A toast as the Greenpeace leaves Vancouver. Clockwise from left: Thurston, Metcalfe, Darnell, Cummings, Hunter, Bohlen, Moore, Simmons.
Gulls yowking, diving, plunging like burst white fragments of a single wing, our wake heaving out behind us gurgling and bubbling, one moment falling down from the stern as though we just soared over a hill, next moment our stomachs being dragged up into a pulpy collision with our lungs and the cold grey boil of the wake wagging over our heads. The boat is rolling like a drum and the horizon is only yards away, coming up like a belch, then dropping out from under, and yet somehow instead of falling we are being pushed into slow, agonizing liftoff, and gravity hauls our stomachs back down like lard into slippery squids of intestine – and then whack thunk, as though a boulder had been thrown against the hull, whoosh, down we surf in slow-mo into another canyon, and up rears the bow like the head of a dying mastodon, each upward heave a last gasp. Whack. Thunk.
We wallow in water suddenly gone still, disengaged from gravity and tides and current, and then we are swing-heaving and lurch-falling again, fumbling through the troughs and clambering to the tops of roaring ocean hills that collapse beneath us. Hiss of water across the old wooden decks, whose brass hatchways to the hold – built for hauls of halibut – are the exact shape of the ecology symbol, the symbol we have on our sail, along with the peace symbol. And the word GREENPEACE, painted in yellow but now almost impossible to see because the black smoke from the chimney behind the wheelhouse has sooted it out. We poor eco-freaks cringe at the pollution. The engine makes its chugging clunking snik snik snik snik, the smoke ghosting out across the sky, white light flaring along the horizon.
Northbound.
Bob Keziere is down in his bunk, face like a squashed grape, long hair sticky with salt, hardly able to talk and certainly not daring to eat. Not that there is much to eat anyway – the cook, Bill Darnell, is collapsed in the bunk above Keziere, face blank, as if involved in some desperate yoga exercise to remove his consciousness from the long yawns and swoop-plunge-lurch-chop takeoffs of the boat and his guts wildly trying to follow. Pat Moore is wedged in between the galley table and the wall, his shoulders pressed back against the wood, feet jammed against the legs of the table, looking like a spaced-out rock star with his frizz of kinky hair and the poster of Richard Nixon above him, Nixon’s face blurry and the words: LET ME MAKE MYSELF PERFECTLY CLEAR. Our language has come down to grunts and mutterings, everyone tight-jawed, stiff, sore, bruised from being tossed against walls and bunks. The only way to move is to grab something and haul yourself along hand over hand.
To sleep, I curl up in a fetal ball on my bunk, ass wedged against the guard rail, knees jammed into the wall, both hands gripping the cold pipe that runs through the bunk, expecting any minute to be flipped right out over the edge of it. The dreams are fantastic: my kids on a grassy hill on a windswept plain, my little girl running up and down the slope in utter silence, the grass flattened by a giant invisible foot stalking across the world, my little boy sitting quietly in the arms of a monkey who has long silky hair and a glint of supreme intelligence in her eyes. She is brooding over the boy and watching the girl as she runs. It is a dream of evolution – the children are all alone but for the Wise One from out of the past, an ancestral mother. The world as I know it is gone. The world is lost . . . my children! Ah, but it’s a dream, not a vision. It can be explained. Swinging from the rafter over my head is the brown monkey doll my daughter gave me, and the hill and the wind are like the storm and the surging falling sea, and this feeling I have – an urge to sob wildly because my children are out of reach, off in some other world and time, and they will never hear me even if I cry out to them – that can be explained too. I miss them.
But there is more. A painful awe opens up inside me. It has been building for days. The sea is the colour of a basilica – granite, limestone, with foam traces of fossil, a hint of archways built of marble – like an immense wrecked cathedral. Standing out on the deck, I have a stoned-out feeling that leaves me tingling and goosebumped, not just from the icy witch-breaths of wind or the terror that this old halibut boat might roll right over and sink. The peace pennants flapping from the rigging, the red and white Canadian flag and the green and gold Greenpeace flag, and above them all, nailed to the top of the mast, the blue and white United Nations flag, all snapping and crackling in the wind. And this old boat – a kind of funky temple, or at least an art object, floundering through the swells. It is incredible that we eco-freaks should be moving out in an assault on the power that put men on the moon, that could blow up the world, in this boat, the Greenpeace, in her other life the Phyllis Cormack.
She is thirty years old, glossy white with lime trim, with strokes of glistening black along the bumpers of her hull, Rorschach strains of rust running down the enamel like dried blood, and rubber tires dangling from her sides like hippie beads. Her railings, ladders, metal instruments, and huge anchors have been gnawed and sculpted by rust, which is turning green from years of salt water breaking over her decks. The varnish on the wooden walls in the wheelhouse and the john have peeled like films of green skin. She seems a solid piece of wood, this longliner, seiner, fish packer, general anything of a boat, 80 feet long, 102 gross tons, powered by a 17-ton Atlas engine with six cylinders, 230 heavy-duty horsepower and an oil-slicked green mass of machinery, a Disney-animated robot city of pumps and spires and pipes and screaming whirring parts. The noise that blows through the bunks when the hatch to the engine room opens is like an elevated train crashing by. Pipes and fittings and hoses run over the decks, geometric arteries and veins, and the life raft mounted beside the battenclaim is like the one that Captain Ahab rode out in to face down the great white whale. The wheelhouse, which the captain calls the Penthouse, is like the conductor’s booth in an old wooden tram. Six wood-frame windows. A night light over the compass bowl with a thick cloth-wrapped wire running down from it like the tube on a hookah. The barometer hangs there, corroded, utterly useless. You have to hammer the depth sounder with your fist to make it work. The mood on the boat is an atmosphere of communion, an aura of High Mass, and far down the long aisle between the rolling sloshing pews stands the skipper, John C. Cormack, a sorcerer alert to invisible presences and forces. The peace and ecology symbols flap on the big green sail above us like hieroglyphs of some weird religion, a whole new Zen-like view of the universe.
Not one of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee members on board the Greenpeace has set foot in church since he was a kid. Jim Bohlen is a composite materials researcher, space technician, builder of geodesic domes and rocket motors made of filament-wound glass-epoxy resin composites; Pat Moore is a forest biological and interdisciplinary computer simulator man; Terry Simmons is a cultural geographer; Bob Keziere is a chemist and photographer; Bob Cummings writes for the psychedelic mind-blown godless Underground Press; Bill Darnell is a full-time organizer for minority causes; Ben Metcalfe is a theatre critic, journalist, former public relations man; Lyle Thurston is a doctor, about as far into existentialism and phenomenology as you can get without being locked up; Dick Fineberg is an associate professor of political science at the University of Alaska. As for myself, I hate churches with a passion, though I will throw the I Ching and admire it as a psychological toy, and generally I agree with Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity.
Darnell (left) and Cummings in the wheelhouse.
Yet this protest is somehow connected to the nerve centre where religion dwells, the experience we know as awe. The feeling of awe fills the boat, fills our heads and stays there, throbbing gently. Dave Birmingham, the ship’s engineer, came into the galley one night shortly after we left Vancouver as we were polishing off the last of the wine someone had donated. We were as raunchy and boozy as guys in a troop train, swearing and singing, and Birmingham said, “I must say I’m disappointed. I’d expected the crew of the Greenpeace to be men of religion.” Hoots of laughter and catcalls. But now, more than a week later, out in the Gulf of Alaska, with the ocean thrashing around us, a giant across whose flanks we skitter like insects, holding our breath lest the giant roll over in his slumber and crush us, some crust has cracked, some veneer of sophistication has begun to flake away. The first time Moore opened a can of butter upside down, the captain flew into a rage. “Don’t you thirty-three-pounders know anything? That’s bad luck!” And then Darnell hung a coffee cup on a hook facing inward instead of outward, and the captain flipped out again. “That’s worse luck! Now you’ve done it! We’re in for it now. . . .” Behind his back, we laughed and shook our heads. Did the old goat really believe that shit? Imagine, a superstitious captain! And yet . . . and yet. . . . Maybe, over the years, sunken boats had been found to have cans in them that were opened upside down, or china cups that faced inward. Maybe it was a pattern – inexplicable, probably coincidental, no doubt meaningless – but. . . .
But now we’re out on the Gulf and the swells are coming in 200-foot strides, like a canyon getting up and walking, and, well, when in Rome . . . so we have decided to play it the captain’s way. He has been out on these waters for forty years, he tells us, and “There’s many a brave heart’s gone down to the bottom of the sea.” He loves to spoon out sea talk, calling us thirty-three-pounders or mattress-lovers, talking about waves “high as treetops,” dismissing the heaving sea as “fuck all” because so far nothing has happened, even though we are already at the point where nobody opens a can upside down and in the morning we all run our eyes nervously over the cups on the hooks. But the awe. That’s real – we all feel it.
In less than a week, if everything goes well, we will be within three miles of Amchitka Island, where the Americans will blast off an underground hydrogen bomb 250 times as powerful as the artificial sun that burned over Hiroshima. It might leak radiation. It might trigger an earthquake. It might set a tidal wave in motion. We will be at the gates of hell, it is as simple as that. Maybe we will wave our microphones and cameras and notebooks like crucifixes at the gate, but our tape recorder and marine side-band radio and cameras and other electronic wands, and the hieroglyphs on our sail and the peace pennants flapping from the rigging, are finally not much protection against radiation and shock waves. Moore brought along a Geiger counter, so at least we will know if the decks are being swept by Strontium-90 or Cesium-136 and we can try to make a run for it. The guys who have already had kids – Metcalfe, Bohlen, Birmingham, and I – will go out on deck in slicks and gumboots and try to wash down the walls, while the other guys hole up in the engine room, trying to keep their genes out of reach of the invisible poisons.
The Bomb itself is awesome. When it is triggered, pressure in the firing chamber will rise to more than a hundred million pounds per square inch in about one-millionth of a second, and the temperature will leap to about a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, instantly vapourizing hundreds of thousands of tons of solid rock, creating a spherical gas-filled chamber in the earth like a giant glazed light bulb. We will be sitting at the edge of the three-mile territorial limit of Amchitka, and the bomb will go off about a mile inland. All ships within fifty miles of the island will have been warned away. The only other human beings in that area will be a group of U.S. Atomic Energy Commission technicians locked up in a concrete bunker mounted on steel springs twenty miles from the test site at the other end of the island, behind a mountain range. The risk? Out of eighty-three underground tests in Nevada, triggered at depths greater than 300 feet, seven tests leaked, so the chances are at least eight out of a hundred. But Nevada is a relatively stable geological area. By contrast, the Aleutian Islands have been described by one geographer as “the scene of some of the freakiest geological happenings on the planet,” where earthquakes strike several times a week and volcanoes are still active. No one knows how much greater that makes the chance of radiation leakage
Two previous tests have been done at Amchitka: a “small” eighty-kiloton blast in 1964 – conducted in secret – and a one-megaton blast in 1969. The first explosion, code-named Longshot, leaked. The second, Milrow, did not. It is a small sample, but the leakage record for tests on the island is one hit, one miss. This third blast will be five times as large as Milrow. It will be called Cannikin, which sounds like something out of the worst early 1950s science fiction pulp magazines – a beast name, like a monster in Lord of the Rings, an atomic fire-breathing dragon. This is the mythical overtone. We are like Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves attempting to get to the lair of Smaug. No – more like the Fellowship of the Ring – the Ring of Power, which for us is the closed-circle ecology symbol – and we are on our way to the dread dark land of Mordor, and Amchitka is Mount Doom, and Cannikin is the very Crack of Doom. Somehow we have to hurl the Ring of Power into the fire and bring down the whole kingdom of the Dark Lord, whose blurred face looks out from the poster in the galley. We are the Fellowship of the Piston Rings. And if there is a sorcerer aboard, a Gandalf the Grey, it is Captain John Cormack, for he is the only one with the magic knowledge that will get us across the ocean and through whatever perilous passes and storms we will run into along the way.
Thurston on deck.
To the rest of us, who have almost no practical experience with the sea, the ocean itself is mythical territory. Moore opens another can upside down and we all pounce and throw the cursed thing overboard. Then fall into giggling fits, we space technicians and hard-nosed journalists, academics, and political radicals, floundering in confusion as we try to grasp new responses appropriate to this weird scene. We should have brought the I Ching. We should have brought a lot of things. But it’s too late now. The awe. . . .
Not just the wonder and vastness of the open sea, but the screwy things that have been happening all the way. Like the synchs Tom Wolfe talks about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The synchs happen with mysterious regularity, pieces falling together naturally, forces slipping into play, combinations of events and people so perfect, so beautiful, so weird and unlikely that it rocks our heads, it loosens the old logic, it drives us deeper into the growing sense of awe and magic, the sense that we are part of a vast unfolding pattern of events.
When the journalists among us – Metcalfe, Keziere, and I – attacked the Amchitka plan in print, we had freely used the phrase “nuclear John Wayneism.” One of my pieces, which was read into the Congressional Record in the U.S.A., said that Amchitka might be the Custer’s Last Stand of the weapons-makers. And then, on the very day we pulled out of Vancouver – September 15, 1971 – who pulled in at Victoria, just across the Strait of Georgia, in his converted minesweeper? John Wayne, the reincarnation of mad George Custer himself. Asked about our protest voyage to Amchitka, the arch-cowboy growled, “They’re a bunch of Commies.” It was perfect. Canadians should “mind their own business,” he said With B.C. right in the path of any radiation leaking from Amchitka, right in the path of any tidal wave that might sweep across the Pacific, Wayne’s statement wiped out any remaining public opposition to our protest. Even local ultra-conservatives were suddenly yelling, “Yankee go home!” and cheering us on.
And then, two days out of Vancouver, heading up through Johnstone Strait around the northeast tip of Vancouver Island, we got a radio message from the town of Alert Bay, asking us to stop in. A group of people came down to the dock and gave us a couple of fresh coho salmon. Two Kwak’waka’wakw women, Lucy and Daisy Sewid, came aboard to give us the support of all the aboriginal people on the west coast. They invited us to stop in on the way back and carve our names on a totem pole they were carving, which would be the tallest one in the world. The arch-cowboy was against us and the Indians were on our side.
I had brought along a book called Warriors of the Rainbow, a collection of Native legends and prophecies. In it was a core legend that predicted a time when the Natives would be almost completely wiped out by the white man, and the forests would be chopped down and the water and the skies poisoned. At that time the Natives would rediscover their spirits and teach the white man how to live in the world without wrecking it. They would become Warriors of the Rainbow. Thus baptized by the Kwak’waka’wakw, we headed on up the coast, shaking our heads and laughing at the perfect coincidence. Some time later, Chief Dan George, the only Native North American ever to come within arm’s reach of an Oscar, spoke out publicly against the test. Chief Dan was one of Lyle Thurston’s patients, and when Thurston heard the news, he lay back in his bunk and chuckled and chortled, muttering over and over again, “Unreal! Unreal! Absolutely unreal, man!” John Wayne and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission vs. Chief Dan George and the Warriors of the Rainbow.
Down in the bunkroom – which we renamed the Opium Den because the ten bunks are stacked in twos in a space the size of a bathroom – someone has tacked up posters of a magnificent ancient blue frigate, ornate as a gingerbread house. Its name is Friendship Frigate, and the sunset into which it sails is pure psychedelic – golden flows of lava and a giant popcorn cloud white as the gulls spilling down around its sails. Down through a cosmos of the blown mind the frigate rides into new eras and new depths of being, a flagship of the Aquarian Age. On its sail, delicate as the pattern on a butterfly wing, is the peace symbol. With that and the ecology symbol, we are one step farther out than Friendship Frigate.
Up the Inside Passage along the west coast we have chugged, flagship of the new consciousness, the Warriors of the Rainbow attacking a nuclear Little Big Horn, with the prayers of the Indians behind us, plowing smoothly through a great technicolor eruption of Beautiful British Columbia postcards, the sweetest Indian summer on the coast in years, the sun sending three-dimensional spots of pure light down on the beer commercial blue waters, mountain slopes rising like perfect Zen states above walls of forest surrounding the boat, rocks drifting by with seams like ancient faces – and down through the narrow passages blew thousands and millions of seeds, each large enough to be an angel insect dancing above the water, glinting like snowflakes against the purple shadows. North through the Strait of Georgia, into Discovery Passage, over the hump of Vancouver Island, through a maze of channels and inlets and sounds and bays and passes and rivers and creeks, up along Johnstone Strait into the wide island-littered mouth of Queen Charlotte Sound, and immediately the motion of the boat changed from slow caboose to long glides of flow and rise, ripples transformed into great booms of rolling water. Then, as suddenly as they had come, the swells were gone, and we were in the shelter of Calvert Island and moving up Fitz Hugh Sound, turning west at Denny Island, through the tight narrow channel of Lamas Passage, winding northward again past Bella Coola, then west out to Milbanke Sound, north into Finlayson Channel, up the long bow of Princess Royal Channel into Wright Sound – a nexus of disintegrating jigsaw puzzle pieces of island, and up the avenue of Grenville Channel, out into Dixon Entrance. Now the faint silver veins of the mountains are engulfed by the swells, and our last glimpse of the continent is a line of rubble, early winter dusk rising like smoke, cold breaths of sea witches fogging the portholes and chilling the decks, sunset a flare of white in the puddles and foam on the poop deck, billows of cloud with traces of dark brass.
The crew of the Greenpeace, photographed by crew-member Keziere. Clockwise from top left: Hunter, Moore, Cummings, Metcalfe, Birmingham, Cormack, Darnell, Simmons, Bohlen, Thurston, Fineberg.
It was never our intention to go to Amchitka and park there through Zero Hour to protest against war. We are eco-freaks, arguing that the world itself was being destroyed. Even without war, we are doomed. Even if the nuclear button is never pressed, within fifty or sixty years we will pass the point of no return and planet Earth will no longer be fit for human life. Cannikin is as much a monster of pollution as of war machinery, and it is the spectre of a dead world that haunts us, that drove us out against the Cold Warriors in this funky old boat.
As it turns out, the northern B.C. coast cannot have been a more perfect place to pass through on our way to Amchitka. It is already the graveyard for a civilization that was devastated by disease, and another that is in the process of decay. Abandoned canneries stand along the shores – patchworks of warehouses made of rusting corrugated sheet metal, broken windows, sheds perched on barnacled pilings, wood collapsed as though burned and swathed in gauze, bull kelp floating among the sagging wharves, jellyfish drifting in the silence. Streams leak down into tiny deltas that gurgle across moon-beds of tideflats, past the wrecks of old fishing boats. Under the impact of technology, the herring population has been dying off. Now the halibut are dwindling and whales are rare. One by one the canneries have been closing down, and as the fish died off, the government stopped issuing fishing licences and cut down on the number of fishermen. The white men devastated the land and then retreated, leaving the Natives to live among the derelict canneries and boats along the beaches. In the Greenpeace we chugged up past stretches of coastline whose deathly silence was like a forewarning of what was to come – the West has already begun its great fall.
Set back in the lush, cool forest, where we couldn’t see them, stood hundreds of petrified creatures, symbols of an earlier devastation, the attack on the magnificent civilizations of the Coast Salish, the Nuuchah-nulth, Kwak’waka’wakw, Bella Coola, Haida, and Tsimshian. No new totem poles or housefronts had joined the aging ones standing like death masks, the skulls splintered and the huge eyes staring out as though hypnotized, tall gods thrown down in a slow green explosion. Some vibration lay tingling on the water, a mood of awe. Another synch – on our way to try to prevent a blow to our own civilization, we pass through the land of one that barely survived its own terrible blow. Destruction happens. Whole civilizations die. There is almost a buzz in the air.
On Sunday, four days out of Vancouver, we were up in the Penthouse and Thurston reverently stacked two stereo cassettes in the wooden tray in front of the wheel – Beethoven’s Fifth and a Moody Blues album, On the Threshold of a Dream. We were all bruised and numb from the batterings of the last few days, groggy from anti-seasickness pills, and the music of the Moody Blues rises from the tape recorder like a flock of birds.
Tell us what you’ve seen
In faraway forgotten lands
Where empires have turned back to sand.
Well, we had seen abandoned canneries and old wrecked fishing boats, and we had picked up a mysterious psychic buzz emanating from the staggered totem poles, and we had seen that fish and whales were dying off and that immense tracts of forest along the coast had been stripped bare. The steering wheel was a torture rack at first, like trying to guide a herd of elephants with one thin rein, and the boat zigzagged slowly for the first few days, swinging one way, then the other, each of us grunting and grappling furiously with the wheel, trying to keep her on course. But the wheel evolved into a mandala, and the chain that clattered and rattled through the first few nights as we swung her wildly this way and that was clinking now like the bracelets of a Tibetan princess.
Sweeps of clouds and light. Triumphs of music moving through the Penthouse as solemnly as the sea. Now not only were we being borne along like a tram, we were being swept by electric swells, rocked in long pendulum-swings of sound. The sunset was the colour of a cataract, but now the light moved up the spectrum only to the lower hues of brass, which matched exactly the mood of the music. Lyrics came through between plunges and wallowings of the boat.
It all unfolds before your eyes.
The music was full of the crashing of cymbals and deeps of a piano. It plunged, it rose, harpsichord passages trailed out like thin wires, organ swells advanced from out in the silence, drumbeats were lured into its orbit, concertos were mustered like storms. It trickled, rained, flowed down through our heads, pianos surfacing like whales, racing toward us with twitching keyboards.
Now you know how nice it feels.
Thurston swayed in the movement of the boat, eyes closed, music crashing down through his mind, toppling him into realms beyond the reach of words. He was humming and conducting the orchestra, which was like calling forth the waves and pulling the clouds across the sky and making the boat surge and pause as it groped through the swells. Everything was in motion, inside Thurston’s head and out. The boundaries had all dissolved. He was back in oceanic consciousness. Thurston, born in Saskatchewan, was perfect material for a sailor – no fear of wide open spaces. No fear, period, as far as I could see, although he did mention that being the ship’s doctor was the best job on a boat until something went wrong, and then it was the worst. The music soared through the Penthouse and echoed down into the Opium Den, luring the other crew members. Moore climbed up through the hatchway. Fineberg wedged himself between the radar and the door. Darnell shed enough seasickness to join us, wearing an engineer’s cap, a string of beads, and flaming yellow suspenders. Keziere groped his way up out of his bunk, still sick and weak, but grooving on the meshings of music and sea motion. Thurston went on conducting the orchestra while I took my turn at the wheel, Cummings puffed on a pipe, and Simmons slouched under the depth sounder, chin bursting with the first prickles of red beard, hands disappearing into the pockets of his blue nylon jacket as though amputated. We all swayed with the Greenpeace and the Moody Blues, jammed together like commuters on a train, saying nothing, just humming along, riding up and up and up to white sky and grey sea and dark varnish-peeling wood and pale wasted faces, down down down toward the bottom of a wide sea valley with a canyon of water marching toward us.
