of Native culture with the coming of white civilization.
A lot of time through I guess maybe the midway point of the book was spent on 1791-1795 exploration expedition of British Royal Navy officer Captain George Vancouver (“Captain Van�), whose expedition explored and named a number of places from Oregon to Alaska (though as the author showed, while he wasn’t always the first European to name something, more often than not, Vancouver’s name stuck). Vancouver’s name is preserved in Vancouver Island, later the city of Vancouver, and among other features that still have names he bestowed include Mount St. Helens, Puget Sound (after the 2nd lieutenant of the HMS _Discovery_, Peter Puget, one of the expedition’s two ships, the other being the HMS _Chatham_), and Mount Rainier (after Rear Admiral Peter Rainier). Raban didn’t relate a dry “and then this happened� history of the expedition but put the reader in the shoes of the expedition, describing personal drama and the great friction between Vancouver and his crew, painting a complex (though largely more unflattering than not) portrait of Vancouver. It was engaging and interesting though it felt like at some point in the book the author just more or less dropped the thread of discussing Captain Van.
One of the places the author really excelled at was to give a strong feel of what it was like to sail from Seattle to Juneau, of describing the shore, weather, what wildlife he saw, other ships and boats he encountered, and really more than in any other book I have read described the sea itself, noting its many moods, how currents, tides, wind, distant storms, whirlpools, river outflows, being near or far from a particular feature on shore, and submerged rocks all made water very alive and interactive, not a neutral flat surface to make your way across but with a movement all its own, that different parts of the sea at different times had rather distinct characteristics. I learned for instance about sailing by swell and about how the tide “calendar as well as clock � mapped the Indian year.� Just wonderful writing.
The book though is very literary and personal, with much of the book interwoven with deeply personal personal drama of the author dealing with two life changing events, both of which cast deep shadows over his trip. As other reviewers have questioned, one might wonder why the author even took the trip given these two massive upheavals to his life. One of these life events required a lengthy interlude in which the author and his family returned to England and spent time with his parents. Coverage of one of these life changing events especially was well-written and engaging, but also I will say depressing and if you are expecting these events having something to do with a travelogue of Seattle north to Juneau, they have nothing at all to do with it.
I liked the book, though I felt it might be a tad on the long side and at times depressing. I appreciated the maps. I think an index might have been nice. The author mentioned a number of times taking photographs but they are not in the book I read. I liked his occasional discussion of books he was reading, some at times only tangentially related if related at all to his travels, but all were interesting (particularly his discussion of the sailing adventure books of Miles Smeeton). I don’t think I have ever read a book that described as well as this one did how the ocean is a moving, unpredictable body of water, how the sea is different in a harbor or at river outflow or in a receding tide in a narrow strait, how it looks, how it sails, dangers, and opportunities.
A lot of time through I guess maybe the midway point of the book was spent on 1791-1795 exploration expedition of British Royal Navy officer Captain George Vancouver (“Captain Van�), whose expedition explored and named a number of places from Oregon to Alaska (though as the author showed, while he wasn’t always the first European to name something, more often than not, Vancouver’s name stuck). Vancouver’s name is preserved in Vancouver Island, later the city of Vancouver, and among other features that still have names he bestowed include Mount St. Helens, Puget Sound (after the 2nd lieutenant of the HMS _Discovery_, Peter Puget, one of the expedition’s two ships, the other being the HMS _Chatham_), and Mount Rainier (after Rear Admiral Peter Rainier). Raban didn’t relate a dry “and then this happened� history of the expedition but put the reader in the shoes of the expedition, describing personal drama and the great friction between Vancouver and his crew, painting a complex (though largely more unflattering than not) portrait of Vancouver. It was engaging and interesting though it felt like at some point in the book the author just more or less dropped the thread of discussing Captain Van.
One of the places the author really excelled at was to give a strong feel of what it was like to sail from Seattle to Juneau, of describing the shore, weather, what wildlife he saw, other ships and boats he encountered, and really more than in any other book I have read described the sea itself, noting its many moods, how currents, tides, wind, distant storms, whirlpools, river outflows, being near or far from a particular feature on shore, and submerged rocks all made water very alive and interactive, not a neutral flat surface to make your way across but with a movement all its own, that different parts of the sea at different times had rather distinct characteristics. I learned for instance about sailing by swell and about how the tide “calendar as well as clock � mapped the Indian year.� Just wonderful writing.
The book though is very literary and personal, with much of the book interwoven with deeply personal personal drama of the author dealing with two life changing events, both of which cast deep shadows over his trip. As other reviewers have questioned, one might wonder why the author even took the trip given these two massive upheavals to his life. One of these life events required a lengthy interlude in which the author and his family returned to England and spent time with his parents. Coverage of one of these life changing events especially was well-written and engaging, but also I will say depressing and if you are expecting these events having something to do with a travelogue of Seattle north to Juneau, they have nothing at all to do with it.
I liked the book, though I felt it might be a tad on the long side and at times depressing. I appreciated the maps. I think an index might have been nice. The author mentioned a number of times taking photographs but they are not in the book I read. I liked his occasional discussion of books he was reading, some at times only tangentially related if related at all to his travels, but all were interesting (particularly his discussion of the sailing adventure books of Miles Smeeton). I don’t think I have ever read a book that described as well as this one did how the ocean is a moving, unpredictable body of water, how the sea is different in a harbor or at river outflow or in a receding tide in a narrow strait, how it looks, how it sails, dangers, and opportunities.
