The Starship and the Canoe. Kenneth Brower
Dyson and the Little Prince are a lot alike. Freeman has the large solemn eyes and the love for great questions. Freeman has a measure of the same sort of innocence. It is not hard, for me at least, to imagine the physicist in the prince’s cape, wandering between Mars and Jupiter, in the vast gap where the planets crashed. I can see him hopping amongst the debris of that ancient judgment day, looking for the answers, for water, for a home.
12
Inside Passage
The tree house is not home to George Dyson. He thinks of his Douglas fir as the anteroom of a much larger dwelling. The entire Inside Passage province, the nine hundred miles of protected waters from the southern end of Vancouver Island to Glacier Bay in Alaska, is George’s place. He would like to build rooms here and there all along that coast.
Few coastlines on Earth are so convoluted. If you could unravel all George’s promontories and indentations and lay them end to end, they would run out nearly forever. There is no conclusion to the gulfs, bays, coves, straits, sounds, canals, channels, passes, passages, inlets, arms, entrances, or surprises around the corner. The coast contains, in other words, a universe. There are several Aegeans worth of islands. Ulysses never had so many archipelagos to wander in. Aeneas met no stranger people, nor did Captain Cook, nor Flash Gordon. There is the Island of the People Who Sing to Whales. There is the Island of the Indians Who Bury Their Dead Under Singer Sewing Machines. There are logging camps and fishing villages. Hidden away in deep inlets are communes of bearded men and long-haired women. Monasteries of strange religious sects stand inland in the mountains. “On D’Sonoqua,” says George, “I learned to move in that whole society of people.”
“Our friend wants a steak!” a logger demanded, his burly arm around George’s slender shoulders.
The cook protested that he had no more steaks.
“That’s all right,” said George, who seldom ate meat now. “I don’t want a steak.”
“You want a steak,” said the logger. “The cook ran out of steaks, that’s his own fucking fault. He better find a steak. If he doesn’t find a steak, we aren’t working tomorrow.”
Late one night on Denman Island, some kids from the village staggered down to the wharf.
“They were drinking,” says George, “making a lot of noise, throwing their bottles down into D’Sonoqua. That was their drinking place. They always came down to the wharf to drink. It’s the kind of thing where I just turn over and try to go back to sleep. Or if there’s too much noise, I get up and read. It was their wharf. We were the strangers there. But one guy on our boat got really pissed. ‘You kids get the hell out of here so I can get some sleep.’ They just cursed him, so he went down and got the old Winchester we kept on the ship—it was empty—and he came up and waved it at them. It was the wrong thing to do. Those guys hunted deer for their families on that island. They went home and got their guns. They set up behind their cars and shot up the boat. They didn’t actually hit it, but they did real good. They came real close. Ping! Zip! We lay low. Then some lady came down in a nightgown. She was really mad. ‘Johnny! Jim! Stop that and come home!’ She was somebody’s mother. So they stopped shooting and they all went home.”
D’Sonoqua contracted with the Indian village of Church House, on Raza Island, to deliver groceries. The Indians of Raza Island once had been consummate canoebuilders, but they no longer made canoes. They bought speedboats and big outboards and booze with their government allotment. They wore the liners from hard hats as headbands. Hard-hat liners were the craze at the time. “We had to get there a day or two after the welfare checks came,” says George, “or they would have spent all the money.”
Sailing the Inside Passage, George met the people who would become his models, insofar as George has models. Besides Dr. Spong, the psychologist who became a student, then champion, of killer whales, he met Michael Berry, a marine biologist who became a fisherman and jack-of-all-trades, and Jim Land, who scavenges the alleys of Vancouver’s Chinatown for the beautiful handmade crates that come to Canada from Communist China, and who, with the empties, has built himself a palace. He met an old woman who subsisted on crows and potatoes—an interesting dietary experiment, in George’s opinion.
He met a young man who made his own wooden shoes and lived in a hammock. Few humans have dwelt more lightly and immaculately on this Earth than the young man of the hammock. He had been a librarian and a logger once, but all that had fallen away. He had simplified. He now slept everywhere in his hammock—in forests, in greasy freightyards—it didn’t matter, for he levitated above all inconvenience. His toothbrush and other articles had their places on his hammock line. His whole life was suspended between two points. He was a Houdini of self-containment. He was not much older than George. Remembering him, George shakes his head with envy.
One of the nicer things about this society was how easily it was left behind. When George and Jim Bates tired of people, they simply weighed anchor, sailed around the point, and found themselves alone in the wilderness. (Passing Lasqueti Island recently, George nodded toward it. “They’ve got beautiful ladies on that island,” he said. “Healthy. Cook their own bread.” It was a nice encapsulation of most of what he wants from the world of people. But he did not want it right then, and he did not go ashore.)
George’s universe has a center.
The Queen Charlotte Islands, according to his acquaintances who have visited, are a northern Eden. The Queen Charlottes lie at the midpoint of the Inside Passage, and are the most seaward of its archipelagos. They are a quintessence of the Northwest, a promised land of virgin forest, game, and shellfish. It was on the Queen Charlottes, say the Tlingit Indians, that Raven taught humans to build canoes. At first, according to the Tlingits, the early humans were afraid to climb into Raven’s prototype. “The canoe is not dangerous,” he assured them. “People will seldom drown.” D’Sonoqua never had business in the islands, and George has never visited, but from the day he first learned of them, he has thought of building a vessel that would take him there. In the Queen Charlottes, he has heard, there is an Indian girl who daily swims a mile out into the ocean, and a mile back. Two miles in the frigid North Pacific! He would like to see if she is true.
British Columbia’s coast range is a nine-hundred-mile fold in the Earth’s crust. Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes are parts of a parallel seaward fold, most of it submerged. Both folds—the entire Inside Passage province—were covered by the Cordilleran ice sheet, which in grinding its way over George’s country carved the final touches upon it. The glaciers were enormous, and so are the land and seascapes they left behind. The fiords are deep and labyrinthine. The landforms are all out of scale, belonging on a larger planet. The peninsulas between the fiords are big, steep, and dark, like negatives of the vanished tongues of ice. The darkness is less geology than botany. A dense forest of Douglas fir, cedar, Sitka spruce, and hemlock has sprung up after the thaw. As the forest colonized above waterline, the Pacific and its seaweeds were colonizing below, and today the two influences make for a jarring disconformity. Above waterline a traveler sees subboreal forest; when the tide is running, he might be on any northern river, or, when the tide is slack, on any northern lake. But below waterline he watches kelp lean with the current; from time to time a seal surfaces, or the fin of a porpoise. He’s not on any northern river or lake. The water is salt. The lower boughs of the hemlocks are trimmed straight by the high tide. The river is the Pacific, and it flows both ways.
The Inside Passage is a country shaped by water. Water is responsible for its character, just as wind is responsible for the butte country of the Southwest, or meteors for the surface of the moon. Water, in one form or another, did all the work. Glacial ice carved the country steep. Heavy rainfall dark-greened it. Fog grooved the needles of the conifers and tipped the guard hairs of the wolves. Cold stream currents thickened the pelts of the mink and otter, fattened the grizzlies, streamlined and silvered the flanks of the trout, chambered the salmon’s indomitable, homewardleaping heart. The high annual precipitation sends the Douglas firs up two hundred feet and more, broadens their boles to seventeen, furrows their bark, and then, after a millennium or so, undermines their roots, topples and sends them out to the Pacific, which soaks