Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

Pantheon, 448 pp., $26.50

With the waters of today's publishing world swirling with titles such as Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Erik Larson's more recent Isaac's Storm, it's worth noting that the rough seas in Jonathan Raban's new book Passage to Juneau are primarily emotional and intellectual.

In this nonfiction narrative, Raban, a British expatriate living in Seattle since 1990, travels alone in a wooden sailboat from his new home, following the so-called Inside Passage, a protected Pacific waterway shadowing British Columbia, to Alaska. And while his stated goal is to "meditate on the sea, at sea," a matter reiterated in this travelogue's subtitle, A Sea and Its Meanings, Raban takes plenty of time out to consider matters as varied as mythology, art, colonialism, his father's death, and his own troubled marriage.

In turn, the reader faces not a high sea adventure but a somewhat domestic literary endeavor (which is not a complaint). Those who appreciated Raban's earlier work, especially 1996's Bad Land, an award-winning volume about the boom and bust cycles that attended the settling of the American West, will enjoy reacquainting themselves with the author's detail-oriented and revealing prose. Passage to Juneau, in fact, makes an excellent companion to Bad Land with Raban stepping into the role of New American and coming to terms with the perils life in his adopted country holds. For those who don't know Raban, this is a fine route for discovery.

"As a post-Romantic tourist, I felt that entering a landscape like Desolation Sound was uncomfortably like wandering over a famous battlefield left over from someone else's war," he writes in a typical passage. The apparent irony -- that Raban is waterborne -- the author does away with early on. From the outset, he makes a purposeful stab at spelling out a conceptual lineage between himself and the Native American tribes, who saw the Inland Passage as a knowable landscape. For these Indians, the navigable seas, not the bear-ridden mountainsides, offered self-knowledge, albeit fractured by prisms found in even the smallest waves.

Following this tack, Raban addresses various rites of passage while studiously avoiding the faux-mysticism that could have damned his voyage. A satisfying story emerges. The only misfires stem from a heavy reliance on the unhappy account of a British ship that explored the area in 1792 and the writer's critical penchant for picking fights against absent opponents, including fellow authors and the American conservation community. But such quibbles detract only slightly from Passage to Juneau. Its author, who also edited The Oxford Book of the Sea, makes an excellent guide and traveling companion for the duration.