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day he found a 20'©20'©10' half-submerged container of fine Tennessee white oak, which he pulled in. Some of the wood was wormy, but the bulk of it was in good condition and of considerable value. By this time his family was on its economic feet again, so he got permission from his parents to barter the oak for a twenty-seven-foot sailboat that the owner didn’t want, since it had a problem staying upright. By the time he was fifteen, Frank had the sailboat rebuilt and ballasted with concrete, which he poured into the hull. He took fourteen people out sailing once, including a guitarist, a clarinetist, and an accordionist. In those days, my father told me, they called an accordion a “squeeze-me-pull-me.”
    On sailing trips, young Frank Herbert liked to sleep out on the deck. Stars lined the roof of the sky over his head, and he memorized the names and locations of constellations and major stars. He learned to use a sextant for navigation.
    When he was fourteen, he swam across the Tacoma Narrows, a mile through treacherous currents. A short while later, he and a seventeen-year-old friend, Ned Young, took a small Willits sailing canoe all the way to the fjords of the British Columbia mainland, just south of the Alaskan panhandle, a round trip of nearly two thousand miles. They turned the canoe over on beaches and slept under it. But when they got to the fjords there weren’t any beaches, so an Indian woman let them sleep on the porch of her little house, and gave them breakfast.
    Through learning of my father’s experiences in the outdoors, I’ve gained an insight into the thought processes that went into his writing. His great “mainstream” novel Soul Catcher , about an Indian who could not accept the ways of white men, comes into clearer focus. He also wrote another Indian book, which was never published: Circle Times , a fictionalized but historically accurate account of the wars of the Coast Salish. My father admired the link between Native Americans and their environment, the way they lived for centuries in harmony with nature, not wreaking havoc upon it as the white man did. Frank Herbert developed a deep respect for the natural rhythms of nature. The ecology message, so prevalent in much of his writing, is one of his most important legacies.
    There is also an interesting, recurrent water-and-ocean theme in his writings, from his submarine novel The Dragon in the Sea (1956) to the sand formations of Dune (1965) that resemble slow-moving waves upon a great ocean. He was a sailor, fisherman, and swimmer, and would serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He understood the critical importance of potable water to a backwoodsman, hiker and sailor. A tiny drop of water is the essence of all life.
    One of my father’s earliest short stories, “The Jonah and the Jap”(1946), concerns a seaplane that makes an emergency landing in the China Sea. In “Try to Remember!” (1961), aliens threatening Earth arrive in an immense spaceship that resembles a tiny freshwater organism with cilia. “The Mary Celeste Move” (1964) describes a phenomenon in which people abruptly leave their homes and move far away, often leaving their belongings behind—an idea based upon the mysterious sailing ship Mary Celeste, found floating in 1872 with its passengers and crew missing. “The Primitives” (1966) describes a man named Swimmer who is adept at underwater criminal activities. “The Mind Bomb” (1969) takes place in an oceanside town. “Seed Stock”(1970) concerns a world with a purple ocean, where the primary food source is a creature like a shrimp. “Songs of a Sentient Flute” (with Bill Ransom, 1979), like their collaborative novels The Jesus Incident (1979) and The Lazarus Effect (1983), involve ocean worlds covered with vast, sentient kelp formations.

    As a young man, Frank Herbert was close to his grandmother, Mary Ellen Herbert. A