Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  Frank Herbert often spoke with fondness of the extended family in which he lived as a child, of time spent at the homes of aunts, uncles and grandparents in Tacoma and Burley. His father had four brothers living in the area, and his mother had eight sisters and two brothers nearby. So young Frank had many cousins with whom he could play, and if he happened to be over at a relative’s house at dinner time the aunt or uncle would phone home and say young Frank was staying for the meal, and often that he was going to spend the night.

  His Irish Catholic maternal aunts, who attempted to force religion on him, became the models for the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood of Dune. It is no accident that the pronunciations of “Gesserit” and “Jesuit” are similar, as he envisioned his maternal aunts and the Bene Gesserit of Dune as female Jesuits. The attempted brainwashing by his aunts, as he later termed it, was performed over the protestations of F. H., who was an agnostic. Before giving up the fight, F. H. had many arguments with Babe over this. In the end, the boy’s religious beliefs became more like those of his father’s than those of any other adult he knew.

  It would be impossible, perhaps, to categorize Frank Herbert’s religious beliefs. He ascribed to no single organized belief system, but instead drew from many. He was attracted to Zen Buddhism in particular, as can be seen in his classic novel, Dune, where there are wordless truths and “Zensunni” and “Zensufi” belief systems. Though he would not study Zen in detail until he met Alan Watts in the 1960s, he was exposed to it in his childhood. For a time, he had Nisei friends, second-generation Japanese who were born and educated in the United States. Some of them held Zen Buddhist beliefs.

  He also knew Coast Salish Indians, and would come to know and respect their religious beliefs. This world view would become central to his only non–science fiction novel, Soul Catcher (1972).

  At a time before television, the children, particularly Frank, became adept at imagining adventures and frightening tales. In the evening around the fire at scout camp, everyone came to count on young Frank to come up with a scary story. Typically a boy or a counselor would call out a blood and guts idea, such as “blood in the well” or “a screaming eyeball from hell,” and my father would fill in details to create a story around it. He never failed to entertain. In darkened bedrooms with his cousins, where mattresses and sleeping bags were thrown on the floor, he would do the same. His stories were filled with fright, adventure, voice alterations and sound effects, and frequently involved ghosts, the old West, and the sea.

  In 1928, while still on the state patrol, F. H. moved his family to Burley, where they maintained a small subsistence farm for the production of family foodstuffs, with a cow, chickens, and pigs. Bub, “the dog who hated clams,” accompanied them. They had a large vegetable garden, with corn, peas, beans, carrots, lettuce and other crops. Young Frank, now seven, had chores to do, and he accepted responsibility for them. Regularly rising in the frosty time before dawn, he milked the cow, collected eggs and fed the pigs. Sometimes the farm animals were treated as pets, and the boy named them. He stopped doing that, however, when a favored chicken ended up on the chopping block.

  “Never name your dinner,” his mother told him one day.

  He was in the 4-H club, and participated in a number of county fairs held in Burley. In one 4-H project, he raised and canned five hundred chickens by himself.

  Children in town didn’t have to go to school on their birthdays. In October 1928, on the morning of his eighth birthday, Frank Herbert went downstairs to a breakfast of sourdough flapjacks and real maple syrup, favorites of his that had been prepared specially for him by his mother and paternal grandmother. After the breakfast dishes were cleared away, he climbed on top of the table and announced to his family, in a very determined tone, “I wanna be a author.”

  That morning he wrote his first short story, entitled “Adventures in Darkest Africa,” which he read to his family. Crayon drawings accompanied it. A jungle tale that began with a pretty good narrative hook to get the reader’s interest, it involved an interesting character who had to surmount obstacles and find his way back to camp. The jungle, though described with childish inaccuracy, was nonetheless a threatening, problem-filled environment. Young Frank had been on a number of hunting and camping trips with his father and uncles in the forests of Washington State, and this story was an extrapolation, based upon what he had learned about not getting lost in the woods. He had never been to Africa, except in imagination.

