Moontrap - Don Berry Read online

  A brilliantly rendered centerpiece of the novel is the trial and hanging of a group of Cayuse Indians for the Whitman massacre six months earlier. The Indians who were hanged almost certainly were not directly involved in the massacre at the Walla Walla mission, a fact that didn't give pause to those who executed them.

  After the hanging, Monday and Webb visit John McLoughlin. Berry's sketch of the eagle in his roost at Oregon City, retired from the Hudson's Bay Company and fighting futilely against the Americans who were biting the hand that had so generously fed them, is a poignant snapshot of McLoughlin's final years:

  "I heard there was some trouble about the land," Monday said, embarrassed. The trouble was simply that the Americans, Thurston most prominently, were methodically stripping McLoughlin of all his holdings in the Oregon country, their only legal weapon a campaign of hate against the "damned jesuitical rascal of a Hudson's Bay man."

  "Yes, yes, quite. But it has all been turned over to intermediaries for settlement now, and I am a bit hopeful. I am expecting them momentarily with the papers. But now—" McLoughlin suddenly swept his arms up in a great despairing gesture to heaven. "Now, Mr. Monday."

  When civilization comes crashing down on Monday, it is Webb who takes frontier revenge for his friend and flees to Saddle Mountain, where he holds off the pursuing mob and builds a moontrap, a more explicitly Eastern practice than anything in Trask. Berry said that despite his immersion in Chinese literature and friendship with Snyder and Whalen, he did not study Zen Buddhism until a good ten years after he wrote his novels.

  To Build a Ship is different in tone and style than the novels that preceded it. It is narrated in the first person, by someone who is not a skilled mountain man and not a fair-minded friend to the Indians.

  History tells us that the kind of me-first moral relativism that consumes Thaler was more typical of the white settlers to the Oregon Territory than the open-minded, live-and-let-live attitude of Trask and Monday.

  Indians in Oregon were wiped out by disease, killed by settlers or local militia, and moved to reservations, in a very short time after first contact. "The cumulative death fate for Oregon Indians is estimated by 1850 to have ranged between 50 and 90 percent in some originally heavily populated areas," notes the Atlas of Oreg0on. "... What disease began, warfare completed."

  It is to Berry's credit that he wrote honestly and sympathetically about Indians during a time (the late 1950s and early '60s) when attitudes toward them had not noticeably begun to change. Thaler, a rationalist who puts the construction of the ship above anything his conscience might be trying to tell him, is still sensitive enough to recognize that he "has never known a more intelligent man of any color" than Kilchis. When Kilchis asks Thaler why Trask did not come back and tells him Thaler must keep the peace in Tillamook Bay, he knows he is asking the impossible from someone not capable of giving it. The settlers came, and the Indians soon disappeared.

  So did Berry. After four books in four years, a National Book Award nomination (for Moontap) and a stack of great reviews, nothing. He wrote a children's book called The Mountain Men in 1966, but published no more novels for the rest of his life.Why?

  When I made contact with Berry in 1997, via email, that was the first question I asked him. This is his reply:

  At different times I've been interested in different explorations. Some of these explorations involved writing (my primary medium), but many did not. Writing is not my "career." I have no idea what a "career" is. Basically, I have wandered the world physically and mentally, most of the time fascinated and astounded by what I discover, and sometimes putting that astonishment into words, or music, or film, or bronze, or design, or teaching, or philosophy. The trilogy of Oregon novels and historical works were all done before I was thirty. Moontrap and To Build a Ship were written in France while I was travelling around the world with a packsack, a guitar and a typewriter.

  I am also hopelessly inept at the business side of art, and don't have the patience to deal with it. I am not a dependable source of a predictable product. The vast majority of my life work—in all forms of art and thought—doesn't fit into market categories. And I don't think a marketing committee ought to determine whether what I write gets read or not.

