Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 17

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 craft we accepted that very day the offer of a paying venture up the coast.

We 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.