Dreamer of Dune (7 page)

In this excerpt from a 1,500-word piece my mother wrote about the adventure, she described her first impression of their living quarters:

She entitled the piece, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, “Look Out!”—a reference to the perils of honeymooning in a forest service lookout station. It formed the first chapter of what she and Dad hoped would be a collaborative book.
^*
His contribution, two thousand words long, included the following passage:

On a Victrola hauled in by pack mule my parents listened to classical, jazz and swing music. In the evenings they read or played cards by the light of a kerosene lamp. They developed their own card game, a two-hand version of Hearts in which they played and drew, played and drew, so that no one knew where all the hearts were.

The young couple wrote short stories at every opportunity, sitting separately with typewriters set up on footlockers. His stories were pulp adventures and hers romances. Mom also composed an unpublished poem about what it might be like to trade places with her new husband and look back at herself:

She often curled up on a pillow with a good book and a red-and-white pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes that were cellophane-wrapped and bore the company slogan “LSMFT”…“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” Invariably she tucked a book of matches into the cellophane wrapper. She had been smoking since the age of fourteen, and had a constant, nervous need to be doing something with her hands. If she wasn't holding a cigarette, she enjoyed knitting or crocheting.

Dad found occasion to utilize his hunting skills on Kelly Butte. He hadn't brought along a rifle, but did have a .38 pistol, an Iver Johnson five-banger. Early one afternoon, near the northern boundary of the butte, he spotted a blue grouse in a clump of shrubbery. With scarcely a moment's hesitation, he drew his pistol and blew the head off the grouse, thus avenging an earlier insult committed against his father by another of that breed. The honeymooners prepared a fine meal with the fowl that evening.

One day, after transmitting the location of a fire to the dispatcher and to all other lookout towers in the area, Mom forgot and left the microphone open. Dad was preparing to make the trek into Lester, and she was going over the grocery list with him. She read the list aloud, saying, “…Three pounds of flour, two dozen eggs, fresh carrots, oh my God, there's a bear!” She had spotted a large black bear outside as she spoke. Subsequently they received cards and letters from fire watchers, rangers and others who had heard the broadcast and were amused by it.

On warm summer days they were in the habit of hauling mattresses outside and making love on the walkaround ramp of the lookout at sunset, with a golden glow around Mount Rainier. I was conceived on that porch.

When they saw Howie Hansen a few days later in Seattle, Dad said to him, proudly, “Just feel these muscles in my back, from carrying a pack up and down hills!”

Howie felt them. They were hard and taut, like cords.

“Do you know what we did up there?” Dad said. “We conceived a child!”

“The biggest fire in the woods was us,” Mom added.

O
NE
M
AY
afternoon in 1947 when my mother was very pregnant with me, she found herself overwhelmed by a craving for watermelon. The grocery store was only a couple of blocks away in the Queen Anne district of Seattle, so she walked there and made the purchase. On the way back, she noticed a man and woman in a car looking at her and laughing. She had been carrying the watermelon in front of her belly, and didn't realize how funny it looked.

Before dawn a few weeks later, the time came to rush her to Maynard Hospital. As my father wrote years later in a special dedication to my mother, they were in a silly, joyful mood as they entered the hospital. They laughed and giggled as they walked down the corridors, holding hands. Their ebullience drew surprised stares, since hospitals were, after all, supposed to be serious, sober places.

I was born on June 29. My parents brought me home from the hospital on Independence Day, July 4, 1947, a year to the date from the day they trekked up Kelly Butte to their honeymoon roost. As Mom walked in the door of the house with me and realized how much work she would have to do with a new baby, she thought,
This is independence?

Like my father, I had shining, golden hair as a child. My given name, Brian, is Gaelic, meaning one who is nobly descended and honorable. Also one who is fair-spoken and wordy. My middle name, Patrick, stems from St. Patrick, credited in legend with having driven all the snakes out of Ireland. A larger design was at work as well. My parents' first child was to have an Irish Catholic name, after my father's Irish lineage on the McCarthy side. The second child was to take on a Scottish given and middle name, following my mother's Presbyterian Stuart lineage.

During the early years of his marriage to my mother, Dad worked for a number of newspapers. By late 1947 he was employed as a feature writer for the
Tacoma Times
. He had grown a beard, and when going out on assignments in the blustery northwest weather often wore a trench coat and fedora, while carrying a large Kodak Medalist camera slung over one shoulder.

