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WHALE WORSHIPPERS AND MOONCHILDREN
IN 1974 I was working on the theory of adaptive optics. This is the system of control enabling a flexible thin mirror in a big optical telescope to counteract the distortions of the image caused by rapid fluctuations of the atmosphere. The atmospheric turbulence varies on a time scale of milliseconds, and the compensating movements of the mirror must be equally fast. A working adaptive optics system had been developed secretly by the U.S. government for optical imaging of satellites flying overhead. I learned about this secret project as a member of the JASON group of scientists advising the government. Adaptive optics would obviously be of enormous benefit to astronomers peacefully exploring the universe.
Claire Max is a professional astronomer and also a member of JASON. She succeeded in persuading the military to declassify adaptive optics so that we could all work on it openly. Claire continues to be a leader in applying adaptive optics to big telescopes observing faint objects. I solved the problem of designing the best possible computer program that would take the information from the optical image as input and deliver the motions of the flexible mirror as output. I published my solution in a fat paper in the Journal of the American Optical Society. So far as I know, my solution was never used in a working adaptive optics system. Practical systems that are not optimized work well enough. But it is still helpful to practical designers to know how close they are to the theoretical optimum. The advantages of an optimized system may become greater as telescopes become larger and moving mirrors become more complicated. As a consequence of this jump into astronomical engineering, I was invited to spend the academic year 1974–75 at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich. We were delighted to spend a year in Germany and renew our contacts with Imme’s family. We rented a house in Munich and put the children into German schools.
In January 1975 my mother died peacefully at the age of ninety-four. She had seven good years after my father’s death. So long as he lived, she remained his quiet companion, sitting in his shadow while he enjoyed the limelight. After he died, she came out into the limelight herself, entertaining all of us with her strong opinions and eloquent language. She became once more the forceful personality that she had been as a young woman. Then in her last two years, she was fading and ready to depart. After her death, the letters are to my sister Alice, who remained in our parents’ house in Winchester. Alice was three years older than me, had lived most of her life in London, and had returned to Winchester to take care of the parents when she was needed. I was not able to be with her for our mother’s funeral celebration.
JANUARY 30, 1975, MUNICH
I wish it shall be a beautiful morning for you on Monday and a ceremony worthy of Mum’s demanding spirit. I imagine her floating overhead and inspecting the proceedings with her old sharp eyes now seeing clearly again. Looking at the priest, she would say, “Funny old bird, isn’t he?” She always believed that when she died, she would somehow merge her spirit back into the world-spirit from which she came. But I can imagine that after all these years the world-spirit may be finding her a little indigestible. Perhaps she may have to float around for a while before she can merge. Anyhow, when she finally does merge, I am sure she will make her presence felt. On that day the world-spirit will become a bit more demanding and will look at us all with a slightly more critical eye. I hope all this is not just playing with words but in some rudimentary fashion describes the way things really are.
Five days in Geneva with the European Southern Observatory, a group of astronomers from six countries who have a telescope in Chile and are the most go-ahead astronomers in Europe. I finally found some people who take my ideas seriously and may follow them up. I gave three lectures, and the room was packed even for the third. After this experience, I decided it makes no sense to go around universities making everywhere the same speech and receiving polite attention. I shall go only where there is a chance of serious activity being stimulated by my coming.
MAY 28, 1975, MUNICH
We did after all go to Westerhausen. All the official formalities were successfully negotiated, and we drove from here to Westerhausen in eight hours with our sleeping bags, dog, and a big box full of presents. We stayed in the big house where Imme lived as a child. It is unbelievable that this big house, which Imme so often described, and which always seemed to me something mythical out of an inaccessible past, is now as solid and familiar to me as my own house in Princeton. It is a magnificent house, the only one of its kind in the village, with fourteen acres of garden and woods belonging to it. It stands there, a little dilapidated but still dominating the landscape. It still belongs to Onkel Bruno. In the old days two families lived in it, Onkel Bruno’s family with four children downstairs, Edwin’s family with four children upstairs. The eight children grew up together as one big family. The ninth child, Onkel Bruno’s youngest, was born after Imme came to the West. Now Onkel Bruno and his wife live upstairs with young Bruno and his wife and baby. The downstairs is rented to another family.
The big house was built by Imme’s grandfather who was also the village doctor in Westerhausen. His two sons Bruno and Edwin were both doctors. When the grandfather retired, Bruno took over the practice and Edwin moved to Berlin. Westerhausen is in Sachsen-Anhalt, southeast of Hanover, in the part of Germany that was overrun in 1945 by General Patton’s third army. After three months of American occupation, that area was handed over to the Russians in exchange for West Berlin. The Americans moved out and the Russians moved in. Westerhausen became part of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic.
