by Victor Gonzalez
I watched the horizon overtake the moon this morning. In real time. I saw the movement of the earth through a Bushnell "Trophy" spotting scope designed to view the points on a buck deer from 300 yards.
I had been looking at Jupiter and four of its moons -- the weather improved over the island, and Jupiter was sharp.
During the day the scope has served more nefarious purposes: I turn it on the sailboats and cruisers that motor into Reid Harbor, hoping to catch a Microsoft millionaire's blonde beauty topless in the sunlight. Once, from my position 60 feet above sea level on a pale clear dawn, before the sun had cleared the hill behind the house, I scanned over barely rippled water to see a young woman pull her pants down and pee near a beached driftwood log on one of the tiny islands that guard the entrance to Reid Harbor, more than 500 yards distant. She was crouched sideways to my view, but I could
see her bare ass and her blond hair, though the stream of urine had to be imagined.
At night the scope's snout ascends to the sky: stars, airplanes, satellites, planets, and whatever else radiates or reflects. I hear the buzz and thud of thick moths against the window as I sip my iced Irish whiskey, then push my glasses up on my forehead and delicately adjust the focus knob. The rims of craters within craters snap clear.
I'm typing this on an Underwood typewriter in a wooden house sitting on a hill overlooking a thin horseshoe-shaped harbor on a 3-square-mile island in the Puget Sound, a saltwater sea cutting into the Northwestern part of Washington state. The San Juan Islands are an attractive tourist destination, yet Stuart, the northwesternmost U. S. island, is not served by ferry. There are no paved roads, no stores, no phone booths. There is no electricity provided, or water, or natural gas. The county flies propane in twice a year, and you can bring anything in on your own --but it's still pretty remote. We get in and out in my father's 4-seater airplane, landing on a grass strip.
Spending a week off up here is always enjoyable, even in the winter, when the day is eight hours long, gray, rainy and cold. It's still comfortable because the house is equipped to handle those challenges. It is mainly solitude I seek here, the lack of the thousand voices and inputs constantly battling for my attention.
The only thing I really wanted to accomplish, as such, was this article. But thoughts of nature, and how people survive it, instead occupy my mind, pushing fannish contemplation to the side. How can one write about the latest fanzine or feud or party when one is gazing at distant planets?
Wait a minute. I've come full circle. Some items protect me from nature --such as the stove, the house, the cell phone. Other items, like the spotting scope, enhance nature, whether it be a setting moon turned into an epiphany of orbital motion, or a young woman urinating made into an erotic scene of fluid movement.
The moon has gone to bed later and fatter each night. This morning the it was just a few degrees above the horizon, a little puffy because of atmospheric distortion, even without magnification.
I turned the scope to it, gazing at the lunar image, just a few degrees more exposed than the previous day. The dark side cut a knife edge of shadow against the craters that straddled the line of light. The lit edge of the disk looked bumpy, but I figured it really was smooth, because the bumps wobbled and weaved, the atmosphere distorting the true curve. The day before the moon had been higher in the sky, and better defined. There had been late-occurring craters in the older seas that I couldn't see this morning because of the distortion. Refraction was far less evident on the inner edge, where the sun's light ended and the dark side began.
The descending moon was intercepted by the first porcupine limbs of a cedar on a hill across the harbor, and I pressed my eye against the scope's lens in amazement: I could actually see the satellite sliding east into the horizon. The craters slipped into the needles like a watch's second hand, sweeping without pause or hurry.
The trees are pretty thick on the southwestern hill behind which the moon was sinking, but the motion remained clear until the acute angle on the moon's top half sunk. Even then the faintly outlined dark side of the moon still poked over trees. Then all that was left was a white light glimmering through through the limbs. It disappeared, except for one little spot which flared and then faded like a candle with a glass placed over it.
I'm no stranger to natural phenomena -- being brought up around physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians -- but I
was blown away by the sight of the earth's movement. I thought it was simply too slow to see, like the rising of the tide, or lichen spreading on a water-eroded rock. One only appreciates the change in discrete, separate moments. This, I thought, would be enough to convince anybody that the universe is a far more wondrous thing than seen in the bible
or any other fantastic conception: a part of an ultra-complicated construct of matter and energy.
Progress is that which makes our lives easier. But what is easier? Less danger, more time to play and less to work? While few have to worry about being hunted by large predators, most find automobile accidents scary enough. True, the process of progress requires wealth, and those without wealth tend to get screwed. But the implements of
progress -- the tools wealth creates -- can be used by anyone.
It is about the relative nature and definition of luxury.
Where I sit now, I'm on a thin edge of civilization --a cusp of technology that allows me to enjoy myself where those 50 years ago would have been lucky to be content on such a night. I think about the wonders of mankind that are helping keep me comfortable: the wonders of science fiction nonfictionally operating to make a wilderness seem like home. And I also wonder about the natural paradise this technological expertise allows me to experience: did the Native Americans who navigated this coast and the dozens of other island corrugations nearby spend their evenings staring at the brilliant sky and the meaning it might have for them? Sometimes, I'm sure, they did. More likely, on many nights, they worried about whether the fish would be plentiful in the morning, and if their shelters were warm enough
for the newborn.
The appreciation of beauty is poor second to the comforts of home and a full stomach.
