Frank Herbert Remembered

In the late Sixties, I was an educational film writer in Seattle, where science fiction author Frank Herbert was still making his steady living as a newspaperman. (Dune had been published, but had not yet become recognized as a modern sf classic and model of ecological awareness.) One short documentary--I hadn't written it but was producing--required an outside expert on environmental matters, and somehow King Screen Productions found Frank. Working together on the film led to us progressing from slight acquaintances to casual friends.

Frank and I were both living atop Queen Anne Hill in those days, and one winter’s night a year or so later, Seattle was experiencing such near-blizzard conditions that I was forced to park at the base of that steep, half-mile-climb hill and then proceed to hike up and over to my house a mile away, arms laden with bags of groceries. After several blocks of slipping and falling in the blowing, 10" inch-deep snow, I finally staggered onto Frank and Bev’s porch and into their living room, exhausted and half-frozen. They cheerfully warmed and fed me, and finally I was able to stagger on for the last several blocks home.

Later the Herberts came to my house for a sort-of payback dinner--enchiladas, frijoles, and guacamole that I prepared--and after the meal and some great sobremesa conversation (did we have margaritas too?), Frank studied the bookshelves, found my copy of Dune--only a paperback, but at least I had it there at the right moment!--took it down and inscribed it with a friendly message that also kidded me about "being so Mexican."

Frank and Bev soon moved over to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where they constructed an early attempt at a self-sustaining "green" home, using a tall windmill as well as solar batteries to generate their electricity, for example. Frank was also proud of his live chickens, free-ranging before that term was introduced (I think), there to eat the bugs and supply chickenshit for... fuel, was it? He had big ideas, as any fan of the Dune books knows!

We saw each other less frequently then, but I did conduct interviews with him for a couple of magazines as his reputation grew. And long before the movie of Dune ever appeared I also adapted with Frank's approval a portion of that novel--Paul’s exhilarating first worm ride--as a comic book story for a Marvel Comics b&w sf magazine, but poor art guaranteed its failure. Yet pause to consider that the heroic people of Arrakis, in a resistance movement often resorting to terrorist measures, seem to be descended from Arabs.

Increasing fame, movie deals and such, plus Bev’s cancer, diagnosed as terminal, finally led to their departure from the Northwest. I know they tried cancer cures in Mexico and then wound up in Hawaii, but we lost touch. Thinking critically now, I believe Frank should have stopped the Dune series after the third book, but it's hard to argue with such huge success; and I believe the Herberts likely needed all the money they could gather in the face of approaching death.

Anyway, Frank Herbert was a fine man, genial and thoughtful, and clearly ahead of his time. His like is not to be seen in these sad days of global warming, global economics, and yet another now-global war.

Makes you wonder if Arrakis might not be our future too...

Hidden Depps

Jack's back, and the whole world is watching--or at least waiting in line for the next screening. This time the Pirates have left the Caribbean and headed for World's End... wherever 'tis waiting. Early reviews grumble that the special effects and three-hour length overwhelm plot and character, but I reckon Johnny Depp has enough character to make up for all the whizbanging and slithery creeps encountered.

The nice irony, a big plus for any Rolling Stones fans, is that Keith Richards appears as Jack Sparrow's father, which should be riotous since Depp built Sparrow pretty much on Keef's physical mannerisms anyway, half loose-spine junkie and half fey Ichabod Crane (hmm, another Depp role!), weaving and mumbling and grinning maniacally.

The idea of reaching World's End and falling over the edge haunted mariners for hundreds of years. And the southwestern tip of Portugal, Cabo de Sao Vicente, the furthest western point of Europe, is called just that, the End of the World--a holdover from those early exploration days of sailing when ships from Isabella's Spain and Henry the Navigator's Portugal thought of that lonely barren outcropping as the last bit of land they might ever see...

When I left the U.S. for two years of 'round-the-world travel in the mid-Eighties, sometimes continuing on westward by boat, I was vaguely aware of reversing the course of explorers like Magellan, but really thought nothing about such adventuring until I wound up in Portugal for the winter of 1986-87. My soon-to-be-wife and I chose Portugal's Mediterranean coast, the Algarve region, because we (erroneously) figured it would be the warmest place in Europe to spend the season. (That particular winter was the coldest Europe had experienced for decades--so much for warmth!)