In our honour when we arrived, the whole of Onkel Bruno’s family was there, all five of the children who used to be downstairs, four of their wives and husbands, and nine grandchildren. It was a wonderfully warm and friendly atmosphere. There, where the conditions of life are so much harder and the government so much more oppressive, family ties are strong and unbreakable. It was a happy contrast to our spoiled and squabbling relatives in the West. I was particularly struck by the complete trust they have in one another. They all talk freely of the stupidity and corruption of the government, in a house with twenty-six people running around, and without even bothering to shut the windows. I got to know all of them a little and some of them quite well. The men were all working furiously at a wall which they are building around the estate. The old one had collapsed from a storm and long neglect. Every one of the men is in a job where he is frustrated by the system. Not being party people, they cannot hope to get to positions of real responsibility. So they do their jobs as well as the system allows and save their real energies for weekends. They built this wall in Westerhausen with passion. A more solid job I never saw. Beginning with rock foundations three feet deep, then concrete mixed and poured into wooden forms, all hand-made, and on top bricks and mortar.
Coming home across the frontier in the car, our children spontaneously began singing American patriotic songs. I never heard them do that before. That is what the DDR does to you. I am glad they now understand a little better how lucky they are.
Tomorrow I fly to Seattle and Emily will fly out to join me there, and together we will go to Vancouver to visit Katrin. I telephoned with Katrin, and she is delighted to have us for the weekend. So we will see her again after five years. Then on Monday we go north to George’s territory, to Hanson Island, a little island on the north end of Vancouver Island. George is living there with his new boat and hopes to show us his whales. We shall travel partly by road but mostly by boat.
Last weekend Ken Brower came down here, and I spent two days telling him everything I could think of about George. I like him very much, and we seem to have a lot in common besides our interest in George. He is firmly resolved to go ahead with writing his book. He will come with us to Hanson Island, so he can witness this historic meeting and see me and George together. It is all faintly comic and a bit pathetic, but I shall be glad for practical reasons to have him on the trip. He knows the country and will bring provisions. We shall stay for a week and fly home to Princeton.
Ken Brower is a writer who writes books mostly about nature and people who live in wild places. He got to know George when George was in Berkeley in 1970. After George built his treehouse north of Vancouver and started building beautiful boats, Ken decided to write a book about him. He offered to organize the trip to Hanson Island, where he would play the role of Boswell to George’s Johnson. I was glad to cooperate in this enterprise, and my daughter Emily was glad to come with us. I wrote a journal of our trip and sent a copy to my sister.
AUGUST 11, 1975, PRINCETON
The five days on Hanson Island were like a dream. Or rather, it seems that the life up there was reality and everything here is a dream. Most of the time the weather was fresh and fine, as in the Western Isles of Scotland. From our tents in the quiet of the night, we could hear the rhythmic breathing of whales. It is for the whales that George goes to the island. The people on that island are whale worshippers. Their love for these animals has the passionate purity of a religious experience.
AUGUST 4 TO 8, 1975, JOURNAL OF A VISIT TO THE NORTHERN ISLES
MONDAY
Left Vancouver at five-thirty to catch the early ferry to Nanaimo, with Ken Brower and my fourteen-year-old daughter Emily. Ken drove us north along Vancouver Island to Kelsey Bay. Afternoon ferry from Kelsey Bay to Beaver Cove arriving seven-thirty. My son George was at Beaver Cove waiting for us. I had not seen him for three and a half years. Words from somebody’s parody of A. E. Housman’s “Shropshire Lad” flashed through my head,
What, still alive at twenty-two,
A fine upstanding lad like you.
Because the hour was late and the tide running against us, George did not come in his new six-seater kayak. Instead he came by motorboat with a friend, Will Malloff, who lives on Swanson Island. George had intended to take us to Hanson Island, but Will’s boat had engine trouble and so we all stayed overnight at Will’s place. This was lucky. We sat up half the night listening to Will’s stories.
Will comes from a Doukhobor village and learned the skills of a pioneer from his Russian-speaking parents. He and his wife came to Swanson Island four years ago with two pairs of hands. Now they have a solid and cozy house for themselves, a guest house for their friends, a farm with a Caterpillar tractor, two boats, and a blacksmith’s forge with a large assortment of machine tools. Will paid for his two square miles of land by felling and selling a minute fraction of the timber that stood on it. Beyond his homestead, the whole island is untouched forest. The homestead is decorated with woodcarvings done by his wife, the house with wrought iron fashioned by Will himself. The conversation turned to one of my favorite subjects, the colonization of space. I remarked to Will that he and his wife are precisely the people we shall need for homesteading the asteroids. He said, “I don’t mind where I go, but I need a place where I can look around at the end of a year and see what I have done.”
