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As Greenpeace Sailed into Storm, Hunter Kept Notes

In the fall of 1971, a band of "eco-freaks" on an old wooden boat challenged the world's great nuclear power. They were seasick, but they never looked back.

Robert Hunter 6 May 2005TheTyee.ca

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The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey documents the original initiative Greenpeace initiative — to protest a U.S. nuclear test in Alaska. Prospective publisher Jack McClelland rejected the experimental, introspective manuscript, and for 30 years it languished unpublished. Last year, Arsenal Pulp Press brought it to light. It’s an artifact that provides a valuable window into a pivotal time. This fragment from the beginning of the book reminds us that Bob Hunter, who died May 2 at 63, was not only a ground-breaking activist but a daring writer as well.

Gulf of Alaska, Wednesday, September 22,1971

Gulls yowking, diving, plunging like burst white fragments of a single wing, our wake heaving out behind us gurgling and bubbling, one moment falling down from the stern as though we just soared over a hill, next moment our stomachs being dragged up into a pulpy collision with our lungs and the cold grey boil of the wake wagging over our heads. The boat is rolling like a drum and the horizon is only yards away, coming up like a belch, then dropping out from under, and yet somehow instead of falling we are being pushed into slow, agonizing liftoff, and gravity hauls our stomachs back down like lard into slippery squids of intestine – and then whack thunk, as though a boulder had been thrown against the hull, whoosh, down we surf in slow-mo into another canyon, and up rears the bow like the head of a dying mastodon, each upward heave a last gasp. Whack.Thunk.

We wallow in water suddenly gone still, disengaged from gravity and tides and current, and then we are swing-heaving and lurch-falling again, fumbling through the troughs and clambering to the tops of roaring ocean hills that collapse beneath us. Hiss of water across the old wooden decks, whose brass hatchways to the hold – built for hauls of halibut – are the exact shape of the ecology symbol, the symbol we have on our sail, along with the peace symbol. And the word “Greenpeace” painted in yellow but now almost impossible to see because the black smoke from the chimney behind the wheelhouse has sooted it out. We poor eco-freaks cringe at the pollution. The engine makes its chugging clunking snik snik snik snik, the smoke ghosting out across the sky, white light flaring along the horizon.

Bob Keziere is down in his bunk, face like a squashed grape, long hair sticky with salt, hardly able to talk and certainly not daring to eat. Not that there is much to eat anyway – the cook, Bill Darnell, is collapsed in the bunk above Keziere, face blank, as if involved in some desperate yoga exercise to remove his consciousness from the long yawns and swoop-plunge-lurch-chop takeoffs of the boat and his guts wildly trying to follow. Pat Moore is wedged in between the galley table and the wall, his shoulders pressed back against the wood, feet jammed against the legs of the table, looking like a spaced-out rock star with his frizz of kinky hair and the poster of Richard Nixon above him, Nixon’s face blurry and the words: let me make myself perfectly clear .Our language has come down to grunts and mutterings, everyone tight-jawed, stiff, sore, bruised from being tossed against walls and bunks. The only way to move is to grab something and haul yourself along hand over hand.

To sleep, I curl up in a fetal ball on my bunk, ass wedged against the guard rail, knees jammed into the wall, both hands gripping the cold pipe that runs through the bunk, expecting any minute to be flipped right out over the edge of it. The dreams are fantastic: my kids on a grassy hill on a windswept plain, my little girl running up and down the slope in utter silence, the grass flattened by a giant invisible foot stalking across the world, my little boy sitting quietly in the arms of a monkey who has long silky hair and a glint of supreme intelligence in her eyes. She is brooding over the boy and watching the girl as she runs. It is a dream of evolution –the children are all alone but for the Wise One from out of the past, an ancestral mother. The world as I know it is gone. The world is lost ... my children! Ah, but it’s a dream, not a vision. It can be explained. Swinging from the rafter over my head is the brown monkey doll my daughter gave me, and the hill and the wind are like the storm and the surging falling sea, and this feeling I have – an urge to sob wildly because my children are out of reach, off in some other world and time, and they will never hear me even if I cry out to them – that can be explained too. I miss them.