Then the radio room door opened and Bohlen hauled himself into the packed Penthouse, coughing from all the cigarette smoke. “Well,” he said, “the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” He was right – that’s exactly what we looked like, only shaggier and shabbier and more wasted.
He pointed at the tape recorder right beside the compass. “Hey, isn’t that going to throw the magnet off?”
“Nah,” somebody reassured him.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
Actually we weren’t sure, but the scene was so delightful, nobody wanted to mess it up.
In fact, the tape recorder did affect the compass. While we were grooving on the Moody Blues, the Greenpeace wandered ninety miles off course. It was no sweat off our noses – we were well ahead of schedule, at least eleven days to go before Cannikin was expected to go off. But our accidental side trip cost the American taxpayers something like $22,000.
We made no effort to cover our tracks. Metcalfe regularly radioed our position and course to his wife Dorothy. And Dorothy got a request from the Coast Guard commander in Juneau to keep them “posted” – just in case we got in trouble. Wouldn’t want the boys to run into bad weather and not be able to find them. Sure, sure. So on Monday, the day after the Moody Blues sent us off course, a notice went up on the flight schedule board at Kodiak: SEARCH CAN VES GREEN PEACE, and the 17th District of the U.S. Coast Guard, armed with specific data about our speed, position, and course, dispatched a Navy plane, a Hercules HC-130 from Kodiak, Alaska, to run out over the Gulf and get some pictures of us for identification purposes later on. The tab on one hour of flying time for a Hercules was $1,100, and they spent ten hours tracking us because the CAN VES GREEN PEACE wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
Late Monday night the Hercules swung back into Kodiak, not having found a trace of its prey. At the headquarters of the 17th District, the only conclusion to draw was that we had deliberately deceived the Coast Guard, that we were sneaky bastards, and that if we could elude them on the open seas in our thirty-year-old fishing boat that does no more than nine knots at full throttle, what tricks must we have up our sleeves for later, when we got close to Amchitka?
Aircraft surveillance by a U.S. Navy plane dispatched from Kodiak, Alaska.
Yesterday morning the notice went back up on the flight board: SEARCH CAN VES GREEN PEACE. And the Hercules came gliding across the waves at us like a silver steel albatross on the hunt, four long fingers of smoke trailing from its wings, sound mounting from a hiss to a whine to a mutter, a moan, a howl, huuuuuuuuuuuu, down to a wail, a rumble, a faraway wind. Then out and out it headed in the opposite direction. It banked and took another run, like a strafing run, except that the side door was open and they were shooting us with their cameras. Keziere fired back with his Leica, and Metcalfe trundled out the sleek Japanese 15mm movie camera loaned to us by the National Film Board. They took pictures of us for the record and we took pictures of them for the record, and it was a war between two motion picture studios making two completely different movies with completely different bad guys. It was a McLuhan-type war, a war of the icons, a public relations struggle.
In addition to the $22,000 we estimate the Coast Guard spent finding us and photographing us, the Atomic Energy Commission is going to have to spend plenty on public relations to patch up the damage. We have planned for a high level of exposure in the mass media. The only way we can make any impact is to keep ourselves in the spotlight the whole time. That’s why we emphasized media when we selected the crew. Metcalfe would handle public relations. He’d send reports every night to Dorothy, who would immediately dispatch them to radio, TV, newspapers, and wire services. Cummings would file his stuff with Vancouver’s underground paper, The Georgia Straight, which would pass it on to all the underground papers in Canada, the U.S., and Europe via the Liberation News Service. I would pump out a daily column to The Vancouver Sun. Fineberg would get stories out to papers in Alaska and to a small radical wire service called Dispatch International, based in Washington, D.C.
With the delivery of this information to the media as our sling, we will hurl our stone – the Greenpeace – against the American Goliath. Our boat is to be a tiny domino that we will push so that it falls against the larger domino of public opinion in Vancouver. That larger domino will topple the giant domino of public opinion right across Canada, and that giant piece might fall hard enough to knock down the super-pyramid of public opinion in the United States. The last decade of turmoil in the U.S. fused the Civil Rights movement with the anti-war movement, which had its roots in Ban the Bomb, a worldwide campaign that started in Great Britain in the 1950s. Civil Rights demonstrations and peace marches made the walls tremble. Now, virtually overnight, a vast environmental movement has come into being, born out of a sudden awareness that the planet itself is being destroyed. We need to pull this trinity of changes together, fusing the clenched fist and the broken cross and the closed circle of unity. Here, with the notion of Greenpeace, is an alliance that might finally wrest the Cold Warriors out of the control tower. In these times, what larger ambition can be dreamed? It is as monumental a quest as for the Ring of Power.
But power corrupts. Each of us runs the risk of being corroded, like the Bearer of the Ring. Just when Frodo the Hobbit finally reaches the Crack of Doom and is ready to hurl the Ring into the fire to bring down the kingdom of the Dark Lord, the poor guy finds that he can’t let go of the Ring. Its power has corrupted him, taking over his soul.
Metcalfe sensed early in the voyage that we might be in for some heavy shocks and trials, and he gave us two warnings. First, “Fear success.” Second, “Beware of paranoid grandiosity.” Here’s the Encyclopaedia Britannica definition: “Paranoid grandiosity tends to be well organized, relatively stable and persistent. The complexity of delusional conviction varies from rather simple beliefs in one’s alleged talent, attractiveness or inspiration to highly complex, systematized beliefs that one is a great prophet, author, poet, inventor or scientist. The latter extreme belongs to classical paranoia.” Well, the Greenpeace, suffused with our grand ambition to cripple the Megamachine of the nuclear weapons makers, is a floating paranoid grandiosity trap. The ambition gets into our heads, tricking us into thinking we are a hundred or ten thousand times as important as we are, and this can warp our perception of reality. Careful, careful. Tread gingerly along the wire, boys! We have to keep talking each other down from bad paranoid grandiosity trips. Remember, we’re just a dozen middle-class cats out here on an old boat, away from our warm, comfortable Canadian Hobbit holes. All we can hope to do is concentrate public attention on the test at Amchitka, to provide a focal point for opposition – which is growing all the time. All we’ll be doing is what millions of other people have already done – establish a picket line, a floating picket line.
But the trap is slippery with quicksilver. Just before we reached the open sea, the Prime Minister of Canada tried to raise us on the radiophone. He couldn’t get through, but he did issue a statement opposing the test. It was a major political victory – and the beginning of a transformation. In its final edition on Monday, the day the Hercules went out looking for us, The Vancouver Sun ran a full eight-column headline: TRUDEAU CONDEMNS TEST AT AMCHITKA, followed by an article that Dorothy Metcalfe read to us triumphantly over the radio:
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau issued a statement Sunday condemning the proposed Amchitka nuclear test – but he failed to get the message to the crew members of the Greenpeace protest vessel. A spokesman for Greenpeace said in Vancouver that Trudeau tried to contact the crew via radio, but the ship was in the Grenville Channel near Prince Rupert and out of radio contact. She is sailing towards Amchitka Island off Alaska in an attempt to halt the nuclear test schedule by the United States government for sometime during the next few weeks. Trudeau’s statement notes his “great concern for an issue which is causing anxiety to Canadians generally and so very much more so to the citizens of B.C.” The statement continues: “The proposed underground nuclear testing at Amchitka has been the subject of numerous consultations between the Canadians and U.S. governments. The Canadian government has informed the United States administration that it cannot agree with the proposed testing and that we believe all such tests should be halted. . . .” Meanwhile, a protest telegram containing 6,000 names was sent to U.S. President Richard Nixon Sunday night by the Canadian Coalition To Stop The Amchitka Bomb.
Well, hurray hurray! It had been a long time since a protest got the backing of a head of state. We cheered – a bit. It was a wishy-washy statement, and when you boiled it down and examined the remains, it was pure cabbage talk. Trudeau merely acknowledged that there was a lot of public feeling against the test. Norman Mailer observed: “In a modern state, the forces of propaganda control leaders as well as citizens, because the forces of propaganda are more complex than the leaders.” But hold on. Nobody thinks for a moment that we can do a single thing to halt the test, unless the Atomic Energy Commission is far more worried about radiation leakage than they admit. If so, they will have to find some way to bust us or kick us out of the area, because if it does leak, and that Geiger counter of Moore’s starts clicking away, we’ll be on the radio getting the news back as fast as we can. And if we get sprayed with radiation, the Atomic Energy Commission will be stuck with a dozen martyrs on its hands, and maybe they don’t like that idea. But halt the test? Careful, now! Fear success, boys! It’s true that right from the day Bohlen announced to the press that a ship would be going to Amchitka, the word “blockade” had been bandied about. Some serious arguments were even put forward to the effect that the Greenpeace may be the straw that breaks the Megamachine’s back. If enough political pressure can be brought to bear, if the issue fires up enough people, if we draw enough attention to the island, then our presence offshore might be enough to tip the scales.
At the same time, there is a weird absence of ego in the protest. The United States can blow up the world if it wants. Can we really pretend to ourselves that we can throw the Cold Warriors to the floor? Maybe we are too modest, too rational. Maybe we need more ego, not less. Enough ego to imagine that we can throw down the empire. The energy that motivates us, that built up the venture and sustained it through amazing transformations, is generated by the urge to stop the bastards. Yet here we are, at the very speartip of the attack, trying to stay cool, to keep our perspective. The call from Trudeau had the effect of making us the unofficial official Canadian Navy, and now the media are watching us like hawks. If the paranoia level twitched upward at the U.S. Coast Guard when their Hercules failed to find us, it was nothing compared to the convulsion of paranoid grandiosity that shuddered through the Greenpeace when we found out that the Prime Minister picked up the phone. Now we had all of Canada behind us.
The pictures that the Yanks took from the Hercules would have shown them clearly that in addition to the life raft near the stern and the two inflatable rafts up behind the Penthouse, there is an aluminum skiff and an outboard motor lying out on the poop deck. In fact, we have seriously discussed the possibility of three or four of us leaping into the skiff at the last minute and making a run for the island. We know that Captain John will not enter the three-mile territorial limit. If he does, his vessel can be confiscated, and each of us is subject to a $10,000 fine and ten years in jail. He will be powerless to stop us from jumping into the skiff in the last hours before the bomb goes off and racing across the water to make a landing on the island. That is, if anybody is willing to do it. The question is open. Each of us will have to make his own decision. At first I guessed that Bohlen and Moore might try it. They strike me as the most radical of the bunch. Will I join them? Well, goddamn, it is going to be an exquisite moment of torture. The mirror will flare to unbearable intensity and there, stark naked and absolutely visible, will be the revelation of each of our essential inner selves, too vivid for any of us ever again to pretend to strength, passion, or conviction that we do not have.
Thurston in his bunk, writing.
It is not the thought of certain death that hangs me up, it is the thought of rotting in jail for ten years. It is hard enough to go through the agony of deciding to go on the damn boat in the first place. Life is sweet in these years on the west coast of Canada, and though the Golden Age is near its end, storms of environmental ruin lie ahead, the oceans will die, the whales and fish will disappear, the land will be poisoned, and the cities will become rat traps of rape and murder and mayhem as they are already becoming in America, and though soon enough radiation will begin to leak from all those places where it is trapped underground or in lead-lined tanks, and though the world will be a gas chamber and a sink hole and millions of people will be killed by famines and plagues – though all of this comes down on our heads like an avalanche, life is still sweet on the west coast. Canada is like the Shire where the peace-loving Hobbits live, sucking on their pipes and eating six times a day, and I don’t want to leave it, leave my wife and kids and good friends and cozy Establishment job. Shit, no.
The other guys on the boat, including Bob Cummings, who is supposed to be our ambassador from the Land of Counterculture, live lives no less sweet. Doc Thurston is, well, a doctor, Moore and Keziere and Simmons work for Establishment universities, Metcalfe for the Establishment Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Bohlen for the Establishment Government of Canada. Birmingham owns a hunk of land on Vancouver Island and the skipper belongs to the Shipowners Association, the capitalists of the fishing industry, even if he is very much a working-class hero who worked his way up from a deckhand job. Even Darnell, an organizer of minority and environment causes, works for the Company of Young Canadians, a government-funded make-work program that is about as revolutionary as the Boy Scouts. We all live sweet lives, we are part of an aristocracy, so it is doubly hard for us to get our asses moving. We decided that something had to be done, that it wasn’t enough just to write and talk about it, that we needed a real life-or-death engagement. To have gone through all of that and to arrive at a point where we are actually floundering across the Gulf of Alaska, with storms lying up ahead and dangerous passes to manoeuvre in a boat that a number of fishermen told us is too broken-down to get us through, on our way toward the very gates of twentieth-century hell – well, it changed us. It was a tremendous relief finally to be in motion, finally to have joined the army, to be on our way to a battlefield in a war that has to be waged if the tailspin of pollution and war is ever to be halted. A revolution is in the works – nothing less will turn the tide – and once you have joined the Revolution, brothers and sisters, you are smack at the doorway leading into the Temple of Paranoid Grandiosity.
And meanwhile, our tender asses are smarting. Life has become distinctly uncomfortable. Thurston’s porthole leaks and icy water keeps splashing over his feet, while his head is wedged against the wall containing the chimney that runs up from the engine room, which is usually about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and the thunder of the great Atlas blasts continually from below, and a transom in the floor of the radio room directly above the Opium Den lets through all the LSD shrieks and whistles coming out of the radio at night when Metcalfe or Cummings or I try to get our reports through storms of static to Vancouver (the radio doesn’t work during the day because of all the electromagnetic convulsions lying between us and the shore). What sounds! From the radio comes the noise of a torture chamber, or a lizard being hatched at the dawn of time, screeches and squawks and wild whimpering gurgles. All of this as we try to sleep, while the sound from the engine below – well, a power lawn mower would be a hum in comparison. Explosions of gasoline and air rubbing, clanking, vibrating, spent gases detonating, the fan belt screaming for help, explosions within explosions, cylinders and pistons pounding. Then there’s the clattering and crashing of pots and pans all night long, china dishes smashing on the galley floor, and the weird noises of the sea. What was that? Sounds like . . . like . . . would you believe two giant squids copulating? An enormous underwater bat rubbing its leathery wings against the hull? A human skeleton rattling around in a big tin box? A huge wet kiss being planted on the porthole from outside? Easy to understand where myths and legends about sea monsters come from. You could freak out at night, lying in your bunk, sure that you heard the slap flap flop of a monster from the Black Lagoon walking around on the decks. No chance of sleeping, not with all those noises and the boat still doing its drum-roll acrobatics, great sudden thumps as though – I swear – a boulder has just hit the hull.
And then there’s the problem of having amateurs at the wheel. One night Metcalfe is half asleep on duty in the Penthouse – a sensory deprivation chamber at night, since Cormack insists on no light except for the tiny bulb over the compass, “otherwise you can’t see a damn thing outside.” (But John, I can’t see a damn thing anyway. “Goddamn weak-eyed landlubbers can’t even see at night!”) – and he gets caught unawares by an enormous wave. A sudden lurch, sudden kamikaze leaps of chinaware from the shelves in the galley, exploding like grenades, clatter whang ching of frying pans and kettles and tin cups, and the boat takes a sickening sideways plunge like a buffalo that’s been shot. Metcalfe is thrown down but hangs onto the wheel, whirling the whole boat around, and by the time he can get to his feet and stop the mad spin of the wheel, the boat, which was going due west, is suddenly going due east, and four or five of us have been thrown out of our bunks. Up in the radio room, above the skipper, the wooden guard rail on Fineberg’s bunk breaks when his body is hurled against it, and he sails through the air and lands with a horrible thud. To the rest of us down below, it sounds like the whole Penthouse is splitting and breaking off. Splash and whack of waves snapping against my porthole like wet towels. God, we’re going down! “Oh, fuck around,” yells Thurston. “Shape up, Metcalfe, or you’re fired! Goddamn, what’m I doing here!” Moore: “Isn’t it awful?” Darnell: “Bhleeeee.” Keziere: “Yuks.” He has barely begun to get over his seasickness, and now his stomach is collapsing back into the stew pots. Moving like a man half paralyzed, he gets up and gropes his way to the galley and out the door to puke. No sooner has he pushed open the door than a vast screaming silver and black amoeba of water hits the deck like a thousand sheets of plate glass, soaking him and almost washing him away. “Fuck’s sake,” he mutters, “a guy can’t even have a decent puke around here.”
Somebody starts whistling “We Love You, Greenpeace” – our theme song. We picked it up at Klemtu, the Kitasoo fishing village in Finlayson Channel, 355 miles up the coast from Vancouver. We’d put in there so Cormack could do some welding on a boiler plate, way back in the days when we were chugging up the Inside Passage. My, doesn’t that seem a long time ago, even though we have only been out on the open sea for three or four days – or is it five? The Kitasoo kids had converged on the old rotting wharf where we were moored (symbolic abandoned cannery looming behind them), excited because Keziere and Moore and Thurston and I looked like real hippies, and white society has never produced a figure so loved by Native children as the hippie. “Wow, they look just like us!” It could even be argued that the appearance of the hippie signalled the beginning of the great reversal in white Western society, what with the grandchildren of the cowboys turning out to be more like Indians than spacemen. The only link these kids have with the weird futuristic supercivilization a couple of hundred miles down the coast – as far out of reach as the moon for most of them – is television, and on television they had watched the Greenpeace depart from Vancouver. And here we were, the first television image that had ever come to life in front of them. They swarmed over the decks and hung around for the whole five or six hours we were there.
We walked through the village and rapped with anyone who could talk to us, then slunk back to the boat, guilty and depressed because of the bum deal the Indians were getting, how badly they’d been ripped off by us white people. Now the kids wanted us to come out on deck and perform whatever magic tricks we had done to get ourselves on television. As a matter of fact, we put on a not-bad show. They sang songs and Metcalfe swung out on the upper deck with his tape recorder. The rest of us straggled out on the deck, one by one, in a much better mood, having finished off a couple of bottles of wine and the last of the salmon we’d been given at Alert Bay. The kids went through a bunch of nursery rhymes and the national anthem, to which Keziere responded, “Can’t you do better than that, you kids?” and then they struck up a catchy tune, “We Love You, Conrad,” from the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie. After a couple of rounds, the kids started yelling at us to tell them our names. One by one Metcalfe shouted out our names, and one by one the kids sang:
We love you, Uncle Ben,
Oh yes we do,
We love you, Uncle Ben (or Bob or Bill or Dave or Pat or Lyle),
And we’ll be true,
When you’re not near to us, we’re blue,
Oh Uncle Ben, we love you.
The vibes were terrific. Then Darnell shouted, “What do you think of Greenpeace?” And the kids, with us singing along as loud as we could, burst into a beautiful full-throated passionate rendition:
We love you, Greenpeace,
Oh yes we do,
We love you, Greenpeace,
And we’ll be true. . . .
And as the boat chugged away into the darkness, the kids were still singing, “Oh Greenpeace, we love you,” and tearing off their headbands and plastic peace symbols and rings made of beads and throwing them at us and cheering and yelling and whooping, and we were all gathered out on the stern, singing back at them, “We love you, Klemtu!” Damn if Bohlen and I weren’t almost crying by the time it was over.
Since then, whenever things get rough, somebody starts singing or humming “We Love You, Greenpeace” as an anthem, a gentle reminder that it’s a good cause, and let’s not blow our cool. Like now, the boat having swung around 180 degrees while Metcalfe crashed to the floor of the Penthouse, Fineberg crashed to the floor of the radio room, pots and pans and china dishes crash everywhere, and the squid-ink darkness envelops us, waves breaking across the decks, most of us convinced in our half-asleep stupor that the old boat has finally given up the ghost and we are on our way down to Davy Jones’ locker – now we all start singing “We Love You, Greenpeace” between fits of swearing and complaining. Only a couple more weeks, guys, then it’ll all be over and – touchy touchy wood – we’ll all be safe and sound back in our little Hobbit holes and puffing on our pipes and telling fantastic stories about the fire-breathing dragon and the dread land of Mordor and how Captain Cormack’s Lonely Hearts Club Band went out to save the world by. . . .
“Did you say a couple of weeks?” moans Cummings from directly below me. “Aaaaarrrghhh!” Poor Cummings. A year ago – no, longer than that, two years ago – he was described in The Rolling Stone as being “close to the breaking point.” As managing editor of The Georgia Straight, he had been busted repeatedly. The Straight – acknowledged as the most harassed and hassled underground paper in North America – faced so many charges at one point that the editor stood to go to jail for a total of seventeen years. The strain had got to Cummings. He had finally resigned as managing editor and spent the summer recuperating in Mexico. But now he is getting that harassed look again.
Then the blow lands. Moore and Darnell and I are down in the galley when the skipper comes tromping in from the poop deck and says, “Test’s been delayed.” Wham. We let out three simultaneous groans. We are eight days out of Vancouver and within one day’s sailing of the Aleutians, and from there it is only a matter of 400 miles to Amchitka. The delay, according to the newspapers, will set the test back until at least early November. The effect on us is something like what an astronaut might feel if he was descending in his module toward the surface of the moon, and the moon suddenly leapt fifty billion miles away.