Read
August 24, 2015Once upon a time I lived in a fjordish crook of the Pacific Northwest, amid sea and pines and snowy mountains. And what could make me miss that landscape more than Jonathan Raban's sea journey, stopping en route in abandoned canneries, ghostly islands, Indian villages, and Alaskan boomtowns, with journeys back to George Vancouver's initial expeditions into the region. Raban is a thankfully unsentimental traveler, but he's not without his sensitivities. The sort of travelogue that makes a good companion on your own vacation, really.
May 7, 2009
Another all-time fave, this book is a treasure: a man taking time to listen to himself think, to travel in an elemental way, to commune with nature and history, and taking us along for the ride. Introspective, historically thorough and informative, Passage to Juneau is a journey I take over and over, whenever I need the comfort of a wise friend and a sense of history and discovery to help me enjoy the world again.
March 17, 2021
An articulate, talented writer crafting a story of history, interwoven with a seafaring journey of his own through the Inner Passage of Alaska. I savored this book before, during and after an Alaskan vacation. I am looking forward to reading Bad Lands.
February 14, 2021
"In a calm sea, the first sign of turbulent water ahead is often a slight roughening of the horizon line, like the deckle edge along the top of an invitation card. Odd, you think, but pay it no special attention. Only later do you realize it was a signal to batten down the hatches."
Raban melds together his journey sailing through the Inside Passage with that of the natives and the explorers who traveled before him on these same waters. The Northwest history is enlightening and the personal narrative continually connects to it in unexpected ways.
His reflections on the minute details of the sea and land are often mesmerizing, and cause one to reread and really take notice. Raban beautifully captures not only the Pacific Northwest geography, but also the people he encounters, along with all of their eccentricities. He is insightful into their personal journeys, as well as his own.
The story takes its time, without losing its direction. But, Raban acknowledges that even the most keen observer can still be taken unawares and tossed off course for a time, and there is the element of that here too.
Raban melds together his journey sailing through the Inside Passage with that of the natives and the explorers who traveled before him on these same waters. The Northwest history is enlightening and the personal narrative continually connects to it in unexpected ways.
His reflections on the minute details of the sea and land are often mesmerizing, and cause one to reread and really take notice. Raban beautifully captures not only the Pacific Northwest geography, but also the people he encounters, along with all of their eccentricities. He is insightful into their personal journeys, as well as his own.
The story takes its time, without losing its direction. But, Raban acknowledges that even the most keen observer can still be taken unawares and tossed off course for a time, and there is the element of that here too.
April 17, 2025
A mix of art, philosophy, historical expeditions, Native American literature, and memoir of the author’s own journey + the people he meets on his solo trip sailing from Seattle to Juneau. I didn’t know much about Alaska/the Inside Passage before reading this and learned a lot.
The author draws upon Edmund Burke’s 1757 essays “On the Sublime and the Beautiful� and how the ocean is an archetype of sublimity and nature, especially the ocean in a storm.
Fav quotes -
- Meditation and water are wedded forever ~ Melville
- Her bungalow was full of cats: strolling cats, squirming cats , cats draped over chair-arms, cats asleep, cats bickering (171).
- This is how the world is. We live with chaos as the encompassing condition of our lives. We learn to work through it. With luck, we emerge from it (187).
- Here we find nature to be circumstance which dwarfs all other circumstances, and judges like a god all men who come to her ~ Emerson
- Death is a wilderness in which everyone is lost for words (258).
- Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight (432).
The author draws upon Edmund Burke’s 1757 essays “On the Sublime and the Beautiful� and how the ocean is an archetype of sublimity and nature, especially the ocean in a storm.
Fav quotes -
- Meditation and water are wedded forever ~ Melville
- Her bungalow was full of cats: strolling cats, squirming cats , cats draped over chair-arms, cats asleep, cats bickering (171).
- This is how the world is. We live with chaos as the encompassing condition of our lives. We learn to work through it. With luck, we emerge from it (187).
- Here we find nature to be circumstance which dwarfs all other circumstances, and judges like a god all men who come to her ~ Emerson
- Death is a wilderness in which everyone is lost for words (258).
- Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight (432).
December 20, 2019
First published as a hardback in 1999, ‘Passage to Juneau� received rave reviews from major US and British newspapers. In 2000 Picador released the more affordable paperback.
In the book, Raban writes about his solo yacht journey from his home in Seattle, Washington, up through the ‘Inside Passage� to Alaska. This Pacific Northwest coast is full of islands, craggy mountain backdrops, sombre forests and serpentine waterways.
The author weaves his own passage with that of British Captain George Vancouver, whose two ships ‘Discovery� and ‘Chatham� charted and explored these waters during the 1790s. With rare exceptions Vancouver found the area dismal, uninspiring and savage. But some of his young crew were beginning to see nature in a different light. They delighted in their surroundings, and through their writing, Raban gives us a fine explanation of the emergence of the romantic period of nature appreciation.
Our own positive response to wild landscapes is now so embedded in our psyche that it’s difficult to conceive of a time when such landscapes were considered ‘terrible�.
Although major cities like Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria now dot the seascape here, the Inside Passage is still very much a wild coastline. Some of the channels, while very narrow, are extremely deep and tides move through them at extraordinary speeds. Local First Nation peoples (including the Tlingit and Haida) have lived on these waters for centuries, and Raban theorizes about its influence on their culture and art.
