How Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau Decolonizes Nature Writing

My copy of Passage to Juneau went to sea with me, and it shows. Its pages are sun-browned, foxed, and dog-eared. The front cover is water stained. I first read it in 2001 while idling along the south coast of England in a hired yacht, skippered by a sailing friend called Ben who’d given me Raban’s book as a Christmas present. “I think he writes better on water than anyone since Conrad,” said Ben.

I came to agree. I underlined and scribbled on my copy, picking over the language like a magpie in a field of unearthed coins. Much as “They rode on” becomes the key anaphora in another epic North American journey, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in Passage to Juneau “The sea” recurs as a sentence-starting refrain: “The sea was smooth as a pool of molasses. Twists of smoke rose from its surface in the chilly early-morning air”; “The sea, scored with current-lines, was like an ice rink imprinted by the tracks of figure skaters”; “The sea was covered, shore to shore, by the glossy membrane of its surface film…like an enormous sheet of Saran Wrap.” Even things which are not made of water become watery: on the quayside, two people work threading floats onto a quarter-mile-long gill net, while “the jade-green, gossamer nylon mesh shimmered at their feet like a river.”

I could go on. I must stop. I’d end up quoting a quarter of the book. Each of these is a tiny, shining prose poem in its own right. It’s characteristic of Raban that he’s ready to reach for a brand name (“Saran Wrap”) to evoke the texture and structure of the sea at that moment. Passage to Juneau is full of such disruptive, category-breaking imagery.

I take him to be stylistically at work on two convergent tasks here. The first is to escape the suffocating language of the “sublime” which has characterized so much white Western apprehension of the coastline of the Pacific Northwest, from John Muir’s raptures at the “embosomed…scenery,” to the gushing copy of contemporary cruise company brochures (“You cruise this enchanted waterway and each vista surpasses the one before”).

The second task is driven by what would now be called a decolonizing impulse. That is to say, Raban seeks both to honor and to write with the perceptions of the First Nations people from the regions through which he passes. Those bookshelves in his cabin hold Trollope, Arendt, and Homer, sure–but also a monograph on Kwakiutl art and translated collections of Tlingit stories.

Influenced by the “marvelous, stylized, highly articulate maritime art” of those people, Raban’s own prose begins to shimmer with lozenge-like, luminous images, resembling “the tiny capillary wave raised by a cat’s-paw of wind, as it catches the light and makes a frame for the sun.” He is drawn to the Kwakiutl understanding of the ocean as a dynamic, sentient “place,” a “mobile surface full of portents, clues, and meanings,” and finds repellent the aqua nullius described by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century white sailors, to whom the sea is only waste, threat, or “empty space.”