We convene a meeting in the galley, which at this moment becomes the boardroom of Greenpeace Inc. There are several questions with no answers attached. Is the report accurate? Is it a trick cooked up by the Atomic Energy Commission to throw us off the track? Or is that pure paranoid grandiosity? The thing is, we don’t have the faintest idea whether the Greenpeace matters or not. It may be that by parking so close to the blast, we are creating a bad political situation for the weapons freaks. Canadian-American relations are at a low point because of a number of otherwise unrelated factors, like trade issues and the Vietnam war and dealings with China. Inevitably, the opposition building up against the test back home is taking on anti-American overtones. Even U.S. congressmen and senators are mumbling about how awful it will be if America’s critical alliances with Canada get too badly strained, Canada having become America’s last great stash of natural resources after they trashed their own. It will not do to have a Canadian boat and crew wiped out at Amchitka, especially a boat with such broad public support that the Prime Minister himself had to endorse the protest. But it isn’t likely that the test has been delayed just to shake us off. Premier Kosygin of Russia is due to arrive in Canada soon for a cross-country tour, and it will be bad diplomacy to blow the bomb while he is on tour. Emperor Hirohito will arrive in Alaska not long after that, and Nixon will be coming up to shake his hand, and it will be even worse diplomacy to blow the bomb virtually under the Emperor’s ass, especially since America’s alliance with Japan is strained as badly as their alliance with Canada. There have been several king-sized demonstrations against the test in Tokyo, the nearest major city to Amchitka. Politics, politics, politics.
Captain Cormack (right) and engineer Birmingham.
The real question is: can we hack it for another whole month? After only eight days, we are smarting. We started out with enough fuel and supplies to last us six weeks, but Darnell says we’ve already gobbled up two weeks’ worth of food. If the bomb does go off in early November – even the first of November – we will find ourselves at the tail end of the Aleutians, only a few hundred miles from the Soviet mainland, with a good two weeks between us and Vancouver. We’ll have nothing to eat or drink and possibly not enough fuel to get there, what with the winter storms blowing down on us from the Bering Sea, and the Gulf of Alaska a convulsion of screeching winds. Bohlen figures we have three choices at this stage. One: we can turn around, go back to Vancouver, and wait until a new date for the test is announced. But they probably won’t announce the date, or at least not until they have to, and Nixon only has to give something like seven days’ warning. We can’t possibly make it back up here in that time. Two: we can head in to Kodiak, park the boat, fly home, wait, then fly back up and carry on. But Cormack says you can’t count on the weather at this time of year. It could take us as long as seventeen days to get from Kodiak to Amchitka, and if we pull into an American port, they may be able to pin us down in red tape. Three: we can keep going, try to find someplace in the Aleutians where we can get supplies, and kill time until we find out when the damn thing is going to go off.
Birmingham (left) and Cormack in the galley.
We quibble and fret for hours. Somebody points out that at least the test has been delayed, which may be a victory of some kind. When was the last time a nuclear test was put off? Maybe we have the bastards on the run. If so, we have no choice but to keep up the pressure. And then up speaks one madman – me – who wants to press on straight to Amchitka, to go into orbit, as it were, around the island, and to go on a hunger strike until the test is cancelled. This idea doesn’t exactly catch fire. “Are you kidding? Who’ll run the boat?” Now our skipper comes down and announces that he thinks the hunger strike idea is great. “If you fellas aren’t gobbling up all the food in sight, like you’re doing now, there’ll be more for me. And I can keep cooking up pancakes and chicken and fried eggs and bacon and porridge and ham and keep myself going for months. Then, as you fellas die off one by one, I’ll throw your carcasses overboard and that’ll cut down on the amount of bickering that’s going on, puh puh puh puh puh puh.” He has the oddest laugh. We can never be certain that he isn’t putting us on. In the end, after a long meeting while the boat flops this way and that, we decide to head for Kodiak.
Some of us climbed into our bunks last night thinking that in the morning we would wake up near the Alaska mainland. But the boat is back on course for the Aleutians. Bohlen and Metcalfe picked up some new information during the night and told Cormack to forget Kodiak. First, there is a military base there, and we might get trapped in red tape. Second, several reports have come in suggesting that the test will not be delayed. Third, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee is running low on funds and isn’t sure it can afford to wait out the delay.
These are all good reasons to stay on course for Amchitka, but they don’t get aired. A new kind of paranoia begins to develop, especially among the younger members of the crew. There are mutterings and grumblings about “unilateral decisions” having been made, but little of this comes out in the open. Officially Bohlen is our “leader.” He is the only representative of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, the people who raised the money for the protest, got hold of the boat, chose the crew, and generally organized everything. As such, he has the right to make those kinds of decisions, although he keeps insisting that they are to be made by consensus. To adopt that method is to go walking barefoot on all the glowing coals of id and ideology. At the very least, we have set ourselves up for long hours of arguing and debating, finally to be driven back to lobbying and caucus meetings and strategy sessions and – yeah – it is a journey into politics, into all the boring familiar wrangling and power struggling. Bohlen has authority in this action, and he and Metcalfe – the two old vets from the Second World War – are on each other’s wavelength, see themselves as the more mature men on board, and tend to make decisions on their own.
Another month on that boat! This trip is going to be at least a hundred times as heavy as I thought. I look down at Cummings, snoring in his bunk, and think, “Which one of us is going to crack first?” Some conflicts and lines of tension are already showing. Metcalfe can’t stand Fineberg or Simmons, and neither of them can relate to Metcalfe. Cummings and I share an identity problem. For years I have wrestled with the question of whether to quit the Establishment press and go work for the underground press. People tell me, Don’t be silly, you’re much more effective working within the system, you reach more people with your ideas – legalization of dope, support for the Black Panthers and various Red Power groups, environmental revolution, and so on and so forth, up to and including the destruction of mental institutions and schools. The argument has substance. Why write to the converted? Still, it gnaws at me. Cummings, who works for the underground press, would be happier with my job – I think. The mirror image of yourself is the one you hate most, and we have already become the Alter Ego Kids. Cummings also seems to have caught some of the paranoia that infests the underground press, and that can be contagious.
Then there is the question of Fineberg and Simmons, both academics, versus Metcalfe, born during the Depression, when “If you didn’t wake up with a hard-on on Christmas day, you didn’t have anything to play with.” He is the classic School of Hard Knocks grad, who scrambled his way up through the ranks in the bad old days of Canadian journalism, and he is a tough and competitive son of a bitch. One can imagine that way down in the bottomless existential depths of his mind there smoulders a special hatred of authority figures. My guess is that he was a demon at school, that above all he hated teachers, with their dreary logic and their tiresome power that derived solely from their mastery of blackboard psycho-gymnastics. Well, Fineberg and Simmons are teachers, all right. Both have come quickly, thoroughly to hate Metcalfe, and he in turn has got into the habit of shitting all over their logical rational analytical arguments the moment they open their mouths.
Scene: The Penthouse. Time: Four days out of Vancouver, coming up Grenville Channel, the afternoon that the Prime Minister is trying to reach us. I am at the wheel, quite stoned out by the miraculous natural beauty all around. Cummings wanders in from the upper deck and, like an actor stepping onstage, enters through the right doorway. (By this time we have already given up on “port” and “starboard.” The first night out, Cummings asked the skipper which was which. “That’s the left,” Cormack snorted, “and that’s the right. And that’s straight ahead. Mostly we go straight ahead. Do you think you couple of thirty-three-pounders can remember that?”) Cummings seems nervous. Or is he just acting nervous? I don’t know – to me it seems that he is acting all the time. He is a columnist now, but he had worked as a detective for a while and now he is the president of the Georgia Straight Publishing Company because the editor is expecting an obscenity bust and thinks a good place for the president to be at a time like this is out at sea. He lights a cigarette and leans against the radar, staring straight ahead up the channel. Finally he says, “What’s your opinion of Dick Fineberg?”
Fineberg.
“He’s beautiful,” I reply, trying to avoid whatever’s coming.
“No, seriously,” says Cummings. “Hear me out.” He wags his cigarette in the air to let me know he isn’t kidding. “Nobody really knows him very well. We didn’t check him out, you know. Have you noticed all the notes he’s been taking?”
“You know what? I don’t give a shit.”
But Cummings is determined. “I’m beginning to think he’s an agent for the CIA.”
“That’s ridiculous, man. Absolute crap. You have to be putting me on.” He is talking about the guy who wrote The Dragon Goes North, which exposes U.S. Army germ warfare testing techniques in Alaska, the guy who was invited aboard the Greenpeace in the first place because of another exposé he wrote, about the thousands of tons of poison gas canisters that were dumped into the water not far from Amchitka – canisters that might be smashed by the blast, releasing all sorts of deadly shit into the air.
“No, I’m not. I’ve been watching him.”
“Crap, man,” I say. “Utter crap. Underground press paranoia.”
Cummings gives up. “The trouble with you,” he says, a parting shot, “is that you’ve never been busted. I have.”
I go back to grooving in the slow passage of seamed rock faces and ballets of seeds sweeping down the channel. Moore had pointed to them earlier and said, “Just think, each one of those contains the complete genetic blueprint for a dandelion.”
Thurston wanders in from stage left, camera slung over his shoulder like a tourist. He stands around for a while, fingers tugging at the point of his beard as always. Good old Doc. He’s so cool and together – pure Consciousness III. I am just about to tell him the amusing story of Cummings’ paranoia about Fineberg when he drops his voice, leans toward me, and says, “Listen, Booby, maybe I’m losing my mind, but there’s a rumour going around that Fineberg is working for the CIA.”
“Oh Christ, not you too, Doc!”
“Well, why not? Anything’s possible, man. Put it this way: Do you believe a grand piano could come flying into the wheelhouse? Right now? Think about it.”
“Well, sure. I mean, well, I guess an airplane or something could be passing over . . . the door could pop open . . . and a grand piano could . . . Sure. If you mean anything’s possible, well, yeah, I’d have to be crazy to say it couldn’t happen. Okay.”
“Right on, Booby. There you are. I don’t think Dick’s a CIA agent, but what the hell? Grand pianos, man. That’s where it’s at. This boat’s a grand piano when you think about it. A goddamn theatre critic and a saltchuck sea captain and a geodesic dome builder and, well, you can dig it. Why not a CIA agent thrown in just for the sheer cosmic beauty of it? The States is a crazy place, man. They do things like that, you know.”
A few minutes after Thurston wanders off, enter Simmons from stage right. He’s tied his glasses to his head with string to keep them from falling off in the high seas to come. “Have you been getting wind of the rumours about Fineberg?” he asks.
“Well, they’re a bunch of crap, you know. Somebody’s trying to discredit him. I have my suspicions about who it is, but I’m not saying – yet. The fact is, Fineberg’s been raising some very good questions lately, and certain people don’t want to deal with them.”
“What good questions are those, Terry?”
“Well, for example, there is the very good question about our legal status when we get to Amchitka. Nobody knows. And nobody seems to want to know. Fineberg has been saying that we at least ought to get some lawyers working on it. He knows some good marine lawyers in Alaska who are willing to look into it for us. . . .” Simmons departs.
A while later, here comes Metcalfe, a copy of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst in his hand. “This is a hell of a book to be reading on a trip like this,” he says. “You know, I don’t know what it is, but I can’t quite get it out of my head. There’s something about Fineberg that bothers me. Have you noticed it? It’s more of gut feeling than anything else. But . . . something.”
Just as my turn at the wheel is ending, Bohlen saunters in, looking elfishly happy. “Great day, eh?”
“Sure. Listen, Jim. Have you been picking up on all these rumours about Fineberg?”
“What rumours?”
“About him being a CIA agent and all that shit.”
“Uh-oh. Don’t go spreading rumours like that.” Christ, now I’m caught in it too. “Listen, man,” says Bohlen, “I lived in the States too long not to be able to spot a CIA. Believe me, our boy Dick isn’t the type.”
“Well, you’d better do something to calm everybody down.”
“Me? You do something. I want to look at the scenery. Come on, quit hogging the wheel. Isn’t this something else?”
Climbing down the ladder to the bunkroom, I can hear Metcalfe, Simmons, and Fineberg arguing in the galley. To avoid the whole mess, I duck out the side door. Moore is out on deck, leaning against the forecastle wall, staring at the incredible mountains and forests flowing by. “Jesus,” he says, “have you been picking up on all the bad vibes floating around about Dick Fineberg? Whew. He wouldn’t be a CIA agent, would he? That would be awful.”
Metcalfe at the radio. Bohlen looks on.
Later, Fineberg comes out to the battenclaim and complains to Keziere and me that he’s being shat all over every time he opens his mouth to make a logical point.
Still seasick, Keziere lifts his pale waste of a face and says, “Dick. This may not be the most logic-oriented crew you could ask for. But it just so happens that it’s the only crew in a boat on its way to Amchitka right now, man. Either you can dig it or you can’t.”
“I see. Just keep my place, hmm?”
“No, that’s not what I meant, man.”
End of first paranoia scene.
Now we are nearing the Aleutians, faced with the likelihood that we will have to live one on top of another for at least another month, with the pressure getting heavier every day, Simmons and Fineberg permanently uptight about Metcalfe, Cummings and I glaring at each other like Dorian Grey and his portrait, and Metcalfe. . . . Well, the whole thing started when Fineberg posted a letter to his lawyer from Klemtu without showing it to any of us first. On Sunday Bohlen called a meeting and Metcalfe suggested that Fineberg might be an agent of the CIA or the Atomic Energy Commission. The meeting decided that he should stop working as a journalist aboard, and just serve as crew or cook. In Metcalfe’s view, Fineberg created a bad feeling in the group by going his own way and lobbying Simmons and Keziere. Metcalfe and Bohlen made Fineberg send a telegram to his lawyer in Fairbanks, saying that the Greenpeace dissociated itself from Fineberg’s letter and ordering him not to contact anyone aboard the Greenpeace, including Fineberg. At that meeting, which got dubbed the Langara Episode for Langara Island, which we were passing at the time, Fineberg angrily denied being interested in the voyage as an exercise in journalism. But who among us could say what was really going on, deep in his own head? Could Metcalfe or Cummings or I deny all of our instincts as newsmen?
By that time, some fine levels of suppressed fury were at work. Simmons was outraged by Metcalfe – with justification, for he had been in on the planning of the voyage right from the beginning. He had had to hassle directly with the Sierra Club in the U.S. about it, because the Americans were slightly uptight about allowing the club’s good name to be involved in such a reckless venture. During the two years from the time the scheme was hatched to the night the boat pulled away, Simmons had worked like a fanatic, on everything from high-level executive meetings to shifts on the forklift, loading fuel drums. He had put in hundreds of hours, often when other people were just wandering about dramatically, uttering profound thoughts. Metcalfe, on the other hand, had been involved in little of the manual toil that went into the preparation. So now it was all Simmons could do to stop himself from busting Metcalfe’s teeth all over the deck.
Then there is the larger, more critical problem of the skipper and his feelings toward the whole lot of us – a trip in itself. Cormack is fifty-eight, the oldest guy on board. Next comes Birmingham, who is fifty-six. Then Metcalfe, fifty-two. Bohlen, forty-five. And then a decade drop to Thurston and Keziere, both thirty-four. Fineberg and Cummings, thirty-one. Me, twenty-nine (soon to traumatically turn thirty). Darnell and Simmons, twenty-five. Moore, twenty-four. Cormack went to sea in 1928 as a deckhand on the Union Steamship Catala and has been looking into the moods and rages of the ocean for longer than most of us have been alive. He is short, weighs 240 pounds, and is bald except for a wisp of white hair. His left hand is next to useless – “Only good for eating cookies.” One finger ends just below where the fingernail should start. His right hand is a mess of seams and stitches. One day years ago, when he was out fishing, a nylon rope strong enough to bear twenty tons of tension had snapped, and the chain it was attached to exploded in Cormack’s hands. He was thrown onto the deck, and even as he crashed down, he was thrusting both hands toward the sky. “Call a fuckin’ airplane!” he roared, blood spurting from his smashed hands. Some crewmen threw up just at the sight of the bubbling squirting blood and bits of yellow bone sticking out of purple and black boils of skin. But Cormack was on his feet, bouncing from the deck like a rubber ball, hands flung heavenward, tromping into the galley, yelling at the cook to wrap his hands in towels. He sat there cursing steadily until a seaplane arrived, then clambered out into a skiff, hands still up in the air, and out to the plane. He rode all the way into the nearest port, then out of the plane and into a taxi, arms up like the branches of a tree with bloodstained nests at the top, and down to the hospital. Most men would have fled into unconsciousness or at least collapsed, but John Cormack – well, he has the survival reflexes of an old wild bull. If his head sometimes seems like a steel ball that has been ricocheting between iron walls for a century or two, it is only to be expected after the shit he must have gone through, hammering his way up from deckhand to shipowner in one of the most competitive hard-rock professions on earth. The few old skippers who have survived as long as Cormack are tough, that’s all there is to it. Even at fifty-eight years of age he is strong enough to take on any of us and several combinations of us, and scatter us over the decks like children.
Cormack has a habit of being the last guy to come into the galley at suppertime. Three or four of us usually jam ourselves into the bench between the table and the back wall, and Cormack loves to carve out space for his huge bulk by freely chopping away at the nearest guy with his elbow, driving the lot of us down toward the other end of the table. One morning, in a particularly bad mood, I made the mistake of thinking piss on this, you old bastard, I’m tired of being your punching bag, and when he started chopping at me with his elbow, I dipped into my own bag of tricks (a Purple Belt in Butokan Karate) and let him have a fairly solid side-handed chop in the ribs. There was a pause of about one-twentieth of a second while the skipper’s eyes came level with mine – just enough time for me to realize that he had not made it to where he was by allowing himself to be beaten at anything, and wham – his elbow crunched back into my shoulder damn near hard enough to dislocate it. It would be a fight to the death or nothing. “Right, ah ha ha ha,” I said. “You want me to move over? I’ll move over.”
Hunter at the bow.
Cormack is naturally suspicious of pro-fessors (Fineberg, Keziere, Simmons, Bohlen, Moore, and Darnell, who have degrees of one kind or another). He is also wary of re-porters (Metcalfe, Cummings, and me) – mainly because we were too eager, as we headed up the Inside Passage, to file stories about the engine suddenly conking out one morning. Any reference to his boat breaking down is like a slap on the face. He was so furious about one of Metcalfe’s broadcasts that he threatened to throw us all off at Prince Rupert. But now we have been together long enough for him to sort us out according to our personalities, rather than our social roles, and he has become pretty comfortable with us. Except Thurston and Darnell. Darnell he can’t stand. The rest of us think Darnell is doing a damn fine job of cooking, and he is a calm and stoic presence in the crew, but the skipper keeps muttering, “Now that Darnell fella – if this was a regular trip, I’d have fired him and kicked him off back at Alert Bay. Goddamn mattress lover, that’s what he is. Calls that goop he serves us food. A cook like him wouldn’t last two days on a regular fish run. . . .” As for Thurston, he’s a doctor, and doctors are about as close to a priest class or a shaman or a wizard as you can get in Western society, so Cormack remains convinced that even if the rest of us are loonies, surely the doctor is a respectable gentleman. Yet here is this bearded shaggy-haired freak. Cormack keeps shaking his head. Can’t figure it out, how a weirdo like that Lyle Thurston fella ever got to be a doctor.
Meanwhile, up in his bunk over the skipper, Fineberg is writing another letter to his lawyer in Fairbanks, complaining that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by not allowing the letter of the law to guide our strategy. Nobody is accusing him of being a CIA agent any more, but he is still an outsider. So is Cormack, which may be why the two of them hit it off so well, once Cormack stopped thinking of him as Dr Fineberg of the University of Alaska.
Or maybe it’s simply because they are both candy freaks. Fineberg came aboard in Vancouver with boxes of chocolate and bags of candy, not knowing that the captain had a sweet tooth too – or, more precisely, four sweet teeth, the only teeth left in his mouth. We noticed early in the voyage that whenever anybody left a chocolate bar lying around, it disappeared. “Who’s the chocolate bar thief?” we began to ask. It was one of the deeper mysteries of the voyage. “It’s a CIA plot,” said Fineberg, drily. Much later we learned that there was not just one chocolate bar thief on board, but two. I can just see them up in the radio room in the dark of night, whispering. “Pssssst, how many bars did ya cop today? I got three. Picked one from Hunter’s pocket.” “Good work. I got one from Moore while he was out taking a piss.”
Poor Fineberg. As the only official American on board, he is a Big People (as in Lord of the Rings) and the rest of us, including the expatriate Bohlen, think of ourselves as Hobbits. It is totally unfair, ethnocentric, racist – the whole sorry bundle. Fineberg bears up quite gracefully, all things considered.
Thus divided, hung up, the seeds of mutiny already sown, late on a Friday afternoon, while far away some five thousand Canadians are blockading the U.S.–Canada border right across the continent from Vancouver to Fredericton in a protest against the test at Amchitka, we come within view of the Dread Mountains of Mordor.
The Aleutian Islands exist in a space warp or time warp or at least a culture warp, somewhere right outside the noosphere or the psychoelectronic skins of the Global Village. They come up out of the mists cold and bleak, like wrecks of giant grape-stained wine urns. Crags and slags and polished shards. Ocean heaving and running like foam through chipped and shattered tusk, froths on white-gummed beaches and a distant flush and whoosh of waves. With chunks of cliff coming into focus like a photo developing on hard-grain paper, it is as though we have stepped into a three-dimensional wraparound total immersion stereophonic movie about a little band of men armed only with magic electronic wands, going back and back in a funky seagoing time machine to the beginning of the planet, when volcanoes were still booming and chucking up bloodflows of planetary guts. That lurch in your vision may not be your optic nerve twitching, it may be the tic of yet another earthquake rumbling and clattering through the massive wreck-piles of stone and crumbled masonry, and the sea moaning as mountains shift their positions, jostling for a place to perch amid the cracks opening on the ocean floor.
It is a mist world of weird vibrations and dank cold creeping down from the fleets of icebergs in the Bering Sea. Last spring, blinding flashes of sunlight on ice were glancing into the eyes of the Aleut people whose villages are strung out through the islands. It was the first time in living memory that the icebergs had come so far south, like snow-queen chess pieces hundreds of feet high closing in on the ebony bishops and knights and castles of rock. A year ago, when I was in the Canadian Arctic as far north as Inuvik, the Inuit talked nervously about how, also for the first time in living memory, the whales failed to appear after spring breakup in the Mackenzie River delta. Here in the Aleutians, the Aleuts talk no less uneasily about the icefields travelling farther south than ever, jamming against the islands like ice cubes pouring out of a freezer that cannot stop pumping them out. The mood is intensifed by the islands’ “high ambient strain fields” – they are the most geologically unstable area on earth, the epicentre of the great Alaska earthquake of 1964. And now Cannikin is soon to roar among the volcanoes, its vibrations crashing through the earthquakes that occur almost daily in the region. It is as though the plot of the wraparound movie hangs on the theme of a world coming to its end. Whales failing to appear, icebergs on the march, suspected submarine rumbling – an impression of the temples of Atlantis collapsing in bursts of bubble and trailing slime, far beneath us in the icy grey water. The pale purple ghost of a giant jellyfish floats past the bow like a cellophane bag, a nexus of nerve-webs in the centre. At any moment a dull red flare could pulse through the fog as one of the volcanoes booms to life.