Passage to Juneau is fine, intelligent writing, crafted in a style to match the currents that Raban faces; at times as reflective as water at slack tide, at other times challenging as Raban surges through themes, navigating between romanticism and cynicism.
Raban’s writing is so enjoyable I could forgive him two crimes; one flicking his cigarette butts over the side, and two questioning the value of nature writer Barry Lopez. One passage is perhaps sufficient to reveal just how deft he is with words about the sea: “At the bottom � lay the ceaseless tumbling of the water in the basin, as it answered to the drag of the moon. In the morning calm this productive turbulence was revealed in the snaking S-shaped lines of kelp and driftwood that collected on the margins between eddies; in finger-sized whirlpools; in windrows of slack water; in threads and seams of current, like whorled fingerprints. The slightest breeze would wipe these signs of disturbance clean off the face of the sea.�
Passage to Juneau, as several critics have pointed out, is considerably more than a travelogue � it’s a journey as much on the emotional seas of life as it is on the physical ocean.
Essential reading.
In the book, Raban writes about his solo yacht journey from his home in Seattle, Washington, up through the ‘Inside Passage� to Alaska. This Pacific Northwest coast is full of islands, craggy mountain backdrops, sombre forests and serpentine waterways.
The author weaves his own passage with that of British Captain George Vancouver, whose two ships ‘Discovery� and ‘Chatham� charted and explored these waters during the 1790s. With rare exceptions Vancouver found the area dismal, uninspiring and savage. But some of his young crew were beginning to see nature in a different light. They delighted in their surroundings, and through their writing, Raban gives us a fine explanation of the emergence of the romantic period of nature appreciation.
Our own positive response to wild landscapes is now so embedded in our psyche that it’s difficult to conceive of a time when such landscapes were considered ‘terrible�.
Although major cities like Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria now dot the seascape here, the Inside Passage is still very much a wild coastline. Some of the channels, while very narrow, are extremely deep and tides move through them at extraordinary speeds. Local First Nation peoples (including the Tlingit and Haida) have lived on these waters for centuries, and Raban theorizes about its influence on their culture and art.
Passage to Juneau is fine, intelligent writing, crafted in a style to match the currents that Raban faces; at times as reflective as water at slack tide, at other times challenging as Raban surges through themes, navigating between romanticism and cynicism.
Raban’s writing is so enjoyable I could forgive him two crimes; one flicking his cigarette butts over the side, and two questioning the value of nature writer Barry Lopez. One passage is perhaps sufficient to reveal just how deft he is with words about the sea: “At the bottom � lay the ceaseless tumbling of the water in the basin, as it answered to the drag of the moon. In the morning calm this productive turbulence was revealed in the snaking S-shaped lines of kelp and driftwood that collected on the margins between eddies; in finger-sized whirlpools; in windrows of slack water; in threads and seams of current, like whorled fingerprints. The slightest breeze would wipe these signs of disturbance clean off the face of the sea.�
Passage to Juneau, as several critics have pointed out, is considerably more than a travelogue � it’s a journey as much on the emotional seas of life as it is on the physical ocean.
Essential reading.
January 1, 2022
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban (Author)
Pantheon (1999), Edition: 1st, 448 pages
Jonathan Raban solo sails his sloop from Seattle to Juneau, mirroring the explorations of George Vancouver and others at the end of the eighteenth century. While coupling the past to the present with transformative insight, Raban takes us along on his own inside passage - the interior journey of self-discovery that encompassed the voyage � coming to terms with the death of a father, with whom he had a difficult relationship; and the end of a marriage, which took him almost by surprise. Anthropology, history, oceanography, geography, geology, seamanship, folklore, literary and art history,spiritual and religious beliefs � all are woven thoughtfully and beautifully through a story that is notable for the perfect pitch of its prose. Passage to Juneau brings the complex hydrology of the Inside passage to life in ways that will amaze those who take the passage only as passengers, and makes a profound and convincing argument for the influence of sea over land in shaping the lives, cultures, art, and spiritual beliefs of the peoples of the Inside Passage.
The rest of this description will be a list of Raban Quotes I liked so much I wanted to commonplace book them.