TUESDAY
Facing Will’s homestead, two miles away across Blackfish Sound, stands Paul Spong’s house on Hanson Island. Paul also lives alone on his island with his wife and his seven-year-old son Yasha. Paul and Will are as different as any two people could be. Paul is every inch an intellectual. He resigned a professorship at the University of British Columbia to come and live here. His house is a ramshackle affair, made of bits of wood and glass, stuck together haphazardly. One side is covered only with a plastic sheet and leaks abominably when it rains. At the dry end are some beautiful rugs, books, and a 250-year-old violin. We arrived at Paul’s place in the morning and found George’s kayak at anchor. George had spent the last winter building it, copying the design from the Aleut Indians. He said the Aleuts knew better than anyone else how to travel in these waters. The kayak is blue, covered with animal designs in the Indian style. It has three masts and three sails, rigged like a Chinese junk.
George took us inland to see the tree from which he cut the planks for the kayak. Each plank is thirty-five feet long, straight and smooth and polished. Half of the tree is still there, enough for another boat of the same size. In the afternoon we went out with Yasha in the kayak to look for whales. Since there was no wind and George’s crew was inexpert with the paddles, he turned on his outboard motor. I was glad to see that he is no purist. George merely remarked that we must choose either the whales or the motor but not both. We chose the motor and saw the whales only from a distance. At sunset we lay down in the tents which George had prepared for us, on a rocky point overlooking the sea. The evening was still and clear. Soon we could hear the rhythmic breathing of the whales, puff-puff, puff-puff, lulling us to sleep.
WEDNESDAY
It began to rain at midday and continued for about twelve hours. I was glad to taste the life of the pioneers, not only under sunshine and blue skies. George took us out fishing and quickly caught a fifteen-pound red snapper, enough to make a good supper for us all. He spent the afternoon preparing salads and sauces to go with it. The fish itself he baked over Paul’s wood-burning stove. During the afternoon Jim Bates arrived with his girlfriend Allison and their seven-month-old baby. Jim is the man who taught George how to build boats. When George was seventeen he worked for a year with Jim building the D’Sonoqua, a forty-eight-foot brigantine with living quarters on board for ten people. After she was finished, Jim and George with a group of their friends lived on her for a year, cruising up and down the coast. Then George decided he was old enough to be his own master and quit.
This was my first meeting with Jim. I had already heard much about him from George’s letters and expected to encounter another strong, capable pioneer type like Will Malloff. The reality was very different. Jim came up the beach through the pouring rain on crutches. His back is crippled so that he can barely walk. One stormy night last November, he drove the D’Sonoqua onto the rocks, close by the Indian village from whose God she takes her name. That night, he says, the God was angry. Allison was with him on board, seven months pregnant. Also with them were two little girls, daughters of Allison. Jim got them all safely to shore, but they lost the ship and everything they possessed on her. Now, nine months later, D’Sonoqua is beached not far from Hanson Island, with gaping holes in her bottom, her inside furnishings rotted and wrecked. Jim has not given her up. Every spare minute he drags himself to work on her and dreams of getting her afloat. He is skipper of the D’Sonoqua still.
I looked into the eyes of this noble wreck of a man, and I saw the true image of Captain Ahab. With his wild, far-away eyes, obsessed with impossible visions, he is destined to drive himself and all those near him to destruction. And I looked into Allison’s eyes, full of patience and gentleness, and saw in them the unconquerable loyalty which will never allow her to abandon this monomaniac to his fate. It was pitch dark when Jim and Allison left. I watched them walk slowly down the beach to the boat, in the dark and pouring rain, Jim on his crutches, Allison carrying the baby in her arms. It was like the last act of King Lear, when the crazy old king and his faithful daughter Cordelia are led away to their doom, and Lear says,
Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.
Tragedy is no stranger to these islands.
THURSDAY
In the morning it was still raining. Emily and I lay comfortably in our tents while George gave an exhibition of his skill as an outdoorsman. In an open fireplace under the pouring rain, using only wet wood from the forest, a knife, and a single match, he lit a fire and cooked pancakes for our breakfast. In the afternoon the sun came out, and we went for a longer ride in the kayak. This time there was some wind, and we could try out the sails. She sailed well downwind, but without a keel she could make no headway upwind. George had made a pair of hydrofoils, which will be fixed to her sides as outriggers and will give her enough grip on the water to sail upwind. But it will take him another month to make the outriggers and put the whole thing together. In the meantime, we have been improving our skill with the paddles.