The Greenpeace enters the Bering Sea.
We go through Unimak Pass in the dark, and Cormack insists on taking the wheel himself until we are almost into the Bering Sea. Between the broken flanks of mountain on either side of the pass, uncountable tons of water rush from the sea into a mad embrace with the surges coming up from the Gulf of Alaska, generating rip tides that can tear the steel boat apart like a toy. Up until this point, Cormack has got his jollies telling us sea stories that made our hair stand on end, and when twenty- and thirty-foot swells roared across the Gulf at us like steamrollers, he laughed and said, “Huh, that’s fuck all. It’s when the waves get as high as treetops, that’s when a fella gets to thinking.” With the twenty- and thirty-foot swells, the rest of us have got to thinking quite a bit. What thoughts will we have later on? Now, as we crawl gingerly through Unimak Pass, Cormack is no longer laughing. “Some fellas was up here last winter,” he says, “and they damn near got caught in the biggest damn rip tide you ever saw. Water just suddenly split. Dropped seven feet on one side and stayed up on the other. Damn near got caught. A couple of steel boats I know of got ripped right in half getting caught in one of those.”
So he isn’t about to leave amateurs at the helm. He stays up all night, handling the wheel as though it were an eggshell, leaning forward the whole time with his head cocked slightly sideways, pressing all his senses down into the hull, feeling, groping, jiggling, flicking the wheel like a man guiding an elephant along a high wire. The swells have subsided, but there is almost a hum in the night air, a strange gurgling sound rising up all around the boat. “A lot of good men have gone down in this here pass,” Cormack says. But mainly he doesn’t talk much, just hangs in there at the wheel, sensitive as a bat creeping through a monster-haunted cave. Well, we have made it to the Bering Sea. But there is a new problem. (There is always a new problem.) Seems Cormack needs to do some work on the engine – tightening something here, replacing a few pins, pumping out the bilge – the sort of work he can’t do when the boat is tumbling around in the open sea, and seeing as how we can expect the weather to get worse and worse, he figures we’d better do it while we can. That screws up all our hopes of staying out of jurisdictional reach of the Americans – there are no non-American ports around that we can put into – but it has to be done.
Metcalfe gets on the radio and establishes contact with the U.S. Coast Guard ship Balsam, which is somewhere in the vicinity, and requests permission to put in at Dutch Harbor, just around the corner of Unimak Pass on Unalaska Island. A reply comes back to the effect that Dutch Harbor is a U.S. Navy base, so the request will have to be forwarded to the Navy, and the Navy will want to know all our names, nationalities, etc. In the meantime we are to anchor and wait for clearance. We come out of Unimak Pass into the Bering Sea at about four in the morning, swing north around Akun and Akutan islands, and drop anchor three miles off Akutan, just across Akutan Pass from Unalaska Island. Then we wait twenty-four hours for word to come from the U.S. Navy via the Coast Guard cutter Balsam, which we have already renamed the Pisscutter Ballsoff.
Last night Metcalfe broke out a bottle of rum he had stashed away, and we had a party. We had reached the Bering Sea and we were within 400 miles of Amchitka. Emperor Hirohito had arrived in Anchorage and Nixon had gone to greet him, and while we drank and sang in the galley, squawks of sound came bursting through the old wooden radio box mounted on the galley ceiling – crowds cheering and chanting, excited announcers babbling about this “historic moment,” the Emperor of Japan landing on North American soil for the first time in the history of the known universe. Not a word about the Second World War, when 30,000 Japanese stormed the Aleutian Island of Attu, just two days’ sailing beyond Amchitka – apparently one of the greatest battles of the war, yet it was fought in a blackout. Neither the United States nor Canada could admit to their people that the dread yellow hordes had established a beachhead on the edge of continental North America. The Japanese refused to surrender or give up an inch of territory, and the battle raged for ten days. In the end, the Japanese were wiped out to a man, all 30,000 of them.
But now the Emperor of the Rising Sun was shaking Richard Nixon’s hand in Anchorage and the mindless mobs were cheering. We had vaguely hoped that the Emperor would say something like: “Say, Dick, it’s kind of a rotten thing you’re doing up at Amchitka, blowing off a bomb 250 times the size of the one you dropped on us at Hiroshima, and just a couple of thousand miles away from the wobbly earthquake-prone heart of Tokyo, which you may remember is the largest city in the world. . . .” But the Emperor said nothing. Nixon said nothing. The gushing announcers said nothing. There were no demonstrations, no outcries. Just Nixon’s voice squawking through the old wooden radio in the galley, talking about the eternal friendship that has endured “between our two great peoples. . . .” And then, in a small lame voice, “for the last quarter of a century.” Politics, politics, politics.
On the open sea.
Darnell reached out and savagely clicked off the radio. We downed the rum, and – ho ho! – a couple more bottles of wine were found. Moore opened a can of lemon juice upside down and Cummings screamed, “After ten days at sea haven’t you fucking learned not to open cans upside down?” We sang a couple of rounds of “Bering Sea” to the tune of “Deep Blue Sea,” then a few verses of “I Left My Heart at Old Amchitka,” and generally got ourselves plastered. Fineberg broke out his banjo, Darnell went to work on his harmonica, Thurston and I hammered away on some pots and pans, the galley was thick with fumes from our smokes. “We love you, Greenpeace, Oh yes we do, Oooohhhh Greenpeace, we love you. . . .”
This morning, suffering badly from the runs and a hangover, I stagger from my bunk and find Metcalfe unconscious in the galley, slumped in a canvas camping chair, still in his red T-shirt, his woollen ski cap perched at a jaunty angle on his head. The boat is rolling at maybe a fifteen-degree angle, the rum bottle clanks down from one end of the galley floor to the other like a glass rat, everything is in motion – yet somehow Metcalfe remains perfectly balanced, his head on one shoulder, his goatee resting like a blue jay on his collarbone, his centre of gravity just low enough that he remains stable while the galley, the boat, the whole world goes lurching and swinging around him. The party was good for us. Nobody has quite realized how much tension we were storing up as we came across the Gulf, and now we have blown it all out.
The galley is a mess. Cigarette butts, punched-open cans, dented pots and pans, crumbs, the remains of a jigsaw puzzle that someone from the United Church of Canada gave us scattered all over the floor. Early in the planning stages of the protest, the church considered sending a ship it happened to own – a ship much larger than the Phyllis Cormack – to Amchitka with us. But they backed off on the advice of the ship’s captain. The waters around Amchitka are considered to be among the most dangerous in the world because of the rip tides, and the Aleutians are the nesting place, as it were, of a strange meteorological phenomenon known as a williwaw, a hurricane-force wind that blows up out of nowhere, then vanishes. Such winds have been known to tear the wheelhouses off boats ten times the size of ours. They stalk the Aleutians like weird demons of wind. Because of these factors, combined with the possibility of a radiation leak or a shock wave from the blasts, the church concluded that it could not take such risks with human lives, even for such a good cause. Well, that was cool. But too bad the United Church doesn’t have the vigour of, say, the Quakers, who in 1958 twice sent boats out – the Phoenix and the Golden Rule – against atmospheric nuclear tests, in the face of certain death. Neither Quaker boat reached its destination – one got pinned down in red tape at the dock and the other got grabbed at sea by the U.S. Navy. We are on a Canadian boat and most of us are Canadians, so the Americans can’t grab us on the open seas as they could grab the American Quakers. We had ignored the puzzle until last night, then we drunkenly put it together, only to discover that it said GOD BLESS YOU. Down to the floor it was flung with a vengeance. “Why doesn’t somebody send a telegram to the United Church, thanking them for sending a jigsaw puzzle instead of a boat?”
But in the morning, the bad feeling toward the United Church dissolves. It is Sunday, and Dorothy Metcalfe gets through on the radio to let us know that the head office of the United Church in Toronto has authorized the ringing of church bells across the country in a protest against the Amchitka test. More to the point, they will be saying prayers for our souls. And then we get word from the Pisscutter Ballsoff that the U.S. Navy has turned down our request to put in at Dutch Harbor, but we may go into Akutan.
“Huh,” says Cormack. “I was in Dutch Harbor when they set that last bomb off at Am-cheet-ka back in ‘69, and nobody said anything then about it being a military base.” But back then he was an ordinary Canadian fisherman. Now he is the skipper of CAN VES GREEN PEACE, a whole different scene. Up comes the anchor and back we chug around Akutan Island. The Authorized Prayer from Toronto must be working – the sun slashes open the cloud banks and scatters them in drifts and plumes across the sky. The vegetation that hugs the island above the cliffs is like a fur hide, a shade of green that none of us has ever seen. “We’ll call that Greenpeace green,” says Bohlen. We are all out on deck, hauling in lungfuls of vintage wine-sparkling air, and the surface of the ocean is thick with herring gulls, petrels, black-legged kittiwakes, horned puffins, sooty shearwaters, slender-billed shearwaters, and ducks and terns of all kinds. Whitecaps lick among them, and as the boat dives forward they rise in sweeps, like parts of a single immense body flapping and cruising over the water. I have never seen so many birds in my life. Their cries are all around, splintering on the gusts of wind as crab pots dance on the waves, sea lions bob up in packs of half a dozen and roll and flop alongside us, seals, porpoises, jellyfish, hundreds of thousands of birds flapping in cloud banks, the waters breaking around brown- and black-furred animal persons that leap and plunge everywhere.
Moore runs from one end of the boat to the other with Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds in one hand and binoculars in the other, yelling, “Wow – that one over there! With the big bright orange beak and the white cheek markings on a black body, that one! That’s a . . . that’s a . . .” flip flip flip through the pages, “. . . a crested puffin! Isn’t it beautiful? Jesus Christ, what a heaven! Oh, I want to live here the rest of my life!” At certain moments the sky and the green carpets of the islands appear only as flashes of colour between surging waves of feather, and the sound of all those birds envelops the boat so completely that we have to shout to make ourselves heard. Into Akutan Bay we chug, and far down the neck of the bay is a tiny cluster of little white wooden houses, all with green roofs, like a mushroom patch. Already we are becoming aware of something peculiar to the Aleutians – the grass grows as high as your knees, as high as your thighs in a few places, but there are no trees at all – only moss and fungus clinging to the rocks, and spruce that grows like bonsai, never getting any taller than three or four inches. Streams come sparking down between trenches and gorges carved in the bedrock, but beyond the castle-like cliffs there is nothing that you can take a bearing on to gauge distances. If there were any trees here, or buildings on the slope, we could guess how far away a given hill or pasture or meadow is. But all the usual visual reference points are unavailable, so a hill that seems only a few thousand yards away may actually be five miles off across the slopes, and a meadow that appears to be an hour’s walk away may be reachable in ten minutes.
The surf-cloud at Akutan Bay, Alaska.
The experience of arriving in Akutan Bay is a bit like landing on Mars – it is another world and the mind wobbles in confusion, suddenly not knowing how big the world is or how small. No sooner does Cormack let down the anchor about a hundred yards away from the village than we shove the skiff overboard and scramble to be the first to go ashore. The mountains and meadows beckon. We have been eleven days at sea now, and we have developed a thirst, a raging hunger to get back on the land. And look where we are! Beyond the village, a smooth, lush Greenpeace green hide of moss and grass rambles up toward a dark flat-topped mountain (1,650 feet high, according to the maps) with a plate-glass sky beyond so bright it shrinks our pupils to pinpoints. On the other side of the bay – well, mountains, but they are completely blanketed in clouds unlike any clouds we have ever seen. The Surf-Cloud of Akutan, streaming over the mountains like an endlessly breaking wave, a wide foamy froth of white smoke, flowing boiling sluicing plummeting in absolute silence down the slopes until it reaches the water and then somehow vanishes as though into a hidden crack in the earth. Such a torrent of cloud must soon exhaust itself – but no, the Surf-Cloud keeps coming, rushing magically down the slopes, rimming the mountains with white gauze, a silent unending downward surge like the granddaddy of perpetual tidal waves looming over the bay. It is . . . awesome.
And now that we are out in the air and streaking for the land, wide sky scaled down by the green mountain on one side and the Surf-Cloud on the other, the crankiness and claustrophobia are released and we are wild and free as children escaping from a dungeon. Like Alice, we have passed through the looking glass. After a week on the cold grey-silver-white shadows of the Gulf, in a single step we have entered a realm as unbearably intense and brilliant as the Other Worlds of schizophrenia and LSD, flashing explosions popping from rapier blades of grass, stalks thrusting bunchberries at us like tiny brain creatures, rainbows unfurling beyond the Surf-Cloud, alien civilizations of cow parsnips arrayed at our feet, moss, lupine, horsetails, blueberries, and daisies like scattered flaming bits of Holy Nimbus. It is a psychedelic rush – one moment staggering through the stupor of battered turned-off senses, then click – the music is on, you are on, the universe leaps eagerly and joyously to embrace you, to let loose the fireworks in the middle of your brain, tell you all its secrets at once, infuse every flower petal and every bead of water with neon – look, look, look. And down goes your mind like a tree in an avalanche, crashing into a state of grace, a beyond-words orgy of seeing and feeling and smelling and hearing – ah, and above all, of being. All there, not somewhere else, not locked away in a time capsule in your head, but turned inside out, in touch at last, touching, being touched by, in touch with what is around you. We’re out of that dinky little boat, where the reek of our unwashed bodies has become a palpable gas in which we float, hardly able to breathe, nothing but grey and silver and black outside the portholes, and shadows, dark wood, peeling varnish, rust, green metal, and grease-soaked floors within. From that we come to this, from a universe with three dimensions to one with at least fifty. Pow! Thurston throws out his arms and screams, “Far out!” as he jumps from the skiff onto the gravel shore. He is looking up at the great green rippling mountain universe before us, above us, around us and all over, like the beard of a green giant. “Unreal,” Moore whispers, clambering out beside him. “Too much,” says Cummings. “Out of sight, man,” says Keziere, and on the shores of Akutan we speak the language beyond the Age of Literacy, as precise a language as we can find.
We walk into the Aleut village feeling like we are in a Bergman film. The path leading up from the beach has taken us past a dock where a cannery boat is moored and straight through the local graveyard, wet ornate stones and mouldering wooden crosses overseen by a Russian Orthodox church, left over from the days before the Americans bought up Alaska, when the fleets of the Czars swept down among the islands. Of the 10,000 Aleuts who lived here when the Russian warships arrived, all but 120 were killed. About 3,500 people remain, scattered in seventeen communities throughout the 1,100 islands. Their history goes back 8,000 years. Here as elsewhere, in the wake of the sword and the cannon, came the cross – in this case, the double-barred cross of the Russian Orthodox Church. Would the Americans be participating in this protest if the Soviets had held on to the islands and were themselves planning to set off an underground nuclear explosion? This is a strange land of cultural overlap, a devastated group of Native people, once massacred by Russians, who are now the arch-foes of the Americans, who are about to blast off a bomb right under the asses of the Aleuts.
The clearest thought that comes out of all this is: Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be an Alley-oot. The village looked enchanted when we were pulling in aboard the Greenpeace – small white shoebox houses with their green roofs – but as we got closer we could see that it was much like the Native communities along the west coast of B.C. Broken-down shacks were scattered along the shoreline and wrecked boats lay on the beaches. The only paid work left for the Aleuts is to chop up Alaska king crab on the cannery boat, and a bit of fishing. But the fish are dying off and the whaling station across the bay has long since been closed down. One by one the Aleuts are being forced onto welfare. The same dreary story of a rich land looted by the white man and his technology, then abandoned when the game is up. We pass through the village quickly, bearing the white man’s burden of guilt. An old Aleut man sits on a swing overlooking the bay. One of his hands ends in a mechanical contraption, a variation on the old hook, complex enough for him to hold a cigarette between two of the metal parts.
Hunter.
“Hi,” I say. “Beautiful weather you’ve got here.”
“Been bad, been bad. Bad weather. First time the sun’s shone since spring. Not a day of sun all summer. Very bad.”
“You mean today’s the first time you’ve seen the sun since spring?”
“Bad. Bad weather. Yep.”
“Well, I guess you don’t know about it, but that boat we’re on, with the green sail, that’s the Greenpeace. We’re up here to, ah, protest against the, ah, bomb that’s gonna be set off up at Amchitka – you know about that?”
“Yep. We know. Weather’s been bad ever since they set off the last one.”
“Right on. Well, anyway, the United Church of Canada said some prayers for us today. So I guess all this beautiful weather is a miracle, eh?”
No reply. He just looks away, shakes his head, lifts the cigarette to his mouth and then blows out some smoke without having inhaled. “Bad. Bad.”
Later we learn that he’s the local lay preacher for the Russian Orthodox Church, and we hear that with some indignation he has complained to people in the village that one of those funny-looking men from the protest boat has been going around claiming that the weather’s a miracle brought on by prayers from another church thousands of miles away. That doesn’t make us any more popular in the village. But whatever popularity we may have earned is about to be destroyed forever. Just after we pass through the village, Moore, Bohlen, Keziere, Simmons, Darnell, Fineberg, and I take off madly up the hill, whooping and bounding. The slopes are snaggled with tundra and scrub willows and moss – a mattress of vegetation, a tough springy miniature forest over which we leap like giants. We lurch drunkenly, discovering that we haven’t got our land legs yet. This vegetation is like a trampoline – you can take seventeen-foot leaps and bounce. You can throw yourself around crazily and not get hurt. With the wind slapping our cheeks, and explosions of plant smells engulfing the salt and stink of our clothes and bodies, we flounder up the hill and follow a stream until we are up maybe 600 feet over the village and presumably out of sight. Then, in a flash, we are tearing off our clothes and crashing into the – Ah! My God, it’s cold! – stream. The finest goddamn experience in my life, lying there in a gravel creek bed in about five inches of sloshing icy water, under a blinding ultra-blue sky. The wind flattens the grass, the Surf-Cloud rolls along, the crust of sweat and salt on my body is washed away, and my itchy sticky hair floats as free as seaweed around my head. There are three sinks on the boat, but there is so little water that we are under strict orders not to use water for anything but cooking and drinking, except half a cup daily to brush our teeth. One by one the other guys peel off their clothes and get in the water – Darnell crashing in with a whoop, Moore easing in, Bohlen lowering himself with a gritty-toothed grin, Fineberg cautiously moving upstream to ensure that he is completely out of sight of the village.
The Greenpeace off Akutan Island, Alaska.
Back in my clothes, I kneel on the slope by the stream, arms thrown toward the sky, and offer a prayer to Mother Earth, who is now Lover Earth. “You’re so beautiful, lady. I love you! Love the Earth! Ohhhhhhhh, man, this is without doubt the most beautiful planet in the universe. It has to be. God, I love her. . . .” It is a feeling that only a zombie could go through life without experiencing, a feeling that comes in a flash on a wild wet afternoon, or during a storm or a blizzard, or in the spring or fall or on a sleepy heat-wrapped summer afternoon – a feeling of planet love. Different from love for children, different from love for a woman or a man, different from love for a special pet, and way beyond love of country. Planet love. It is such a miracle of planetary art, this gleaming gem of Earth. Or maybe all of those feelings of love radiate from a single inner source. Maybe the problem is that we categorize, chop up the surges of life-awareness into little hunks, because who can feel the whole thing without blowing up? Under my wet knees the grass and the moss and the scrub willows sink toward a mushy embrace with the rocks of the island, to the seabeds, which spread around the globe like palpitating tissue, and there is no point on Earth where anything is divided or sundered from anything else. “I am the Earth!” Moore standing there dripping wet, grinning at my delicious madness, his eyes roving lovingly over the plants.
When we get back to the boat, Metcalfe tells us that the stream we bathed in is the water supply for the village, and that at least one woman there has announced that she won’t take another drink of water until those filthy men from the protest boat go away. We have to stay in Akutan for six days, waiting for word on the new date for the detonation of the bomb. There is only one telephone on the island, a radiophone down at the grocery store. The ship radio can’t get anything out through the mountains around us, and the radiophone hookup is part of an inter-island party line. The main generator is over on Unalaska Island at Dutch Harbor, and each island is allowed a ration of telephone time per day. With Metcalfe, Cummings, Fineberg, and I all wanting to file dispatches, press releases, reports, and columns, and at least 120 Aleuts in the village who may also want to use the phone, we have a big logistics problem. Metcalfe has priority – he is in charge of relaying press releases. The rest of us will have to wait until Friday morning, when the mail plane arrives for its once-a-week pickup. Meanwhile, Simmons and Bohlen do what they can in their few moments on the radiophone, calling the Don’t Make a Wave Committee in Vancouver and representatives of various environmental groups in Washington, D.C. When is the bloody bomb going to go off?
Cormack figures we are only four or five days from Amchitka if we have decent weather, but we can’t just go straight to the island and wait. This is something we didn’t understand before – the storms of the autumn equinox will soon be upon us, and there is no way the boat can survive out in the open water. “The way fishermen work it up here,” says Cormack, “is you wait for a break in the weather, then you rush out as far as you can, put down your pots or your nets, then high-tail it back to shelter before one of them williwaws or a storm comes up. Wait again for another break in the weather, then make a run for it, grab up your gear, and get going back to port fast as you can. Weather’s mean up here this time of year. So far we’ve been lucky. That weather you fellas thought was so bad out on the Gulf, shit, that was nothing. That was the flattest calm I’ve seen in forty years out there this time of year. But she’ll start getting sloppy now. Getting close to October.”
“So we can’t just get going now and wait it out?”
“For a whole month? Shit, no. Never last. Not unless we can run for shelter when the wind comes up.”
“We can’t do that. It’s a security zone around Amchitka. They won’t let us in, that’s for sure.”
“Well then, you fellas are just gonna have to sit on your hands and sweat it out. Nothing else you can do. Now we’ll see how much of what you’d call staying power ya got . . . puh puh puh puh puh.”
