Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  MAY 28, 1975, MUNICH

  We did after all go to Westerhausen. All the official formalities were successfully negotiated, and we drove from here to Westerhausen in eight hours with our sleeping bags, dog, and a big box full of presents. We stayed in the big house where Imme lived as a child. It is unbelievable that this big house, which Imme so often described, and which always seemed to me something mythical out of an inaccessible past, is now as solid and familiar to me as my own house in Princeton. It is a magnificent house, the only one of its kind in the village, with fourteen acres of garden and woods belonging to it. It stands there, a little dilapidated but still dominating the landscape. It still belongs to Onkel Bruno. In the old days two families lived in it, Onkel Bruno’s family with four children downstairs, Edwin’s family with four children upstairs. The eight children grew up together as one big family. The ninth child, Onkel Bruno’s youngest, was born after Imme came to the West. Now Onkel Bruno and his wife live upstairs with young Bruno and his wife and baby. The downstairs is rented to another family.

  The big house was built by Imme’s grandfather who was also the village doctor in Westerhausen. His two sons Bruno and Edwin were both doctors. When the grandfather retired, Bruno took over the practice and Edwin moved to Berlin. Westerhausen is in Sachsen-Anhalt, southeast of Hanover, in the part of Germany that was overrun in 1945 by General Patton’s third army. After three months of American occupation, that area was handed over to the Russians in exchange for West Berlin. The Americans moved out and the Russians moved in. Westerhausen became part of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic.

  In our honour when we arrived, the whole of Onkel Bruno’s family was there, all five of the children who used to be downstairs, four of their wives and husbands, and nine grandchildren. It was a wonderfully warm and friendly atmosphere. There, where the conditions of life are so much harder and the government so much more oppressive, family ties are strong and unbreakable. It was a happy contrast to our spoiled and squabbling relatives in the West. I was particularly struck by the complete trust they have in one another. They all talk freely of the stupidity and corruption of the government, in a house with twenty-six people running around, and without even bothering to shut the windows. I got to know all of them a little and some of them quite well. The men were all working furiously at a wall which they are building around the estate. The old one had collapsed from a storm and long neglect. Every one of the men is in a job where he is frustrated by the system. Not being party people, they cannot hope to get to positions of real responsibility. So they do their jobs as well as the system allows and save their real energies for weekends. They built this wall in Westerhausen with passion. A more solid job I never saw. Beginning with rock foundations three feet deep, then concrete mixed and poured into wooden forms, all hand-made, and on top bricks and mortar.

  Coming home across the frontier in the car, our children spontaneously began singing American patriotic songs. I never heard them do that before. That is what the DDR does to you. I am glad they now understand a little better how lucky they are.

  AUGUST 1, 1975, LA JOLLA

  Tomorrow I fly to Seattle and Emily will fly out to join me there, and together we will go to Vancouver to visit Katrin. I telephoned with Katrin, and she is delighted to have us for the weekend. So we will see her again after five years. Then on Monday we go north to George’s territory, to Hanson Island, a little island on the north end of Vancouver Island. George is living there with his new boat and hopes to show us his whales. We shall travel partly by road but mostly by boat.

  Last weekend Ken Brower came down here, and I spent two days telling him everything I could think of about George. I like him very much, and we seem to have a lot in common besides our interest in George. He is firmly resolved to go ahead with writing his book. He will come with us to Hanson Island, so he can witness this historic meeting and see me and George together. It is all faintly comic and a bit pathetic, but I shall be glad for practical reasons to have him on the trip. He knows the country and will bring provisions. We shall stay for a week and fly home to Princeton.

  Ken Brower is a writer who writes books mostly about nature and people who live in wild places. He got to know George when George was in Berkeley in 1970. After George built his treehouse north of Vancouver and started building beautiful boats, Ken decided to write a book about him. He offered to organize the trip to Hanson Island, where he would play the role of Boswell to George’s Johnson. I was glad to cooperate in this enterprise, and my daughter Emily was glad to come with us. I wrote a journal of our trip and sent a copy to my sister.