But there is more. A painful awe opens up inside me. It has been building for days. The sea is the colour of a basilica – granite, limestone, with foam traces of fossil, a hint of archways built of marble – like an immense wrecked cathedral. Standing out on the deck, I have a stoned-out feeling that leaves me tingling and goosebumped, not just from the icy witch-breaths of wind or the terror that this old halibut boat might roll right over and sink. The peace pennants flapping from the rigging, the red and white Canadian flag and the green and gold Greenpeace flag, and above them all, nailed to the top of the mast, the blue and white United Nations flag, all snapping and crackling in the wind. And this old boat – a kind of funky temple, or at least an art object, floundering through the swells. It is incredible that we eco-freaks should be moving out in an assault on the power that put men on the moon, that could blow up the world, in this boat, the Greenpeace, in her other life the Phyllis Cormack.

She is thirty years old, glossy white with lime trim, with strokes of glistening black along the bumpers of her hull, Rorschach strains of rust running down the enamel like dried blood, and rubber tires dangling from her sides like hippie beads. Her railings, ladders, metal instruments, and huge anchors have been gnawed and sculpted by rust, which is turning green from years of salt water breaking over her decks. The varnish on the wooden walls in the wheelhouse and the john have peeled like films of green skin. She seems a solid piece of wood, this longliner, seiner, fish packer, general anything of a boat, 80 feet long,102 gross tons, powered by a 17-ton Atlas engine with six cylinders, 230 heavy-duty horsepower and an oil-slicked green mass of machinery, a Disney-animated robot city of pumps and spires and pipes and screaming whirring parts. The noise that blows through the bunks when the hatch to the engine room opens is like an elevated train crashing by. Pipes and fittings and hoses run over the decks, geometric arteries and veins, and the life raft mounted beside the battenclaim is like the one that Captain Ahab rode out in to face down the great white whale. The wheelhouse, which the captain calls the Penthouse, is like the conductor ’s booth in an old wooden tram. Six wood-frame windows. A night light over the compass bowl with a thick cloth-wrapped wire running down from it like the tube on a hookah. The barometer hangs there, corroded, utterly useless. You have to hammer the depth sounder with your fist to make it work. The mood on the boat is an atmosphere of communion, an aura of High Mass, and far down the long aisle between the rolling sloshing pews stands the skipper, John C. Cormack, a sorcerer alert to invisible presences and forces. The peace and ecology symbols flap on the big green sail above us like hieroglyphs of some weird religion, a whole new Zen-like view of the universe.

Not one of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee members on board the Greenpeace has set foot in church since he was a kid. Jim Bohlen is a composite materials researcher, space technician, builder of geodesic domes and rocket motors made of filament-wound glass-epoxy resin composites; Pat Moore is a forest biological and interdisciplinary computer simulator man; Terry Simmons is a cultural geographer; Bob Keziere is a chemist and photographer; Bob Cummings writes for the psychedelic mind-blown godless Underground Press; Bill Darnell is a full-time organizer for minority causes; Ben Metcalfe is a theatre critic, journalist, former public relations man; Lyle Thurston is a doctor, about as far into existentialism and phenomenology as you can get without being locked up; Dick Fineberg is an associate professor of political science at the University of Alaska. As for myself, I hate churches with a passion, though I will throw the I Ching and admire it as a psychological toy, and generally I agree with Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity.

Yet this protest is somehow connected to the nerve centre where religion dwells, the experience we know as awe. The feeling of awe fills the boat, fills our heads and stays there, throbbing gently. Dave Birmingham, the ship’s engineer, came into the galley one night shortly after we left Vancouver as we were polishing off the last of the wine someone had donated. We were as raunchy and boozy as guys in a troop train, swearing and singing, and Birmingham said, “I must say I’m disappointed. I ’d expected the crew of the Greenpeace to be men of religion.” Hoots of laughter and catcalls. But now, more than a week later, out in the Gulf of Alaska, with the ocean thrashing around us, a giant across whose flanks we skitter like insects, holding our breath lest the giant roll over in his slumber and crush us, some crust has cracked, some veneer of sophistication has begun to flake away. The first time Moore opened a can of butter upside down, the captain flew into a rage. “Don ’t you thirty-three-pounders know anything? That ’s bad luck!” And then Darnell hung a coffee cup on a hook facing inward instead of outward, and the captain flipped out again. “That ’s worse luck! Now you ’ve done it! We ’re in for it now....”Behind his back, we laughed and shook our heads. Did the old goat really believe that shit? Imagine, a superstitious captain! And yet ...and yet.... Maybe, over the years, sunken boats had been found to have cans in them that were opened upside down, or china cups that faced inward. Maybe it was a pattern – inexplicable, probably coincidental, no doubt meaningless – but.....

