Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 15

The next year, when he was thirteen, George built a thirteen-foot plywood kayak. He had to build it in his room, for his father and stepmother would not let him use the garage. This remains a sore point with him. To make his kayak long enough, he had to extend it into the closet, and it was hell getting it out. The kayak was an idea before its time—not in human history, perhaps, but in the scheme of George’s life. It was a premature budding of his genius. George paddled his kayak once on the river, then sold it.

It was not the kayak that George regards as epochal in his life. In his thirteenth year he went on a time voyage, and that weighs more heavily with him.

It began like this: George left a friend’s house one evening in June and mounted his bike to go home. As his friend watched, George fell and hit his head on the pavement. He rose, remounted, and pedaled home. On entering the door, he walked straight up to his room without speaking. His father noted this and found it peculiar. Later, at dinner, it seemed to Freeman that George was acting strangely.

George does not remember any of this. He remembers opening his eyes on an intensely bright light. He was lying on his back, and men in white coats were staring down at him. He was in a hospital. “All right,” someone said, “what kind of dope did you take?”

Then they told him it was June.

“That scared me to death. I thought it was March. I remembered that back in March I was thinking of trying some of this marijuana everyone was talking about.” Now it was June, and these men in white coats thought he had taken some bad dope. George assumed they were right. In the missing months, he thought, he must have gone from marijuana to something stronger, the very thing all the high-school propaganda warned against.

When George came home from the hospital, it was for him still March, yet he found all his term papers written. They were in his handwriting, so he must have done them, but he remembered not a word. They were a gift, written as if by magic. It was a painless way to have done two months of work. “It was great,” George claims now. “It was like time travel.”

At fourteen George was smoking marijuana for real. He had earned the name so now he played the game. He dressed all in black, cultivating a hoodlum’s image. He became, without knowing it, the center of a big investigation. The local narcotics officers suspected him of being the California Connection, the main source of marijuana for his high school. Whether or not this was true, George does not say.

He had spent his recent summers in California visiting his mother, who was teaching there. He had hiked the Sierra Nevada and the Haight-Ashbury, meeting people in both places. Some of his acquaintances were a little shady. He was back in New Jersey, and the target of the investigation, when a package without return address came to him from California. It was opened in the post office and found to contain marijuana. George was at school when the police knocked at his family’s door. They told his stepmother that he might be in trouble, and asked to look at his room. She let them in. Among George’s things they found some marijuana seeds.

“They came and got me in class. That really raised my status around there. At that school the most exclusive clique was the people who had been to jail. They called each other by their old cell numbers. These three detectives came into the classroom and handcuffed me—my hands between my legs so I couldn’t run. They were strong. They knew what they were doing. They really plan those things in advance.” The detectives fingerprinted George and shaved his head. They showed him mugshots of a number of reprobates and warned him about following the same path.

George had lived a sheltered life at Princeton, and suddenly that was gone.

“You’re really insulated at the institute,” he says. “They don’t want their people to worry about anything. They want you to spend your time thinking. When a staff member travels somewhere, the institute works out all the details—passports and schedules and everything. They have limousines to take the wives shopping. There’s a good cafeteria. You get a plate of prawns and crab and everything for two dollars.” Jail was not like that. The jailhouse was inhabited by a real cross-section of New Jersey. At first his new cellmates scared him, then he got acquainted, and they no longer seemed so tough. The black kids taught him to play basketball, a game that George, temperamentally cool to team sports, had never learned. Jail was not a bad experience, he claims now. It taught him about a lot of things.

That his father would leave him in prison, for whatever reason, had shaken him, he admits. It seems to have marked the end of something between them.

The authorities told George he would be in jail for two years, and he made a decision. He knew he couldn’t do that much time. A week later, when they released him, he was already planning his escape. He knew where he was going, once he broke out. He was going to the mountains.

The next summer found George in the mountains indeed. He was working as a pot washer for a Sierra Club base camp in Colorado. The white peaks of the Rockies had become the most hopeful feature in a dark landscape.

It was an ideal summer, except for the intrusion of a party of hunters. The hunters came on horseback, led by a packer and guide named Carol Martin. George and the Sierra Club people resented Martin’s dilution of their wilderness experience; Martin resented the hikers for trampling the meadow where he always camped. Years later, he and George would meet again.

Susan Baxter, one of the girls who worked with George in the camp commissary, recalls him then: “I remember the sense of being alone—his aloneness. He was precocious. He seemed very grown for his age. Not so grown in his dealings with people, maybe, but he knew exactly where he was going. He knew what he wanted to experience.”

The commissary girls, who were two and three years older than George, pulled him into their female mountain gaiety. To tease him, they braided his hair, and he shyly put up with it. Several of them remember hiking with George, his long hair braided, carrying an ice ax, wearing nothing but net long johns. Net long johns would become a trademark.

“His tarp!” Susan Baxter remembers. “He pitched an incredibly beautiful tarp in the aspens. It was clear plastic. One night we had this incredible storm and we all went to George’s tarp to watch it. You could sit under it and watch the lightning and everything through the plastic. He had done just a beautiful job on it.”

George had begun work on another trademark. He was building nests.