  AUGUST 11, 1975, PRINCETON

  The five days on Hanson Island were like a dream. Or rather, it seems that the life up there was reality and everything here is a dream. Most of the time the weather was fresh and fine, as in the Western Isles of Scotland. From our tents in the quiet of the night, we could hear the rhythmic breathing of whales. It is for the whales that George goes to the island. The people on that island are whale worshippers. Their love for these animals has the passionate purity of a religious experience.

  AUGUST 4 TO 8, 1975, JOURNAL OF A VISIT TO THE NORTHERN ISLES

  MONDAY

  Left Vancouver at five-thirty to catch the early ferry to Nanaimo, with Ken Brower and my fourteen-year-old daughter Emily. Ken drove us north along Vancouver Island to Kelsey Bay. Afternoon ferry from Kelsey Bay to Beaver Cove arriving seven-thirty. My son George was at Beaver Cove waiting for us. I had not seen him for three and a half years. Words from somebody’s parody of A. E. Housman’s “Shropshire Lad” flashed through my head,

  What, still alive at twenty-two,

  A fine upstanding lad like you.

  Because the hour was late and the tide running against us, George did not come in his new six-seater kayak. Instead he came by motorboat with a friend, Will Malloff, who lives on Swanson Island. George had intended to take us to Hanson Island, but Will’s boat had engine trouble and so we all stayed overnight at Will’s place. This was lucky. We sat up half the night listening to Will’s stories.

  Will comes from a Doukhobor village and learned the skills of a pioneer from his Russian-speaking parents. He and his wife came to Swanson Island four years ago with two pairs of hands. Now they have a solid and cozy house for themselves, a guest house for their friends, a farm with a Caterpillar tractor, two boats, and a blacksmith’s forge with a large assortment of machine tools. Will paid for his two square miles of land by felling and selling a minute fraction of the timber that stood on it. Beyond his homestead, the whole island is untouched forest. The homestead is decorated with woodcarvings done by his wife, the house with wrought iron fashioned by Will himself. The conversation turned to one of my favorite subjects, the colonization of space. I remarked to Will that he and his wife are precisely the people we shall need for homesteading the asteroids. He said, “I don’t mind where I go, but I need a place where I can look around at the end of a year and see what I have done.”

  TUESDAY

  Facing Will’s homestead, two miles away across Blackfish Sound, stands Paul Spong’s house on Hanson Island. Paul also lives alone on his island with his wife and his seven-year-old son Yasha. Paul and Will are as different as any two people could be. Paul is every inch an intellectual. He resigned a professorship at the University of British Columbia to come and live here. His house is a ramshackle affair, made of bits of wood and glass, stuck together haphazardly. One side is covered only with a plastic sheet and leaks abominably when it rains. At the dry end are some beautiful rugs, books, and a 250-year-old violin. We arrived at Paul’s place in the morning and found George’s kayak at anchor. George had spent the last winter building it, copying the design from the Aleut Indians. He said the Aleuts knew better than anyone else how to travel in these waters. The kayak is blue, covered with animal designs in the Indian style. It has three masts and three sails, rigged like a Chinese junk.

  George took us inland to see the tree from which
he cut the planks for the kayak. Each plank is thirty-five feet long, straight and smooth and polished. Half of the tree is still there, enough for another boat of the same size. In the afternoon we went out with Yasha in the kayak to look for whales. Since there was no wind and George’s crew was inexpert with the paddles, he turned on his outboard motor. I was glad to see that he is no purist. George merely remarked that we must choose either the whales or the motor but not both. We chose the motor and saw the whales only from a distance. At sunset we lay down in the tents which George had prepared for us, on a rocky point overlooking the sea. The evening was still and clear. Soon we could hear the rhythmic breathing of the whales, puff-puff, puff-puff, lulling us to sleep.

