The Starship and the Canoe. Kenneth Brower
that he stole from a museum. On the wall above the bed a barometer is nailed, and next to it hangs a pair of binoculars in a leather case that George made himself. An octagonal window with leaded panes is inset in the wall beside the bed, and an identical octagonal window is inset at the foot. George can lie in bed and watch, through his binoculars and his leaded panes, any boats moving on the inlet. He has three rectangular windows, too. No point of the compass is hidden to him.
Across from the bed is a small, cast-iron, wood-burning stove. Stamped on the front is NEW ALBION STOVE WKS, and beneath that is the raised emblem of a fish, and beneath that is VICTORIA.
Against the seaward wall is a tiny desk. On the desk are candles, a kerosene lamp, a small jar of flowers, another jar full of pens, a vial of washable blue ink, and a wooden letter seal. The seal was carved by a friend of George’s. It is titled LING COD and shows a cod swimming among the stalks of a kelp forest. On the wall above the desk hangs a silver letter-opener with Arabian designs on the scabbard and handle. Stored beneath the desk are a big jar of nuts, a few pots and utensils, and a coffee mug. The mug is thick, white, and plain. It came from an Alaska ferry. It is the kind of mug, says George, that a man on watch can take out on deck. It is the kind of mug that, on the bridge of a seiner, a man can set down heavily and satisfactorily, then return his attention to the helm.
On the landward wall hangs a frying pan and a whiskbroom and a toothbrush.
When I visited, two books lay under the bed. One was the U.S. Coast Pilot for the Pacific Coast, tenth edition, 1968. The other was the Bering Sea and Strait Pilot, first edition, 1920. George is especially fond of the old 1920 volume. He chooses old books over new ones when he can. The old guides, assembled in the days of sailing ships, have better information on the winds—“Wait for SE wind and stay close-hauled on the port tack”—and they tell George where, in 1913, the Indians rendezvoused in their canoes.
Inside the old pilot book was a sketch of a canoe rudder George was planning. In the margin of the sketch was a note I have puzzled over, and have never been able to decipher. It said,
I would take this for a list of possible names for a canoe, except for the odd placement on the page. The note looks more like a crude map. Are these sailing instructions to some obscure region? Dawn Treader is the ship in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, but is “Mariem” a misspelling of the Latin marem? I don’t know. When I asked George the meaning of the note, he claimed to have forgotten.
Outside the door, on the landward side of the house, hang two buckets for rainwater. They are brimful through most of the year, for maritime British Columbia is a rainy country. On a seaward branch is a birdhouse.
Henry Thoreau was proud of building a grounded house at Walden for $28.12½. George built higher, and for $20.00 less. He split all his shakes from a single drift log he found at sea and towed to shore. His two octagonal windows, his three rectangular windows, and most of his other materials are gifts or salvage. He spent $2.00 on a stovepipe and $6.00 on the string for his lashings.
Sometimes George looks alarmingly like Thoreau, even in the style of his beard and the cut of his hair. From the old daguerreotypes it is impossible to tell the color of Thoreau’s eyes, but his gaze in black and white is as wide and arresting as the Dyson gaze. George, like Thoreau, suffers and enjoys a heightened sense of solitude. George has the same rawboned ego, inflated to fill the solitude. His personality, like Thoreau’s, is sharp with edges that companionship has not had opportunity to wear away. If George is Henry reincarnate, then their soul has made some progress since 1845, but entirely in matters of economy.
Like Thoreau, George is a bean-eater. When George’s body is entirely finished with the beans he has eaten, or the brown rice or fish or sprouts, he rappels down the tree and disappears briefly in the forest. In nature he answers nature’s call. Sometimes, when it’s raining hard, or when he just doesn’t feel like making the trip to earth, he selects a red-cedar shingle, uses it, then sails it like a Frisbee out over the canopy of trees.
In the autumn George has trouble with flying squirrels. In that season they besiege him like paratroopers. When he is home, there’s no problem, for on hearing them bang into his windows or land on his doorsill, he shouts, and they jump off to glide elsewhere. But when he is gone, they enter and burglarize his place. In British Columbia, 1974 was a bad year for flying squirrels.
“They were driving me crazy,” George told me afterward. “They were flying down from the hill into my tree and messing up my house.”
“Eating your food?”
“Yes. That I could tolerate. They shit all over my floors, and I could take that. But then they began taking the insulation from my walls to make their own nests. They began taking the insulation from my sleeping bags. That was too much. I was seriously thinking of getting a shotgun.”
This, from George Dyson, is a powerful admission. George is a pacifist who first came to Canada at the height of the Vietnam War. The squirrels were testing his creed. They were bending his essential nature. He never got the shotgun, but he began practicing with a slingshot and became, in a purely theoretical way, deadly with it. He honed his skill down very fine, continually postponing the day of the massacre. Then came an idea for a new sort of trap.
Conventional rattraps don’t work with flying squirrels, according to George, because the squirrels know how to set them off harmlessly. Had he proceeded conventionally, he says, bomb squads of squirrels would have eased into his house, defused his devices, then whistled an all-clear. George believes that living in trees boosts intelligence, and that squirrels are smart, like primates. Arboreal life had sharpened George’s wits too, of course. He designed a cage with a door like a guillotine blade, a mousetrap for a trigger, and power supplied by rubber bands. He trapped three squirrels, transported them thirty miles, and released them. They were the ringleaders, apparently, for he had no more trouble that year.
Raccoons sometimes bother George in his tree. Most of his trouble is with the juveniles. “They’re bad then. It’s their teen-age period or something. They challenge each other to go up my tree. ‘I dare you to go up to George’s house.’ One night they wouldn’t let me in until four in the morning. There were five of them, all from the same litter. I threw rocks at them and everything.”
“Did you hit them?” I asked.
“Yes. But they’re tough. They wouldn’t move. I don’t know where they are now. I guess they broke up.”
Winter is George’s favorite time in the tree house. In that season, fogs roll in from the cold strait and obliterate everything but the Douglas fir. George is perfectly alone then, his tree rising from the immaculateness. He sits high and detached, like a Moslem in his minaret, or an astronaut orbiting a planet of clouds.
On being fired up, the small stove warms his small space instantly. He passes stormy winter days reading, thinking, and swaying slightly in the wind. At night, high in the dark, wet motion of the Canadian fir forest, his hidden fire burns.
5
Wunderkind
“My repute is that of a good technician, happy with words, but not markedly original,” George Dyson once wrote. Not the George Dyson of the wool cap and the tree house, but his grandfather, Sir George Dyson, director of the Royal College of Music. “I am familiar with modern idioms, but they are outside the vocabulary of what I want to say. I am really what the eighteenth century called a kapellmeister, an untranslated word which means a musician equipped both to compose and produce such music as is needed in his position or environment.”
Sir George Dyson was a gifted, busy, forceful man. In 1923, when he was forty, his only son, Freeman, was born.
If, as is often suggested, music and mathematics arise from a single aptitude, or from two very similar aptitudes, then Freeman inherited that.