All Intensive Purposes

I liked Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau so much that I've been putting off blogging about it, waiting to have the time to craft an extra-long post to do justice to what Raban does with this book. Two decades ago, Raban wrote two books I haven't read about boat trips -- one about sailing around England, and one about motoring down the Mississippi. This book, which came out a few years ago, he chronicles a trip in a sailboat up the coast from Seattle, where he now lives, to Juneau. And if Passage to Juneau were nothing more than a fine account of his trip, there would be nothing to complain about. And yet Raban weaves several other strands into his tale, including the journals of Vancouver's exploration of the coast in the 18th century, insight about native myths and art, and Raban's personal life. I finished the book with aitdmiration for the way Raban made it all work together, and yet I didn't see it coming.

There is so much to draw from this book, so I will take one example. Raban's time at sea gives him a perspective on native art that I've never encountered anywhere else. For example, take the ovoid, "the fundamental design unit in the art of all the Northwest coastal tribes is a shape more easily sketched than described." Here are some examples:



Raban sees this shape all around:

In a full-blown composition like a Chilkat blanket, a wall-hanging, or a carved and painted bentwood chest, you can see dozens of these lozenges, sometimes packed as tight as bricks in a wall. They vary in size and shape; they can be stretched out into a long, curvaceous boomerang, or squashed up until they're very nearly square. Often they contain smaller lozenges, just as the ripples I was trying to photograph contained concentric ellipses of light and shade. . . .

I've watched ovoids form, in their millions, in almost-still water, under a breath of wind, or by the fraction of the moving tide. The canoe Indians, living on this water as their primary habitat, saw ovoids in nature every day of their lives; and when they combined them in a design, they made them do exactly what capillary waves do -- reflect the world in smithereens.

* * * * *

The maritime art of these mostly anonymous Kwakiutl, Haida, and Tsimshian craftsmen appeared to me to grow directly from their observation of the play of light on the sea. Trailing through the museums of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria, then, later, through the Northwest Indian galleries of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Menil Collection in Houston, I saw a water-hauntedness in almost every piece. This was an aspect of the art the descriptive literature ignored. Thousands of pages were given over to discussion of its shamanistic symbolism, and, since Bill Holm's landmark Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965), its abstract design. What I found, touring the museums, was an art in thrall to ripples and reflections.

Passage to Juneau, 203, 205. I'm no expert myself, but I've never seen this connection made before, surely because too few of us spend much time on the water anymore.

Raban is also very good when he discusses native myths, a word I hesitate to use because it connotes a departure from the world around us that Raban suggests had nothing to do with the ways that natives understood their world. Many European and American anthropologists, succumbing to a Victorian morality, cleansed native stories of their raunchiness, turning them into a sort of meaningless pablum and changing their sense and meaning. Turning to Franz Boas, who was relatively alone in preferring to record all of what he heard, Raban finds reconnects the stories to the hard life experienced by natives living in the narrow strip between dark forests and the deep sea.

This is only a small part of Raban has to say. I won't give much more of it away, so read Passage to Juneau. (San Franciscans, take note: You can buy a hardcover copy at Stacey's for about six bucks. Or use the link above to order from Amazon.com.)