“Alaska liked to advertise itself as “The Last Frontier� . . . . 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.�/8
On Northwest Indian Art
“The more I looked at these pictures, the more I saw that Northwest Indian art was maritime in much more than its subject matter. Its whole formal conception and composition were rooted in the Indians� experience of water (a fact that seems to have generally eluded its curators). The rage for symmetry for images paired with their doubles was gained, surely, from a daily acquaintance with mirror-reflections; the canoe and its inverted twin on a sheltered inlet in the stillness of the dusk and dawn. The typical ovoid shape � the basic unit of composition, used by all the tribes along the Inside Passage � was exactly that of the tiny capillary wave raised by a cat’s paw of wind, as it catches the light and makes a frame for the sun. The most arresting formal feature of coastal Indian art, its habit of dismembering creatures and scattering their parts into different quarters of a large design, perfectly mimicked the way in which a slight ripple will smash a reflection into an abstract of fragmentary images. No maritime art I knew went half as far as this in transforming events in the water itself into constituent elements of design. /24-25
Oral Histories as unreliable sources
“In an unchronicled society, without writing, things that happened yesterday bleed into ancient history; and after a hundred years of rubbing up against explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial administrators, the tribe members had ceased to be reliable authorities on their own traditions. /29
Why We Sail to Alaska
“I had a boat, most of a spring and summer, a cargo of books, nd the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle, Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul. Other people’s reflections, as I thought then. I wasn’t prepared for the catch I eventually made. /36
The Corruption of Native Culture (after attending a Salish dance by invitation)
“I shoudn;t have accepted the invitation. Yet what I’d seen was revelatory, in its jumble of long-disused customs, ecstatic CHristianity, careless translation, ethnic pride, anthropology, New Age mysticism, and Oprah Winfrey-style therapy. I had gone in the hopr of finding a true fragment of the lost maritime culture of the Coastal Indians. Fat chance. Cast a leadline now into the turbid water of the Salish tribal past, and it would never touch bottom.� /76
White and Native Maritime Practices
White invaders from the Age of Reason burst into an Indian world of primitive, animist, sensory navigation. Naval ships and cedar canoes, though afloat in the same water, were sailing on two different seas. Whites and Indians inhabited parallel universes, and the behavior of each was a source of mystified anxiety to the other. /98
World Orientation of Whites and Indians Was of Land vs Sea
Two worldviews were in collision; and the poverty of hite accounts of these canoe journeys reflects the colonialists� blindness to the native sea. They didn’t get it � couldn’t grasp the fact that for the Indians the water was a place , and the great bulk of the surrounding land mere undifferentiated space.
The whites had entered a looking-glass world, where their own most basic terms were reversed. Their whale focus was directed toward the land: its natural harbors, its timber,its likely spots for settlement and agriculture. They traveled everywhere equipped with mental chainsaws and at a glance could strip a hil of its covering forest (as Vancouver does, again and again in his Voyage) and see there a future of hedges, fields, houses, churches. They viewed the sea as a medium of access to the all-important land.
Substitute “sea� for “land,� and vice-versa, in that paragraph, and ne is very close to the world that images from Indian stories, where the forest is the realm of dangerm darkness, exile, solitude and self-extinction, while the sea and its beaches represent safety, light, home, society, and the continuation of life.� /103-103
>>>>>
The mountains, in Tlingit cosmology, occupied the same space as the ocean does in the cosmology of Europeans like Aurel Krause. They represented the formless and primordial flux, “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse,� as W.H. AUden writes of the ocean. /106
Romanticism Has Made Us Blind
Two centuries of romanticism, much of it routine and degenerate, has blunted everyone’s ability to look at waterfalls and precipices in other than dusty and secondhand terms. Motoring though the sound, watching fr deadheads, I sailed through a logjam of dead literary cliche; snow-capped peaks above, fathomless depths below, and in the middle of the picture, the usual giant cliffs, hoary crags, wild woods, and crystal cascades.� /184
On the Northwest Nature Writers (Muir on. . .)
Reading the Northwest nature writers I found myself an agnostic in their church; embarrassed, half-admiring, unable to genuflect in the right places. I wished there were more jokes. But humor was not their line. I liked the microscopic particularity of much of their writing, their intent and well-informed gaze, as they tried to penetrate the veil of the natura world. I thought individual passages were beautiful. But I couldn;t join in their hymns, and after a few pages I grew restless and began to ache for more profane company.� /191
WAVES AS SYMBOLS
According to Mircea Eliade, the earliest form of decoration, the zigzag pattern rimming a Neolithic pot, represented a wavetrain in profile. On this cost, the undulating line of the waves, their interminable cycle of growth and collapse, ran through the art of the INdians as the essential shape of life itself. Waves chase each other around woven hats and baskets. Beautifully chiseled waves edge a goathorn ladle, a wooden feasting bowl, a male-wood mortar. The swooping calligraphy brushstroke, as it defines the outlines of an extended composition, mimics the curve of the wave, from trough to crest and down to trough again. /212
Indians Views of Nature As Seen in their Stories:
It’s another warning story about the fragile and precarious nature of human identity, and the danger of tangling with such forces of the wild as bears and whirlpools. Stay in the town, or on the safe surfaces of the water. . . .
The moral of these stories would seem merely sensible and commonplace if it were not for the sentimental myth of Indians living in a state of idealized harmony with nature, Nature as described in their literature is quick to take offense, vengeful, sexually predatory and generally ill-disposed to humankind. Civilization � the canoe, the house, the village � exits as a tiny circle perpetually threatened by a greedy and rapacious wilderness; and can be destroyed by one careless move. . . .
The trouble is that the Indians Oral literature has been systematically eroded by several generations of Dr. Bowdlers and Mrs. Grundys � starting with the first late-Victorian collectors, who tended to flinch at the stories� bawdy relish for the details of sex and evacuatin. . . . Later folklorists trying to gain a larger, younger audience for Indian �,yths,� bled the stories dry of all remotely unseemly references, until all that was left behind / was a milk and water residue of Native American Spirituality and a cast of characters who wuld nt disgrace themselves in The House at Pooh Corner /214-216
Raban’s Trip-Borne Understanding of Native Folklore and Stories
I found that Indian art and stories were becoming daily more meaningful, losing their tophamper of exoticism and grotesquery and gaining a melancholy realism that was rooted in the physical landscape I was traveling. It was easy to feel a personal resonance in the many stories about bad things that happen to people who wander away from home. Loneliness was a dominant theme. CHaracters who were constantly being driven to madness or suicide by the death of a spouse or the desertion of their friends . . . . No fate was worse than being an outcast or exile.. . . The stories harped on the terrors of the unknown � the lonely island, the dark forest, the undersea grotto of the giant devilfish. . . . I was beginning, at last, to put all this in its proper context. The stories reflected an imperiled social world, in which humans were laughably puny in relation to 200 foot conifers, impassable 10,000 foot mountains,and tidal rapids resembling horizontal Niagaras. Here people were hugely outnumbered and outweighed by carnivorous wild animals. /216-7
Turbulence meant life as well as danger. The best fishing was where the tide ran fast; and the rapids attracted all the other creatures that fed on fish. . . . Indians cast the animas in the role of arbitrary and malevolent powers .. . .