Frantically, Bohlen, Simmons, and Metcalfe put through their calls, scratching like dogs for a single scrap of information: when? The reports are contradictory. Some sources say late October. Others insist it will be November at the earliest. Environmentalists in Washington are “confident” that they have the Atomic Energy Commission on the run. They are attacking on every possible legal front. According to the White House, Nixon is “studying” the test. Six “leading scientists,” including former presidential aides, have come out against it because of “physical and political risks.” Cannikin, they say, is “potentially the most destructive man-made underground explosion in history.” Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk says he believes a majority of Americans are against it. The U.S.–Canada border has been blockaded. Relations with Japan may be damaged, according to Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. One day the newspapers carry reports that Nixon is “seriously considering” cancelling the test. The next day the headlines read: N-BLAST STILL ON. The Saturday Review and The New York Times have spoken out against it. In Ottawa there is talk of sending an all-party Canadian delegation to Washington to make a plea to Nixon. External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp lodges what he calls a “forceful presentation” of Canada’s views on Cannikin with U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers. Then, under pressure from American environmental groups, the United States Court of Appeals orders a lower court to reconsider an earlier ruling allowing the test. While the ruling does nothing to stop the blast, it does force the issue back into the courts. Like a seesaw, the battle swings back and forth. Meanwhile we continue to scrap and claw desperately for one tiny nugget of pure information: when?
By this time the boat has become home. Damn uncomfortable overcrowded home, but home, and we are starting to love it for its sheer funkiness. Certain things have become fixtures in our lives: the photo poster of an atomic mushroom cloud pinned up in the doorway from the galley, opposite a Sierra Club poster with the motto: IN WILDNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD. And another poster, intended for display should we get busted by the Coast Guard, which says simply, in big black letters: MANGE D’LA MARDE. (We looked around for a FUDDLE DUDDLE poster, in reference to the famous expletive mouthed by Trudeau in the House of Commons, but they were all sold out.) In the bunkroom, junk has begun to accumulate in the corner between the bunks. Seashells, rocks, bits of driftwood, bones, barnacles, crab shells – we are hopeless souvenir addicts. Metcalfe, Moore, and I have slung curtains across our bunks to give us a measure of privacy, and Cormack took one look and pronounced them jerk-off curtains. In the galley dangle plastic peace pennants thrown to us by the kids at Klemtu, and the blurred face of Richard Nixon continues to look out over all our meetings and meals and conversations and arguments.
Then somebody in the village learns that we have a doctor on board, and a couple of the men come out to the boat to ask Thurston to examine a friend of theirs who has some horrible sickness. Back and forth the friend has been shuttled between Akutan and hospitals in Anchorage and Juneau, and each time he’s been sent back with the stark diagnosis of chronic alcoholism. But Thurston doesn’t know this at the time and he doesn’t mind improving our relations with the villagers, especially since we may be here for another month. It is rainy on the night he goes into the village with the two Aleuts. The sick guy is drunk by the time they arrive at his house. He complains of chest pains, back pains, stomach pains, head pains, the works. Catching on fast, Thurston figures he can get himself out of the whole mess by insisting on a urine test. It is a neat ploy. To conduct a urine test he needs a microscope, and he hasn’t brought one along and doubts that anyone on the island has one. Out into the rain staggers the patient to piss in a beer bottle, at which point his two friends suddenly remember that the schoolteacher – the only white resident on the island – has a microscope. By this time they’ve plied Thurston with a few shots of rye and he’s a bit wobbly himself. They all goes off into the rain, the patient merrily waving around his bottle full of piss, his two pals laughing and stumbling all over the place, Thurston saying to himself, “What am I doing?”
Metcalfe.
They arrive well past midnight. The teacher is an uptight, totally straight old cat who brags that he hasn’t read a newspaper in thirty years and whose classroom walls are plastered with posters bearing messages like THIS IS YOUR FLAG – BE PROUD OF IT. Earlier this week he told Keziere and Metcalfe that the whole bunch of us ought to pack it up and go home since the bomb is none of our business (hello out there, John Wayne!), and that if it weren’t for America, the Commies would long since have taken over the world and made everybody into slaves like the Cubans. Now his doorbell rings in the night and three stoned Aleuts stand on his doorstep, one of them holding a beer bottle that he claims is full of urine. Thurston, who looks quite deranged, explains that he’s a doctor and he wants to borrow the school’s microscope to run a urine test to find out what’s wrong with this fellow here, whom the teacher knows is the village lush. Teach gumbles and swears but this crazy-looking foreigner is an actual doctor, so he takes them to the school. Thurston runs the urine test, mumbles some Latin incantations and says he’ll have to look some things up in one of his medical books back on the boat. Then everybody crashes and fumbles back out into the rain, and the teacher swears at them as they fade away into the night. “From now on,” says Thurston, “if anybody wants to know what I do for a living, tell them I’m a fucking botanist. Got it?”
We have also discovered that the young guys in the village hate whites with a passion. It makes no difference to them whether we’re Canadians or Americans, for the bomb or against it – we’re white. As they walk past us on the wooden planks running through the village (the only road), they make a point of spitting on the boards. Several beautiful young women live here too, and they seem extremely friendly. When Cummings mentions this – “Strictly as an observation, you understand” – the skipper points out that there is a $1,000 fine if you get caught with an Aleut women on board your boat, even if she’s not doing anything at all. The Aleuts are penned in here like animals. They are forced to slave away for rotten wages on the crab cannery boat, and when the boat pulls out at the end of the season there is nothing for the adults to do but sit around and drink, which they do with a vengeance. After a few days we start to avoid the village, because every time we go there, somebody invites us in for a drink, and once you’ve accepted one drink you are expected to accept a second and a third and a fourth. After a couple of occasions of crawling back to the shore in the wee hours of the morning, head swirling and vomit boiling up in your throat, calling out hoarsely to the Phyllis Cormack, “Hey! Will somebody please come out and get us? Heeeeeyyyy! Anybody awake? Ahoy, the Greenpeace! Hey, wake up you bastards! Come and get me before I freeze to death! Send that skiff out, f’Christ’s sakes!”, you get into the habit of staying away from the village.
But not from the mountains and the meadows beyond. We are, after all, nature freaks. Simmons founded the Sierra Club of B.C. – considered in the U.S. to be the northern lunatic fringe, but still a part of the Club. Bohlen and Darnell are directors. They subscribe to the motto IN WILDNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD, and Bohlen keeps saying that this territory, the Aleutians, is authentic Sierra Club land. It is wild and nearly unspoiled, a perfect place to get back in touch with the Earth.
Simmons, Bohlen, and Darnell announce that they are going to lead a Sierra Club expedition up to the top of the 1,650-foot hill rising beyond the village. Does anybody else want to come along? Moore, Fineberg, Cummings, Keziere, and I decide to join them. At 8 a.m., after a whopping breakfast, Birmingham shuttles us ashore in relays, equipped with all the sandwiches and smokes we can carry, and we set out. By this time the slope is wrapped in fog, the bad weather having returned after being driven away briefly by the Authorized Prayer from Toronto. We are all wearing green jackets with hoods that were supplied by the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, so it looks as though we are in uniform. And we are. Think of the army for which we are the troops. The Vancouver Real Estate Board paid for TV commercials showing a sudden earthquake and nuclear explosion, urging its viewers to STOP THE TEST AT AMCHITKA – a giant step, and with such heavy artillery. The Americans are catching up! No one can doubt the power of advertising. If presidents and cigarettes and booze can be marketed successfully on TV, why not peace? This may be the first time such an attack has been launched on the military Establishment. “What? A bunch of guys right out of the Chamber of Commerce attacking us with the same heavy commercials they use to peddle pantyhose?” Military intelligence must be cringing at that one, the Establishment turning their own big guns on themselves. Metcalfe has been in public relations long enough to understand the tricks of Mad Avenue. In modern Western industrial society, power rolls not out of the barrel of a gun but out of the cathode ray tube. And so he did not hesitate to welcome aboard as temporary allies even the “land sharks.” I almost decided not to go when I first saw that commercial (“Christ, if those guys are on our side!”). But advertising is power – only a fool would refuse to unleash it on his enemies – and the U.S. military-industrial complex is our enemy and our children’s enemy. Revolution makes strange bedfellows, such as the Sierra Club and the Vancouver Real Estate Board, but then again, if the world gets wiped out, you won’t get a plug nickel for a chunk of terrestrial real estate.
So, as we climb Akutan Mountain in our green uniforms, we laugh. We are soldiers in the Army of the Landlord as well as the shock troops of the Conservation Movement. Up and up and up we climb, and a white kitten from the village follows along behind us. The rain sheets down the slopes, the grass is slippery and wet and cold to the touch, and the wind is chill enough to remind us of those ice packs not far away in the Bering Sea. Yet the kitten tags along and keeps up. Where I come from, that’s not how kittens behave. “Another grand piano, man,” says Thurston. Cummings picks up the kitten lovingly, and for the first time in a week I start to like him. Oh, the vibes are starting to get good.
The Greenpeace anchored in Akutan Bay, Alaska.
Bohlen and Darnell are so far ahead they’re almost lost in the fog rolling down on us. All the synchs and weird combinations that have been gathering since we set out start to click in our heads. We are the green-hooded men: Captain Cormack’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Fellowship of the Piston Rings, Soldiers of the Landlord, the Unofficial Official Canadian Navy, Eight Angry Environmentalists, the Warriors of the Rainbow, the Crew of the Friendship Frigate, the Crew of the Greenpeace, the Akutan Branch of the Moody Blues Fan Club, the Bearers of the One Ring of Ecology, the Unconventional Symbol of All Canada’s Revulsion at the Amchitka Test. The United Church has prayed for our souls and the Prime Minister has blessed us. We are the underground press and the Establishment press, the crew of the National Film Board, a flying wedge of freaks and straights – multisensory mutants and middle-class protestors, all slogging together through bursts of icy rain, fog all around us, the world itself vanished, leaving us wandering across a broken-off chunk of Earth sailing through a grey mist of cosmic voids, all singing, “We love you, Greenpeace, Oh yes we do . . . ooooohhhh, Greenpeace, we love you.”
Somebody gets an inspiration and yells, “All power to the plants!”
“Right on!”
“Who are we?”
“We’re the Green Panthers!”
Then a greater inspiration: “Hawkaaaaa! We’re the Greenhawks!” That’s it. The Greenhawks, leaping through a non-world of fog, clambering up on outcroppings of rock and throwing ourselves off in mad leaps, landing on a great natural trampoline of scrub willow and mush and blueberries and springing up into the air again, curling, rolling over and over down the slope, wrestling with each other like kids, screaming “Hawka!” just like the Blackhawks in the old comics used to do when they went on the attack. “Everything’s getting unreal again,” Moore sings out. For we have got such a contact high that our minds have begun to mesh. We make flashing instantaneous connections with each other, as though a Group Mind had begun to form – the sort of thing Tielhard de Chardin and Marshall McLuhan talk about. Where does one Greenhawk stop and the other begin? Is a new race in the making? Not just here, with the eight Merry Men in their green Sherwood Forest uniforms, but out there in the world beyond the enveloping fog, a race whose midwife is the transpolitical alliance being forged to stave off the impending destruction of the world? Metcalfe isn’t with us on this mystical journey, but I can almost hear him yelling from the boat, “Beware of paranoid grandiosity!”
But . . . but . . . but . . . couldn’t the Greenhawks be the forerunner of an army in the making? The Army of the Earth? Just this month the United Nations declared the beginning of World War Three, a war against industrial and military pollution of the planet. “Ben!” I am yelling to Metcalfe in my mind, through the fog. “It might be real!” And if it’s not, if there’s no new mass alliance of forces rising up to reverse the self-destructing forward rush of the Megamachine, then there’s no hope. And man, I’ve still got hope! I can’t live without it. We are the famous poster, GET HIGH ON A MOUNTAIN.
How high nobody can tell because of the swirling grey-as-the-inside-of-your-brain fog, but we have reached the end of the grass and bunchberries and lupine. Gun-metal blue rock thrusts out at us, loose jagged chunks breaking off in our hands and clattering down, making no echoes – all sound is swallowed and smothered by the mist. And now there are fewer cries of “Hawka!” Harsh breathing. Pounding noises of my heart as though it had moved up into my skull and was humping my brain. Flaming pains in thighs and calves and across the chest, whole body going numb, bare hands hanging like hooks, frozen from the wind and grabbing at stones. Oh, to lie here in the immense green mattress, half-smothered in the Earth, buoyed up in the Earth, rocked in the Earth. Lying at this angle, with my feet pointed up toward the blue cliffs where Bohlen, Darnell, and Fineberg clamber on, ghostly mist-men like spiders on a dark web straight above me – or below me – or opposite me – I am on a planet spinning through the universe. Down or up? What does it matter? The wind is rising every minute, becoming a gale – maybe a williwaw! And even though I am exhausted and half-numb from climbing and chilled right to the bone from rolling in the wet grass, I’m starting to get a hard-on. I actually want to sink my poor tender prick into this mushy vagina-like stewpot of Earth. I part the moss, digging my fingers down into the wet brown interior – and look! A hidden universe of spiders and ants and caterpillars and worms and slugs, a whole throbbing world. A non-human civilization, where incredible battles take place. Magnificent tumult, drama, action! Will that spider poised among the intertwining roots get the ant-like creature zigzagging in nervous spurts through the dark mass of moss and lichen and roots and grass?
I push deeper into the real underworld, each layer a whole new universe, and Moore kneels beside me – Moore, who has studied the ecology of animals, plants and forests, as well as plant and animal genetics, biochemistry, physiology, and morphology. Moore, who guides me down through the unfolding universes within the breast-soft slopes of Akutan Mountain, the perfect setting for the ultimate lecture on ecology. Simmons gets down on his knees with us. Then Thurston, then Fineberg, then everyone else. We lie at crazy angles, gently probing the tender green flesh, understanding how this life form is related to that life form and how that tiny weird creature over there could not survive without those bits on that plant, which makes this substance out of that. The links between living things flow through endless phases and changes, and the links are never broken. In a leaping flash of Group Mind understanding, we all connect with the idea that all life is interwoven, including us. We are all one. It is pure Zen thought coming out of pure Western technological thought – ecology is just the latest surge of science. For one moment, East and West come into phase, the great dichotomies breaking down, the void coming alive like an all-creating flame.
Moore.
“If you can relate back far enough,” someone says, “I mean ten thousand or a million years, sooner or later you come to the point where the whole bunch of us here had the same father.”
“And if you want to push it even further, like maybe a billion years, you come to the point where we hadn’t evolved from apes yet, the apes hadn’t evolved from the lizards or whatever, the lizards hadn’t evolved from the fish, the fish hadn’t evolved out of the protoplasm, and for sure you come to the point where all of us – the fish, the lizards, the apes, the bunch of us – we all had the same glob of protoplasm for a daddy.”
“Yeah, right, right! And, man, can you dig it? It’s not just us and the fish and the lizards and all those. Don’t forget the birds and the trees and the cactuses and rosebushes! Like, we all had the same daddy – the first cell to evolve out of gases floating around the planet.”
“So that means –”
And four or five of us scream it out: “A flower is your brother!”
There is the ultimate message of ecology – we’re all related. Up the last cliff-face of Akutan Mountain we stumble and claw, wild with a burning inspiration, a lightning flash of clarity that transforms the root of thought.
One by one we crawl up over the last ledge, only to find our faces slashed and tears ripped from our eyes by a pounding wind that must be blowing eighty miles an hour across the flat plateau. Twisting mists all around, absolute nothingness. This wind can scoop us up and fling us away into the void. Bohlen’s voice, barely audible over the witch cries: “Hey, this must be a williwaw!”
Williwaw, who haunts our minds more profoundly than Cannikin. Williwaw, the wind wraith who stalks the Aleutians. Williwaw, who tears a wheelhouse from a boat as if it were ripping a man’s head from his shoulders. Radiation is hypothetical. Wind is a beast making a grab for you. It is our first encounter with the williwaw, though our eyes have roved over the crags as though we might see a giant dervish squinting down at us like a stalking wind lion. We crept through these islands, tense and helpless, the boat limping along under us, Moore saying things like: “Nice williwaw. Good williwaw. Nice boy. Lie down and stay there, boy. Good boy. Good old friendly Willy Williwaw.” And now, at the top of Akutan Mountain, who should come raging at us like a ghost out of the mists?
You can lean into an eighty-mile-an-hour wind and it will hold you up as though you were floating, your only connection to the Earth the tips of your rubber boots dug into the loose volcanic gravel. It is the closest thing to flying. But on top of a plateau forty feet wide, surrounded by cliffs and fog, not even a root or a branch to hang on to, it can be terrifying. At any moment the wind might burst just a little more violently and your body will lose its toehold in the skittering gravel and you will be flying for real, out over the edge of the plateau, out and out, and finally down through grey universes until – crunkshhhh-riiiiiippppppppp-pulp-slap-skrak.
But in the Group Mind, we know that if we can’t hang on to anything else, we’ll hang on to each other’s splayed legs. The wind plasters our clothes to us so hard we can see the outlines of each other’s bones, and our green jackets billow out on the other side so that we look like inflated toys, or astronauts on the moon, bounding in slow motion, in huge leaps, across chunks of black rock. All this time we have perceived ourselves as anti-heroes of technology, anti-spacemen. The old hippie-beaded rust-stained Phyllis Cormack, plowing across vast distances at nine knots, was the perfect anti-spaceship. And now here we are, crazy mirror images of astronauts – princes of the Whole Earth instead of the Megamachine, all hair and comic-book madness. None of this five, four, three, two, one, zero, blast-off shit for us. We are on our way to the Other Moon – Amchitka. The moon landing in 1969 connected technology to metaphysics and gave us a symbol of magic. By landing on Amchitka, the symbol of the other face of technology – waste-maker and ruin-bringer, poisoner of beautiful worlds – we may yet bring people’s minds back from dreams of conquering the universe to the reality of the world going to wrack and ruin around them. An ecological Iwo Jima! A landing on the other moon! Scott arriving at a crazy sociopolitical magnetic pole! Leaping slowly and mysteriously as though in one-sixth gravity, half-birds, half-spacemen, we set to work building a cairn. We have not thought to bring the Greenpeace flag, so we pile the biggest loose rocks we can find into an ecology symbol, then a peace symbol, each of them about ten feet wide. The eco-cairn on Akutan. Keziere takes photos of the (historic and/or meaningless) event.
Then quick, before this mad wind really does grab one of us or the lot of us and hurl us into the void, we clamber back to the ledge. But where on the ledge did we climb over? And what if we start down the wrong side? We could find ourselves on the face of a hundred-foot sheer cliff. “Help!” yells Moore. “Where am I?” yells Thurston. “This way!” yells Bohlen. Hawkaaaaaaa!
And down over the ledge we go, rocks plinking and shattering as we kick them loose, but we are not afraid. One of the powers of the Group Mind is to foresee disaster – or so we think, madly, caught up in the euphoria of the day. Nobody falls or gets smashed on the head or even scratched. Everyone is in one piece when we reach the meadows. We are in the lee of the mountains. Perhaps a williwaw still rages back up at the top, but we are inland now, and the wind is a low moan and a flapping of the grasses. Silence unfolds from the mist-lands and the world around us is wet Greenpeace green again, a land that seems never to have been touched by man. At any moment a grazing dinosaur might shuffle heavily from around a hill.
Finally I am by myself, sagged against a blue-black outcropping of rock, numb fingers fumbling through jacket pockets for my log book, and fumbling hours longer, it seems, to find a pencil, mind flipping around wildly for some handle, some key word or phrase that will hold the magic of what has just happened. Later, when I am back to “normal” – no longer a free-flying eco-freak in an epiphany – I will flip open the log book and there it will be, the Diamond of Wisdom, the Final Truth, the Sacred Rune of Akutan, the Absolute Summary of Everything. And it comes. One moment my head is full of swirling ecstasy and planet love, and the next moment, in the rain and cold, fumbling like a bear with a ballpoint, I write down my key to the miraculous day:
PARANOID GRANDIOSITY
IS THE HUMAN
SOUL
In the afternoon we get ready to take leave of Akutan. There is still no word on when the bomb will go off, but the most consistent reports place the date sometime between mid-October and early November. Which means we still have two to four weeks to kill – unless Richard Nixon suddenly makes himself perfectly clear. After about a dozen meetings in the galley, we decide that the best bet is to inch our way up the chain, closing in on our prey as slowly as possible. Cannikin has proven elusive, but that just means we must stalk all the harder. Darnell has instituted a no-eating-between-meals policy to slow the rate at which we’re gobbling up our supplies, we’ve bought up all the goods we can at the grocery store – not much, but maybe enough – and Cormack is planning to replenish the water tanks at the abandoned whaling station across the bay. Simmons and Metcalfe have gone ashore for the last time to get a message through to U.S. Customs and Immigration in Anchorage, advising them that we will be taking a “deep-sea” route to Atka, an island several hundred miles closer to Amchitka. We assume that permission will come through within twenty-four hours and we’ll be able to leave Akutan. The deep-sea route allows us to bypass Atka and sneak up on Amchitka, circle the island and scout out the territory, then fall back to Atka and hang on there. From Atka it will be an easier run. The weather is getting rougher every day, and the closer we are when the test date is finally announced, the less likely we are to be stopped by storms.
When Simmons and Metcalfe return to the Greenpeace, everybody is getting ready for supper. Cormack is up in the radio room, flipping through some maps, a grizzle of white hair starting to grow like a mat on his face – “Seeing’s how all you pro-fessors and re-porters’ve got beards, thought I’d try one on for size. ‘Course it’ll be a man’s beard, not like that stringy thing on that Thurston fella.” Idly, Cormack looks up, and sees a flash of metal and foam out in the ocean beyond the bay. “Coast Guard cutter’s coming,” he says, in that matter-of-fact way of his, in exactly the same tone of voice as he’d said, a week ago, “Test’s been delayed.” If the Second Coming was announced, he’d come tromping in here and say, “God’s coming.” If the planet’s biosphere finally collapsed: “Sky’s falling.” Or (this one I have imagined a dozen times): “Boat’s sinking.”
Our long-awaited moment of confrontation with the American Empire has finally arrived. The hassles between Metcalfe, Simmons, and Fineberg all the way across the Gulf centred on: what can they do to stop us? We are a Canadian boat in international waters, yet only three miles away from Amchitka, Ground Zero, around which there is a fifty-mile security zone. What can the Americans do to stop us, short of an act of piracy, or a reversion to the time-honoured naval tradition of blasting us out of the water with their cannons? Cannikin is a key component in the building of the Anti-Ballistic Missile System, which is itself a step in the direction of Dr Strangelove’s famous bummer. Caught between the wish not to fuck up what little remains of her tattered alliances, and an obsession with the old nuclear deterrent fantasy, America might bust a gut over this one. They can’t win. If they do nothing, we’ll concentrate public attention on the recklessness of the test just by parking so dangerously close and risking our lives. If they blow their cool and grab us, we’ll become the subject of an international incident with far-reaching consequences. At the very least we will be a flaming match dropping into the dry hay of Canadian nationalism. Politics, politics, politics.
