The Starship and the Canoe. Kenneth Brower
He was a real boy, with a strong spirit.”
Freeman himself says little about the separation, aside from taking the blame. “These five years have been me. It’s been my fault. He’s been on the other side of the country. There was the expense and . . . and I thought it was important for George to get away, to be on his own.”
But it is possible to find more about George between the lines of what Freeman writes. Freeman’s confessional piece on his days with the RAF, published in 1971, during the Vietnam War and shortly after George had left the U.S. for Canada, seems addressed in part to his pacifist son. If the confession rings a little false, or rings at least peculiar—and certain of Freeman’s acquaintances think it does—then the fault may lie in its undercover polemicism. George appears too, of all places, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 1969, the year George left home, Freeman enumerated for that journal several facts of modern life:
“ . . . A third fact of life is drugs. By this I mean not the harmless legal drugs like aspirin and penicillin, but the illegal ones, LSD, marijuana, and so forth. Many people no doubt have more experience with these than I do, but at least I have not brought up a couple of teen-agers without realizing that drugs are an important part of the landscape.
“ . . . I find the underlying pattern to be the propensity of human beings to function best in rather small groups. Our pot-smoking teen-agers are unanimous in saying that the great thing about pot is not the drug itself but the comradeship which it creates. And to make the comradeship real, there must not only be a group of friends inside the circle but enemies outside, police and parents and authorities to be defied. This is human life the way it is: my son wearing his hair odiously long just because I dislike to be seen together with it in public, and we of the older generation fulfilling our duty as parents by keeping our hair short and marijuana illegal.”
Freeman’s solution was dramatic. The answer was in the new frontier of space. Out there, he wrote, “Man’s tribal instincts will move back from the destructive channels of nationalism, racism, and youthful alienation, and find satisfaction in the dangerous life of a frontier society.”
This, for someone searching for George between the lines, is startling. The generation gap suddenly becomes an interplanetary void. Freeman seems to have contemplated shooting his odiously long-haired son entirely off this globe.
In 1972, at Birkbeck College in London, Freeman gave a lecture he called “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” He had borrowed the title from a book by the physicist J. D. Bernal, whom the occasion in London was honoring. Freeman acknowledged Bernal’s influence on his own ideas, conceded that their shared view of the future was as unpopular now as in 1928, when Bernal first advanced it, and then roughly paraphrased it: Man would defeat the World, its limited resources and living space, by leaving the planet for free-floating colonies in space. Man would defeat the Flesh, its various diseases and infirmities, with the aid of bionic organs, biological engineering, and self-reproducing machinery. Man would defeat the Devil—the irrational in his nature—by reorganizing society along scientific lines and by learning intellectual control over his emotions. “Bernal understood,” said Freeman, “that his proposals for the remaking of man and society flew in the teeth of deeply entrenched human instincts. He did not on that account weaken or compromise his statement. He believed that a rational soul would ultimately come to accept his vision of the future as reasonable, and that for him was enough. He foresaw that mankind might split into two species, one following the technological path which he described, the other holding on as best it could to the ancient folkways of natural living. And he recognized that the dispersion of mankind into the vastness of space is precisely what is required for such a split of the species to occur without intolerable strife and social disruption.”
But did Bernal foresee that the split might appear between one generation and the next? Did it occur to Freeman, as he paraphrased in London, that this speciation might already have come to pass—that he and his son were different animals?
10
Two Years Before the Mast
When George was sixteen he attended, in a loose sense of the word, the University of California at San Diego. That campus did not agree with him. After a few weeks he moved north to Berkeley and loosely attended classes there. They did not hold his attention either, and he took to wandering away. One day his stroll brought him to the Berkeley marina. At one of the moorings was a small sailboat, and on it a FOR SALE sign. George stopped in his tracks. He could buy this boat, he calculated, and have something left over. His fortune was three thousand dollars, part of which his father had given him for expenses at school. He knew nothing about sailboats, and had never considered owning one. But if he bought, he reasoned, he would have both a place to live and a boat. He bought. He moved his things in and lived onboard. He cooked on a Primus stove, slept in one of his four narrow berths, and read on the tiny galley table. He came and went stealthily, for it was against marina rules to live on your boat.
Biologists have a word for this. They have found a new meaning for the old term cryptozoic, using it now to describe the life led by raccoons, possums, and the other wild animals that have adapted to civilization by learning to live secretly alongside it. George’s style was cryptozoic. In the California nights, in the rows of darkened boats, his secret light was burning.
My family knew George then. My sister was one of the commissary girls who, two summers before, had braided his hair and watched the lightning storm through his clear plastic tarp. On arriving in Berkeley, George looked us up. He visited our house when he needed company, or when his ship’s stores ran low. He was already suspicious of processed foods. Once my mother found him in her kitchen reading the ingredients on a bag of dog food. “This is the only thing in the house that’s fit to eat,” he muttered. It was a line she has always remembered.
George learned to sail by simply casting off and setting out. San Francisco Bay became an extended home. When he studied, which was seldom, he liked to sail to Angel Island and stand off its coast while he read. He had suspected that he would not like higher education, and he was right. He did not last a semester at the university. He quit and made preparations to sail to Hawaii. He read books on navigation and learned that his boat, though small, was designed for open-ocean sailing.
When my mother heard of his plans, she urged him not to go. She believed that George was unhappy, that he didn’t much care whether he reached Hawaii or not. She called his sister Katrina, who was living in Vancouver, and enlisted her aid. Together the two women leaned on George. Pleased at all the commotion, he let himself be dissuaded. He offered to sell his boat to my brothers and me, but we were broke, so he sold to a stranger at a considerable loss. He left Berkeley and headed up to British Columbia.
He has told me since that he’s glad he didn’t make the trip to Hawaii. “Knowing what I do now about the ocean, I think I would have ended at the bottom of it,” he said. He laughed his odd, shy, silent laugh. The shoulders shake, but no sound comes out.
George has written an account of his new beginnings in Canada. It is part of an unpublished article on whales. His style then was nautical, and about a hundred and fifty years old. He must have been subsisting on a straight diet of sea classics, Melville and Richard Henry Dana:
At the age of seventeen, while seeking my place in the world through hard and persevering work, I was partner to the launching of the D’Sonoqua, a small vessel of forty-eight feet and twenty tons which I had helped build in the preceding months. She was launched at Vancouver, British Columbia, into waters that yearly see the migration and presence of numerous killer whales. This diminished but still thriving population visits the various straits and inlets to feed upon the gathering schools of salmon, and being the subject of much local legend and esteem, finds itself free from most harassment. This is a coastline rich and hospitable to all who learn its ways, and although worthy of the mariner’s due respect, offers good shelter and safe traveling to the careful user of many kinds of watercraft.
Our little ship was in no way complete and we knew of her true habits solely that conjectured during her construction. D’Sonoqua was launched with the last of our meagre funds, so disregarding the preliminaries usual with such a new-born