Meet Me at Infinity (37 page)

Well, all this and now I remember what I really wanted to chat at you about, which is, Tiptree’s Year of the Women. Culminating in trying to write one for Vonda Mclntyre’s antho,
Aurora (Beyond Equality).
To do it honestly. I have as you probably know a talent for making any simple task into a soul-searing struggle, complete with intimations of mortality. But it grows late; let’s break. Leaving for our next, if interested, how Tiptree found happiness in Women’s Lib. I know now why women have always attracted me, you see:
They are the real aliens we’ve always looked for…
yes. Now I feel better.

—April 3, 1974

Aah-h-h, I made it. British Columbia, that is. Life-long desire finally fulfilled. Moreover, now I’ve found it, I don’t really need to go to New Zealand, since I’m told they’re very much alike except for marsupials and araucaria trees.

British Columbia starts with Vancouver, which must be one of the sweetest cities in the world to live in. You’d have to stay there a month to begin to see it, too; my lad> taxi driver told me she had been exploring it for six years and was still getting surprised. Picture a city sprinkled around on islands in the mouth of a great river, filled with the greenest greenery you ever saw and surrounded by dazzling snow-clad mountains. With the sea mixing in everywhere among flowers and skyscrapers and wildernesses and enough beaches so you can still find empty ones—there’s even one for nudists—and Chinatowns and a great zoo-forest on a special island (it has kissing-tame killer whales, if you want to kiss a killer whale) and polite sturdy people of every national origin and denomination, and a coastline wandering off to infinity in fjords and inlets, boating such as you wouldn’t believe. And the hotels have the kind of service I thought had gone down with the
Titanic,
heavy silver and snowy napery and delicious food. (“Does the coffee suit, sir? I’ll be glad to brew you another pot.”)

Oh, my.

There is, of course, a cautionary note. It is said to rain there (hence the greenery) although it never did for me. And the sea carries the cold Japan Current, which makes for hardiness. More on that later. And… . the service ain’t free. Tiptree’s wallet started going down like the
Titanic
before I got out to the wilderness. But, ahhh, while it lasted!

Now that wilderness! The British Columbia coastline is what is called “drowned,” which means that the sea comes halfway up the mountains with incredible arms and inlets wandering right through the Coastal Range. (How they ever got it explored is a story you should read—elsewhere.) So the settlements are where rivers come in, and they’re surrounded by walls of snowy peaks. You can get to them from the east over some fairly hairy roads or you can take the coastal steamer. I flew north on a small, informal airline which wanders around delivering newspapers and taking children to the dentist. My fellow passengers were other fishermen and two young Bella Coola Indian girls going home to Bella Coola, which was where I was headed too. Bella Coola is a famous settlement of a few hundred hardy souls including a reservation town, and is where Alex MacKenzie finally came out when he made his great trek overland seeking the Pacific.

The flight was eye-popping. We headed up the scenic straits between the mainland and great Vancouver Island (on which the city of Vancouver is
not
located), laboring higher and higher. And then the little plane turned and took off over the snows and crags of the Coastal Range, with glaciers and peaks going by the wings and no, but absolutely
no
place to land whatever. Gulp. I had just finished reading about the Uruguay soccer team who had crashed in the Andes snows and survived by eating their dead, and I couldn’t help casting an eye on the potential toughness of my companions. (I am
very
stringy.) And then we dived into a gorge on the far side and kited down and around a huge glacial valley—and suddenly there was a salt sea arm meeting a pale-blue river, and a cluster of roofs, and forests. And we and the newspapers had arrived at Bella Coola.

Immediately I got out. I realized I was on the inland side of the mountains—it was a glorious
dry
day. On the sea side they get like 150 inches of rain a year, inside they get eleven. Summer is one endless cobalt blue sky and the sun on the snows above.

The next thing I saw was the scale. You’ve heard of giant redwoods. Well, there are giant Douglas firs. I mean
giant.
What I thought was a normal forest was a staggering cathedral of these great firs and cedars, with the mountains looking down at you over their tops. Unless you put a Human figure in your snapshot you don’t appreciate the scale of everything. You see a simple log bridge—and when a Human being wanders out on it you realize the logs are waist-high lying down. Some are as big as sequoias; there is a drive-through fir in Vancouver. And the mountains—it’s a land of stupendous triangles, triangles of blue blue sky pointing down, triangles of peaks poking up.