Since Thursday was our last evening on the island, we went to visit with Paul and his family. When it was almost dark, the whales began to sing. Paul had put hydrophones in the water and connected them to speakers in his house. The singing began quietly and grew louder and louder as the whales came close to shore. Then the whole household exploded in a sudden frenzy. Paul grabbed his flute, rushed out onto a tree trunk overhanging the water, and began playing weird melodies under the stars. Little Yasha ran beside Paul and punctuated his melodies with high-pitched yelps. And louder and louder came the answering chorus of whale voices from the open door of the house. George took Emily out in a small canoe to see the whales from close at hand. They sat in the canoe a short distance from shore, and George began to play his flute. The whales came close to them, stopping about thirty feet away, as if they enjoyed the music but did not wish to upset the canoe. So the concert continued for about half an hour. Afterwards we counted the whales swimming back to the open sea, about fiteen in all. They are of the species popularly known as killer whales, but Paul calls them only by their official name, orca.
Anybody who witnesses this ceremony of the whales cannot fail to be profoundly moved by it. And indeed it is Paul’s purpose to use the whale songs to awaken the conscience of mankind, so that the whales may be preserved from extinction. The ceremony itself has a religious, mystical quality. But one may see and hear it, and be moved by it, without believing that whales are gifted with superhuman intelligence or supernatural powers. The ceremony is a natural one and seems strange only because we are unaccustomed to the idea of a whale behaving like a dog or a horse. Paul considers it an established fact that the whales enjoy and respond to his flute playing. How much more they may understand, he does not pretend to know.
FRIDAY
Our last day. It happened to be shortly after new moon, so that the tides were stronger than usual. We woke early to find the sun shining, sat on our rock overlooking the water, and watched the morning birds. Kingfishers skimming below our feet, eagles soaring above our heads. Between Hanson and Swanson Islands, about a mile from shore, there is a strong tide race. That morning it was fierce, making a white streak on the blue sea. By and by we saw a little black speck move into the white area and heard the distant putt-putt of a motor. George saw more than Emily and I did. He said quietly, “Those people have some nerve, going with an open boat into that kind of water.” A few seconds after he spoke, the black speck disappeared and the noise stopped. George at once moved into action. Taking Ken with him, he ran to Paul’s motorboat, an unsinkable affair made of rubber, and within two minutes was on his way out. From the shore we could see nothing for the next half-hour. I roused the Spongs and helped them heat up their stove. Then the rubber boat reappeared, and we could make out four figures in it. They came ashore, and I helped the old man stagger up the beach, his hand in mine as cold as ice. We wrapped them in blankets and sat them down by the stove.
An old man and a young man, both loggers on strike, had decided to go out with their aluminum boat to dig clams. It was a lovely morning, clear and still. They never imagined that one could capsize on such a morning. Luckily they had had the sense to cling to their capsized boat and not try to swim to shore. But George said they were close to the end when he found them. The old man had not been able to move his arms or legs anymore. In that icy water nobody can last long. While they revived, George cooked hot tea and pancakes on the stove. Then he radioed to their families to send a boat to take them home. The old man afterwards told me how it had felt. He said he knew his life was over and he was ready to go under. When the rubber boat appeared he thought he was seeing visions. Only when Ken and George hauled him aboard did he believe it was real. In the afternoon he and I chatted again over cups of tea. He turned out to be intelligent and well-read, and he asked me many questions about my life and work at Princeton. And I said, “But it seems to me now the best thing I ever did in Princeton was to raise that boy.”
Toward evening a big solid tugboat arrived to take the two loggers home. In the meantime George and Ken had rescued their boat and beached it on Swanson Island, taken their motor apart, and soaked the insides in fresh water. So the loggers went home with their boat and their motor intact, ready for another day. It was now time for us also to depart. George took us in the rubber boat to catch the night ferry going south from Beaver Cove. He was apologetic because we went home empty-handed. He had intended to spend the last day with us salmon fishing, so that we could take with us two big salmon, one for his friends in Vancouver and one for my family in Princeton. I said to him, “You don’t need to apologize. Today you went fishing for something bigger than salmon.” And that was our good-bye.
Ken Brower’s book The Starship and the Canoe (1978) turned out to be a double biography, half about George and half about me. It told a slightly romanticized story of both of us. It was helpful to George, making him a local celebrity in British Columbia. It was helpful to me, bringing me new friends in the environmental community. It frequently happened that strangers would write to me thanking me for the book, under the impression that I was the author. I hastened to write back telling them that it was actually written by Ken Brower. Looking at the book now almost forty years later, I am grateful to Ken for providing an accurate and perceptive account of the father-and-son drama through which George and I lived, beginning with anger and rebellion, ending with pride and joy.
My portrayal of Jim Bates as a tragic Captain Ahab turned out to be totally wrong. After our visit, Jim slowly recovered from his injuries and succeeded in patching the holes in the bottom of D’Sonoqua. To my astonishment, he made her seaworthy, turned her upright, and got her afloat. He continued for several years to sail her up and down the coast of British Columbia. Then he sailed her down through the Panama Canal to the Atlantic. The last time George saw her, he was on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia and unexpectedly ran into Jim Bates at the island’s grocery store. D’Sonoqua was anchored in the nearby river, making her way up the Atlantic Coast. Jim eventually sailed her to the Bay of Fundy, where she now still sits, up on land on a property where Jim rents cabins to tourists.