I crash down the ladder into the galley, rapping at everybody in a tense, excited voice. “John says Coast Guard cutter’s coming.” And at that moment the question comes into focus in my mind: Saaaaaay, how come we’re not out in international waters? This wasn’t supposed to happen 100 yards off the shore of Akutan, an American island. We must be inside their territorial limit, where our diplomatic immunity or whatever doesn’t apply. But we heard what Cormack said. We can’t stay out in the open for a whole month, not in the October storms. There’s a fine jittery air in the boat. Nobody’s overreacting. We’re all keeping a pretty good surface cool. Then again, four times I find myself going from the poop deck back to my bunk to get my pen and log book, and four times I forget what I wanted by the time I get there, then hurry back outside to watch the approach of the cutter and suddenly remember that I still don’t have my pen and log book. Wanting to get all the details down. What time is it, exactly? What direction is she coming from? What’s the date?
Our only weapons are our tape recorders and typewriters and notebooks and cameras. Which give us access to the mass media in Canada, the Office of the Prime Minister, and our public support – as long as we remain in clear view. Everything depends on that. If nobody knows we are out here, the Yanks can do anything they want. No non-American in the world today can watch the approach of one of the symbols of America’s might without a slight case of nerves. Metcalfe’s hand shakes with excitement as he fumbles through the boxes by his bunk for his film and tapes. Keziere mutters about what a rotten time of day this has happened, getting dark, available light going fast. He tries on one lens after another, darting in and out of the galley to check his light readings. Fineberg arranges his papers neatly on his clipboard, flicking his ballpoint around like a cowboy checking his pistol. Several hummed snatches of “We Love You, Greenpeace,” some actual giggling – and then, suddenly, the engine starts up.
What? Birmingham has pulled up the anchor, Cormack is heaving his huge bulk up from the engine room and tromping up to the Penthouse, yelling orders at Birmingham, spinning the wheel around. The engine is throbbing and clunking, water is gurgling up at the stern, and, my God, the fucking boat is moving. Thurston throws up his hands in despair as Bohlen and Metcalfe, already at the bridge, demand to know what the hell Cormack thinks he’s doing. Cormack is slamming gears around, spinning the wheel, waving his arms, and yelling at Birmingham, and the Greenpeace is heaving around, engine throttling up. Are we making a run for it? Cummings tries for the sixth time to light his pipe.
“Think maybe old Cormack’s flipped out?” I ask.
Fineberg.
Bohlen comes down from the bridge, shrugging and shaking his head, on the verge of laughing or crying, I don’t know which. He reports that Cormack is in one of those moods again. That means he’s bustling around like a bull, and if you try to talk to him he’ll just tell you to shut up or get the hell out of the way or fuck off. All the Greenhawks can do is collapse into a collective state of sitting back to watch what happens. The Coast Guard vessel slows down. “What next?” Keziere chuckles helplessly. Then a sudden blast of smoke from the cutter’s stack as the crew catch on. It’s absurd – we seem to be under full throttle, which only amounts to nine or ten knots, and that big mother of a Coast Guard ship can probably do thirty knots. They’re coming in through the mouth of the bay. Maybe a wily old sea fox like Captain John can dodge around them and beat it out to sea. He can’t just go forward – the bay’s a dead end and we’re trapped. Even if we do manage to dart through their fingers, they’ll get us out in the open, or send the Hercules after us again. It’s no use, John! We can’t escape! Why are we trying?
Then, as abruptly as it started up, the engine stops. Cormack is yelling at Birmingham to let down the anchor. We have moved about half a mile up the bay.
“So this’s what’s next,” says Keziere, gurgling in quiet hysteria. “We start up for no reason. And then we stop for no reason. It figures. Fuck around.”
Bohlen’s got the binoculars. “Have they got a gun?” I ask him.
“Oh yes, sure. Ah, I can see the name. The Confidence.”
“Well, they can afford to be confident. What kind of a gun is it?”
“Dunno. It’s covered up.”
“Thank Christ for that.”
“No need to worry,” says Fineberg. “I advised the CIA in my last secret report that you guys would give up without a fight. We won’t shoot you.”
One thing about Fineberg, he does manage to get in some licks while the blows are landing all around him. The shaft is so perfect, it is a shame Darnell and I are the only ones close enough to hear it. Fineberg is still feeling hurt that anyone would suspect him of being a CIA agent – he, Dick Fineberg, who has been fighting the military-industrial complex through his whole academic career, who turned down a juicy postdoctoral grant so that he can risk his life trying to bring the bastards down and generally give peace a chance, who has draped a sweatshirt carelessly over the licence plate on his motorcycle to protect Taiwanese people from the criminal charge of entertaining foreign visitors. He is accused of academic nit-picking when he points out that we have fallen victim to paranoid grandiosity because we lack clarity of purpose. Just before we got boarded by the Confidence at Akutan, for instance, Metcalfe claimed with existential grandiosity that for the Greenpeace, “the action transcends the law because it’s a whole new movie, a new scenario, a new plot.”
And now, here we stand on the old squeaky greasy wooden planks of the Phyllis Cormack in Akutan Bay, watching John Wayne’s boys bearing down on us in their immense armed super-dreadnaught.
“I guess this part’s real,” I say to Thurston.
“Another grand piano, man,” he says.
He looks out over the Surf-Cloud, the peak with the eco-cairn, the lovely cut of the wind across the water. This whole scene is a grand piano. He is totally alive, alert to every nuance of the situation, so turned on to so many levels of reality, always looking out in a way that the rest of us look only occasionally, seeing the world as a never-ending treasure, and life itself as a constant state of grace. He stands absolutely still on the poop deck, absorbing the flavour of the experience, then drifts into the galley with Darnell, who yells back to the rest of us, “Come on. Might as well have supper. It’ll be a while before they get to us.” Darnell is almost unflappable, the stereotypical stoic Canadian who doesn’t say much, just does things quietly and heroically, and in the end he gets killed and the American or Englishman gets the girl. Well, sure. Why not have supper? I’m hungry, come to think of it.
“We really are Hobbits,” says Moore, chuckling to himself as we troop in and sit down around the galley table. We even break out a final stashed-away bottle of rum.
“Christ,” says Metcalfe, “we can’t go to Amchitka now. We won’t have anything left to drink when the fucking bomb goes off.”
Darnell has the turkey out of the oven, Metcalfe pours rum into china mugs, the naked bulb in the ceiling makes it very bright and cozy in the tiny white enamel-walled galley, and we pretend to be unbothered by what’s going on out in the gathering blue dark. We’ve thought up a thousand schemes for dealing with the Yanks when the moment of the bust comes – hitting them with wet mops, throwing roles of toilet paper at them, peeing on them from the upper deck, fighting them off with grappling hooks, taking off all our clothes and lining up at attention on the poop deck and singing, “We Love You, Greenpeace,” and everything in between. But these scenarios were built on the old high-seas immunity theory. As it is, we’re caught with our pants down inside their waters.
“When they come in and start poking their sten guns at us,” says Metcalfe, “we burst out singing `The Star-Spangled Banner’ and demand political asylum from Canada.”
“Yeah, the whole thing was an elaborate trick to escape from Trudeau’s Communist slave state, right?”
“And then we sell our stories to Life, and Keziere sells his photos of the first Canadian refugees to arrive in the United States of America from north of the border, and then –”
“We retire to Morocco and smoke hash for the rest of our lives.”
“And Canada claims that we’re actually prisoners of war and uses us as pawns in a defence-sharing agreement with Russia.”
“And the Royal Canadian Air Force sends a Piper Cub loaded with tennis balls over the White House and drops them all.”
“And the U.S. government immediately surrenders –”
“And once again we save the universe!”
It is a terrific supper. Halfway through, we spot a motor launch bobbing across the water toward us from the Confidence, which has stopped about half a mile away. Four figures are clearly to be seen standing up in the launch. Standing up! It must be some crazy navy boarding tradition – the water is rough enough that any sane man would be huddled down in the boat. The launch cuts across our bow and comes puttering up to the poop deck on the starboard – no, port. At the last minute our collective cool breaks down and Keziere, Bohlen, Metcalfe, and Simmons all rush outside. The skipper waits up in the Penthouse, one hand on the wheel, the other in his pants pocket, one leg folded across the other, his fedora low on his forehead, looking like a pleasure boater curiously watching the approach of another boat – might be peddling shrimp for all he knows.
Birmingham comes crashing into the galley and points at the poster of Nixon, whose nose has been festooned with two darts – two green darts – ever since the night we heard about the test being delayed. “Gotta take that down,” says Birmingham. I remember that the MANGE D’LA MARDE poster came down when we were out on the Gulf because we kept getting thrown against it and it was starting to tear. I go and get it out from where somebody stashed it under a bunk, and when I get back, Birmingham has pulled down the Nixon poster. “It’s no laughing matter,” he says – genuinely angry, I think – as Moore, Thurston, Darnell, and Fineberg howl and pound their fists with glee. Birmingham’s normally super-white skin is turning pink. “No laughing matter at all. You damn young smart alecks can laugh all you want, but just you remember we’re in their water right now, and we’re in enough trouble as it is without going and getting them madder at us. How’d you like it if you went on an American ship and saw a picture of our Prime Minister with a couple of darts on his face?” Explosion of redoubled laughter, Moore and Thurston gasping for air. Wow, when Dave Birmingham gets mad, it’s really a trip. The docile, polite, ‘scuseme-for-butting-in-I-know-it’s-none-of-my-business Birmingham – ten times as strong as any one aboard except Cormack, and maybe the stolid Darnell – is almost shaking with fury. He shoves past me on his way into the Opium Den to hide the poster, not noticing MANGE D’LA MARDE rolled up in my hand. Immediately I tack it up in place of Nixon.
We are still lying back against the galley walls laughing our heads off when Bohlen comes bounding and whooping through the galley door, his eyebrows halfway up to his hairline, yelling, “Whoooopppiiieeee! Listen to this!” He’s reading aloud from a cablegram-looking piece of paper, in a jabbering delirious-with-joy voice: “Due to the situation we are in, we crew of the Confidence feel that what you are doing is for the good of all mankind. If our hands weren’t tied by these military bonds, we would be in the same position you are in if it was at all possible. Good luck. We are behind you one hundred percent.”
“What’s going on?” screams Thurston. “You mean they’re not busting us?”
“You mean they’re on our side?”
“The U.S. Coast Guard is on our side?”
Wildly, the thought flashes through my mind that maybe, while we’ve been out of radio contact, the Revolution has happened in America and it’s all over, and the revolutionaries are coming out to let us know there’s nothing to worry about, there won’t be any H-bomb test at Amchitka. Peace, love, and freedom have conquered and Nixon is locked away. Now, having switched instantly from hysterical helpless laughter to heart-pumping adrenaline excitement, we jam our way through the galley door and out on deck. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the gloom, but there, tied to the Greenpeace with a rope, is the Coast Guard launch, about a third the size of our whole boat. It bobs there with three young guys standing in it – frogmen? Yeah, they’re wearing wetsuits, but without flippers or goggles or helmets, just navy wool caps on their heads. Metcalfe jabs his microphone at them, yelling: “Is it okay with you guys if we get this on the eleven o’clock news?” He steps back with his National Film Board camera on his shoulder and the other hand still holding out the tape recorder mike. Bohlen stands beside the launch with the three frogmen bobbing around behind him, reading the message aloud – get it on the record. Keziere leaps around with his camera. Cummings peeks over Bohlen’s shoulder, scribbling furiously in his notebook, and Moore, Thurston, and I are drawn to the action like iron filings to a magnet. I have only to take one look at the Coast Guard guys to see that – my God, they’re freaks! One of them is a chubby guy, a Fabulous Furry Freak Brother. Another is a black guy. I throw my hand out to him and we automatically engage in the revolutionary handshake, which I used to think was silly but which now makes perfect sense. It is a hell of a fine feeling to be gripping that American’s hand. They have not had to look too closely at us to see that not a few of us have “freak” stamped all over our faces, our hair, our clothes, what we’re doing. The vibes! It is a near-instantaneous telepathic communication. The enemy is dying from within! The enemy has a revolution on his hands! The mere physical barriers between races and cultures collapse before the wave of evolutionary mutation. A new race is in the making. The freaks on the Greenpeace meet the freaks on the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Confidence like two small bands of Homo sapiens rushing with cries of recognition into a joyous embrace, while the Neanderthals, a strange brutish shambling race of turned-off hung-up blind grotesque primitives, haunt the world around us. Brotherhood is powerful. “Brother, am I glad to see you! Man, we were expecting a pack of, you know, Green Berets, to come leaping down on us. Seeing you freaks is like seeing angels, man!” The black guy and the Freak Brother guy are rapping madly away. The third dude comes on much more cool and got-it-together, as if to say, “Everything’s out of sight, man. You know, the whole scene is so mind-blowing every day that it’s just . . . wow . . . far out . . . I mean, either you can dig it or you can’t. This’s a gas, man. Let’s all dig it.”
The letter from the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard vessel Confidence.
Commander Floyd Hunter of the Confidence pays a visit to the Greenpeace.
Meanwhile, as this good contact high unfolds between us on the poop deck, old Captain John is having the book thrown at him by the Commander of the Confidence, and the Revolution in America is a hell of a long way from over. Though I didn’t even notice him coming aboard, the Commander is doing what we expected all along – busting the Greenpeace. My research tells me that he was very cool when he climbed aboard. None of that stereotyped snappy military clown stuff. He has his role, and the range of his actions is defined in ink. Well, he is a U.S. Coast Guard commander. He has a good presence, even if he moves like a robot and his shaved head looks as though it just came out of the head-making machine. The electrodes have been peeled off, the eyelids have been tested and found to be in working condition, the ego component has been installed and the switch thrown to ON. All that remains is for the head to be attached to the filament-wound glass epoxy android body unit, and voila! – Commander Floyd Hunter, Serial Number 774-8888-002, Model #37. Function: Officer in charge of U.S. Coast Guard vessel Confidence, 17th District, U.S. Coast Guard Command. Instructions for use: Feed required tape (C-90 microminiaturized psychotronic cassettes now available) at specified psi-band into molecular ether-sensitive ego component. Results guaranteed! Which is to say that Commander Hunter doesn’t look like any relative of mine. He wears a wetsuit with a garment that resembles a pilot’s nylon jumpsuit over it, a rather quaint navy blue turtleneck sweater, an orange life jacket fastened neatly over top of all that – presumably in strict accordance with some subsection of some rule on officers’ attire in some regulations handbook. He stands in the Penthouse with the air of an honest but world-weary highway patrolman talking to the driver of the car he’s just pulled over, informing the master of CAN VES GREEN PEACE, Captain John C. Cormack of Vancouver, that he has just broken the law, and he is liable to have his vessel impounded.
But there is an aura of irony about Commander Hunter. He may know his role and conform to it perfectly, yet he retains a sense of himself that is quite separate from the situation and the role into which he has been thrust. Like having formally to board this rather lovely, almost antique-looking fishing boat skippered by one of those crazy but delightful, even honourable (in their own knavish way) old captains, famous along the Northwest Coast for their exploits. Yeah, the Commander of the Confidence seems basically a good man with an eye for the texture of a situation, a sense of himself, and a sense of humour.
While the freak convention takes place out on deck, Commander Hunter reads out a warrant for our arrest. He then hands a piece of paper to Cormack and the two of them go down to the galley, where Bohlen and Metcalfe introduce themselves, Bohlen as one of the executives of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, the Canadian group that chartered Captain Cormack’s vessel and whose instructions he has been following, etc., etc. All very formal, all very stiff, with a shivery air of excitement and humour and a shared recognition of the real political import of the scene. Yet in another way, the formalities are silly. We are human beings, members of the same society. These men are practically cousins and this is a family squabble. A polite and proper exchange is taking place between two men who might otherwise be sitting down at the bar to have a drink together. While Commander Hunter is formally charging Captain Cormack with a “customs violation,” their crewmen are shaking hands and exchanging messages of support and sharing the last of the rum. We are ecstatic, joyous, amused, angry, frightened, frustrated, calm, cool, crazy, sane, together, unnerved, overwhelmed, happy, sad, content, edgy, and jittery all at once. Commander Hunter lays the piece of paper on the galley table and flips out his notebook and ballpoint, at the same moment as Metcalfe flips out his notebook and ballpoint.
STATEMENT OF CUSTOMS VIOLATION, F/V PHYLLIS CORMACK/GREENPEACE.
1. SITUATION
A. PHYLLIS CORMACK ARRIVED AKUTAN ON 26 SEP HAVING GIVEN COAST GUARD REQUIRED ADVANCE NOTICE OF ARRIVAL. VSL DID NOT REPORT HER ARRIVAL TO CUSTOMS WITHIN 24 HOURS AS REQUIRED BY 19 USC 1433 AND DID NOT MAKE FORMAL ENTRY WITH CUSTOMS WITHIN 48 HOURS AS REQUIRED BY 19 USC 1435. VSL HAS NOT TO THIS TIME NOTIFIED CUSTOMS.
B. DISTRICT DIRECTOR OF CUSTOMS HAS ASKED COAST GUARD TO NOTIFY MASTER OF PHYLLIS CORMACK THAT HE HAS INCURRED PENALTY WITHIN U.S. CUSTOMS FOR FAILURE TO REPORT UNDER THE TARIFF ACT OF 1932 (19 USC 1435). LETTER OF PENALTY WILL BE SENT TO HOME ADDRESS OF MASTER. CUSTOMS HAS ALSO REQUESTED COAST GUARD TO NOTIFY MASTER OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE TARIFF ACT OF 1932. 19 USC 1436 PROVIDES THAT VSLS FOUND IN VIOLATION OF 19 USC 1435 ARE LIABLE FOR A FINE OF UP TO 1,000 DOLLARS.
C. IF VESSEL DOES NOT MAKE FORMAL ENTRY TO CUSTOMS BEFORE HE DEPARTS AKUTAN HE WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF 19 USC 1585, FOR WHICH PENALTY IS UP TO 5,000 DOLLARS FINE AND/OR FORFEITURE OF VESSEL.
2. ACTION:
ENTRY WITH CUSTOMS MAY BE MADE BY GREENPEACE OR HER REPRESENTATIVE CONTACTING THE DISTRICT DIRECTOR OF CUSTOMS IN ANCHORAGE TO REQUEST A FORMAL ENTRY INTO A NON-CUSTOMS PORT. . . .
PHYLLIS CORMACK MUST ARRANGE FOR A CUSTOMS OFFICER TO PROCEED TO AKUTAN TO MAKE FORMAL ENTRY.
The gist of this tight-assed message is that we blew it by crossing the border without reporting to customs. All our elaborate planning to be in international waters has come to nothing. They have us. And what now? End of the attack on the weapons makers of Amchitka. End of the Fellowship of the Piston Rings. Go home, Hobbits. The Dark Lord wins. Custer drives off the Indians with a wave of his hand – they forgot to pay their entry fee to the Little Big Horn Theatre. Game ball. Or is it?
The freak convention is coming to an end and we want to give our brothers some gifts. Over the side go the presents. We find the Nixon poster and hand it over, along with the green darts, a handful of books on eco-tactics, a small Canadian flag, some peace pennants, Canadian cigarettes, and a copy of The Female Eunuch. It is all we can spare. They especially dig the poster – “That’ll go up for sure, man” – and the darts. They tell us how they have come to be handing us a message of support while they are busting us. There is a year-long waiting list to get in the Coast Guard, and if you get in, you don’t have to go to Vietnam. “It’s a four-year stint, and it’s a drag – it’s really a drag – but you get back home alive, you know?” They first got word about the Greenpeace mission three or four months ago. “But the brass are hip. They know what’s coming down. When we set out on this little caper they didn’t tell us anything about where we were going or what we were up to. You know? And that’s weird. Usually they don’t give a shit and everybody pretty well knows what’s happening. But this time – not a word, man. Just keep us all in the fog. Wasn’t till a couple of hours ago word sneaked out it was you guys we were going to bust.” They got their petition together immediately and started getting guys to sign it. At that time no one knew who was going to be taking the brass to the Greenpeace, but everybody wanted to sign. At the last minute, men were fighting to grab the petition and sign it. “Sure hope you guys can squeeze outta this and get on up there and shove it up their asses. So – do it, man. Far out.”
Well, now. This is getting incredible. The radio message from the Camsell, Lucy and Daisy Sewid’s similar greeting on behalf of the Kwak’waka’wakw, people, the United Church of Canada, and some fifty other organizations ranging from the B.C. Federation of Labour to the Liberal Party of Canada speaking through the Prime Minister. This is great. But if all these people care so much, how come they are all carrying on busily doing what they always do? Why is business going on as usual? In a sickening flash that takes me as low as I was high a moment before, I see that a revolution can go no faster or further than people themselves, and together people generate inertia. Even in this situation, when hundreds of thousands of people all over the political spectrum join together in a common objection, there is not enough momentum to move people out of the mass inertia. The Megamachine continues to plunge unimpeded toward destruction. These guys in the Coast Guard have taken a huge step – in effect, they have committed an act of treason. In a different age they might have been court martialled, or shot. But their strength lies in the fact that all of them were willing to commit the act of defiance. And yet between us, even with all the support we have – in Canada, the closest thing to a mass movement in decades, and for the Coast Guard rebels, the peace and Black Liberation movements – damn it, we still aren’t strong enough to throw the androids down. They are still running the show. The Coast Guard freaks had to wait for the Commander to turn his back and then sneak their message to us.
Now, at the moment when Commander Hunter stands up in the galley, Cummings rushes back to warn the crewmen, who hand back the rum, stash their books and pennants in their wetsuits, and come to attention. Fully occupying his role, the Commander walks across the poop deck and climbs into the launch. He must notice that one of his men has a Canadian flag tucked in his belt and that their wetsuits are bulky with goodies, but he neither blinks nor not-blinks. As well, he could not have failed to note in a single glance that the crew of the Greenpeace are not all of the same mould. Some obvious regular citizens are aboard – Metcalfe, Bohlen, Cormack, and Birmingham – but there are also some characters who look a lot like hippies. No reaction has been prescribed in the prerecorded instructions, so no reaction is made. He stares evenly into Keziere’s Leica and Metcalfe’s purring NFB camera, accustomed to being in the presence of the media and giving no hint of his private thoughts.