Readily as children’s fiction, these stories describe a world of baffling rules of infinite danger and portent, where knowing one’s place and following baffling rules of deference and etiquette. . . humankind lived on sufferance. . . tread with care. . . Theworld of these stories is turbulent and random: again and again, they show Indians as creatures moving through a landscape full of powers � hapless babes in the malevolent woods. . . . Komogwa and Tsonogwa /218-219
Living in Harmony with Nature Myth is romantic claptrap
Too often, Indian life on the Northwest coast was pictured as an idyll –� the tribes living at one with nature, in a region of unparalleled abundance � until it was violated by white intruders. Nothing in their own art or literature gave credence to that guilty , sentimental notion. Rather, what rose from every page was the justified terror of living cheek-by-jowl with creatures far larger and more powerful than oneself. 219
Exhaustion of Native Technologies
By the late 18th century, Indians had pretty well exhausted the possibilities of their technology. The artifacts that Cook picked up in Nootka sound (now in the British museum) are astonishingly ambitious and refined, when one thinks of the craftsmen laboring to bring them into being with elements of bone, stone, and shell. Looking at the red cedar Tlingit chest in New York’s American Museum of Natural History that is aid to date from the 17th century, one imagines a fierce struggle between the carver’s soaring imagination and his minimal toolkit; it is as if the chest were dreaming of what it might have been, if only the carver had possessed a better chisel./220-221
Tide
The tide was the most nearly friendly to humans of all the powers of nature. . . . the best available way of telling the time was by the tide. The tide � calendar as well as clock - mapped the year. /221=222
Whirlpools
Drowning in a whirlpool was probably the culture’s single most vivid image of catastrophe 226
Canoe
Northwest Indians were inclined to see the whole of human life as something you do in a canoe. /227
Untruswortyh Memory
Memories of early childhood are never trustworthy. Memory always has its own dark purosem often hidden from the rememberer; and it is a ruthless editorm with a facile knack for supplying corroborate detail. It's impossible to draw hard and fast distinctions between deep dredge memory, retrieving material directly from the silt in which it has lain for many years, and the shallow dredge variety, in which one remembers only an earlier act of remembering. Freud warned: “Our childhood memories show us our earliest years nt as they were but as they appeared at later periods when the memories were aroused /309
Cruise Passengers and WIlderness
The wilderness that led Vancouver to desolation and prompted Muir to flights of histrionic rapture had become , in the late 29th century, a soothing, therapeutic wallpaper for cruise ship passengers.. . . . The Inside Passage worked like a course of Prozac with its calm seas, muted colors, and diffuse, angled lighting. What it chiefly offered was emptiness on a luxurious scale. . . In an overcrowded world, the simple absence of population was enough to render this a compelling tourist attraction . . . . You wound;t see much wildlife from a stateroom window but the near proximity of animals capable of killing and eating humans was a cruise feature that figured prominently in the brochures. The ship’s naturalist was employed to fill the forest with creatures red in tooth and claw, so that passengers could nvest the passing undergrowth with action sequence worthy of the DIscovery Channel.� [316]
Northwest as Utopia
The idea of creating utopia in the wild is programmed into the far-western imagination. And the Northwest coast is littered with such projects, started by Hutterites, vegans, Indian spirit channelers, survivalist, Christina sects so fundamentallist that even fundamentalists thought them eccentric.. . . These utopias usually had a half life of a year or two. Loneliness, rain, and the unwinnable battle against the intrepid brambles and salal soon drove most of the idealists back to civilization /338 339
Solitude
One of the bad legacies of Romanticism was this greedy prizing of one’s own solitude in an increasingly crowded nature.The central conceit of the “traveler�, as distinct from the mere “tourist�. Was that he was alone in the landscape; its sole, original discoverer. [342]....The Insiude Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists./342-343
Ketchikan
By non-Alaska standards, Ketchikan was village-sized. If the streets were empty, it woud take three or four minute to walk the city center nd to end. In summer, it suffered thousands more strangers than it could reasonably bear; logging cres, cruise passengers, seasonal cannery workers, commercial fishermen, sport fisherman here for the charter fleet, boat tourists like ,me/ The little town was bursting with us, and we were all in a bad temper with one another crushed, hanch to haunch , ike crowns in a corral. /371 . . . Dolly’s House belonged to the colorful tapestry of “heritage� � history wied fastidiously clean of the last speck of bloody meaning.� /272
Naming
A feartuew of the AMerican West, at sea and on land, was that much of it had been named at a period when Pilgrim’s Progress, in the umpteenth small-print edition was on every familys short bookshelf, between the Bibem the Sears roebuck catalog and � here, at least, the tide tables.. . .. . the wilderness became a three-dimensional allegory whose plot (depending on your route through it) changed continuously Today I was bound from Misery Island yo Cemetery Point./383
Alaska
Alaska traveled light (in expenditure on education, for instance it ranked forty-eighth) and lived for the moment sowing the wind reaping the whirlwind./394
Northwest Oral Literature
The whole corpus of Northwest Indian oral literature added up, in my reading of it, to an epic parable about the capricious and untrustworthy nature of nature.� /404
Glaciers
Now the rivers of ice � Sumdum, Sawyer, Taku, Norris � were coming thick and fast, spilling from the mountains to the sea like chutes of rippled china clay. You could feel the dry presence of their chill on your skin from miles off. Their melted prehistoric water stained the whole sea a milky green.� /406