I also misjudged Will and Georgeanna Malloff when I described them as a suitable team for colonizing an asteroid. Less than a year after our visit, Georgeanna abandoned Will and left the island. She is an artist and needs a community to give meaning to her life. Five years of solitude was enough. Will stayed on the island, unwilling to move but unhappy to be alone. He died in 2015 at Alert Bay.
The battle of Princeton was a turning point in the American War of Independence. It was the first major battle that Washington won, proving to doubtful fence-sitters in America and to doubtful observers in Europe that the rebellious colonists might actually defeat the British Empire. Princeton is justly proud of this victory, paid for by the citizens with heavy losses of life and property.
JANUARY 10, 1977
The big event this week was the Battle. January 3, 1977, was exactly two hundred years from the original battle, and they reenacted the whole thing as precisely as they could. Five hundred real redcoats from England came over for the occasion, and a suitably rugged and miscellaneous crowd of Americans were collected from various places to make up Washington’s army. The only difference from the original battle was that nobody was hurt. About ten thousand Princetonians came to watch and got in the way to some extent. The great good luck was that the weather was the same as on January 3, 1777, a cold sunny day with about three inches of snow on the battlefield and the ground hard frozen. So not only Washington’s troops but also the spectators were able to move around without producing a sea of mud. The battlefield was still clean and white when it was over. What people forget is that the real battle destroyed about half of the houses in Princeton, and more people died afterwards from cold and sickness than died in the battle.
Our home is on Battle Road, on the edge of the Battlefield Memorial Park, a protected area of grassland where the reenactment of the battle took place. Historians are still disputing how much of the fighting in 1777 was actually within the park. Much of the battle was probably in the built-up area of the town, where many buildings were destroyed.
JANUARY 29, 1977
Today I went to the first meeting of a citizens’ committee which is supposed to decide for the town of Princeton whether the biologists at the university are to be permitted to work with recombinant DNA. I was asked to serve on the committee and agreed to do so because this is an important question and I should not stand aside. The committee will involve a great deal of work, and is supposed to produce a final report by May 1. We were told to expect to put into it about ten hours of work per week for ten weeks. It will probably add up to more than that.
The modern era of genetic science began in 1976 with the discovery of recombinant DNA, popularly known as gene splicing. Recombinant DNA is the genetic hybrid produced by splicing a gene from one species into another. Recombinant DNA allows an experimenter to take genes from a bacterium or from a mouse and insert them into a living human embryo. Experimenters could break the barrier that nature had put between species. Biologists all over the world understood that such experiments could raise serious problems of ethics. An international meeting of biologists at Asilomar in California agreed to impose a set of guidelines, deciding which experiments should be allowed and which should be forbidden. The biologists at Princeton University accepted the Asilomar guidelines, but the municipal authorities of Princeton Township were unsure whether the Asilomar guidelines were sufficient to ensure public safety. The municipal authorities set up our committee to find out whether recombinant DNA experiments were acceptable to the Princeton community. Our job was to educate ourselves and also to educate the public concerning the possible costs and benefits of the new technology. Most of our time was spent listening rather than talking. We invited expert and nonexpert witnesses to come and express their opinions. Anyone who wished to be heard was heard. We treated every witness with respect, no matter how long-winded or ignorant they might be. As a result of our patience, the public debate remained friendly and nobody felt excluded. When we finally announced our conclusions, they were generally accepted as fair and reasonable.
Today we had our first meeting, and I found to my surprise that the main subject of discussion was whether I am fit to serve. A lady who is a vociferous opponent of DNA research challenged my membership on the ground that I have taken a public position in favor of the research and cannot have an open mind. So we argued about this for the whole afternoon. I said I would be happy to step down if the township authorities ask me to. I really hope they will. But I feel an obligation to stick it through if they decide to keep me on. This will be decided next week.
The lady who opposed my membership was Susanna Waterman, an environmentalist who sincerely believed that DNA research was a violation of nature. The township denied her objection, and I continued to serve on the committee. Quite soon Susanna and I became friends, and I valued her presence as the most thoughtful and eloquent voice on the committee. In the end, I voted with the majority to allow DNA experiments, and Susanna voted with the minority to forbid experiments. But we learned to respect each other’s opinions and stayed friends.