Metcalfe, Bohlen, and Fineberg.
In spite of the fact that the Commander’s role appears to have taken him over completely, I still pick up that vaguely warm sense of humour. “Will we be seeing you again?” I ask him. He flashes the thinnest tic of a smile and says, “You can count on it.”
The launch bearing Commander Hunter heads back through the thickening darkness, the three freaks flashing V-signs and grins at us whenever the Commander isn’t looking. Finally the launch vanishes into the steel grey bulk of the Confidence, which stays where it is, looking suspiciously as though it is blockading the mouth of the bay. “Well, we’re in a splendid trap now, aren’t we?” mutters Thurston, still shaking his head in amazement at the many flaming extremes of the last half-hour. Yeah. We are in a trap, no doubt about it. Amchitka is slipping out of reach. First the delay, and now this. Up until now, the faith has burned in me. We will make it. Our vibes are so good, we are in harmony with so many forces, magic is afoot. We’ll make it for sure. But now. . . . Well, there sits the Confidence, curled up like a cat with a hundred eyes.
But they are being careful to play it very neatly. A boat in an allied country that has been blessed by church and state alike can only be dealt with diplomatically. By arresting us, they took the chance that even more attention will be drawn to us and to the protest. And that’s exactly what happens. Metcalfe gets the story on the eleven o’clock news. It goes national in Canada and makes the front pages in Toronto, Washington, and Alaska, and – good grief – we are even briefly noted in the New York City press. Not because we were busted, but because a whole boatload of Coast Guard guys supported a protest action undertaken against their own government by a foreign power. What? Is there some kind of mutiny brewing in the Coast Guard? Once again, it was either our karma running or our blind luck. Out of the jaws of a boo-boo we had snatched a public relations victory.
Simmons and Fineberg have “I told you so” written all over their faces. We have been caught on a technicality, just the sort of thing they were trying to warn us about. And yet . . . and yet. . . . Maybe this is the best thing that could have happened. Without the confrontation, we might have petered out quietly here among the islands, waiting and waiting and waiting for the test. They delayed it once. They can delay it again. Certainly they can keep it up longer than we can. Sooner or later we will run out of food or water or energy or will or spirit, whichever goes first, and we’ll have to turn around and head home. But now we won’t have to go quietly. Now we are making some waves. Whatever damage the brass inflicted on us, it is already backfiring on them. Instead of leaving us alone to sink into obscurity, they have confronted us and got us onto the front page. Even Simmons and Fineberg can see that the situation is still in a state of flux. Will it continue to work more to our advantage than to theirs? Who can declare with certainty that we are blessed or cursed, star-crossed or enchanted?
That has been the question since early in the voyage. Three days out of Vancouver, Birmingham came up from the engine room and announced that he was resigning as engineer. Now that he’d had a chance to examine the engine, he wasn’t willing to take responsibility for it. He would stay on as the Captain’s assistant, but that was all. “This boat,” he said, “runs on no known principles of science or engineering. It runs on shithouse luck.”
And as we crossed the Gulf of Alaska, most of us throwing up or frozen in fear as the mountain-size swells heaved toward us, Cormack kept shaking his head in amazement, scratching his chin, and muttering, “Can’t figure it out. Never seen the weather so calm out here this time of year. Should be blowing like a bastard and here she is, flat calm.”
“It’s our karma, John,” Thurston explained.
“Huh,” said Cormack. “Crazy weather.”
“No,” Thurston insisted, “it’s our vibes, John. We’ve got good vibes. That means good karma. Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.”
Who knows the difference between good karma and shithouse luck, and who cares? As long as it keeps working. Even now, although we have sustained two body blows, each strong enough by itself to wipe us out – the delay and the bust – we are still in motion and gradually we are bringing more and more pressure to bear. Around the same time Birmingham abdicated as guardian of the engine, a radio message came in from the icebreaker Camsell: “You have our full support for your courageous and idealistic action. Wish we could do more to help but we can only pray and hope that the test will be cancelled.” The lightning rod flares through the electronic night of the Global Village – twice hit, the Greenpeace looms larger than ever when it should be sinking. With every delay, every fuck-up, more public attention is turned toward the protest. To the Americans we are still a tiny symbol, scarcely a spark. But there is tinder everywhere. Ah, we are Hobbits! In the Great War of the Rings, the Hobbits were too small and weak to make much difference in the battles that raged on the Field of Cormallen outside the gates of the Kingdom of the Dark Lord. Their humble function was to sneak in through the back door of Mordor and hurl the One Ring into the fire. Like the Hobbits, we have no great swords to draw. We have no magic power. We will only be the temporary Bearers of the One Ring, while the real struggle is carried by a mass alliance of Black warriors and white warriors and wizards of legal magic, environmental organizations, anti-war groups, troops of Quakers and other pacifists, and legions of elf-like flower children.
It is the old shithouse karma at work again – that and Metcalfe’s nose for news. He was on the radiophone within minutes of the Coast Guard’s departure, feeding the fires of public awareness and unrest. In another stroke of ridiculous luck, we found that the radio, which hadn’t been getting through to Vancouver at all, was suddenly loud and clear. In moving the boat, Cormack had accidentally put us in a position where the mountains were no longer in the way.
In the morning the Confidence is gone, maybe on another mission or maybe lurking out in Unimak Pass, waiting to counter our next move, whatever that may be. Our range of options is narrow. Metcalfe gets through to the Coast Guard and learns that we don’t necessarily have to wait for a customs officer to come to us. We can head back along the Aleutian chain toward the mainland of Alaska, to a place called Sand Point. There we can see a customs officer, clear customs, and maybe wiggle out of the mess we are in, and still be in a position to strike for Amchitka once the date for the test is announced. The risk is that by going into Sand Point, we may be stepping into a deeper pit of red tape and technicalities, but there is not much choice at this stage.
Cormack ups anchor and we head out of Akutan Bay and back through Unimak Pass, past Unimak Island toward the Alaska Peninsula. For the first time, we are heading away from Amchitka. But maybe it is only a temporary setback. If nothing else, we can restock our supplies at Sand Point, and though we will be 300 miles farther from our objective than we had been at Akutan, we will still be within a week’s sailing of Amchitka. Given decent weather, we could make it there in time for the rendezvous with Cannikin. There are a lot more ifs, buts, and maybes than before, but we are still in the ball game. Whatever pressure is applied just by our presence is still being applied, only more so. Not only have we succeeded in getting as far as we have – within striking distance – and not only did we accidentally manage to elude the Coast Guard at sea, now we have also triggered a near-mutiny. This morning things do not seem so bad at all. If they pin us down in Sand Point, we can scream and holler and maybe hype the level of action even further. Or make a break for it. Yeah, come to think of it, we still have plenty of options. The battle isn’t lost.
Yet as we head down along the south coast of Unimak Island, a wintery wind whipping the waves and a few flakes of snow stinging across the decks, old Cormack comes up to me and says, “Wanna make a bet?”
“Maybe. What’s the bet?”
He leans forward, as though to whisper a secret. “I’ll bet you that it’s the [mumbled word] of the Greenpeace.”
“The what of the Greenpeace?”
“Didn’t you hear me? Well, I’ll say it again, puh puh puh puh puh, this’s the [mumbled word] of the Greenpeace.”
“What the hell’re you saying, John?”
He grinned, one of those I-know-something-you-don’t-know grins of his. “Wal, put it this way, since you can’t seem to hear what a fella’s telling you. I either said it was the retreat of the Greenpeace or something else. Now that’s the bet. Whaddya think it is?”
“I’d say it’s the retreat, John. I don’t think we’re completely beaten yet.”
Thurston, Moore, and Darnell.
“The word I used wasn’t retreat, I’ll tell you.”
“So you think we’ve had it, John? We’re finished?”
“Wal, I didn’t say retreat, so I must’ve said the other word. Even a dummy can figure that out.”
For some reason Cormack can’t bring himself to say the word out loud – defeat. Briefly I wonder if there is some sort of taboo on uttering it, like the taboos against opening cans upside down and hanging up mugs facing the wrong way.
“Why don’t you just say it, John? Defeat. D, E, F, E, A, T.”
He shrugs and looks away. “That’s what the bet’s about,” he said. “Which one is it?”
But he won’t say it. Maybe he can’t say it. I begin for the first time to understand John Cormack. He has probably never said the word “defeat” aloud in his life. Somewhere in my mind, a warning bell rings. If John can’t say “defeat,” if he can’t cry uncle when the time comes to cry uncle, then he may yet take us to the bottom of the sea out of sheer stubbornness. His word on how safe something is may not be absolutely reliable. A man who cannot admit defeat is a man who will take you over the edge of the world. That makes him a strong man, an indomitable man, a man of iron will. Ah, John!
The Bering Sea is behind us. We did not get to know much about its mood, except that it is getting mean, and the ice packs will soon be awakening. Winter is on the wind. The windows in the Penthouse are fogging on the inside and getting covered with cold wet slush on the outside. Coming across the slow mystical back of the Gulf, we gathered often in that little tram-like booth, the centre of daytime social activity. Now it is cold, like one of those old wooden streetcar waiting stations, the kind that were covered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and old newspapers, stiff gusts of wind blowing through the door every time someone entered. Outside, there is a hum and a wail. The window panes rattle. The old waiting station swings back and forth and bounces along in a movement that can only be described as doggy. We have to wear gloves now, and steam puffs from our mouths. We have to stomp our feet to keep them warm as we alternate between taking the wheel and going out into the sleet and the icy teeth of the wind to wipe the slush off the glass so we can see where we are going. At night the radar is on all the time, but we still have to work at the windows to see the lighthouses and beacons. And now we are in the fishing lanes. Lights move blurrily in the puddles on the windows – halibut boats, crab boats, shrimp boats. Once we pass a Russian trawler. The crew’s voices come jabbering through the radio, the powerful generators running their electronic equipment overriding our tiny side-band. “Yep,” says Cormack, “them Russian boats has always got the latest stuff.” Occasionally, over the woofing whining keening noises that come through the radio, we hear Japanese mariners calling to one another.
It is an odd, lonely corner of the world. We are close to the American mainland, moving between the peninsula and little clusters of islands with names like Poperechnoi, Dolgoi, Ukolnoi, Iliasik, Chernabura, Sanak, and Canton. Between the Japanese and Russian voices, and Cormack on the lookout for other Canadian vessels skippered by men he knows, the area does not feel American. It is completely removed from neon jungles, race riots, Mayor Daly, smog, freeways, billboards, pop art, suburbia, napalm, and all those other distinctly American things. Yet there are names on the charts that tell us clearly enough we are near the shore of the good old U.S.A. To the north, with great white scallops of wind-trimmed cloud around its peaks, looms Pavlof Volcano, yet the shore below it is called Long Beach. After Cape Tolstoi comes Cape Seal, after Belkofski Point comes Bluff Point, north of Unga Spit is Lefthand Bay. Opposite Kaslokan Point lies Kitchen Anchorage. John Rock is only a few thousand yards from Olga Island, and going through Popof Strait you are just north of a bay called Saddler’s Mistake. Along the Alaska peninsula itself, no one can quibble with the naming of the peaks, even as the Russian influence wanes: After Pavlof Volcano comes Mount Dana, then Hoodoo Mountain, Monolith Peak, Pyramid Peak, and Cathedral Peak – names that speak to the Arctic timelessness of the place, no signs of civilization at all beyond the remote flickering beacons. The drum-rolling Gulf of Alaska was a whole new world after the northern B.C. coast with its crumbled totem poles, and Akutan was like another planet after the Gulf. Now we are moving along Davidson Bank past Sandman Reefs toward the Shumagin Islands, and once again we have entered a new perceptual movie, slid across the line into another dimension.
And another season. It was Indian summer, then autumn North Pacific, then a plunge into the miracle summer of Akutan. Now it is crystal early winter, breath fogging the glass, and the Penthouse is no longer the hearth. Even when we are awake we tend to stay in our sleeping bags in the Opium Den, wearing sweaters and sometimes scarves, or we gather in the galley to be near the big iron-topped stove, the only source of heat on the boat, which still bears its original name, M.S. AMBASSADOR, in faint rust-coloured letters. Hardly anybody stays out on deck – it is too damn cold. The four-hour watches seemed long when we came up the Inside Passage and stretched out into long stony trips on the Gulf. Now they are eternities of waiting.
We are starting to get tired. Conversations move more slowly and there are fewer babbling sessions. We are no less nervous – Cannikin looms large in our minds – but a kind of numbness is setting in. It’s hard to keep your momentum up when you’re moving away from your target. One afternoon Metcalfe and I were on watch, he sagging against the wheel, looking half-asleep like a dozing cat, as though melting away into another world. “The question is, Bob,” he said, speaking from far away, “is this an Ahab trip or an Ishmael trip? Cannikin is Moby Dick, you know. For some of us, anyway. And you know, to this day I still don’t know which one it is for me.” He waited a while, and I waited a while, and then he seemed to return to the world of the lurching bobbing wagging waiting station, aware once again that he was holding the wheel. He looked at me evenly. “Do you? Know what it is, I mean? Are we madmen or orphans out doing a job? I remember that line of Melville’s: ‘There is death in this business of whaling.’ Well, the whales are gone. Sometimes I feel like Ishmael looking at Ahab in horror. The Ahab part of me is mad enough to pull the lightning down from the sky. ‘Leap! Leap up, lick the sky! I leap the burn with thee; I burn with thee!’ He’s obsessed and he scares me, because he doesn’t give a shit about the Pequod or the Greenpeace. What was it Ishmael said about the Pequod? A noble old craft, but melancholy too. . . . Well, this old rig’s a Pequod if there ever was one, and I can see it going down. ‘And the great shroud of the sea’ rolling on, and on, and on, ‘oh, death-glorious ship! Oh lonely death on lonely life!’ And then the other part of me who’s in this century, not that one, says, Metcalfe old man, don’t blow your cool, and I’m right back into the politics and press releases and news desk phone ringing at three in the morning and meetings in executive suites and plush carpets and the tinkle of martini glasses. Ishmael survived, but who remembers him? Ahab was the hero, and he was mad. Sometimes I think I’d rather be Ahab – I’d rather go down with the fucking whale.”
The fishing vessel Sleep Robber pays a visit to the Greenpeace.
“I’m not Ishmael, Ben,” I said, “but neither are you. We’re not Ahab either.”
We have a strange intimacy, Metcalfe and I. We have jumped through the same hoops, inhabited the same small closed world of western Canadian journalism, worked at the same jobs – police beat, city hall, news desk, night city editor. But he did them almost thirty years before I did. By the time I arrived on the scene, scarcely any trace of him was left. Both of us dropped out of high school in Winnipeg, both of us went kicking and sweating through the same late-night pits of reporting and editing, and now our trajectories have come together on this noble but melancholy old boat. The bond is undeniable. Yet even at that moment, standing in the Penthouse, taking turns at the wheel, we both knew that a struggle was shaping up between us. We will face each other across the galley table and fight desperately, for our very lives and for control of the boat. Yet it will be more like a struggle with our own shadows than a direct fight. He can fight with Fineberg and Simmons easily enough, and even Bohlen, but not so easily with me, because I can’t help but know the kind of punches he will throw. We have identical fight styles, but Metcalfe is thirty years older, thirty years tougher, with thirty years more training. He is strong. How strong? The only way to measure it is in the ring. When it comes down to the final battle for control of the Greenpeace, who will win?
But at this moment the struggle is not yet in focus. At this moment we are approaching Shumagin Island, just complying with the orders of the U.S. Coast Guard. We will head into Sand Point, Alaska, go through the red tape of formal entry through customs, which we should have done earlier, and then we will be faced with nothing more than a long wait for word on the test.
Funny about that bust. The Coast Guard had advised us we couldn’t go into Dutch Harbor, but we could go into Akutan. They said nothing about having to make formal application for entry. It was enough to make you paranoid. You can go in that room, and then, Aha! You’re under arrest for trespassing!
Into the Shumagin Islands we came sailing on this day, the day on which Cannikin was supposed to go off. We should be at Amchitka now, waiting for America’s largest underground explosion to hit us, but instead we are almost 700 miles away, rounding the tip of an island called Unga, not Amchitka, up through Popof Strait to the cannery town of Sand Point, with the test still at least a month away.
Cormack angles the Phyllis Cormack in toward the dock, looking for a place to park among the dozens of fishing boats. Sand Point does not look like much, even though it is the largest community we have seen since Vancouver. How many light years away does Vancouver seem? The physical exhaustion of taking watches, of hauling oneself along against the walls and decks as they are flung about, and the months of excitement and tension and anticipation – all have taken their toll, and time seems to have lengthened. Can it be true that we have been on the boat a mere seventeen days? It feels like months. And yet we may still be in the early stage of the voyage. Another month before the bomb goes off, and then another two weeks before we make it back to Vancouver? A shiver goes through me. Sometimes the boat seems like a prison. Worse, I can feel my own determination crumbling, see the group’s resolve fading on their faces.
Cormack jostles the boat in against the wharf. It’s low tide – the pilings reach on up over our heads and we are staring between them into murky cold cavern-like glooms, the water milky and full of orange chips, and hundred of gulls yowk and crash up and down on the other side of the wharf to get at the bits of waste being discharged from the cannery. A wooden sign is nailed to one of the pilings beside the ladder leading to the top of the wharf. The bottom of the sign has been broken off, so all it says is PLEASE DO NOT. The air is cold and dank and there is a peculiar unpleasant smell. God, do we have to anchor right next to a stinking cannery? But we do – it seems there is nowhere else to put in.
Up on the wharf we are confronted by a long white warehouse with the name WAKEFIELD’S printed on the side. And underneath, in smaller print, ALASKA KING CRAB. A forklift is trundling back and forth between six-foot-square wooden boxes and the entrance to the cannery. On each trip it carries a metal container over the edges of which we can see prickly crab legs and claws waving frantically. Then the container is flipped on its side with a pulpy eggshell-breaking sound, and a hundred or more Alaska king crabs go clicking and scratching down to a metal ramp, which carries them out of sight into the depths of the cannery. This is going to be a bummer.
Back at Akutan, Metcalfe and Keziere went aboard the sister ship of the Pueblo, the crab cannery boat, and Keziere came back as shaken and white-faced as when he was seasick. “Man,” he said, “that’s the worst place I’ve ever seen. No . . . reverence for life, or whatever you want to call it, at all. They just run those crabs through like old shoes, man, chop chop and tear them apart.” Here at Sand Point it is the same. By the thousands the crabs are hauled up in nets, dumped into metal containers, forklifted over and piled in huge wooden bins, and then scooped up. Too bad if a leg gets sheared off or a claw or eye stalk gets torn out in the process.
Morbidly, we wander over to the wooden bins and look in. There is a constant rattle and clickety-click-click, like distant typewriter keys or paper clips, and we are peering into the pit. A dizzying swoop of emotion, like vertigo, and I am on the precipice of my childhood nightmares, which were filled with monsters just like these clacking mandible-wagging creatures. Backward and forward they plow, heaving desperately upward, only to slide back with a splash and be caught in a seething avalanche of prickly purplish armour, shells shuddering and convulsing, pincers groping wildly, long fragile feelers bent and broken and twisted. Click click click. For one gagging gasping moment I think I’m going to pass out. King crabs are possessed of some kind of consciousness, aren’t they? They have families, they have tribes, they set up colonies as deep as seventy fathoms down, they migrate, they go hunting, they fight – some kind of consciousness, so how do they feel in that trap, especially the ones at the bottom? “Let the goddamn bomb go off, man,” says Thurston. “The sooner this planet is rid of us, the better.”
The whole story is that the crabs are caught in pots where they remain for as long as five days, starving, struggling desperately to get out. The boat comes along and they are hauled up, dumped in heaps into a water-filled hold, and carries them back to shore, which may take another day or two. Several more days may go by before the forklift hauls them up in nets, dripping and clacking, their snapped limbs dangling, and drops them into the bins. Within a day or two the crabs are swept down the chute into the cannery, where they are seized like coconuts and rammed against a fixed steel blade that looks like a battle axe. They are literally split in half. Their pincers tighten spasmodically at the moment of dying, with enough force to chop off a man’s finger, so the workers keep their hands out of the way. Then, still twitching, the half bodies are tossed onto a conveyor belt and carried through a giant dishwasher-like apparatus. They are dismembered, canned, and shipped to the south, where people like us eat them as a delicacy.
Workers at the crab cannery at Sand Point, Alaska.
Meanwhile, the cracked remains of the shells and the white mucus that spills out like broth are flushed into the water. The gulls dive down to feed and the stench hovers under the wharf like a cloud. It is in that very cloud, so different from the Surf-Cloud at Akutan, that the Phyllis Cormack is moored, while the forklift chugs and putts along the wharf, and the distant clicking of the trapped crabs tinkles in the air all day, all night. The record for an Alaska king crab is sixty-one inches across – wider than your kitchen table. But that was ten years ago. Since then, hordes of boats have gone out hunting for them. With the whales almost extinct, the herring at the edge of oblivion, the shrimp disappearing, and the halibut so scarce that boats have to push out into uncharted waters to find them, fishermen have turned increasingly to crabs. At first it was a bonanza, with regular hauls of creatures larger than German shepherds. But each year, as the plunder continues, they drop in size. And each year the “minimum allowable size” is lowered, just an inch at a time. Now, in the autumn of 1971, scarcely a decade after the great Alaska king crab industry became “commercially viable,” it is on its last legs. The crabs piled in the bins at Sand Point average seven inches across the shell (twenty-four inches spread out), and fishermen and cannery workers are handling crabs with six- and even five-inch shells. We saw the abandoned canneries along the B.C. coast, we saw the abandoned whaling station at Akutan – just one of hundreds – and we do not have to be geniuses to see that the vast white Wakefield’s Cannery will soon be as quiet as the one at Klemtu. Worse, the seas will be silent and lifeless, and there will be more human beings than ever, all starving to death in a stripped and looted world.
