Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

Though it takes the form of a solo voyage in a small boat from Seattle to Juneau, this is no day-by-day, point-to-point travelogue but an attempt to unravel the deepest meanings of the sea in art, literature and mythology, as well as in daily life, by concentrating on this particular sea. The Inside Passage is an extraordinarily complicated route, in continuous operation for several thousand years and now a well charted and buoyed marine freeway, in places choked with fishing boats, tugs, barges, yachts and cruise ships, all following its serpentine course between the Puget Sound and the Alaska Panhandle. Parts are open ocean, parts no wider than a smallish river; some stretches are shallow, muddy seas in their own right, others sunken chasms as deep as 1200 feet; and along the way there's everything from clear sailing to violent tides and whirlpools sandwiched between islands to the port side and plunging mountains to starboard. Woven into this vast, thousand-mile canvass are: -- The bestwriting I've read on the aboriginal culture of, in particular, the Salish and Kwakiutl tribes, their art, animism and seaborne life -- long obsc