  Berry did not make much money from his novels. Wyn Berry estimated he never made more than about a thousand dollars per year from his writing, excluding movie options, and Berry guessed he averaged about a hundred dollars per year in royalties for twenty years. (There was some movie interest—Jack Nicholson briefly held the rights to Moontrap just before he won the Oscar for Cuckoo's Nest.) Berry was frustrated that he made money more easily from science fiction than historical novels. At that time, he thought of himself more as a painter than a writer, he wanted to travel and follow his interests wherever they led, so why spend all that time writing novels?

  "He never valued his own work very highly until much later in his life," said Wyn Berry, who always was the primary supporter of the family. "He didn't expect great things, but he was annoyed that he wasn't making a living."

  However, there was more writing that never got published. Wyn Berry said her husband wrote a sequel to Trask that he burned because he felt it didn't work as a story and put another finished novel called Eye of the Bear "into the fire." Love writes that Berry destroyed these books "because he realized he had not been changed by the experience of writing [them]." Wyn Berry said he was "a very accurate critic, but fierce in all ways."

  Berry did have a regular job for a while, as a writer on the film unit at KGW in Portland. There he met a gifted producer and director named Laszlo Pal and began a collaboration that lasted more than thirty years. Berry worked as a writer on many of Pal's award-winning documentaries and on industrial and institutional films, which he enjoyed because he could immerse himself in a subject and learn all about it. Pal accepted Berry's wandering ways and Berry said that "if I disappear for five or six years, he accepts that, and when I return we can resume work together again as though no time has passed."

  Berry wrote some commissioned books, such as The Eddie Bauer Guide to Flyfishing and Understanding Your Finances, and taught creative writing at the University of Washington and other colleges. He built a bronze foundry on Vashon Island for his sculpture and played in a band called Vashimba that performed the music of the Shona tribe of Zimbabwe. He spent several years living in a boat in Eagle Harbor, off Bainbridge Island.

  And he discovered the World Wide Web. His Web site, Berryworks, contains a historical novel set in the goddess culture of Minoan Crete called "Sketches from the Palace at Knossos," eight different short stories, a children's book, some essays (including "On the Submissiveness of Women in Tango" and the beautiful "Snapshots of My Daughter, Turning") twenty—one chapters about living on Eagle Harbor called "Magic Harbor," a large amount of poetry, art, and philosophy. Some of the writing is excellent and all of it is original and

  wholly Berry.

  He was passionate about the possibilities of the Internet and a strong believer in it as a creative medium. "Long before I set up my studio in cyberspace, I had been exploring in a different literary form—a mosiac of individual pieces, rather than linear narrative," he said. "Each individual piece ... can be read separately, in any order. In Berryworks, you can move from any place to any other place, with a single hyperlink. Everything is available simultaneously?

  Everything is available simultaneously, and for nothing.

  "I am invariably asked why someone who has been nominated for the National Book Award would simply give their work away," he said. "But I have never been part of that world. It has always been my dream to write exactly what I want to write and give it away to anybody who wants it. Cyberspace makes that possible. And I didn't get paid for probably 90 percent of the other work I've done, so it's not all that different. Economically I'm marginal and always have been, even when the books were new."

  Berry was cautious but curious when I contacted him in 1997. He wanted to
have Berryworks reviewed as a whole, the way a book is reviewed, and wanted to do everything by email. Six months of electronic exchanges led to phone calls and finally a meeting in a coffee shop on Vashon Island. Berry suffered from chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, the result, he said, of "forty-five years of rolling cigarettes out of pipe tobacco." He needed oxygen for any exertion and carried a portable tank when he left his house. He spent up to ten hours every day on-line but did confess to a weakness for "Xena, the Warrior Princess."

  Berry died in Seattle on February 20, 2001. At the end of his life, he knew he would be remembered for Trask and Moontrap and To Build a Ship and A Majority of Scoundrels and was pleased and proud that people still read them.

  "When I wrote Trask I didn't even have any idea anyone would read it," he said. "As to the durability of these works, it is much like watching your children grow up. After twenty years or so you think 'good lord, how did that ever happen?

  "A writer can plan to make a book entertaining, or plan to make a book interesting, and many other things. But a writer cannot plan to make a book last. That is not in our hands."