MARCH 8, 1977
Our Princeton committee has been meeting twice a week for five weeks, and we are getting to know each other very well. I am already quite sentimental about the group and shall be sorry when our task is done. We shall be friends when it is over, however much we may disagree about details. I discovered that Emma Epps, the black woman who is one of the most thoughtful and sensible of the group, lived for thirty years as a maid in the house two doors away from ours. Dora Panofsky used to talk in those days about her wonderful Emma, but we never got to know her as a person. Now she is one of the leaders of the black community and a powerful person in Princeton. If only Robert Armstrong and his friends in Rhodesia would understand that black power is not the end of everything.
Dora Panofsky was the wife of the famous art historian Erwin Panofsky and herself also an art historian. They had twin sons who both became famous scientists. Emma Epps ran the household and brought up the twins. One of them was Wolfgang Panofsky, a physicist whom we knew well. He spoke of Emma Epps with affection and respect. I felt the same way after getting to know her on the committee. Robert Armstrong was a cousin of mine who settled in Rhodesia, owned a tea plantation there, and stayed there through the years when the white supremacy government of Ian Smith ran the country and afterwards when the black power government of Robert Mugabe changed its name to Zimbabwe. After the country became Zimbabwe, I wrote to my cousin asking how he was getting along with black power. He replied, “If we had not known how to get along with the blacks, we would not have lasted six weeks.” He continued to live peacefully in Zimbabwe until he died many years later.
APRIL 14, 1977
Our committee had its crucial meeting last Monday when we each had to decide on the main question, whether to approve the plans of the university. The vote was seven to two in favor with two people absent, and one of the absentees has told us he also votes yes. I am much relieved. It now remains for us to find out if we can agree on the wording of our report.
The final vote was eight to three. The minority consisted of Susanna Waterman, Emma Epps, and Wallace Alston who was pastor of the Presbyterian church. The committee remained divided, because the majority interpreted our task to be to judge whether the DNA research would be an immediate danger to public health, while the minority wanted to judge whether the research might be a violation of long-range ethical principles. Though I voted with the majority, I felt more personal sympathy with the minority, and I was delighted to see that the minority opinions were heard and understood by the public. We quickly decided that we could not write a unanimous report as requested by the township. The majority and minority wrote separate reports, so that the township authorities could hear the arguments of both sides. After considering our two reports, the township finally decided to accept the advice of the majority and allow the university to go ahead with gene-splicing experiments. In forty years since this decision was made, no public health hazards have arisen from the experiments.
FEBRUARY 8, 1978, VANCOUVER
Here I am in Vancouver taking a long walk on the beach with George. I never heard him talk so much. All about his expedition of last summer. At least enough material to fill a book. The expedition was completely crazy, with twelve people who had never been together before, most of them with no experience of the ocean, wandering around the Pacific with six little boats. They started quarreling immediately, some of them panicked, some of them were lost for weeks at a time, and some of them ran out of food. The amazing thing is that George got them all back alive with no loss of boats or equipment. He said he has no desire ever to lead an expedition again. But obviously he has a gift for it and I think this will not be his last. He said he made more real friends and more enemies in that summer than he ever had before. The friends will last and the enemies he will not see again. I found George less strange than he used to be. He is talking more plainly and more freely. He is self-confident in his plans for the future. He will not build any more boats for the time being, but will run a school where people can learn to build their own boats and sail them. He has already leased a big empty house in the woods near to his treehouse and will begin his school there. The house is now derelict, but for George it is no problem to fix it up. The big surprise, George owns a car and drives around in it. He already drove it to California and back. It is a twelve-year-old Volvo, and he bought it derelict for two hundred dollars. He took it apart and put it together so that it now goes beautifully.
Lastly, Katrin. This Katrin who for so many years was living her crazy life, and we never knew where she was. Now here she is, working as a secretary in the very same building where I am staying, the faculty club of the university. This evening we had a faculty dinner, and she was invited to join us. All the professors know her as a secretary but were astonished when she appeared as my daughter. She came looking very elegant in a long black dress and a necklace that Imme bought for her in Princeton. The necklace matches her eyes and is exactly right.
FEBRUARY 12, 1978, VANCOUVER
I spent two days at George’s hideout in the woods. Just Katrin and George and I. Sunshine all day long. Sea birds and snowy mountains. On Saturday Jason came out to join us for supper, and George cooked an immense brew of lasagne with mushrooms that he had picked in the mountains. I don’t worry about anything when George is in charge, not even mushrooms. At night I slept in the house which he has furnished with two big old wood stoves, one for cooking and one for heating. Like a true seaman, he makes everything clean and neat. At bedtime I looked out of my window into the starry night and watched him climb like a squirrel up to his treehouse. I could hear the click of his door opening and shutting, and then I could see the golden light of his oil lamp shining on his wooden ceiling. I was looking up through his window into his house at an impossibly high angle. That little golden lighted window seemed to be floating among the stars.
