Yay for practical George
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Damn, George is a total badass. I had no idea when I met him. The kayak stuff was mentioned as a footnote in a space discussion.
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He navigated the Yuculta rapids in his fiber glass baidarka over 3 days m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlJTK
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On to Chapter 17: Oatmeal. Back to the Orion story.
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Okay that was a short chapter. TLDR: Orion killed. On to Part 2: Chapter 18. Back with George and Baidarkanomics.
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Now into George’s baidarka adventures. Not much to live tweet in this section. Just long, evocative passages about living lightly at interface of land, sea, and sky.
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Now he’s mate and navigator of a barge carrying a small farm up to Alaska in a haywire operation that reads like Huck Finn in the Arctic
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“One day a cow fell overboard. Carol Martin chaser it in the tug, twirling a lariat, full of happy memories of Colorado. He lassoes the cow from deck, and they hauled it aboard.”
HOW IS THIS NOT A MOVIE?
Shades of Oscar and Lucinda here
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The barge had a piano that George played 😂
This trip up to Juneau with a bunch of cows, horses, farm stuff, a truck... legend
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Now he’s done with the barge farm gig and is paddling from Juneau to Skagway. Google says ~7h in what looks like a ferry route. Alaska is huge.
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Replying to
The economics in this story are interesting. Grandpa George was a royal court musician. Freeman was bound to the military industrial complex. George lived a rewilded life outside of the cash economy for the most part. At least for this 1970s frontier chapter of his story.
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George makes plans to build a little cabin at glacier bay. Moonscape type territory. Ringed by mountains and inaccessible except for a few months in summer. He plans to have his climber friends bring food and stay. Inlet-keeper. This puts the hard in hard waldenponding.
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Chapter 20. Still in the 70s. Plans to build his house interrupted. Park service want to hire him and his baidarka for research. The canoe can go where other vessels can’t. George is basically Arctic Han Solo with a baidarka for a millennium falcon and no chewy.
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The idea of the house is now toast. George is now frontier guy setting up a summer camp in Torch Bay for the park service scientists along with guy named Ned Gillette. Cook, carpenter, etc. Book author enters the story as a character.
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Summer camp scientist stories with George as yoda-cook. “George likes cooking for people who work hard. When he cooks for people who just sit around, it hurts his own sense of worth. He explained this pointedly several times, and we took it as a warning.”
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‘“The cook has a lot of power, and I intend to use it,” George confided once to Ned and me. It was a funny line, or a disquieting one, I wasn’t sure which.’
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New chapter. George has pre-installed a beef with a new arrival at the camp, a small mammalogist the book calls Mouse Woman. Wonder who it was. If this were a romance novel they’d fall in love or something.
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George is a character out of Jack London. In this chapter he tries to make a crab trap (fail) and a spare paddle (success). Both projects use combos of natural material and tech material. The paddle is a spruce, plywood, and epoxy. Trap was a sapling plus beach-found junk netting
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Now “a wigwam... sweathouse... tepee of beachcomber plastic draped over a driftwood tripod.”
Something childlike about this but with adult competence. I used to do stuff like this in the yard as a kid.
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No-context George quote: “I’m on a different level...I’m building a different thing. I know it’s strange. But I’m an expert on this business of inner space and outer space, and how one is a manifestation of the other.”
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This book is slow going because I’m reading a paper copy like a barbarism and I can only read for a half hour or so on the balcony before I lose paper book stamina. Kindle ebooks so much better.
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Ok a horrible cruise director type character has arrived and killed the energy, so George who has been making mystical preparations to leave, is leaving with author. 2-person baidarka trip back south. On to chapter 27, back to Freeman.
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Short Chapter 27: Freeman dreams up a huuuge nuclear rocket concept to go to alpha Centauri. I guess with Orion canceled might as well wrap up on a speculative high note. Chapter 28: George plans a huuuge canoe. Brower isn’t subtle about his juxtapositions.
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“For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.” — Freeman Dyson
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3 deft chapters on Freeman. On starship concepts, anecdotes from an exobiology conference, and one on space colonies. Philosophical differences with neighbor Gerard O’Neil of O’Neill cylinder fame.
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O’Neill got famous for dreaming up large, comfy, expensive middle class space colony concepts. Iirc the thing in Neuromancer is an O’Neill cylinder? Freeman wants scrappy shoestring budget tin-can colonies modeled on the Mayflower economically. Pilgrims. Planters and adventurers.
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George and Ken are heading south in the baidarka. Arctic huck finn type voyage.
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That was a long languorous chapter on the voyage. Now some commentary. Brower declares both father and son romantic reactionaries but votes for the nostalgia of the son over that of the father. Freeman’s techno-utopian linear evolutionary visions of Freeman are judged misguided.
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Chapter on George and Ken recovering from exhaustion of 20h of rowing in Tyee, an abandoned cannery town. Both have fevers (coronavirus? 🤔). Hunter graffiti to which George adds:
Didn’t hunt,
Didn’t kill,
Came here
And sat still
— Dyson, 1974
Heh I was born in 1974
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George on pea soup made from a mix: “It’s amazing the stuff they pass off as food. It’s barely enough to let you survive. Just enough to let you sit in front of a TV set.”
He’s suspicious of writers though he became one himself later. In this bit he and Ken aren’t getting along.
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Chapter 37. How to reduce cost of space exploration by 3 factors of 10: fewer people, more risk-taking types willing to die, better tech. 10^3=1000.
I think Elon is shooting for ~100
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Freeman thought one space strategy was to simply wait a century after government programs quit and get junk for cheap, like Mayflower was a cheap private voyage more than a century after Columbus expensive state-sponsored exploration. With space it’s taken ~50 post Apollo.
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George and Ken are scouring a junkyard for an aluminum pole and plate to make a rudder. It’s a year after their big voyage (which Ken quit in Ketchikan). The book really likes to lay it on thick re these father/son juxtapositions.
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Now in a chapter on George’s enormous 48-foot 6-person canoe, Mount Fairweather. Built 1974-75. Dude’s a total Quixote. Apparently a legend in boatbuilding circles. I’d like to see it.
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Big canoe about to launch. On a mad poet present for occasion:
“His lines did not scan, but ended wherever he ran out of room. The poem itself ended similarly...Henry produces poetry the way a factory loom produces fabric — by the yard, and it can be cut off almost any place.”
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Chapter 41: Ken goes to La Jolla to meet Freeman as weird sort of emissary from George. They take walks and stuff, discussing space, nukes, etc. Now on to Chapter 42, the reunion! Starship father meets Canoe son. “Luke, I’m your father” moment.
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This collision of worlds is lit. Freeman checks out the treehouse and then goes with teen daughter Emily, and Ken, to rendezvous with George on some island. The journey itself is a gem of a vignette. The movie scene would be great.
GIF
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“The plexiglass domes [on canoe manholes] were in place...Freeman repeated...that the canoe was beautiful. He confessed that he thought he would like it better without the domes — just the classic Aleut lines. The astrophysicist, oddly or not, did not like the spaceship look.”
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This story is full of colorful side characters, like Will Malloff, a weird frontier guy who ran a 1-person lumber mill and bred Rhodesian ridgeback dogs (lion hunting dogs) on Swanson island, where Luke Dyson met Anakin “Darth Orion” Dyson.
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“The Mallloff settlement testified to the energy that two isolated people...can unleash. Here, I could not help thinking, was the kind of small colony [Mayflower mode] that Freeman Dyson advocates.”
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