Dreamer of Dune (3 page)

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.

O
N
F
RANK
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.

Babe was a strong, earthy woman, though barely five feet tall. With informal training as a nurse, she even delivered babies on occasion. One story in particular says a lot about her and F. H., and about the times in which they lived. When F. H. was still on the State Patrol she went on speakeasy raids with him. While her husband and other officers raided the illegal establishments and arrested scofflaws, she waited in the backseat of the patrol car, wearing a big fur coat. “When we pulled out of there,” Babe recalled years later, “I tinkled (with bottles) under my coat.”

Young Frank often read past his bedtime, using a bare lightbulb on the end of an extension cord under his bedcovers, to prevent casting light under the door. The bulb often browned the sheets. He was safe from scolding, though, since now his family could afford to have their laundry done outside the house, and his mother always blamed the laundry company and their mangle.

But trouble was stirring between the dance-hall partners. During their first year of operation they got into a heated argument, in which my grandparents accused their partners of cheating them. In a huff, F. H. and Babe quit the business without compensation, then devoted their full attentions to the service station.

Over the next four decades the Spanish Castle became one of the most celebrated dance halls in the United States, visited by famous bands from all over—a situation that constantly rubbed salt into my grandparents' wounds.

Depressed when they saw what a huge mistake they had made, my grandparents began drinking more heavily than ever. This detracted from the operation of the service station, which was already struggling in the Great Depression. Soon the business went bankrupt and my grandparents lost everything. To make matters worse, Babe was pregnant. Without any source of income, F. H., Babe and Frank (now eleven) moved in with one of the McCarthy families in Tacoma. Frank—commonly called “Junior”
^*
—shared a bedroom with two of his cousins, Thomas and Leonard McCarthy, and each night before they went to sleep regaled them with adventure stories. The boys became like brothers.

After six months, F. H. secured a job as a salesman. This enabled him to move the family to a beach home on Day Island, connected by a short bridge with the city of Tacoma. It was the spring of 1933. In May, Babe gave birth to a baby girl, Patricia Lou. After Dad's family moved to Tacoma, he visited Burley at every opportunity to see his grandparents and his old friend, Dan Lodholm.

Early one morning, just across the channel from Day Island, Frank was fishing but not doing well. It was near Fox Point on Fox Island, where much of the shoreline was densely forested. After a while he noticed a Native American man sitting on the shore, watching him intently. The man, in his late forties, motioned the boy over and showed him how to make a herring dodger, which subsequently worked very well. Over the next two years the man—Indian Henry—and my father became fast friends. Henry was a Hoh, one of the Coast Salish, and lived by himself in an old smokehouse. He semi-adopted Frank, teaching him many of the ways of his people.

This included how to catch fish with your feet, how to poach fish, and how to identify edible and medicinal plants in the forest. The Indian ate sweet red ants and found protein-rich grub worms under logs, which he also ate. The boy tasted ants and worms for the experience of it, but did not develop a taste for them! Henry also taught him how to catch a sea gull by laying a slip knot tied with fishing line on the ground and placing a piece of herring inside. When the bird stepped into the circle of line, the noose was tightened, thus securing one or both of the gull's legs. In
Soul Catcher
(1972), Frank Herbert would write of another hunting technique that he learned from Indian Henry:

Though Indian Henry never admitted as much, his young Caucasian friend—tending toward the melodramatic—became convinced that he was a murderer who had been excommunicated from the tribe. The man hinted at something troublesome in his past, but the boy never obtained details and never felt at risk in his presence. Forty years later, Frank Herbert wrote about many of these experiences in his suspense-packed novel of Indian rage,
Soul Catcher.

After learning how to fish in the Indian way, young Frank always brought back big bunches of fish. Finally a man who operated one of the general stores in Tacoma asked him how he did it. Naively, Frank showed him the dodger. After that, the man marketed identical dodgers, in such volume that he made a tidy sum.