  WEDNESDAY

  It began to rain at midday and continued for about twelve hours. I was glad to taste the life of the pioneers, not only under sunshine and blue skies. George took us out fishing and quickly caught a fifteen-pound red snapper, enough to make a good supper for us all. He spent the afternoon preparing salads and sauces to go with it. The fish itself he baked over Paul’s wood-burning stove. During the afternoon Jim Bates arrived with his girlfriend Allison and their seven-month-old baby. Jim is the man who taught George how to build boats. When George was seventeen he worked for a year with Jim building the D’Sonoqua, a forty-eight-foot brigantine with living quarters on board for ten people. After she was finished, Jim and George with a group of their friends lived on her for a year, cruising up and down the coast. Then George decided he was old enough to be his own master and quit.

  This was my first meeting with Jim. I had already heard much about him from George’s letters and expected to encounter another strong, capable pioneer type like Will Malloff. The reality was very different. Jim came up the beach through the pouring rain on crutches. His back is crippled so that he can barely walk. One stormy night last November, he drove the D’Sonoqua onto the rocks, close by the Indian village from whose God she takes her name. That night, he says, the God was angry. Allison was with him on board, seven months pregnant. Also with them were two little girls, daughters of Allison. Jim got them all safely to shore, but they lost the ship and everything they possessed on her. Now, nine months later, D’Sonoqua is beached not far from Hanson Island, with gaping holes in her bottom, her inside furnishings rotted and wrecked. Jim has not given her up. Every spare minute he drags himself to work on her and dreams of getting her afloat. He is skipper of the D’Sonoqua still.

  I looked into the eyes of this noble wreck of a man, and I saw the true image of Captain Ahab. With his wild, far-away eyes, obsessed with impossible visions, he is destined to drive himself and all those near him to destruction. And I looked into Allison’s eyes, full of patience and gentleness, and saw in them the unconquerable loyalty which will never allow her to abandon this monomaniac to his fate. It was pitch dark when Jim and Allison left. I watched them walk slowly down the beach to the boat, in the dark and pouring rain, Jim on his crutches, Allison carrying the baby in her arms. It was like the last act of King Lear, when the crazy old king and his faithful daughter Cordelia are led away to their doom, and Lear says,

  Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

  The gods themselves throw incense.

  Tragedy is no stranger to these islands.

  THURSDAY

  In the morning it was still raining. Emily and I lay comfortably in our tents while George gave an exhibition of his skill as an outdoorsman. In an open fireplace under the pouring rain, using only wet wood from the forest, a knife, and a single match, he lit a fire and cooked pancakes for our breakfast. In the afternoon the sun came out, and we went for a longer ride in the kayak. This time there was some wind, and we could try out the sails. She sailed well downwind, but without a keel she could make no headway upwind. George had made a pair of hydrofoils, which will be fixed to her sides as outriggers and will give her enough grip on the water to sail upwind. But it will take him another month to make the outriggers and put the whole thing together. In the meantime, we have been improving our skill with the paddles.

  Since Thursday was our last evening on the island, we went to visit with Paul and his family. When it was almost dark, the whales began to sing. Paul had put hydrophones in the water and connected them to speakers in his house. The singing began quietly and grew louder and louder as the whales came close to shore. Then the whole household exploded in a sudden frenzy. Paul grabbed his flute, rushed out onto a tree trunk overhanging the water, and began playing weird melodies under the stars. Little Yasha ran beside Paul and punctuated his melodies with high-pitched yelps. And louder and louder came the answering chorus of whale voices from the open door of the house. George took Emily out in a small canoe to see the whales from close at hand. They sat in the canoe a short distance from shore, and George began to play his flute. The whales came close to them, stopping about thirty feet away, as if they enjoyed the music but did not wish to upset the canoe. So the concert continued for about half an hour. Afterwards we counted the whales swimming back to the open sea, about fiteen in all. They are of the species popularly known as killer whales, but Paul calls them only by their official name, orca.