  Being the son of a police officer, he had heard adventurous tales of law enforcement. These were frequent topics of conversation at the dinner table, especially when police friends came to visit. The adults told of the time Babe helped arrest a drunken soldier, and of speakeasy raids she went on with F. H. One time an arrested man committed suicide in front of F. H. There were wanted criminals, fugitive chases and police manhunts.

  Such material found its way into Frank Herbert’s early stories. Soon he was using soft-lead pencils to scrawl his stories on lined sheets of newsprint and in notebooks, illustrating many of them in crayon. He misspelled a number of words rather badly, and his handwriting wasn’t too steady, but the tales and drawings were colorful and imaginative.

  With steady work, his stories improved, and he had them piled all over his room. His mother, obsessed with keeping order in a small wood-frame house, was forever making neat piles. In a safe place, she put away stories and drawings that she particularly liked, and kept them for the rest of her life.

  From an early age Frank Herbert was fastidious about his teeth, spending as much as fifteen minutes at a time brushing them. In his entire lifetime he never had one cavity, and his teeth were so perfect that dentists marveled upon seeing them.

  His father, F. H., was an expert fly fisherman and a knowledgeable all-around outdoors man. Frequently he took his son on trips into the woods, out in small boats or clamming on the beaches of Henderson Bay. Young Frank especially liked to fish in Burley Creek, which was loaded with brook trout. In the fall, salmon were so plentiful that they could be caught with bare hands. There were many smokehouses in the area, some dating back to the days of Burley Colony. It was a picturesque creek, winding through a forest of cedar, alder and maple and falling across a sequence of rocky benches…emptying ultimately into Burley Lagoon. Often the boy went out on the salt water of Puget Sound and fished from a rowboat.

  On some fishing trips with his best friend, Dan Lodholm, they rode bicycles to nearby lakes, where they fished for bass, using an unusual method taught to them by their elders. A fake mouse was secured to the fishing line, and with a short cast this mouse was plopped onto the top of a lily pad. Bass could be seen swimming under the lily pads, and when one came close, the boy would pull the line a little, toppling the mouse into the water.

  Every time Frank went fishing he tossed a book in his Boy Scout pack, which he carried with him everywhere. He loved to read Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs. His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, after observing that the boy was always reading, said of him, “It’s frightening. A kid that small shouldn’t be so smart.” The boy was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child’s body, with childlike emotions.

  These were formative days for my father, when the seeds of literary ideas were germinating. Throughout his career as a writer, he would continually call upon boyhood experiences.

  In the late 1920s, Burley was a place where gossip traveled fast. “It was a curtain-twitching town,” my father would recall. “Someone looked out every time you passed a window.” A colorful local, Logger Bill Nerbonne, and F. H. frequently took young Frank on hunting and camping trips. The boy’s uncles, maternal and paternal, also took him hunting, particularly Uncle Ade McCarthy (one of Babe’s brothers) and Uncle Marley Herbert (one of F. H.’s brothers).

  One afternoon F. H. and another of young Frank’s uncles, Jack McCarthy, staged a convincing fight in a dit
ch in the middle of Burley. The whole town came to watch as the men wrestled, tore their shirts and threw fists. The fight went on for the better part of an hour, and matched any seen in Hollywood annals, with theatrics but no real injuries. Presently, F. H. and Jack put their arms around one another, tucked in their tattered shirts and walked off, saying, “That’ll give ’em something to talk about.”

  After that, several people in town refused to speak to the Herberts or McCarthys ever again.

  F. H. and Babe were on-again, off-again alcoholics during my father’s childhood, consuming large quantities of whiskey. When his parents were on binges, the boy was too ashamed and embarrassed to bring his friends home. So he spent much of his time away from the house, fishing, hunting and hiking. To a large degree he grew up on his own and became independent at an early age. Young Frank became something of a provider for the family, as he brought home trout, salmon, crabs, clams, rabbits and grouse for the supper table. His mother, though she had a problem with alcohol, was a wonderful cook.

