The “Inside Passage” we are about to tackle is a modern name for a more or less protected shipping route that threads through the islands of Puget Sound from Olympia, Washington, past the San Juan Islands to Victoria, BC, then ducks between Vancouver Island and the mainland to get up the coast, and keeps on going north to the Alaska Panhandle and Alexander Archipelago, along and between the many islands that line the northern coast of the United States and British Columbia to Alaska.

It isn’t one route and it doesn’t have a single history. Rock and waterways are incredibly intricate and can be treacherous with tides and storms. They speak to the imagination, now and in history. So many people, so many different ships and boats, so much drama. And today, so much nature that is just itself, or at least seems that way. Along this coast short on highways and full of fjords, ferries, cruise ships, freighters, barges, tows, and enormous logging rafts ply the route, as well as adventurous sailors and kayakers. We’re going to to travel the British Columbia part: drive where we can and take a series of ferries for the rest. We have reservations for the longer ferry trips all of this entails.

This coastal passage is generally thought to be the route taken south by hunter-gatherer people who trekked after large game across the Bering Strait when it was neither, and became the first human inhabitants of the Americas some 19,000 to 26,000 years ago. Or earlier. Or perhaps they crossed from continent to continent along Korea and the Aleutians, maybe even by way of some kind of boat. Any way you look at it, they came from the Eurasian continent and they went down the coast. The sea level was much lower then, and much of the area between the edge of the continental shelf and what is now the coast was dry land in the millennia surrounding the LGM or Last Glacial Maximum, taking place between 20 and 33,000 years ago.

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The term Inside Passage suggests a certain ease and familiarity, not just sheltered travel but assured arrival, almost. A fix that is in, deal that has been made. The many routes between the islands served the people who, after the Ice Age, stopped being nomadic and settled along this coast to become the Tlingit, Haida, Eyak, and Tsimshian peoples. Relative ease of passage (given sufficient local knowledge) across the fjords and straits in dugout canoes undoubtedly joined an abundance of seafood and a temperate climate in encouraging relationships and trade between them in helping to transform the pain of survival into thriving but also often warring nations.

In the late eighteenth century, fur traders as well as official “discoverers'' from Russia, Europe and the United States showed up in droves, especially when sea otter pelts started to replace the increasingly hard to find beaver fur as the thing to have in Europe. For the resident populations, relative ease and familiarity ceased. Trade increased, but so did hardship and disease among the local population. An estimated 90% of the Haida died from smallpox alone.

Among the discoverers, George Vancouver himself stands out for peaceful and respectful behavior, while of course, with his extremely accurate charts, doing the ultimate violence of claiming much of the coast for Britain. But despite all of this activity, not many of them would have seen this byzantine coast with treacherous rocks, tides, and storms as a shortcut or easy sailing, as waterway names like Desolation Sound and Blind Passage attest to.

But for the prospectors from California and points east looking to get to the Klondike in the very last years of the nineteenth century, the Inside Passage was all the name suggests: a direct and affordable service to the goldfields on the Klondike. And it is their conveyances that first plied the coast in the way we know it today from Washington State to Alaska, 1,000 miles more or less sheltered passage north and assured arrival, given enough charts and know-how.

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The big adventure is about to start. The MS Northern Expedition is a real ship compared to the Ro-Ro (Roll-on-Roll-off) ferries we've been on so far. She opens her hinged bow like a shark and swallows up to 115 cars and 650 passengers. I love that, driving into the maw of a ship.

I walk three miles that day. The Carpenter stakes out a place on the back deck and I run around, top to bottom, side to side, periodically checking back to reassure him I haven’t gone overboard to join the beauty that surrounds us. From a gorgeous but rainy start the weather turns glorious as we first cross some Pacific swells in Queen Charlotte Sound and then start snaking our way through the Inside Passage to Prince Rupert. We see whales. We see birds, mountains, and water. On the open ocean we see a container barge towed by a tugboat, the barge piled so high with what look like little tea tins that you wonder how we ever do seem to get 90% of the stuff we order from China. You’re having good luck with the weather today, mate!

When dire warnings sound that the cafeteria is going to close for a whole hour to get ready for lunch we decide to splurge and get some breakfast. The containers with unbleached napkins carry an admonition: “Made from Trees. Please take only what you need.” It adds poignancy to the occasional bare hillside we encounter. QED: You can see out the window what we’re doing to get you your napkin.

In the middle of the afternoon the engines slow down and the ferry starts to turn. We’ve been cruising deep in the waterways between islands, turning this way and that, but now we’re going to stop. Out of the undifferentiated greenery on the coast emerge a road, a small building, a tidal ramp to a floating dock, and enough pilings, apparently, to dock a ferry against. We have arrived at Klemtu, home of the Kitasoo/Xaixais First Nation. A whole slew of us hang over the railing, fascinated, as the Captain takes a good 20 minutes to maneuver the large ship against the tiny dock, inch by inch, gently like a butterfly’s wing.

Mooring is equally deliberate: an elaborately choreographed ballet for ship and two workers. Clad in orange vests, the ground crew waits behind a closed gate while the ship inches to pilings and dock. When the rear of the ferry gets close and the nose starts to angle towards the pilings, they open the gate and start walking down a long ramp along the side of the ferry. At the end, they are thrown a tiny line with which they, together, haul in a large loop (hawser) to moor the ship with. All this takes about ten minutes. Then they walk back, split up, and each tie down one side of the rear of the ferry, so far held in place by its thrusters, in the same manner. Ship moored, they retreat to the traffic gate, and open it once the ship’s ramp has touched down onto the floating dock. Then they disappear into the small terminal building.

A baggage cart with three wagons emerges from the hold and parks next to the terminal. A pickup and SUV follow, drive up the road,  and disappear out of sight. Three passengers walk off the ferry to the terminal, where they are picked up.

Silence.

Then, to our collective delight, four BC Ferries employees and two passengers walk off carrying two kayaks and backpacks. The men in safety vests walk back. The kayakers proceed to carry their boats down to a small strip of beach right next to the quay. After a few minutes of arranging things they put in and paddle under the ramp and off into the channel — well before the ferry leaves. There’s no one here to tell them that this cannot be because the BC Ferries insurance company dictates kayaks stay away from ferries. It still exists. I like it.

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Full essay and notes in  Northern Byways and Other Essays From The Road