The Algarve has both stark beauty and a rich cultural history, but it has also become overrun with tourists, especially the British, who use the region as their personal Hawaii. Yet the winter months are fairly quiet and mostly devoid of tourists, which was a plus, but we also found ourselves having to invent our own Christmas celebration, for example--scrounging a scrawny tree, handmaking ornaments from beach flotsam and jetsum, cooking up a duck dinner, and so on.

And we actually spent part of Christmas Day visiting the End of the World. The poem I wrote afterwards, two decades ago now, is sadly pertinent still...

At World’s End

A chill wind rising now, and storm clouds
thousands of miles old gathering over us,
arrived from remote Bermudas and Azore shoals:
we lean out looking down and down,
blown upright by the wind, casting our thoughts
below, where luckless sailors drowned,
their boat-borne souls smashing up

against the shear of the Cape, and others put in—
pressed hard to find haven, much less good hope.
Cabo de Sao Vicente served ocean’s masters,
not its victims: those bound south or east,
or west where winter’s sun shutters and dims.
We are here Christmas Day distressed;
we have come to the End of the World…

Portagee sailors looked back on this cliff,
trapped in the currents of history,
hurled by Henry Navigator to the edge
and off his charts, to danger lands and seas
far on the way to the unknown shelves
wrapped ‘round the Pearls of the Indies.
Lord Nelson rehearsed here for hell,

skirting the Spanish fleet, hard-by
a once-sacred reach where older gods
rested--and St. Vincent’s remains too slept,
briefly hidden from the Moorish invaders,
below a guardian host of ravens that
soon chased his bones north to Lisboa.
Oh, this land knew the blooding and blending:

warrior-poets, Christians with Moors…
now their fishermen descendents
sing the fado blues in white-stucco bars.
The wind-stripped coast was laid waste
by ravages of Drake and time,
by gale and earthquake and violent sea
breaking inexorably against its line.

The curious who come now to look
see no caravels, no azulejos or
blossoming almond, no Muslim paradise,
only the rock and water and wind,
where al-Garve, “the Occident,” dies,
and Europe finds its bitter end.
Unseasonably glum ourselves,

we welcome a cliff-top buffeting;
may it dispel this gone-from-home
gloom we’re ashamed to admit, but feel...
A down-day for the postcard sellers.
No tour buses clog the turnaround.
Only the dark man hawking sweaters
has made the drive out from Sagres, town

of crumbling stone where Henry’s Fortress
and ‘ball-diamond-sized Compass Rose
of all directions could remind us that
Europe’s end is its beginning, if we put
sun’s decline and the storm-wind behind us.
We give each other lookalike sweaters,
then ascend the worn lighthouse stairs.

The massive beacon waits for night,
air through its grid whistling wordless fado,
“Perigo de Morte” perhaps; that’s the sign
posted on some wiring nearby.
But we risk “Danger” daily—terrorists
and thieves: romance shocked by reality—
where world’s end conjoins our history.

Home is out there. Here,
sea raven scavengers spire overhead
as the sun burns orange into night,
and the red-blood earth in dying light
drains down to the chop and flutter
of white, the last of land collapsing
back where it began. Battered,

we lean on the cold wind, rising.

Yankee Go Home

A person with too much money and too little sense these days can easily book him/herself into some sort of Extreme Travel experience--distant places, dangerous terrain, questionable social mores, volatile governments, very little security. (Photo thanks to Trieste friend Adelberto Buzzin.) I suppose it's the same principal as climbing mountains; the challenge and the on-going adrenaline high outweigh the risks for such people.

Chacun a son gout. Growing up as a military dependent teaches one to be flexible, to forget about missing some non-existent hometown, to make the most of new places and situations, to enjoy the travel itself no matter where one is bound, but to keep a low profile too...

I got married at age 20 and was a parent by 21, a graduate student and then working stiff thereafter--which brought all my travel experiences to a screeching halt. For 25 years I worked and parented and pretty much stayed put. But the marriage ended around 1980, with me left raising the kids for the last few years. By the time they were grown, I was ready to hit the trail to the world.