“There’s two things we’ve gotta do before we leave here,” I tell Thurston. “One is to get some black paint and scrawl all over the cannery wall: A CRAB IS YOUR BROTHER. And the other thing is to push those fucking bins over and free as many crabs as we can.”
“Right on, Booby. You get the paint and I’ll steal the forklift.”
Sand Point is a bummer in other ways. Redneck-looking brutes shamble along the wharf, and at the general store, a guy wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and mirror sunglasses comes out, looks our way, spits on the ground, then gets into his truck, starts the engine, and roars forward. For a second we are frozen in our tracks, not believing what’s happening. But here comes the truck, across the planks toward us, and we can’t see the bastard’s eyes, hidden behind the mirror sunglasses. Almost too late, we catch on that he has no intention of slowing down, and six of us leap out of the way at the last second. The truck comes barrelling between us like a bowling ball skimming past the pins, and clatters and rumbles on up the hill. We’re left there, shaking our fists and screaming obscenities. A dozen other redneck-looking characters lounge on the docks, staring stonily at us, no nods or greetings of any kind.
Later, back on the boat, Bohlen calls us together in the galley. “Look, we’d better recognize the fact that we’re not in friendly territory. Most of these people don’t know anything about us except that we’re a bunch of political radicals, and this place reminds me of little towns in Texas. We’d better not make any assumptions about how welcome we are here. Especially you four with long hair. I think it would be wise if none of us went out alone. That bastard with the truck works for the local airline company, and that company has the contract to run supplies out to Amchitka for the AEC. I don’t want us to all get paranoid, but then I wouldn’t want anybody to get run over or beaten up or shot. “
The customs officer, a retired fisherman, comes down to the boat to tell us that the business of our customs violation is being dealt with by authorities in Anchorage, and that he will let us know as soon as possible what the decision is. In the meantime we will have to put up a $500 bond, and the nine Canadians on board may yet be fined $1,000 each for going ashore at Akutan. Bohlen makes an emergency phone call to Irving Stowe, one of the other executives of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee in Vancouver, to find out how much money we have left. Irving reports that he is expecting some donations from environmental and religious groups in the States, but the money hasn’t come through yet. After paying the $500, we are running low on cash. So now, on top of everything else, we are going broke.
“Fuck it,” Thurston says, when we are all feeling as low as we can go. “There must be a pub or something in this burg. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a drink.”
“Wow, I dunno,” Moore says. “The vibes are awful here.”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” says Fineberg. “These little fishing towns can be pretty rough. Not as bad as they were a few years ago, but some story is always tucked away in the back pages of the Anchorage papers. Man Killed in Bar. Or Fisherman’s Body Found Near Such-and-Such, Knife Sticking Out of His Back. This ain’t the Summer of Love, my friends.”
But first . . . there’s a little red and grey metal telephone booth up on the wharf, past the cannery, right next to a laundromat and a musky garbage-littered building like a bus station that has free showers. At last! A telephone where we can communicate without having to scream every single word through the eeeiiiiiiii sreeee yoooooooooo zit zit zit oiiiiiinnnnn ch cu cu zeeeeeeeeep of the shipboard side-band radio. It is like entering the confessional, but in a mood of ecstasy, because it is finally possible to speak to someone without the whole crew overhearing. To step into this blessedly private telephone booth on the wharf, and to shut the door behind me! What relief, what a swift realization of just how badly I have missed uninhibited conversation. Metcalfe goes in first, alone with his wife at last, and the rest of us stand around outside the glass booth, talking animatedly with one another while gazing around at the cannery, the eclectic array of fishing boats, anywhere but at Metcalfe. We can’t bear to watch half of a long-distance lovemaking session – it is too intense, what with our own shaky hunger to get through to our women.
And now up runs Darnell, puffing little clouds of steam as he comes. “Okay you guys,” he says, leaping into our midst, “it’s a fight to the death now! The last guy left standing gets to use the phone next.” We all pull out imaginary machine guns and execute him, and he doubles up, riddled with bullets, and starts to crumble to the wharf. “Well,” he says, “let’s try.” And we all start yelling, “Hurry up, Metcalfe! Just make it a quickie.”
“Goddamn, he talks to Dorothy almost every night.”
“Ah, come on. That wasn’t very intimate.”
In fact, our arrangement of Metcalfe as communications man and Dorothy as relay centre in their Vancouver living room is putting overwhelming pressure on Metcalfe. The few times the rest of us have managed to get through to our wives in the middle of the night have been exquisitely painful – the sound of her voice in your ear makes you ache to be with her. And tremendous backlogs of emotion are piling up in our heads, intensified by the knowledge that this may be the last time we’ll ever talk to each other. Our wives are no less scared than we are at the idea of us sitting at the edge of a nuclear explosion, so each radio communication is another Goodbye-maybe-forever-I-love-you-I-wish-we-were-together-I-wish-this-wasn’t-happening. The few times Keziere has got through to Lou, he is so shaken by his desire to be with her that he has gone out on deck and stood in the night rain and wind for twenty minutes, freezing to death, just to get a grip on himself again.
I am trembling by the time it is my turn on the Sand Point wharf telephone. I know exactly what I am in for – I have seen the others stumble out, pain on their faces. God, I want to be with her! Yeah, the trip has taken more out of us than we admit. We are frightened, nowhere near as casual about the whole business as we pretend, if only to stop ourselves from crying like little boys. Life is so sweet! Why take these chances with it? We’ll all be wiped out in the end anyway. Why not be with the human beings that you love and “get it while you can,” as Janis Joplin sang?
Zoe’s voice, Zoe’s beautiful gutsy strong musical magnificent voice slashes into my ear like a razor, as though she is in the next room. I’m gulping for words, “Zoe, I . . . I . . . I. . . .” Tears leap across my eyes. It was idiotic to have Metcalfe and Dorothy serve as the communications officers. It was like putting the astronaut’s wife in the space centre and telling her to give her husband the order to disengage his module from the lunar orbiter and take the plunge into the fifty-fifty chance of death. All along we have been so envious of Metcalfe because he gets to talk to his wife so much. Now we know that it has been agony for both of them. So close. So far. I want you. My kids come on the line, jabbering madly and urgently, trying to tell me absolutely everything that’s happened to them. “So and so took my tricycle and Zoe went over and got it back and the cat’s gonna have kittens any day Zoe says and the teacher gave me a blue star for a drawing I did of a duck sorta like the ducks in that book that Nanny gave us for Christmas you know that one we changed all the colours with paints and you know what? Tomorrow we’re going over to. . . .”
Emotional overload. I reel out of the booth and go over and lean against the laundromat wall, gasping for breath. What am I doing here? Fuck around, let’s go home! We’re just kidding ourselves – we can’t do anything anyway. The whole Earth doom is coming down too fast, man. We’re half-poisoned already. Why bother?
Well, that’s cool for you to cop out, but what kind of looks are your kids going to give you ten or twenty or thirty years from now when the whole shebang comes crashing down and they die of leukemia or cancer or bone-rot or DDT, or they are driven mad by overcrowding, or wiped out in a nuclear war, and they ask us, Why did you let this happen? The environmental destruction of the world is going on everywhere, in plain view, so anyone who carries on business as usual, or sits on their ass or keeps their head buried in the sand, is an accomplice in the crime of murdering the future. We are all of one mind in this belief, our wives and lovers no less than ourselves, and though we all falter and grow weak and lose faith in our vision of a reverently tended green planet where our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren might live a blessed life, the vision surges up again and again, sometimes in waves of overwhelming power, other times just in quivers. “We love you, Greenpeace, Oh yes we do. . . .”
Metcalfe calls home on a land line for the first time since leaving Vancouver.
But now, after ecstasies and agonies of phone calls home comes the sheer joy of getting into the showers – cold and dirty as they are – and grabbing a bar of soap and washing away all the sweat and sea stink and boat smells. From the showers we go to the laundromat – clean clothes! – and from the laundromat down to the liquor store to buy some wine, beer, and rum. The Don’t Make a Wave Committee may be going broke, but Fineberg has an Alaska chequing account and we all borrow money from him wildly, writing Canadian cheques, becoming giddy at the thought of such luxuries as clean bodies and clean clothes and sleeping bags and ice-cold beer. Wow! Maybe Sand Point won’t be so bad after all.
That night, despite Fineberg’s warning, Thurston, Keziere, Cummings, Darnell, Moore and I head down to the local bar, the Sand Point Tavern. It looks heavy enough – short-haired suspicious-eyed super hard-rock characters, a couple of actual peroxide blondes, guys with cowboy hats and buckskin jackets, lumberjack-shirted scar-faced Aleuts, beefy meathook-handed whites, and a couple of guys wearing flight jackets, probably from the airline company with the contract to take stuff out to Amchitka. The waiter is a dark-haired mean-looking son of a bitch with a scar that winds like a trench across his whole face, from his hairline, over his broken nose, to the right side of his chin, where it ends in a cleft as though a wedge of bone has been taken out. A jukebox blares raunchy western music, but nobody dances, and at exactly the moment in which the six of us come tromping in through the swinging door in our Greenhawk uniforms, the music whangs to an end, leaving only the electronic buzz of the jukebox hanging in the air. Nothing fills the silence but the squeak of chairs and the odd clink of a glass as every single one of the super-heavies in that place turns and looks at us. Shit, we are gonna get killed. But nothing to do except keep on coming in, trying to look cool and vaguely tough ourselves. Darnell and Cummings look like they might be able to acquit themselves pretty well in a fight, but Thurston, Keziere, Moore, and I won’t stand a chance. Hey, what am I saying? I’m the guy with his Purple Belt in karate – and Jesus, maybe those guys are counting on me to do something if we get jumped!
But it’s all a weird hallucination. A moment later, the heavy-looking dudes have all gone back to their drinks, rapping away, the glasses clinking. Another western song is coming to life from the fluorescent whale teeth of the jukebox, the waiter is running about yakking and joking and being a good-time Charlie, and this is just a regular bar. If any of them actually had looked at us when we came in, which is not at all certain, it was out of curiosity. That’s what paranoia does – it causes hallucinations. And that’s why paranoid guys like the ones who are building the bomb at Amchitka can’t be trusted. They’re hallucinating and they don’t even know it. It’s a chilling thought. The doomsday machine is not a fantasy any longer. It is the Nuclear Deterrent System, liable to go off accidentally at any second, and the guys with their fingers twitching weirdly on the buttons are tripping through some paranoid hallucinogenic universe, and they think they’re sane. As Bohlen says, “Living in this world, if you’re not paranoid, you’re crazy.”
We stay five hours at the Sand Point Tavern. We get to know a lot of the guys, we ignore others, and they ignore us. We yuk it up with the scar-faced waiter and blow about five bucks in the jukebox. Thurston gets up and asks a fifty-year-old woman to dance, then I get dancing with her and then a couple of other older women. We work our way down to the younger ones but stay away from the ones with boyfriends. We order round after round of drinks, somebody at another table orders a round for us, and several fishermen crowd in around our table rapping about that goddamn bomb and “Sure hope you fellas can do something about it, no damn good for the fishing, and fishing’s getting hard enough as it is.” They tell us that the halibut catch per man per boat this year is down fourteen percent from this time last year, and there are signs that the shrimp are starting to avoid the banks even south of Sanak, where they’ve always run heavy this time of year, and furthermore blah blah blah. We are rapping away, swearing, laughing, playing the raunchiest music on the jukebox, and Thurston is dancing like a crazy zonked-out lumberjack. Younger guys detach themselves from their tables and wander over to tell us how bad that storm was they had back in April and what you’ve got to watch out for once you get up around the Rat Islands – not so much the rip tides, though they’re bad too if you don’t bide your time so as to ride with them through the straits, but them kelp beds. Yep, kelp beds like nowhere else in the world. Whaddya think all them otters are up there for, the weather? Har har har har. As long as our boat’s fine, we’re fine, they tell us, unless we try to stay out in the open where we aren’t welcome.
At 3 a.m. we stumble back past the house trailers and prefab houses, corrugated sheet metal Quonset huts – hey, at least there’s one yard full of real spruce trees here, and they’re all blowing and flapping in the wind, Christ it’s cold, hiccup, stumble, fall, laugh, clatter across the wharf yelling at the floodlit cannery, “A brother’s yer crab!” Or – what is it? – “A crab’s yer mom! Yer mom’s a crab!” Oooops, pick me up. Hey, fuck around, help! When we come skidding and banging and half-crashing down onto the deck of the boat, Cormack is sitting in the galley, lights on, with Bohlen and Birmingham, Cormack with his big hands wrapped around a china mug, Birmingham reading a western, Bohlen in his long underwear, hair a mess, building a tiny geodesic dome with broken toothpicks and cut-up bits of paper – and they look like three pissed-off fathers.
Thurston.
“Where the hell you dummies been?” Cormack says. “Thought you might’a been lynched by now, though it’d serve you bloody well right, goddamn loonies.”
“I was just going to hit the sack,” says Bohlen, not wanting to admit to any paternal feelings toward us zonked-out drunken bums.
Birmingham wants to know all about the bar. “Hot dang! Never been in one of those places, you understand. All them hot-to-trot gals and all that. Go-go girls and all.” Everybody laughs, because we know by now that Birmingham is a genius – he has almost finished single-handedly building a whole submarine in his back yard, and whenever he gets mad enough to make an observation, he’s always right on. Yet he’s got this old geezer act down pat, the stereotypical by-crickety dang-it-all guy. Still, it’s a good act, and he seems content in it, and let’s face it, it’s pretty safe, so we don’t hassle him. End of Saturday Night in Sand Point.
Whoops! In the morning there are a few hangovers and generally a numbed mood about the boat. We peck a bit at our typewriters, trying to dream up columns to send off to the papers. As usual Metcalfe works in longhand on his Monday morning CBC commentary. Other guys write letters home, Bohlen finishes off his toothpick-and-paper dome, the customs officer drops by to chat, several fishermen come down and lay some gifts of halibut and crab on us, we sip a few beers, Darnell cooks up an incredible supper, the galley windows get steamed up, it gets dark outside, boat engines start up, slap slap slap of little waves. The cannery has been closed all day, gulls trailing desolately over the buildings. No crab slaughter today, but the restless hopeless click click click still comes across the wharf from the bins. A thin rain puddles the beams. The wind is chill. And still no word about when the bomb will go off.
When we arrived, the wharf around the cannery was surrounded by boats, with only a few parking spaces left. But now, boats and more boats are double-parked and in some places triple-parked. The fishing fleets are retreating from the October gales coming up out on the Shumagin Bank, and points beyond. The autumn equinox is stirring the seas into a furry. “Yeah, it was startin’ to smoke out there,” the fishermen say, referring to a wind so hard it sends spray out from the waves and spreads it across the surface of the water like soupy mist. When it starts to smoke, the fishermen leave their nets and pots and run like hell.
Besides fishing boats, there are converted navy supply ships, now used for running gear up to oil companies and mining depots; smart new steel-hulled trawlers, which look more like pleasure craft with leatherette foam-padded swivel seats up at the wheel; old moss-and-slime-covered one-man wooden rigs, like outhouses with tiny windows mounted on rowboats; and proud old gumwood-hide packers, the real vets. No two boats are the same. Some look like houseboats, some scarcely as wide across as a man with his legs and arms stretched out, others even longer than the eighty-foot Phyllis Cormack, and some as bulky and graceless as the crates that hold heavy machinery. Some look like the Little Red Caboose, or PT boats, or castles mounted on Noah’s ark. Some are covered with so much grease and slime from decades of fish scales being crushed under gumboots that it looks as though their decks were coated with grey nail polish. Others are painted with bright green enamel, or their wood is nothing more than peeling piss-coloured varnish. There are old sheds, shoeboxes, freight cars, sports cars – an unending variety of sizes and ages and types of boats. Masts and rigging swing back and forth like sagging cobwebs and the rifles of hundreds of hunters all try to get a bead on the same flock of passing ducks, each taking aim at a different bird, each adjusting and readjusting his aim. The water is choppy and there is a constant squeak of rubber tires and buoys rubbing against wood, the skreek skreek of hulls against the barnacles on the pilings, the flop flap whack of thick wet ropes strung from boats to wharf, and the howl of the wind as it drives the clouds furiously against the distant blue peaks of the peninsula and the islands all around. Whitecaps are clearly to be seen even out in the sheltered waters of Popof Strait, and out in the open, the waves are reported to be rising to heights of sixty and seventy feet.
Down at the tavern, the men just in off the boats tell incredible stories of taking green water over the stern just as they rounded Mountain Point at the tip of Nagai Island. Winds that have been a whispering among the gulls and terns and puffins in the morning have changed into leagues of dark grey smoking water by early afternoon. Guys tell us about the waters farther up the chain, how as you approached the end, around Amchitka, you took blasts of wind that had been building right across the Bering Sea. Three guys got caught up by the Pribilof Islands, a few hundred miles north of the Aleutians, out in the unbelievably vast and lonely sweeps of the Bering, and had to hang on for fourteen days in a 180-mile-an-hour bitch of a storm. Only thing you can do then is get that anchor down as far as she’ll go, face her into the waves, gear right down, and jog for your life. Waves come in at 120 feet. Usually you keep losing ground – the anchor can’t hold against that kind of competition – but the trick is to handle her like a kite, with a baby-pin hanging on to the ground and you up in the kite, in the middle of the goddamnedest hurricane you ever saw, and you gotta keep steering so’s you’re aimed right into that wind and hope the baby-pin don’t come loose completely from whatever little bitty patch of gravel she’s grappling at, ‘cause without that anchor, you ain’t got a chance. Boat just flips around, the 120-footers come down over the roof, and that’s at least a couple of hundred tons of water hitting you like a paddle. A lot of boats break up. Others just kind of lie down and die. Still others flip right over. Yeah, she’s rough.
Darnell.
Everybody we talk to in Sand Point has at least one relative who drowned out there, and everybody can name at least a dozen guys they knew who have gone down. It is like a perpetual state of war – every time Daddy goes out, well, he may not come back, and that’s the way it is. “Holy smoke,” says Moore, visibly shaken by all these yarns. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”
We are all shaken. Cummings is getting a desperate look, Keziere is growing numb, we start losing interest in heading down to the tavern. An afternoon in that place, listening to the fishermen, an awful lot of them with a missing finger or hand or eye, or a moon-pit face from when a big one came over the side and shattered a window and sent shrapnel into whoever was sitting in the galley, the wind keening around the rafters, the glass panes clattering even here in the lee of the island, icy blasts hitting us like blows as we come clambering out of the bar – it is the stuff of nightmares. In my dreams I lie at the bottom of the sea as vengeful Alaska king crabs hop across the seabed like colossal purple tarantulas, their pincers reaching out, a small black lightbulb eye looking squarely into my own, and I convulse helplessly, lungs like waterbeds, trying to speak, trying to shout, “Crab, I’m your brother!”
Then there is the story about Old Jock, the Alley-oot who was on the Annabelle when she went down outside of Port Miller. The rest of the guys were running around drunk as skunks, trying to get the lifeboat loose, but Old Jock had put in forty-five years in these waters and he knew what to do. He put on about three pairs of thermal underwear, all the socks he could find, T-shirts, sweaters, jackets, overcoats, three pairs of mitts, and wrapped his whole head in towels, slung a bunch of life jackets around his legs and arms, and stayed there in the bunkhouse until she started to break up. Never found a trace of the rest of the guys, not a sign of the lifeboat, but Old Jock – well, they found him three days later. Alive, all right. Now, that water’s cold. If you go down in that water without a wetsuit, you’re a dead man in – well, usually takes a minute or two. Of course fishermen can’t be going around in wetsuits all day – never get any work done. So Old Jock was alive, but the sand fleas had got at him. By the time he was pulled up on deck, and they got around to cutting off all the soaked coats and jackets – no one able to believe he had stayed alive in those waters three whole days and two nights, but then he was a tough old bastard, never came any tougher – and peeling off the last few layers of underwear and T-shirts, they could tell it was no use. You could feel the bugs wiggling and bumping around, all over him and multiplying by the handful. Yeah, sand fleas do that – get inside your clothes, sometimes even a wetsuit. Usually they go for the armpits and the little spaces behind your balls first, and start chomping away. When they fished out Old Jock, the bugs had got at his whole belly, even worked their way in from under the armpits, almost to his lungs. His balls were gone for sure, and the toes – he was pretty much down to bone and a bit of meat. Everything except his head, because he’d wrapped it up so tightly in towels.
By this point in the story, we are all trembling. No one dares to ask the question: could he still think?
Somebody gets the idea of sending for a dozen wetsuits and we have a terrific argument about it. I own a wetsuit and did not bring it along, because it seemed absurd – like taking a life jacket with you on a jumbo jet flying over the ocean ten miles up. If that baby goes down, no life jacket’s going to save you. I argue fiercely against the wetsuit plan. Tempers flare, and in the end there is a consensus to get the wetsuits – “consensus” meaning that only a couple of us are in disagreement and the issue isn’t worth the energy it would take to fight about it. We spend a surrealistic evening in the galley while Thurston measures us all and calls out the numbers. Ankle to knee, seventeen inches; knee to crotch, twelve; elbow to wrist, ten; elbow to shoulder, eleven. Bohlen writes down all the figures and places dozens of calls to Vancouver, reading the figures out, while people back home run around trying to get hold of the wetsuits. All because we are getting unnerved by the horror stories we are picking up at the bar. We are afraid that maybe this is going to be a lot lot lot worse than we thought. It is one thing to go to the gates of hell, and another to drown along the way. And then there were the sand fleas, and. . . .
Each day, reports arrive, either from the Don’t Make a Wave Committee or Dorothy Metcalfe, or through conversations with people at home, or through my calls to The Vancouver Sun, or Fineberg and Simmons’ calls to Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Chicago, and points between, still clawing around for that tiny data-point: when? It is good to know that environmentalists in Washington, D.C., the very coalition of high-powered legal beagles who successfully halted the Supersonic Transport program – no minor feat that – are hacking and chopping at the Amchitka program with the same energy they have brought to bear on the supersonic transport aircraft. Some days, small victories are scored. Other days, potentially large victories are scored. We also have setbacks, and days when the battle lines seem frozen, neither side gaining or losing an inch. Like cavemen armed with ballpoint spears, the band of environmentalists are gradually forcing the mastodon into a corner. It is bleeding a bit and limping, but not seriously hurt, and at any moment it may turn with a roar and come charging through their ranks, scattering them like leaves.