I took another even smaller plane up to a wilderness lake full of cutthroat trout—with a glorious 1300-foot sheer falls at one end—and spent two weeks just breathing. Also swatting. It is, unfortunately, true about northern bugs. Some days it pays to be constipated. But other days the wind takes them off and out on the lake is clear. Specifically, it’s black flies and mosquitoes and various brands of carnivorous deer flies up to one called the Bulldog, which is said to take a bite out of you and sit on a limb munching it with blood running out its jaws. I did not meet the Bulldog. But I did meet some quite large mosquitoes; one is rumored to have landed at Fairbanks and taken on 15,000 gallons of aviation gas before being identified.

For what it’s worth, however, my bites didn’t swell. Nothing like Virginia bites. (No, I do not mean Watergate.)

I went back down to the valley to stay awhile and clean up. Down there is river life from time immemorial. Crowds of humpback salmon churning up, crowds of trout ditto, looking for salmon eggs. Coming downstream was a Bella Coola phenomenon: I was on a sandbar and suddenly here comes song and orange plastic, turns out to be a group of guys sailing wet-arse down the river in inner tubes, drinking wine and singing at seven miles per hour plus rapids in the rain. Turns out it’s a Sunday sport, they repeat all day in batches up to thirty. Very festive they looked—offering wine to all encountered. I reluctantly refused because I was on the far side from them, difficult to cross. (That is
fast
water.) But God, their butts must have been cold. That stream is fresh out of a glacier. And so is all the water around, which is what I mentioned earlier. I saw Indian kids snorkeling for hours in a clear lake that was so cold my
scalp
lost consciousness—along with my feet up to the hips, and my ribs contracted so I breathed in short screams. But the kids played on like otters.

The Bella Coolas are rather a mysterious tribe, everybody gives you a different story, including that there now are no Bella Coola Indians—or that there are nine tribes. The mystery is partly because they look exactly like Polynesians. Softly rounded, full curved lips, right at home in the grass skirt and flower-behind-ear bit. (The girls look great.) Thor Heyerdahl came through and pointed out that a raft could drift on the current from Bella Coola to Hawaii very neatly, but not, of course, come back. So maybe Hawaii is full of Bella Coola Indians.

The other tribes around them are more the aquiline Plains types; out on the coast live the Kwakiutl people, whose custom of holding Pot-latch feasts you may have been exposed to in Ethnology IA—even as me. Some of the survivors of all the tribes are doing a little writing; I read one marvelous book called
Potlatch
by a Kwakiutl who witnessed, as a child, the last of the great feasts. Among the competitive courtesies extended to the guests arriving in canoes was to dance in silent formation down to the shore and while guests posed statuelike, you stuck poles under the huge canoe, guests and all, and hoisted the whole works up shoulder-high and “floated” them into the hall.… Made me thankful it’s not obligatory to haul in your dinner guests
in
their VWs. (Mine would take to bikes. If they wanted to eat.)

In and around Bella Coola you meet a few nice foreign types who come for the hiking and fishing; backpackers. One lad comes in every year to follow grizzly bears around in a friendly way. A few adventurous camper-drivers with tales of the road. How Bella Coola finally built its own road to get out of its mile-high pocket and “join Canada” is a real Heinlein adventure yarn. Government failed; they did it themselves with two old cats and blasting powder. It’s over a mile of rock straight up; sometimes they had to chain the cat to the cliff and ride it—
hanging in aid
The day the cat from below met the cat from above the town went wild. The powder man nailed his hat and boots to a tree, bottles popped from top to bottom, and everything in the town that had wheels went jolting up and out in a honking procession all the way to Anahim, which had to be nearly rebuilt when Bella Coola went home.