Pantheon (1999), Edition: 1st, 448 pages
Jonathan Raban solo sails his sloop from Seattle to Juneau, mirroring the explorations of George Vancouver and others at the end of the eighteenth century. While coupling the past to the present with transformative insight, Raban takes us along on his own inside passage - the interior journey of self-discovery that encompassed the voyage � coming to terms with the death of a father, with whom he had a difficult relationship; and the end of a marriage, which took him almost by surprise. Anthropology, history, oceanography, geography, geology, seamanship, folklore, literary and art history,spiritual and religious beliefs � all are woven thoughtfully and beautifully through a story that is notable for the perfect pitch of its prose. Passage to Juneau brings the complex hydrology of the Inside passage to life in ways that will amaze those who take the passage only as passengers, and makes a profound and convincing argument for the influence of sea over land in shaping the lives, cultures, art, and spiritual beliefs of the peoples of the Inside Passage.
The rest of this description will be a list of Raban Quotes I liked so much I wanted to commonplace book them.
“Alaska liked to advertise itself as “The Last Frontier� . . . . 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.�/8
On Northwest Indian Art
“The more I looked at these pictures, the more I saw that Northwest Indian art was maritime in much more than its subject matter. Its whole formal conception and composition were rooted in the Indians� experience of water (a fact that seems to have generally eluded its curators). The rage for symmetry for images paired with their doubles was gained, surely, from a daily acquaintance with mirror-reflections; the canoe and its inverted twin on a sheltered inlet in the stillness of the dusk and dawn. The typical ovoid shape � the basic unit of composition, used by all the tribes along the Inside Passage � was exactly that of the tiny capillary wave raised by a cat’s paw of wind, as it catches the light and makes a frame for the sun. The most arresting formal feature of coastal Indian art, its habit of dismembering creatures and scattering their parts into different quarters of a large design, perfectly mimicked the way in which a slight ripple will smash a reflection into an abstract of fragmentary images. No maritime art I knew went half as far as this in transforming events in the water itself into constituent elements of design. /24-25
Oral Histories as unreliable sources
“In an unchronicled society, without writing, things that happened yesterday bleed into ancient history; and after a hundred years of rubbing up against explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial administrators, the tribe members had ceased to be reliable authorities on their own traditions. /29
Why We Sail to Alaska
“I had a boat, most of a spring and summer, a cargo of books, nd the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle, Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul. Other people’s reflections, as I thought then. I wasn’t prepared for the catch I eventually made. /36
The Corruption of Native Culture (after attending a Salish dance by invitation)
“I shoudn;t have accepted the invitation. Yet what I’d seen was revelatory, in its jumble of long-disused customs, ecstatic CHristianity, careless translation, ethnic pride, anthropology, New Age mysticism, and Oprah Winfrey-style therapy. I had gone in the hopr of finding a true fragment of the lost maritime culture of the Coastal Indians. Fat chance. Cast a leadline now into the turbid water of the Salish tribal past, and it would never touch bottom.� /76
White and Native Maritime Practices
White invaders from the Age of Reason burst into an Indian world of primitive, animist, sensory navigation. Naval ships and cedar canoes, though afloat in the same water, were sailing on two different seas. Whites and Indians inhabited parallel universes, and the behavior of each was a source of mystified anxiety to the other. /98
World Orientation of Whites and Indians Was of Land vs Sea
Two worldviews were in collision; and the poverty of hite accounts of these canoe journeys reflects the colonialists� blindness to the native sea. They didn’t get it � couldn’t grasp the fact that for the Indians the water was a place , and the great bulk of the surrounding land mere undifferentiated space.
The whites had entered a looking-glass world, where their own most basic terms were reversed. Their whale focus was directed toward the land: its natural harbors, its timber,its likely spots for settlement and agriculture. They traveled everywhere equipped with mental chainsaws and at a glance could strip a hil of its covering forest (as Vancouver does, again and again in his Voyage) and see there a future of hedges, fields, houses, churches. They viewed the sea as a medium of access to the all-important land.
Substitute “sea� for “land,� and vice-versa, in that paragraph, and ne is very close to the world that images from Indian stories, where the forest is the realm of dangerm darkness, exile, solitude and self-extinction, while the sea and its beaches represent safety, light, home, society, and the continuation of life.� /103-103
>>>>>
The mountains, in Tlingit cosmology, occupied the same space as the ocean does in the cosmology of Europeans like Aurel Krause. They represented the formless and primordial flux, “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse,� as W.H. AUden writes of the ocean. /106
Romanticism Has Made Us Blind
Two centuries of romanticism, much of it routine and degenerate, has blunted everyone’s ability to look at waterfalls and precipices in other than dusty and secondhand terms. Motoring though the sound, watching fr deadheads, I sailed through a logjam of dead literary cliche; snow-capped peaks above, fathomless depths below, and in the middle of the picture, the usual giant cliffs, hoary crags, wild woods, and crystal cascades.� /184
On the Northwest Nature Writers (Muir on. . .)