In Vancouver one of the physics professors gave a supper party to which George, Katrin, and Jason were invited. It was good to see the two cultures sitting together around the supper table. After supper George gave his slide show of the 1977 expedition. It was a magnificent show, and George told his stories well. He is quite at his ease now in any sort of company. He has the air of a man who knows where he is going. George’s plans for the future are definite and ambitious. He wants to buy a particular island near to the place we camped in 1975. This island would be the permanent base of his Baidarka School. Until the money materializes he will keep the school at the Indian Arm base where he has his workshop. To run the school at Indian Arm he will need about $20,000 a year. He has budgets and plans written down for prospective donors. He told me the main thing he has learned in this year of the 1977 expedition has been how to ask for money. The 1977 expedition cost $11,000, which he successfully raised and spent. The final accounting showed he had overspent the account by exactly ten dollars. The two weapons he has in raising money are his slide show and his air of self-confidence. This side of George, the administrator, the man who can handle money, was absolutely new to me. He said it is new to him too. And yet after all, it is obvious where it comes from. He begins more and more to resemble his grandfather.
Carl Sagan and Edward Wilson were first-rate scientists who knew how to communicate science to the public. Both aroused some hostility, Carl because he was too successful as a television star, Edward because his views on human biology were politically incorrect. In 1977 Carl had given the Christmas Lectures for Children at the Royal Institution in London, a famous lecture series started by Michael Faraday in 1827.
FEBRUARY 18, 1978, PRINCETON
I ran into Carl Sagan in Washington and told him you had enjoyed his talks. He said he had a very good time with the Christmas lectures and found the children delightful, except for the two royal princes who were there and made everyone feel stiff and uncomfortable. He said these princes are so well trained, they can talk intelligently about everything and are interested in nothing. Back from the London lectures, he was immediately invited for a family evening at the Carters, with Jimmy, Rosalynn, Amy, Jeff, and Caron, chatting about Mars and Jupiter and extraterrestrial intelligence. He found Jimmy not so well trained as the English princes but interested in everything.
The trip back from Washington was more exciting than usual. We hit a bad patch where the freezing and thawing of winter made the track bumpy. After a few violent bumps the whole train jumped off the rails. We ended up tilted half over but not quite overturned. Nineteen people were injured, none seriously. After a long wait we were rescued by buses which took us back to Union Station in Washington. I was sitting in the waiting room, battered and disheveled, when I noticed Ed Wilson, a friend of mine who is a professor of biology at Harvard, sitting in the next chair, looking more battered and disheveled than I was. He had a pair of crutches, one leg in a cast, his hair dripping wet, and his clothes looked as if he had been in a fight. I asked him if he had also been in the train wreck and he said no. But he had a bad week. First he slipped on some ice in Boston and broke his leg. But he had agreed to talk to the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) meeting where I also was talking and painfully dragged himself on his crutches to Washington for the meeting. He is the world’s greatest authority on the behavior of ants, and he has written a book, Sociobiology [1975], pointing out the analogies and differences between social behavior in insects and human beings. This is politically dangerous ground, and the young radicals at Harvard have been accusing him of being a fascist and a racist. When he came to give his talk in Washington, a bunch of young hooligans invaded the platform, grabbed the microphone out of his hands, told the audience what an evil character he is, and ended by emptying the speaker’s water jug over his head. After this he gave his talk, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. But he said that is the last time he ever comes to a AAAS meeting.
APRIL 19, 1978, PRINCETON
The main event of the last weeks has been the Moonchildren affair, which has been in all the local newspapers and even for a few days in the New York Times. Moonchildren is a play which Imme and I saw in New York, a good play, rather Chekhovian in theme, about a group of students in a rooming house during the Vietnam years. Miriam’s high school drama class decided to perform it at the high school, and Miriam has beeen working at the sets and the production with all her heart and soul. She also had a minor part as Aunt Stella. Then just two weeks before opening night, the high school principal announced that the play must be expurgated and certain four-letter words omitted. The children got a lawyer and took the case to court in Trenton as a violation of their rights of freedom of speech. For two days Miriam was at the trial in Trenton, learning a lot more about life than she would have learnt in class at the high school. The children lost the case. But the production, even without the four-letter words, was a huge success and crowds of people had to be turned away from the door.
After the expurgated Moonchildren production at the high school was over, the Unitarian Church invited the children to put on an unexpurgated production at the church meeting room.
APRIL 27, 1978
We went to the unexpurgated version of Moonchildren at the Unitarian church. The acting was magnificent. All this fuss has made the children do a far better job than they would have been capable of under normal circumstances. Unfortunately the drama teacher Arlene Sinding who produced the play will now be leaving the school. She is not exactly kicked out, but after this affair it would be hard for her to stay. This morning Miriam was working hard in the bathroom getting the makeup out of her face and hair.