For hikers who are interested, there is the Rainbow Range, a whole continental upthrust of gorgeous colored minerals, even flying over it is unbelievable. Trails are just getting marked out. I talked to the ranger, who like everybody surviving there is built like a Saturn stage and has just about the power. What he had to say about the new trail “littered with little brown piles and lavender toilet paper” I won’t repeat. Suffice it to say that this is a Provincial park, where you can be thrown out for Disturbing a Park Object. They don’t have to see you litter. When they catch you at the end of a trail of plastic or little brown piles they point out that you are “disturbing” the park grass by standing on it, and out you go. Great.

The name is Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, and for any of you who want a look at Eden, go. Go now, go quick. Bring your bedroll and be prepared to buy your own eats at the incredible new Bella Coola Coop. Lodges offer bunks and cooking pots and stoves. Don’t let the bug tales scare you, Cutter keeps them off. And—

No little brown piles, hear?

It’s so damn beautiful.

—August 29, 1974

Yeah, I know the British Columbia thing was impersonal. That was because of this free-floating depression which had struck me (lifting now) so that if I had put personal stuff in it would have come out as a sort of supine wail. Stop it stop it, I can’t stand anymore. Sometimes I get so that all the pain and misery in the world seems to be tied into my nervous system and hurting together. I heard long stories about the ghastliness of the white man’s treatment of the Indians—giving them smallpox-infected blankets among others—and instead of fading out, all these and so many others just seemed to add up and build until I wanted to get out of the planet or out of the species, or out of my own malfunctioning nervous system. Nightmares, nightmares… I’m a kook, Jeff. When I was a kid I almost killed myself when I heard what happened to Carthage. And the burning of the Alexandria library. And the R.C. Church’s destruction of the three thousand Maya codexes. (Only three—three—escaped.) Life seems to be just one long flinch. I am very tied into the natural world, you know, and every bulldozer hurts me personally. Now we’re about to stripmine three states there’s a permanent block of ice-splinters in my left kidney, day and night, especially nights…

Well, let’s not get everybody bawling.

—September 27, 1974

In May of 1974,1 innocently got an idea for a fanzine article that would turn out to absorb all my time for the next year and produce a document that went beyond all expectations. I invited a group of SF writers to discuss “Women in Science Fiction.” The format was similar to the Tiptree interview—there were a few opening questions, and then there were follow-up questions based on the first responses. But with twelve participants, all commenting on each other’s letters, it quickly grew to an almost unmanageable size. Undeterred (well, only slightly deterred), we all continued writing, and at the end “Women in Science Fiction: A Symposium” took up 122 pages of by far the largest fanzine I ever produced, the 156-page
Khatru 3 &
4, November 1975.
(Phantasmicom)],
the second largest, was one hundred pages.) It was only marginally about science fiction, but the forum of eleven high-powered thinkers and one out-of-his-league editor produced something quite remarkable, that is still talked about today.

The contributors were Suzy McKee Charnas, Samuel R. Delany, Virginia Kidd, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. Mclntyre, Raylyn Moore, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Luise White, Kate Wilhelm, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Here is the introduction I wrote for that issue:

This is an issue of letters. And it is an issue that should
draw
letters. I’d like to give a little background here.

I first thought of a symposium on Women in Science Fiction in May of 1974. I drew up a prospectus in early August—a good prospectus—and with a lot of help from Virginia Kidd I had my panel by late September. Unfortunately, after the Worldcon I had gone into a considerable creative slump, and the Symposium suffered for it. I kept putting it off until I figured that if I didn’t move soon I would lose my contributors, and on October 9th I forced out a letter. It began

“Dear People—” (remember that) and ended with some questions that only vaguely resembled what I wanted to ask. I can’t really offer any excuse for that. Perhaps, though, the bad questions initiated a better final product than good ones would have—

Officially, the Symposium ran from 10/9/74 to 5/8/75 (though minor revisions carried on well after), seven months and 168 pages of letters. Most of those 168 are here.

I can guarantee that there will be
something
herein that you will disagree with. (It’s impossible to agree with everything on each of the 168 pages.) Much of it is pure speculation, grasping for ideas, for connections heretofore undiscovered or ignored. I would much prefer letters with similar qualities, rather than personal attacks on persons whose views do not coincide with yours. (I admit the temptation will be great.) And read it all before you write—if you don’t you may just repeat someone else’s remark. But I don’t want to scare you off: strap yourself in (or let yourself go), and forge ahead.