In my father's lifetime there were many incidents involving his driving. He was, in fact, something of a notorious motor vehicle operator wherever he lived—mostly involving speeding incidents. In some neighborhoods, people learned to watch out for him as he raced by, and reined in their children and pets.

If someone were to ask me if he was a good driver, however, I would have to admit with all candor, “Yes. But he scared the hell out of me.” He had remarkably good reactions, something inherited by my older sister, Penny, who became, among her other accomplishments, a trophy-winning jeep racer. Like my father and sister, I, too, have excellent reactions.

There are a number of stories in our family when those reactions came into play. Nothing compares, however, with the occasion in 1948 when my father was driving his mother-in-law Marguerite's big 1937 Oldsmobile. I, barely a year old, sat on the backseat with my “Nanna” Marguerite, while my mother and father sat in front. Dad claimed for years afterward that he came around the fateful turn at only forty-five miles an hour, but one of the passengers told it differently.

According to my mother, none of us were wearing seat belts, and he had the Olds going more than seventy. She'd been watching the speedometer climb, but had not said anything to him about it. It was a two-lane highway. They rounded a turn and were suddenly confronted with a flimsy two-by-four barricade in front of a bridge, with the workers sitting alongside the road having lunch. Pieces of bridge deck were missing.

Dad could either go off the road or attempt a daredevil jump over the gap. He decided in a split second to attempt a leap, similar to one he had seen performed by a circus clown at the wheel of a tiny motorized car. He floored the accelerator. The big car crashed through the barricade onto bridge decking, then went airborne for an instant before all four rubber tires smacked down on the other side.

Frank Herbert stopped the car and waved merrily to the stunned workers, then sped off.

“What fun!” Mom exclaimed. But she lit a cigarette nervously, and noticed her hands shaking. Uncharacteristically, Marguerite was quiet in the back, and admitted later she'd been terrified. It all happened so quickly she said she barely had time to grab me.

My father said at least eight solutions appeared before him when he rounded the turn and saw the barricade, in what could not have amounted to more than a tenth of a second. He compared it with a dream, in which a series of events that seemed to take a long time were in reality crammed into only a few seconds. During the emergency he weighed each option calmly and decided upon the one that worked. He said he visualized the successful leap.

It has been said that art imitates life. Years later, in his 1968 novel
The Santaroga Barrier
, he fictionalized the event:

Frank Herbert received only a few moving violations in the many years he drove, covering what must have amounted to millions of miles. One ticket was for failing to dim his headlights for oncoming traffic. Another involved following too closely and running into the rear of another vehicle, but that occurred on an icy street. I also remember how he backed out of driveways or narrow dead-end streets, going hellbent-for-leather with his head out the driver's window, staring back intently or looking in the side mirror.

He learned some of his high-speed driving skills from his father, who had been a highway patrolman. When barreling down a narrow, winding road he didn't slow at the turns and instead beeped furiously. If anything was coming, it had to get out of the way! He knew how to minimize wear on automobile mechanisms, too. When driving a vehicle with a clutch, each time he had to stop on a steep hill he set the emergency brake and then released it slowly as he started out, thus putting less wear on the clutch. He never rode the clutch, and could double clutch into low gear with gear boxes that didn't have synchromesh. As a child, I always felt he was in total control, and I don't recall ever feeling at risk. In my adulthood, however, when I knew him a bit too well, I often feared for my life while riding in a car with him at the wheel.

Dad and Mom took frequent fishing trips together, while I remained with my Nanna Marguerite, who was a well-known Northwest watercolor artist. She had a large studio in her home, where she painted beach and boat scenes, and landscapes.

On one such fishing trip my parents were on a river near North Bend, Washington. During the day, Dad had been off fishing, performing his hunting and gathering role, while Mom worked around their rented cabin. When he returned with his catch, he discovered he had lost a packet containing fishing flies and hooks that had been given to him by one of his grandparents. It had sentimental as well as practical value, and he was upset.

She told him not to worry, that she would find it. He had been all over the river fishing, not staying in one place at all. Still, she led him directly to an area of unusual rocks, where she knelt over a hole, reached in and retrieved the missing gear.

“It was there that I discovered I was married to a white witch,” he told me.

Another time, in her University of Washington years, her friend Frankie called to say she had lost a gold ring. Beverly told her to go back to Parrington Hall on the campus, where she would find the ring on top of a towel dispenser in the ladies' restroom. Frankie checked, and there it was.

In coming years, Dad would rely upon Mom's ability to find things for him, and upon her power to forecast events.