From the Moonchildren program, April 1978, by Miriam Dyson: To describe the sixties in one paragraph would be to describe the color red to someone who is blind. One could ramble on about Vietnam, the riots, the generation gap, any of these things which gave the sixties its label. But the color would be left out. Color is a feeling. The sixties is a feeling, a color. A color seen only by those who lived, fought, loved and survived the sixties.
On Saturday morning I took the train to Washington and walked as usual the two miles through the ghetto area to my hotel. People friendly as usual. No trouble. The hotel is in the posh area two blocks from the White House and four blocks from the academy. After lunch I walked out of the hotel to go to a meeting at the academy. A young black man came up to me and began talking in an educated voice about how to find the quickest way to the Kennedy Performing Arts Center. I walked along with him and chatted in a friendly way. His conversation seemed a bit strange, he used a lot of big words that he didn’t understand, but I was quite unsuspecting. Then as we walked past some bushes his accomplice came quietly behind me and grabbed me around the neck. The accomplice must have been hiding in the bushes but I never saw him. They quickly pulled me into the bushes, hit me three times on the side of the head, and left me lying on the ground while they picked my pockets and briefcase. All they got was a wallet with seventy-five dollars and some pictures of the girls.
I was fully conscious the whole time and in a state of spiritual peace that is good to remember. I saw the bright sunshine filtering down through the bushes, and it was beautiful. I thought, very likely these fellows will put a bullet into me to keep me from talking. I was quite ready for death, and it did not seem frightening at all. I thought, life has been good to me and this death is also good, with the bright sun and the green bushes. It is good to know that death can be so friendly. Then after a few seconds the men ran away and I picked myself up and found a Good Samaritan who drove me the short distance to the academy. My entrance into the academy was quite dramatic. There I was among friends. Best of all, the thugs didn’t even break my glasses. I had the bifocals on when they attacked me. At the hospital in Washington the police came to talk to me, and I told them exactly where the attack occurred and asked if they could look for the glasses. An hour later a grinning policeman came in with the bifocals, not even scratched. Fortunately they let me out of the hospital right away, and so I traveled back to Princeton in great style in a private air-taxi, landing at the little airstrip only two miles from home. In less than five hours from the time of the accident, Imme and the girls came to get me. I looked so ugly that first evening that Miriam couldn’t bear to look at me. But now I am back to my normal beauty with some glorious sunset colors added. I had only two restless nights and no bad pain. For the first two days I was seeing double. That was all. No concussion, no headaches. Amazing luck.
The whole of Monday I was pushed around from one doctor to another, and my head was shot through with X-rays. The score was three fractures, upper jaw, right cheekbone, and the floor of the right eye. This spoilt our family record of not having any broken bones. This morning I passed another important milestone. I sneezed for the first time since the accident, and none of the loose bones fell clattering to the floor. The amazing thing is how well everything functions, brains, eyes, ears, teeth all okay. I only missed one working day at the Institute. Today I called the plastic surgeon, and he said he doesn’t want to see me anymore. Thank God. Now I am out of his clutches. When Imme and I went to see him on Monday, he was itching to get me laid out on the table so he could begin to carve. I must confess he scared me more than the thugs who beat me up in Washington. I am now free of him and can let Nature do her job of healing.
A close encounter with death teaches us important truths about human nature. We are not only social animals. We are also fighting animals. We may dream of universal brotherhood, but when the bugle sounds, we run bravely into battle. Battered and bruised in a surprise attack, I found myself unexpectedly reacting to it with calm courage and joy. I could handle it much better than I would ever have imagined. In every culture and every battlefield, from the Spartans at Thermopylae to the Jews at Masada, the men who died in battle are remembered and honored as heroes. In the battle of Princeton, George Washington rode his horse at the head of his troops, a conspicuous target for the British sharpshooters. He knew that an act of reckless bravery would make him a more effective leader of his country in the long struggle that lay ahead. In the future as in the past, reckless bravery will be honored, and fighters will be leaders. We must try as hard as we can to make peace with our enemies and get rid of weapons of mass destruction, but we cannot expect to extinguish the fighting spirit and tribal loyalty that are deeply ingrained in our nature. Perpetual peace is a worthy goal, but it is likely to remain out of our reach.
A world of turmoil and violence is our legacy to future generations. They need to understand why science has failed to give us fair shares and social justice, and they need to work out practical remedies. This is not a job for scientists to do alone. It will need a worldwide collaboration of scientists with economists, political activists, environmentalists, and religious leaders, to lift science and society out of the swamp where we are stuck. Pure science is best driven by intellectual curiosity, but applied science needs also to be driven by ethics. Our grandchildren will have a chance to make this happen. One of them is the girl with the pink Afro who spoke at the beginning of this book.