To make extra money my father put a twelve-horsepower King outboard on his rowboat, and used it to tow logs back to shore, where they could be cut into firewood and sold. One day he found a 20'©20'©10' half-submerged container of fine Tennessee white oak, which he pulled in. Some of the wood was wormy, but the bulk of it was in good condition and of considerable value. By this time his family was on its economic feet again, so he got permission from his parents to barter the oak for a twenty-seven-foot sailboat that the owner didn't want, since it had a problem staying upright. By the time he was fifteen, Frank had the sailboat rebuilt and ballasted with concrete, which he poured into the hull. He took fourteen people out sailing once, including a guitarist, a clarinetist, and an accordionist. In those days, my father told me, they called an accordion a “squeeze-me-pull-me.”

On sailing trips, young Frank Herbert liked to sleep out on the deck. Stars lined the roof of the sky over his head, and he memorized the names and locations of constellations and major stars. He learned to use a sextant for navigation.

When he was fourteen, he swam across the Tacoma Narrows, a mile through treacherous currents. A short while later, he and a seventeen-year-old friend, Ned Young, took a small Willits sailing canoe all the way to the fjords of the British Columbia mainland, just south of the Alaskan panhandle, a round trip of nearly two thousand miles. They turned the canoe over on beaches and slept under it. But when they got to the fjords there weren't any beaches, so an Indian woman let them sleep on the porch of her little house, and gave them breakfast.

Through learning of my father's experiences in the outdoors, I've gained an insight into the thought processes that went into his writing. His great “mainstream” novel
Soul Catcher
, about an Indian who could not accept the ways of white men, comes into clearer focus. He also wrote another Indian book, which was never published:
Circle Times
, a fictionalized but historically accurate account of the wars of the Coast Salish. My father admired the link between Native Americans and their environment, the way they lived for centuries in harmony with nature, not wreaking havoc upon it as the white man did. Frank Herbert developed a deep respect for the natural rhythms of nature. The ecology message, so prevalent in much of his writing, is one of his most important legacies.

There is also an interesting, recurrent water-and-ocean theme in his writings, from his submarine novel
The Dragon in the Sea
(1956) to the sand formations of
Dune
(1965) that resemble slow-moving waves upon a great ocean. He was a sailor, fisherman, and swimmer, and would serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He understood the critical importance of potable water to a backwoodsman, hiker and sailor. A tiny drop of water is the essence of all life.

One of my father's earliest short stories, “The Jonah and the Jap”(1946), concerns a seaplane that makes an emergency landing in the China Sea. In “Try to Remember!” (1961), aliens threatening Earth arrive in an immense spaceship that resembles a tiny freshwater organism with cilia. “The Mary Celeste Move” (1964) describes a phenomenon in which people abruptly leave their homes and move far away, often leaving their belongings behind—an idea based upon the mysterious sailing ship Mary Celeste, found floating in 1872 with its passengers and crew missing. “The Primitives” (1966) describes a man named Swimmer who is adept at underwater criminal activities. “The Mind Bomb” (1969) takes place in an oceanside town. “Seed Stock”(1970) concerns a world with a purple ocean, where the primary food source is a creature like a shrimp. “Songs of a Sentient Flute” (with Bill Ransom, 1979), like their collaborative novels
The Jesus Incident
(1979) and
The Lazarus Effect
(1983), involve ocean worlds covered with vast, sentient kelp formations.

As a young man, Frank Herbert was close to his grandmother, Mary Ellen Herbert. A kindly, thin woman with a long face and large round eyeglasses, she favored long dresses with flower prints, and usually wore an apron, even when away from home. Mary usually tied her gray hair in a bun, and it had a beautiful sheen from shampooing with secret ingredients. Some folks in Burley thought it was a concoction of beer and eggs, while others said it was whiskey and olive oil. Mary just laughed at all the guesses.

Though an illiterate country-woman, she was a genius with figures, and no matter how big the numbers were that anyone wanted her to add, subtract, multiply, or divide, she always got the answers right. She instilled a love of math in her favorite grandson, which he employed in his science fiction writings. She also had an incredible memory, and recalled details perfectly from decades before. Mary Herbert was, in effect, a human computer, and she became a model for the Mentats of
Dune
.