Reading the Northwest nature writers I found myself an agnostic in their church; embarrassed, half-admiring, unable to genuflect in the right places. I wished there were more jokes. But humor was not their line. I liked the microscopic particularity of much of their writing, their intent and well-informed gaze, as they tried to penetrate the veil of the natura world. I thought individual passages were beautiful. But I couldn;t join in their hymns, and after a few pages I grew restless and began to ache for more profane company.� /191
WAVES AS SYMBOLS
According to Mircea Eliade, the earliest form of decoration, the zigzag pattern rimming a Neolithic pot, represented a wavetrain in profile. On this cost, the undulating line of the waves, their interminable cycle of growth and collapse, ran through the art of the INdians as the essential shape of life itself. Waves chase each other around woven hats and baskets. Beautifully chiseled waves edge a goathorn ladle, a wooden feasting bowl, a male-wood mortar. The swooping calligraphy brushstroke, as it defines the outlines of an extended composition, mimics the curve of the wave, from trough to crest and down to trough again. /212
Indians Views of Nature As Seen in their Stories:
It’s another warning story about the fragile and precarious nature of human identity, and the danger of tangling with such forces of the wild as bears and whirlpools. Stay in the town, or on the safe surfaces of the water. . . .
The moral of these stories would seem merely sensible and commonplace if it were not for the sentimental myth of Indians living in a state of idealized harmony with nature, Nature as described in their literature is quick to take offense, vengeful, sexually predatory and generally ill-disposed to humankind. Civilization � the canoe, the house, the village � exits as a tiny circle perpetually threatened by a greedy and rapacious wilderness; and can be destroyed by one careless move. . . .
The trouble is that the Indians Oral literature has been systematically eroded by several generations of Dr. Bowdlers and Mrs. Grundys � starting with the first late-Victorian collectors, who tended to flinch at the stories� bawdy relish for the details of sex and evacuatin. . . . Later folklorists trying to gain a larger, younger audience for Indian �,yths,� bled the stories dry of all remotely unseemly references, until all that was left behind / was a milk and water residue of Native American Spirituality and a cast of characters who wuld nt disgrace themselves in The House at Pooh Corner /214-216
Raban’s Trip-Borne Understanding of Native Folklore and Stories
I found that Indian art and stories were becoming daily more meaningful, losing their tophamper of exoticism and grotesquery and gaining a melancholy realism that was rooted in the physical landscape I was traveling. It was easy to feel a personal resonance in the many stories about bad things that happen to people who wander away from home. Loneliness was a dominant theme. CHaracters who were constantly being driven to madness or suicide by the death of a spouse or the desertion of their friends . . . . No fate was worse than being an outcast or exile.. . . The stories harped on the terrors of the unknown � the lonely island, the dark forest, the undersea grotto of the giant devilfish. . . . I was beginning, at last, to put all this in its proper context. The stories reflected an imperiled social world, in which humans were laughably puny in relation to 200 foot conifers, impassable 10,000 foot mountains,and tidal rapids resembling horizontal Niagaras. Here people were hugely outnumbered and outweighed by carnivorous wild animals. /216-7
Turbulence meant life as well as danger. The best fishing was where the tide ran fast; and the rapids attracted all the other creatures that fed on fish. . . . Indians cast the animas in the role of arbitrary and malevolent powers .. . .
Readily as children’s fiction, these stories describe a world of baffling rules of infinite danger and portent, where knowing one’s place and following baffling rules of deference and etiquette. . . humankind lived on sufferance. . . tread with care. . . Theworld of these stories is turbulent and random: again and again, they show Indians as creatures moving through a landscape full of powers � hapless babes in the malevolent woods. . . . Komogwa and Tsonogwa /218-219
Living in Harmony with Nature Myth is romantic claptrap
Too often, Indian life on the Northwest coast was pictured as an idyll –� the tribes living at one with nature, in a region of unparalleled abundance � until it was violated by white intruders. Nothing in their own art or literature gave credence to that guilty , sentimental notion. Rather, what rose from every page was the justified terror of living cheek-by-jowl with creatures far larger and more powerful than oneself. 219
Exhaustion of Native Technologies
By the late 18th century, Indians had pretty well exhausted the possibilities of their technology. The artifacts that Cook picked up in Nootka sound (now in the British museum) are astonishingly ambitious and refined, when one thinks of the craftsmen laboring to bring them into being with elements of bone, stone, and shell. Looking at the red cedar Tlingit chest in New York’s American Museum of Natural History that is aid to date from the 17th century, one imagines a fierce struggle between the carver’s soaring imagination and his minimal toolkit; it is as if the chest were dreaming of what it might have been, if only the carver had possessed a better chisel./220-221
Tide
The tide was the most nearly friendly to humans of all the powers of nature. . . . the best available way of telling the time was by the tide. The tide � calendar as well as clock - mapped the year. /221=222
Whirlpools
Drowning in a whirlpool was probably the culture’s single most vivid image of catastrophe 226
Canoe
Northwest Indians were inclined to see the whole of human life as something you do in a canoe. /227
Untruswortyh Memory