  Anybody who witnesses this ceremony of the whales cannot fail to be profoundly moved by it. And indeed it is Paul’s purpose to use the whale songs to awaken the conscience of mankind, so that the whales may be preserved from extinction. The ceremony itself has a religious, mystical quality. But one may see and hear it, and be moved by it, without believing that whales are gifted with superhuman intelligence or supernatural powers. The ceremony is a natural one and seems strange only because we are unaccustomed to the idea of a whale behaving like a dog or a horse. Paul considers it an established fact that the whales enjoy and respond to his flute playing. How much more they may understand, he does not pretend to know.

  FRIDAY

  Our last day. It happened to be shortly after new moon, so that the tides were stronger than usual. We woke early to find the sun shining, sat on our rock overlooking the water, and watched the morning birds. Kingfishers skimming below our feet, eagles soaring above our heads. Between Hanson and Swanson Islands, about a mile from shore, there is a strong tide race. That morning it was fierce, making a white streak on the blue sea. By and by we saw a little black speck move into the white area and heard the distant putt-putt of a motor. George saw more than Emily and I did. He said quietly, “Those people have some nerve, going with an open boat into that kind of water.” A few seconds after he spoke, the black speck disappeared and the noise stopped. George at once moved into action. Taking Ken with him, he ran to Paul’s motorboat, an unsinkable affair made of rubber, and within two minutes was on his way out. From the shore we could see nothing for the next half-hour. I roused the Spongs and helped them heat up their stove. Then the rubber boat reappeared, and we could make out four figures in it. They came ashore, and I helped the old man stagger up the beach, his hand in mine as cold as ice. We wrapped them in blankets and sat them down by the stove.

  An old man and a young man, both loggers on strike, had decided to go out with their aluminum boat to dig clams. It was a lovely morning, clear and still. They never imagined that one could capsize on such a morning. Luckily they had had the sense to cling to their capsized boat and not try to swim to shore. But George said they were close to the end when he found them. The old man had not been able to move his arms or legs anymore. In that icy water nobody can last long. While they revived, George cooked hot tea and pancakes on the stove. Then he radioed to their families to send a boat to take them home. The old man afterwards told me how it had felt. He said he knew his life was over and he was ready to go under. When the rubber boat appeared he thought he was seeing visions. Only when Ken and George hauled him aboard did he believe it was real. In the afternoon he and I chatted again over cups of tea. He turned out to be intelligent and well-read, and he asked me many questions about my life and work at Princeton. And I said, “But it seems to me now the best thing I ever did in Princeton w
as to raise that boy.”

  Toward evening a big solid tugboat arrived to take the two loggers home. In the meantime George and Ken had rescued their boat and beached it on Swanson Island, taken their motor apart, and soaked the insides in fresh water. So the loggers went home with their boat and their motor intact, ready for another day. It was now time for us also to depart. George took us in the rubber boat to catch the night ferry going south from Beaver Cove. He was apologetic because we went home empty-handed. He had intended to spend the last day with us salmon fishing, so that we could take with us two big salmon, one for his friends in Vancouver and one for my family in Princeton. I said to him, “You don’t need to apologize. Today you went fishing for something bigger than salmon.” And that was our good-bye.

  Ken Brower’s book The Starship and the Canoe (1978) turned out to be a double biography, half about George and half about me. It told a slightly romanticized story of both of us. It was helpful to George, making him a local celebrity in British Columbia. It was helpful to me, bringing me new friends in the environmental community. It frequently happened that strangers would write to me thanking me for the book, under the impression that I was the author. I hastened to write back telling them that it was actually written by Ken Brower. Looking at the book now almost forty years later, I am grateful to Ken for providing an accurate and perceptive account of the father-and-son drama through which George and I lived, beginning with anger and rebellion, ending with pride and joy.