  Above all outdoor pursuits, Frank was a fisherman. When he didn’t have to go to school he was often up before dawn, and off he would go with his fishing gear to a favored spot or to a new one he hadn’t yet tried. Sometimes he took his gear to school, so that he wouldn’t have to go directly home after classes. He smoked much of the salmon he caught, and took it to school for lunch, along with fruits, vegetables and hard-boiled eggs from the family farm.

  The young man, despite his time spent outdoors, didn’t tan readily, and his skin was pale. Some adults were concerned about his health. He had one bout with pneumonia, but overall was a tough, wiry kid, with tremendous arm and leg strength. These physical attributes made him a powerful swimmer at an early age.

  In 1929, the Washington State Patrol assigned F. H. to the highway between Gig Harbor and Bremerton. A big Harley Davidson motorcycle was a common sight parked in front of the Herbert house. In those days, patrolmen wore forest-green uniforms with black pocket flaps and black trouser stripes. The hats were military-cap style, and the men wore puffy fascist trousers and high black boots. F. H. was quite a daredevil. Sometimes he turned off his motorcycle lights at night and roared up behind speeding cars, then flashed on his lights and pulled them over.

  F. H. also took his son into the backcountry with camping and hunting gear on the Harley, a practice that would never be permitted today. F. H. wore a Sam Browne Belt with a .38 caliber Colt “Police Positive” revolver holstered to it, and the boy sat behind him, holding onto the back of the wide belt. On one occasion they went to Sunrise Lake, up a long dirt road. They stopped to make camp, and as F. H. was setting the kickstand of his bike, he spied a blue grouse seated on a low pine bough.

  With a fluid movement he drew the big Colt revolver, took aim and fired. The grouse was peppered with pine needles, but did not move. In a frenzy, F. H. emptied his revolver at the bird, missing every shot. The bird stared back at him. Frustrated, F. H. reloaded and moved closer. He fired again, but only knocked the branch out from under the bird. It flew away, eluding another hail of bullets.

  Eventually F. H. became quite a marksman, moving up to captain of the patrol’s drill team. A banquet was held in the state capitol at Olympia one year, at which he was slated to receive a distinguished conduct award. Frank attended, and just before his father went on, he told the master of ceremonies about the grouse. When the emcee introduced F. H., the boy took the stage and recounted the embarrassing story, breaking the audience up.

  From the time when he was eight years old, young Frank went out spotlighting for deer with his paternal uncles Marley and Louis. The men had a spotlight (built at the Herbert Brothers shop) that was a swiveling car headlight hooked onto a six-volt car battery. When a deer was located, the boy flipped on the light and pointed it at the deer, causing the animal to freeze, staring into the light. Then Marley or Louis would fire their rifles. My father would recall later that there was no sport to it. They just went out and got meat for the family.

  On one daylight hunting trip with Uncle Marley, Marley suddenly stopped and pointed. Frank looked, and saw a big buck with its fore-paws on a tree. Marley didn’t say a word or make a sound. He just passed the rifle to the boy and wagged his finger at the buck. Frank took careful aim and pulled the trigger. He hit the deer square in the chest, and it fell.

  Grandpa Otto had the biggest gun in the family, an eight-gauge shotgun brought over from Germany. A muzzleloader, it had been built by an independent craftsman under the old apprenticeship system, and was such a powerful, dangerous weapon that guns of its gauge would be outlawed a decade later in the United States. One day, Grandpa Otto said Frank could fire the gun, and told him to shoot at an old rotten tree trunk. The boy understood the physics of recoil even at an early age, and was afraid to put the gun against his shoulder. So he jammed the butt of the weapon against a sapling, aimed and pulled the trigger. The roar was deafening. He blew a “hell of a big hole” in the rotten tree, and cracked the sapling with the recoil of the butt!

  On other trips, Frank learned from Logger Bill that it took less energy to step over a log than on it. I, in turn, would learn this lesson from my father many years later. On one hunting trip with Logger Bill and Uncle Marley, however, an exception to the rule presented itself. Logger Bill stepped over a log onto the back of a sleeping six-point buck. The deer jumped and sent poor Logger Bill flying, with his gun coming out of his grasp.

  Some of Dad’s trips into the woods were with his Uncle Ade McCarthy, who, along with his brother Jack, had a secret spot where they dug for crystals and loaded them into knapsacks. The men had a thriving mail-order business selling crystals for crystal radios and other uses. His uncles were also involved in oyster farming, where young Frank learned to skin dive. In these and other ventures he earned money to buy school clothes.

  When he was in his teens, he converted a rifle into a shotgun for bird hunting. He remained an avid hunter throughout most of his adulthood. Late in his life, however, he would develop the opinion that hunting was one of the myths of mankind—the myth that a man could hunt for all the meat his family needed. This was linked, in his view, to the larger myth of complete self-sufficiency—that a modern family could live entirely off the land, completely independent of stores, power companies and money.

  Chapter 2

  The Spanish Castle

  ON FRANK Herbert’s ninth birthday, only three weeks before the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, Logger Bill Nerbonne gave him a superb cedar rowboat he had made himself. With oak framing and spruce oars, it was nine feet long—one foot for each of the boy’s years. It rowed easily, and became a constant source of joy for the young man.

  Christmas that year would be bleak for many families, as the nation reeled in the throes of economic collapse. Burley, with its many small subsistence farms, was something of an oasis from such troubles, and F. H.’s household was further insulated by the secure job he held with the state patrol.

  An adventurer, Frank was in the habit of taking his tiny rowboat on long trips, too far for a child of his age. In the summer of 1930, he made a solo trip from Burley all the way up Puget Sound to the San Juan Islands…a round-trip distance of more than two hundred miles. He accomplished a large portion of this trip by rowing out into the shipping lanes and waiting for a tugboat pulling a barge, going in the direction he wanted to go. When the barge came near, he rowed at a furious pace and hitched himself onto it, often without being seen by the tugboat operator. Sometimes he was caught and cut loose. Other times the tugboat operators let him stay, and even slowed down so that he could hitch-on or unhitch more easily. The boy came to know the schedules and routes of the barges so well that he was a regular, if nonpaying, customer. He also made shorter trips by boat to the small town of Longbranch on the Key Peninsula, around sixteen miles each way.

  When he was ten, my father took his rowboat out in Puget Sound and was fishing for cutthroat trout. It was at Horsehead Bay, near Longbranch, and he
lost track of time. At dusk he realized he couldn’t get back in time to avoid a licking. Then he saw a fancy powerboat carrying people he knew, all of whom were whooping it up, having a merry time. Dad flagged them down, and they pulled alongside to assist. They tied his rowboat on and invited him aboard. After coming aboard, my father retied his boat properly, and saw that the adults were drunk out of their minds. Someone asked Frank to pilot the boat back to Henderson Bay, which he did easily. He knew the waters well. The only accident occurred when they reached the dock. One of the inebriates fell in the water while trying to tie up the boat.

  In the spring of 1931, F. H. left his patrol duties and moved his little family to Highline, between Tacoma and Seattle. His ever-active mind was always coming up with money-making schemes, most of which didn’t pan out. F. H., along with Babe and another couple, started a dance hall on old Highway 99 known as “The Spanish Castle.” When construction began, my father ceremoniously turned the first spade of dirt. This was the Prohibition era and the fledgling business, a seventeen-thousand-square-foot speakeasy serving alcohol illegally, was successful from the start. Babe worked in the ticket booth, while F. H., an intelligent, mechanically inclined man, made certain the lighting and other systems operated efficiently.

  F. H. worked on his own cars and maintained first-class personal shops wherever he lived. He was always coming up with inventions around the shop—tools and devices to make tasks easier. As money came in from dance-hall profits he purchased a Red Crown service station across the street, where he subsequently spent much of his time. Gasoline sold for fourteen cents a gallon. Red, white and blue banners were draped on either side of the fuel pump, and it had a glass top, so that you could check the purity of the mixture as it ran through the machine. F. H. had an auto repair shop around back. As an incentive to customers he offered free crankcase service.