Memories of early childhood are never trustworthy. Memory always has its own dark purosem often hidden from the rememberer; and it is a ruthless editorm with a facile knack for supplying corroborate detail. It's impossible to draw hard and fast distinctions between deep dredge memory, retrieving material directly from the silt in which it has lain for many years, and the shallow dredge variety, in which one remembers only an earlier act of remembering. Freud warned: “Our childhood memories show us our earliest years nt as they were but as they appeared at later periods when the memories were aroused /309
Cruise Passengers and WIlderness
The wilderness that led Vancouver to desolation and prompted Muir to flights of histrionic rapture had become , in the late 29th century, a soothing, therapeutic wallpaper for cruise ship passengers.. . . . The Inside Passage worked like a course of Prozac with its calm seas, muted colors, and diffuse, angled lighting. What it chiefly offered was emptiness on a luxurious scale. . . In an overcrowded world, the simple absence of population was enough to render this a compelling tourist attraction . . . . You wound;t see much wildlife from a stateroom window but the near proximity of animals capable of killing and eating humans was a cruise feature that figured prominently in the brochures. The ship’s naturalist was employed to fill the forest with creatures red in tooth and claw, so that passengers could nvest the passing undergrowth with action sequence worthy of the DIscovery Channel.� [316]
Northwest as Utopia
The idea of creating utopia in the wild is programmed into the far-western imagination. And the Northwest coast is littered with such projects, started by Hutterites, vegans, Indian spirit channelers, survivalist, Christina sects so fundamentallist that even fundamentalists thought them eccentric.. . . These utopias usually had a half life of a year or two. Loneliness, rain, and the unwinnable battle against the intrepid brambles and salal soon drove most of the idealists back to civilization /338 339
Solitude
One of the bad legacies of Romanticism was this greedy prizing of one’s own solitude in an increasingly crowded nature.The central conceit of the “traveler�, as distinct from the mere “tourist�. Was that he was alone in the landscape; its sole, original discoverer. [342]....The Insiude Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists./342-343
Ketchikan
By non-Alaska standards, Ketchikan was village-sized. If the streets were empty, it woud take three or four minute to walk the city center nd to end. In summer, it suffered thousands more strangers than it could reasonably bear; logging cres, cruise passengers, seasonal cannery workers, commercial fishermen, sport fisherman here for the charter fleet, boat tourists like ,me/ The little town was bursting with us, and we were all in a bad temper with one another crushed, hanch to haunch , ike crowns in a corral. /371 . . . Dolly’s House belonged to the colorful tapestry of “heritage� � history wied fastidiously clean of the last speck of bloody meaning.� /272
Naming
A feartuew of the AMerican West, at sea and on land, was that much of it had been named at a period when Pilgrim’s Progress, in the umpteenth small-print edition was on every familys short bookshelf, between the Bibem the Sears roebuck catalog and � here, at least, the tide tables.. . .. . the wilderness became a three-dimensional allegory whose plot (depending on your route through it) changed continuously Today I was bound from Misery Island yo Cemetery Point./383
Alaska
Alaska traveled light (in expenditure on education, for instance it ranked forty-eighth) and lived for the moment sowing the wind reaping the whirlwind./394
Northwest Oral Literature
The whole corpus of Northwest Indian oral literature added up, in my reading of it, to an epic parable about the capricious and untrustworthy nature of nature.� /404
Glaciers
Now the rivers of ice � Sumdum, Sawyer, Taku, Norris � were coming thick and fast, spilling from the mountains to the sea like chutes of rippled china clay. You could feel the dry presence of their chill on your skin from miles off. Their melted prehistoric water stained the whole sea a milky green.� /406
August 29, 2018
I haven't finished this one yet but I'm going to shelve it for a bit. This review isn't about the book but rather how I acquired it (Is that allowed?). I picked it up in a little book store on a rainy day in Juneau. I asked the store clerk to give me a tour of his books about Alaska and tell me his best recommendations. He was genuinely surprised. I guess most customers ask for the latest Clive Cussler? The clerk and I discussed 5-6 books, but this is the one that appealed to me the most. I like the writing style. It's languorous and reflective and honestly perfect for cruising the Inside Passage. I found that reading it outside of this setting, the book lost just a tiny bit of it's appeal. I will just have to go back to Alaska to finish. How I want to get lost (without dying) in that part of the country! My hikes in every port were just a tiny sample. One more moment from Juneau: As I finished my purchase at the book store, the clerk reached across the counter and took my hands in his and expressed his thanks for "letting an old man share his love of this place." The pleasure was all mine.
January 18, 2010
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.
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.
August 2, 2012
Oh wow ... "Passage to Juneau" was first published in 1999. I can't believe that a dozen years have passed without discovering this wonderful travelogue. Anyway, add Raban to my growing list of must-reads. "Passage" describes, in wonderful detail, a sailing voyage through the inland passage from Seattle to Juneau. The author travels in the wake of Captain Vancouver, who surveyed the area for England in the eighteenth century. Yes, it's a thrilling sailing story. But it's also an insightful discussion of nature, waves, Native American tribes, and an dozen other topics. Raban is informative, but never preachy. I love his style - every word is chosen with precision - and will read more of his books. In fact, I just ordered "Coasting" and "Bad Land" from Alibris.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 229 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.