A couple of years ago I got my masters degree -- and nearly died trying. I had spent the last four years in New York City getting degrees, but before I started looking for a job, I needed some rest and asked my dad if I could spend a few weeks in his house on the island. He said yes, and I got used to the idea of a certain level of deprivation: no electricity, no telecommunications, heat by old-fashioned means. The third morning there I realized the container of ground coffee was empty, and it took me 25 minutes to manually grind enough for a morning pot. Thank God he had a grinder -- crushing coffee beans with a rock did not appeal.
But things were pretty good then, and they're better now, with more technology installed.
The other moon I saw through the spotting scope also brought an epiphany: it made me contemplate the issue of micturition being erotic. I flashed on FINNEGANS WAKE, in which Earwicker --and all the versions of everyman in that book --spies on two little girls from a wooded vantage point in Dublin's Phoenix Park. The girls have pulled down their knickers to piss on the grass, and he reacts with amusement, or delight, or sexual arousal.
There are hundreds of version of this tale told in the volume, some a few lines long, others pages. In some, nothing happens; in others, Earwicker is arrested and his reputation is destroyed. In some versions, he rapes the little girls. In others, they see him and laugh at him for being a powerless dirty old man. In Joyce's ultimate expression of dolce
niente, this story is one of the main currents of a book that tells a thousand stories, none of which makes complete sense.
My ability to be the voyeur in much the same way as Earwicker forced me to look again at my impressions from the "night book," and realize that the fears of perversion are in constant battle with the thrills of sexual stimulation: perhaps we turn the guilt into something positive; a tension that suggests tumescence.
But that's not really the point. It only leads me there.
It is a matter of transitions. When I first stayed out here, there was only propane power, reliably. I ran the generator a couple of hours every three days, but my ability to work at night was dependent on propane. Propane lights, refrigerator, hot water, stove, and barbeque. Then, between that visit and this trip to the island, Dad installed the
batteries and the inverter. The Inverter. It is a black box with buttons and a meter. It emits a deep, angry buzz as it converts the direct current from the batteries into alternating current for the hairdryer and the microwave and
the television and the cellphone recharger and -- let us not forget -- the laptop computer. Can you log on
from the island, Dad?
Transition, I say. It is very beautiful here. If I had nothing, how would I do? The temperature right now is high enough to keep anyone alive: I didn't even feel compelled get a fire going in the wood stove on some nights.
But if I had to curl up at the base of a tree I might feel differently. Instead, if I wished, I could light the wood stove. I could fire up the propane heaters. Or I could just cover myself with the finely woven products of the machine age, which could keep me alive for days at above-freezing temperatures.
But summer only lasts about two months out there. You might get lucky and get a dry fall or spring, but watch out for winter. And then you have to build shelter. What do you do? You want to live 'naturally' --nothing made by humans. Building a hut from the limbs of assorted trees you chop down with a blade, probably made in a commercial factory, you could manage it. Or you keep dry in a good spot underneath several trees. Now you need food.
That too is difficult without human-designed, machine-made tools.
From a wood stove to propane heaters to electricity. All of them involve some kind of previous development. When you think about it, an efficient wood stove requires significant technology. Casting the iron alloy, airtight
welding, thick plate glass for the door, a system of air flow that put the smoke in the right place --outside --and allows you to vary the intake, like the choke on a car.
Much like a computer, I could not make with my own hands an efficient wood stove. Nor could I make a knife of the
quality that can be cheaply purchased. I could learn to do these things, but it still wouldn't help me make a computer. The spotting scope would also be virtually impossible to recreate from scratch. Not only glass, but highly refined optics, a mechanism to change power and focus, a steady tripod.
Even contemplating all the small technological factors that go into making iced Irish whiskey could take a long time. Good luck with the still, but, as Joyce notes in the Wake, John Jameson & Son is not a family easily equalled.
Many people complain -- to the dismay of the technocrats most science fiction fans are -- that technology obscures
reality; that we hide from the truth by watching television, even by reading the newspaper. Virtual reality technology has spawned (or, really, reinspired) a genre of SF that talks about people who prefer the computer generated world to the real one. Reading fiction -- or making fanzines -- keeps us from being out in the world, experiencing for ourselves
"the uncreated conscience of our race."
Technology was meant to hide us from the harsher aspects of our lives, whether it be a blanket to keep one warm, a car that allows us to avoid walking miles, or a web site to keep us from being bored. Or the deodorant that keeps us from stinking, or the air conditioning that allows us to keep the windows closed and the bugs out. Meanwhile, yes, the simpler aspects of nature fall away from many people. I'm told there are people in the boroughs of New York City who have never left -- and therefore never seen the sky in true darkness. The city lights keep that vision from them.
Technology was meant to hide us from the harsher aspects of our lives, whether it be a blanket to keep one warm, a car that allows us to avoid walking miles, or a web site to keep us from being bored. Or the deodorant that keeps us from stinking, or the air conditioning that allows us to keep the windows closed and the bugs out. Meanwhile, yes, the simpler aspects of nature fall away from many people. I'm told there are people in the boroughs of New York City who have never left -- and therefore never seen the sky in true darkness. The city lights keep that vision from them.
The same spotting scope that might raise a tear from one of those people was originally designed to help people shoot things to eat. The basic idea is not to hide us from reality, but help us survive it.
The comfort provided by these devices not only makes it possible to keep ourselves alive longer. It not only lets us see things in nature we haven't seen before --like the two dissimilar moons, or the four orbiting Jupiter.
The temporary security they provide also allows us the freedom to care about those sights.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
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