But now we’re out on the Gulf and the swells are coming in 200- foot strides, like a canyon getting up and walking, and, well, when in Rome ... so we have decided to play it the captain’s way. He has been out on these waters for forty years, he tells us, and “There ’s many a brave heart’s gone down to the bottom of the sea.” He loves to spoon out sea talk, calling us thirty-three-pounders or mattress-lovers, talking about waves “high as treetops,” dismissing the heaving sea as “fuck all” because so far nothing has happened, even though we are already at the point where nobody opens a can upside down and in the morning we all run our eyes nervously over the cups on the hooks. But the awe. That ’s real – we all feel it.

In less than a week, if everything goes well, we will be within three miles of Amchitka Island, where the Americans will blast off an underground hydrogen bomb 250 times as powerful as the artificial sun that burned over Hiroshima. It might leak radiation. It might trigger an earthquake. It might set a tidal wave in motion. We will be at the gates of hell, it is as simple as that. Maybe we will wave our microphones and cameras and notebooks like crucifixes at the gate, but our tape recorder and marine side-band radio and cameras and other electronic wands, and the hieroglyphs on our sail and the peace pennants flapping from the rigging, are finally not much protection against radiation and shock waves. Moore brought along a Geiger counter, so at least we will know if the decks are being swept by Strontium-90 or Cesium-136 and we can try to make a run for it. The guys who have already had kids – Metcalfe, Bohlen, Birmingham, and I – will go out on deck in slicks and gumboots and try to wash down the walls, while the other guys hole up in the engine room, trying to keep their genes out of reach of the invisible poisons.

The Bomb itself is awesome. When it is triggered, pressure in the firing chamber will rise to more than a hundred million pounds per square inch in about one-millionth of a second, and the temperature will leap to about a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, instantly vapourizing hundreds of thousands of tons of solid rock, creating a spherical gas-filled chamber in the earth like a giant glazed light bulb. We will be sitting at the edge of the three-mile territorial limit of Amchitka, and the bomb will go off about a mile inland. All ships within fifty miles of the island will have been warned away. The only other human beings in that area will be a group of U.S. Atomic Energy Commission technicians locked up in a concrete bunker mounted on steel springs twenty miles from the test site at the other end of the island, behind a mountain range. The risk? Out of eighty-three underground tests in Nevada, triggered at depths greater than 300 feet, seven tests leaked, so the chances are at least eight out of a hundred. But Nevada is a relatively stable geological area. By contrast, the Aleutian Islands have been described by one geographer as “the scene of some of the freakiest geological happenings on the planet,” where earthquakes strike several times a week and volcanoes are still active. No one knows how much greater that makes the chance of radiation leakage.

Two previous tests have been done at Amchitka: a “small ”eighty- kiloton blast in 1964 – conducted in secret – and a one-megaton blast in 1969. The first explosion, code-named Longshot, leaked. The second, Milrow, did not. It is a small sample, but the leakage record for tests on the island is one hit, one miss. This third blast will be five times as large as Milrow. It will be called Cannikin, which sounds like something out of the worst early 1950s science fiction pulp magazines – a beast name, like a monster in Lord of the Rings, an atomic fire-breathing dragon. This is the mythical overtone. We are like Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves attempting to get to the lair of Smaug. No –more like the Fellowship of the Ring – the Ring of Power, which for us is the closed-circle ecology symbol – and we are on our way to the dread dark land of Mordor, and Amchitka is Mount Doom, and Cannikin is the very Crack of Doom. Somehow we have to hurl the Ring of Power into the fire and bring down the whole kingdom of the Dark Lord, whose blurred face looks out from the poster in the galley.We are the Fellowship of the Piston Rings. And if there is a sorcerer aboard, a Gandalf the Grey, it is Captain John Cormack, for he is the only one with the magic knowledge that will get us across the ocean and through whatever perilous passes and storms we will run into along the way.

The Greenpeace to Amchitka (Arsenal Pulp Press arsenalpulp.com) is available at bookstores for $24.95. For more on Bob Hunter’s life and legacy, see Remembering Bob Hunter.  [Tyee]

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