I left the U.S. in January of 1986 with a big backpack and a vague plan, intending to be gone for maybe two years, travelling to the South Seas and Asia and then on to Europe. I spent a couple of weeks in Bali, for example, hanging out in the same areas where the terrorist bombs would kill so many 20 years later; in 1986, however, Bali was still beach peaceful and Hindu beatific.

But across the world, in North Africa, President Reagan was unleashing our air might on Libya, retaliating for the Lockerbie bombing (wasn't that the reason given)? Suddenly I was seen as maybe one more ugly American, or at least as a representative of our cowboy President, so I was questioned again and again, by Asian residents and European tourists alike, asked to explain what in the world America was up to or had become. I didn't have many answers for anyone then--or now, some 20 years later, when even worse situations have arisen and the U.S. just looks paranoid (terrornoid?) and far from democratic (the small D version), rife with torturers and warmongers, Christian fundamentalist crusaders unleashed.

Muslim terrorists are loathsome and inhuman. (May they all be sterile, die childless, and cry out for Allah in vain.) But I'm also worried about the Land of the Fee and the Home of abu-Grave--outsourcing jobs, sending our soldiers into battle ill-equipped, relying on civilian contractors who get paid better and have no laws to check their actions, neglecting the wounded veterans, destroying the old America that God blessed.

Okay, enough political proselytizing. Some of those thoughts, and further musings from the service brat experience, figure in the poem that follows. This one began when I was sitting in a McDonald's in Basel, Switzerland, in the summer of 1985, munching on ice and thinking about the warnings dentists always issue about ruining one's teeth; then I found myself pondering the then world situation and those first signs of global terrorism... and the result, eventually, was this poem called...

Chewing Ice

From the press and rush, the crowd of quick and lucrid,
I have come to these familiar golden arches,
misplaced on a platz in Basel’s merchant core.
I’m thousands of miles from the nearest Boeing plant
yet less than a hundred from warheads and bombers,
weary of Pax Americana and accusations.
But this is not that poem.
Instead of fear or shame, just now I feel
relief. Drinking-in the culture of Coca-Cola,

I’m "Yankee Going Home," for the moment.
Among these neutral burghers I can sit
simply breaking the ice, my mouth making small talk
and cubelets smaller still—all the while remembering:
"Chewing ice will ruin your teeth."
Dentists have threatened that for 40 years at least,
but I have always reckoned on the inevitable
less-than-perfect dentures in a glass.
Ice is my connection.

To lemonade I sold in summers long ago,
each penny cup with its separate piece melting,
on some postwar development street in upstate New York,
or the shadetree road near Arlington’s dragon’s-teeth graves…
To the domed, grey metal crusher in some kitchen of the past,
its scimitar blades chewing over and over,
shredding and shaving each cube to crystalline gravel…
To the thousand brain-spearing pains I cursed,
shooting them up through the roof of my mouth and away.

I think of ice in the South:
of pre-Cold War trucks and horsedrawn wagons
hauling the great, cloudy blocks, the massive sweating men,
their claw tongs delivering burlapped relief, icebox salvation,
from that ramshackle icehouse down by the river,
whose strangeness of brine and shade
was a magnet drawing local boys like iron filings.
We’d drift in arcs of electromagnetic force
from one clanking hulk of machinery

to another: ammonia-dazed coils, brute forms chopping and grinding,
unnatural devices transforming water to mystery—
cold technology shaping all our futures,
taunting us with the promise of mastery over the earth.
I went seeking ice and silence;
I brought back the chilly, controlling ways
it seems now I may never lose…
Or was it earlier still, in the belly of my mother,
whose craving all that scorching summer and fall

on the San Antonio airbase was pieces of ice?
Chunks she held to her swollen sides,
cubes that cooled her cheeks and soothed her forehead,
chipped ice she chewed for company while my father
taught his fledgling fliers how to get aloft
and stay there, how to fight on the wind and air
and target their tons of fire,
how to never ever lose
a combat pilot’s cool and leather-jacketed smile.