What made me think of Kon-Tiki?

That’s what happens when you have time on your hands, can sleep late, and ideas surface unbidden, triggered by whatever.

My memory is full of stuff, and I don’t always know why I remember whatever.

I suspect it was because I was idly speculating on unexpected surprises, unintended results.

Like the unconsidered mistake of the Stirling Expedition at the turn of the 20th Century when the anthropologists introduced steel axes into a stone age society with disastrous results. That’s the germ of my story, “Makis and the Axe of Power,” which you can read in my book, For Lo These Many.

So I thought back to Thor Heyerdahl and the unexpected consequences of what happened to the Kon-Tiki, that balsa wood raft built modern the old way to test the hypothesis that early man was able to cross the Pacific on a reed boat.

The movie came out in 1950 and won an academy award in 1951 for Best Documentary.

Everybody saw it, talked about it, was excited. Many had already read the book which came out in 1947.

I was just a kid at the time, 9 years old in 1950, and I was riveted. The movie was a great true adventure.

I don’t think I read the book, though I might have. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t side-tracked by Heyerdahl’s curious beliefs that blond/red-haired blue-eyed white men did the pre-historic crossing because the local primitives were too stupid.

If I remember correctly, the film confessed a misunderstanding of the construction, that the balsa wood deteriorated faster than the rope, that the famous raised rear-end of the boat, pulled up and lashed, was in process of loosening and sagging, that the boat was in danger of sinking if it hadn’t run-aground on a coral atoll which ended the expedition.

I remember the intention of keeping it authentic, those few aberrations, the on-board radio, the canned food, but the excitement of relying on the winds, catching rain water, eating fish, made my young imagination go with them on the trip.

The miscalculation, the lack of complete foresight, today would be sheepishly dismissed as “My bad.”

But Heyerdahl was an international hero, the anthropologist explorer who tested theories in real time.

Those were the days when, over several years, the world was intellectually awake and inspired.

Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, came out in 1962 and warned us of the dangers of DDT and ushered in a global awareness and activism for the planet.

Helen Caldicott in 1971 pushed anti-nuclear peace.

Earlier, Jacques Cousteau plumbed the depths of The Silent World and we all watched the films in the late ‘50s. The oceans excited everyone.

The whole planet excited us. Global science was all the rage. The Space Program did things then that we still can’t do today.

Detente with Russia was an exciting time of sharing. The display of shiny Russian satellites and space vehicles and space suits, beautiful technology, on view here in Los Angeles, remains a cherished visual memory.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos came out in 1980 and we were all riveted to our television screens.

I don’t know much about the details of the back-stories.

I may have been dimly aware of Harold Urey’s influence on Harvard to deny Sagan’s tenure. Urey was old-school science. Sagan was a visionary.

Carl Sagan is particularly relevant to me because he lived in Pasadena, and had a store in Montrose nearby, and was a customer of my father-in-law’s AltaPas TV Sales and Service.

Sagan was peripheral to my own life when he was to be the featured guest at the Space Conference in Washington, D. C., 1996, where my students were honored as Representing the Youth of America. Sagan was too ill to attend, and died shortly after. I still mourn him.

We had big names in our neighborhood.

I’ve always been miffed at Einstein for moving away in the middle ‘50s so I couldn’t get to know him. But I forgive him. I know how happy he was in Pasadena, working with the astronomers at Mount Wilson to test his theories. He used to ride his bicycle around Pasadena, and his office was on Green Street, in the very building where my dear friends run Century Books.

Part of Caltech’s checkered past invokes my emotions when, was it Milliken? drove Einstein away, saying, “We already have a Jew, we don’t need another one.”

And, Heyerdahl again, of course that personal connection when his nephew attended UCR with Shirley and me and Shirley got to know him because she was more socially out-going, we weren’t married yet, she was irresistible, and she already had friends from that northern part of the world, her junior high neighbor from Denmark which is right up there with all those Scandinavian countries that include Norway.

So, you may ask, “You got all that from Kon-Tiki?”

To which I can only reply, “Apparently.”

The exciting hopeful parts of the past I want back. The world and I are able to learn from experience. The things that were better then we need now.