Passage to Juneau Quotes

“I loved the sense of being so close to the city, yet so far out on this magnificently eventful sea, with its wild creatures and mazy channels. I thought, if I lived in Seattle, I’d keep a boat of my own, and sail it to where the tide ran at sixteen knots at springs, and where there were whirlpools ten feet deep. I’d live on a sane frontier between nature and civilization, with one foot in the water, the other in a metropolis of restaurants and bookstores. I’d read and write in the mornings, and run away to sea in the afternoons.”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

“I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike at my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbour. 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”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage To Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

“I had never seen charts on which land and sea were so intricately tangled, in a looping scribble of blue and beige.”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings