The Starship and the Canoe. Kenneth Brower
were to load in Vancouver with five musicians, four assistants, and all their associated equipment, to travel in this manner a round trip of over six hundred miles, with the aim of performing in concert to an audience of killer whales. This was part of Dr. Paul Spong’s research on this matter near Alert Bay, and I will not elaborate on this amazing journey other than to point out the occasion of my first finding myself approached by whales.
I will elaborate.
D’Sonoqua was a ferro-cement boat that George and her owner, Jim Bates (“Lord Jim,” George sometimes calls him), had worked on for a year. She was named after a local Indian demideity. She had a diesel auxiliary and would later be rigged as a hermaphrodite brig. Her career began ominously. On the day before the launch, George labored hard for eight hours in last preparations, crawling around in the bilges, where the air was bad. He was dizzy from the stuffiness and the effort. Stepping between the dock and the ship, carrying two seventy-pound pails of ballast—steel punchings—he fell. His free fall to the water was arrested by a bolt, which passed through his arm. He hung there, impaled. The people tried to lift him off, but slipped in his blood and dropped him back on the bolt. Finally they freed him. He spent the night in plastic surgery, then at six the next morning left the hospital, not wanting D’Sonoqua to sail without him.
A big storm hit the boat as she left Vancouver Harbor. Because there were as yet no hatches, she immediately began taking water. “It was exciting,” George recalls. “They were exciting times.” D’Sonoqua rocked and rolled, and the five rock-and-roll musicians became instantly seasick. They remained so for the rest of the voyage.
“We thought the musicians would help fix the boat up,” George says, “but it turned out they were pretty incapable of doing that. They were good guys. They weren’t getting paid or anything. They were drinking and just being musicians. They even had a couple of groupies with them—fifteen-year-old girls. They drank and smoked a lot of weed and took LSD.”
George, still weak from his injury, did not indulge. Nor did he get seasick, in spite of his wounds.
“We didn’t know where we were going. We thought we were going to Pender Harbor. It turned out we were going all the way to Alert Bay. There were no bunks, no masts, no sails, no running water. The drinking water was in drums on deck. The fuel was paid for, and not much else. We ran out of fuel on the way back from Nanaimo. We drifted around for a few hours, then the ferry saw us and called the Coast Guard.
“We put on a dance at Alert Bay to try to make some money for fuel on the way back. We’d spent all our money on alcohol. But the dance got screwed up. The Indians were having their own dances and they had bought up all the halls. The chief let us use the tribal-council house, but by then it was too late, and in the end we played for free. The Indians enjoyed it. Indian kids really like rock and roll.
“So do whales. The musicians liked the whales, and the whales really responded. You play music, and killer whales start jumping all around your boat. It was good rock and roll.”
In his written account George describes how, anchored off Hanson Island in Blackfish Sound, he first encountered killer whales:
A warm August night, with eleven people on board, all asleep but myself, as I had anchor watch on deck. In the utter quiet of calm water and still air I could hear the varied and sonorous breathings of all those below decks, and in the distance the blowings of a sizable pod of whales. As I listened intently they approached over the space of many minutes to glide silently next to our hull, unnoticed except by the faint rippling of water meeting their fins. Their slow and subdued breathing rose from the waters around me, matching that of my sleeping shipmates even to the occasional sniffle or snore. After an unperceived period of time they silently departed, leaving me unsure of the meaning of this visit except that I felt ever different after the touch of their powerful spirit.
After returning the musicians to Vancouver, George put to sea again.
D’Sonoqua and I continued on together for the following two years, spending the first winter in Quatsino Sound, where we selected our masts from the same choice groves of straightgrained spruce as did Captain Cook many years before us. We cut these trees when the sap was low, and combed the whole of this still seagoing community for rigging and canvas to set from our seasoning spars.
Squaring away before an April breeze, we rounded Cape Scott and through the breakers of Nahwitti Bar returned to British Columbia’s inside waters, to try our hand at coastal trade. Supplying goods and groceries out of Vancouver, we made our living upon the water, and embarked on all manner of ventures that chance placed in our way.
11
Asteroids
Between Mars and Jupiter lies a large gap where one or two planets, perhaps even three, are thought to have orbited. The planets collided, or suffered some other serious accident, for the gap is now filled with fragments. These are the asteroids. There are many thousands of them, of which sixteen hundred have been tracked, each in its private orbit around the sun. They appear through telescopes as starlike points of light, hence the name. Astronomers have learned a lot about asteroids by analyzing their light. Asteroids spin, and the variations in the sunlight they reflect reveal their shapes. The smaller asteroids are irregular, the larger ones spherical. On big asteroids, gravity is respectable—nearly that of the moon. The asteroid Ceres is 480 miles in diameter. Pallas is 300 miles wide, Vesta 240, Juno 120. Icarus is a boulder one mile in diameter. Eros, in outline the size and shape of Manhattan, tumbles through space like a dead cigar.
“There’s very good news from the asteroids,” reports Freeman Dyson. “It appears that a large fraction of them, including the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. Nobody imagined that. They thought they were just big rocks.”
Water obsesses Freeman. In his mental wanderings across the deserts of space, he worries about it like a Bedouin.
Freeman grows older, and the comets begin to seem farther away to him. At the same time the news from the asteroids improves. Lately he has made a focal adjustment of the imagination, turning his attention from comets to asteroids.
“A comet is a symbol for me of a place where you really get away,” he says. “A comet is way out. That’s where you can go and get lost. And that’s one of the reasons for going into space—if you really want to get lost, so nobody will ever see you again. You’d really be on your own. A bunch of people who’d like to do that, then a comet is probably the place.
“Whereas the asteroids are much closer in. They’re more conventional. It’s easier to get to an asteroid than to Mars, because the gravity is lower and landing is easier. Certainly the asteroids are much more practical, right now. If we start space colonies in, say, the next twenty years, I would put my money on the asteroids.”
Dyson was anticipated in this by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his The Little Prince. When the time comes to offer the asteroids to colonists, in fact, the illustrations for the prospectus could be lifted from that book. The drawing Saint-Exupéry called “The Baobabs,” showing a tiny planetoid dwarfed by its baobab trees, looks very much like one of Dyson’s worlds, dwarfed by its hundred-mile-high, genetically engineered orchard. Saint-Exupéry was, it is true, less optimistic about extraterrestrial agriculture than Dyson. “Now there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the Little Prince,” he wrote of Asteroid B-612, “and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of the planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces.” Neither was Saint-Exupéry as optimistic about the ennobling effects of life on the asteroids. In search of answers, his Little Prince visits a number of asteroids, and the inhabitants of each display one or another of the old human flaws.
But these doubts can be edited from the prospectus. Life in the asteroid belt will never be rendered more invitingly than in the drawings of the Little Prince moving his chair several steps westward on B-612 so he can continue to watch the sunset,