Free Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert Page A

up Kelly Butte to their honeymoon roost. As Mom walked in the door of the house with me and realized how much work she would have to do with a new baby, she thought, This is independence?
    Like my father, I had shining, golden hair as a child. My given name, Brian, is Gaelic, meaning one who is nobly descended and honorable. Also one who is fair-spoken and wordy. My middle name, Patrick, stems from St. Patrick, credited in legend with having driven all the snakes out of Ireland. A larger design was at work as well. My parents’ first child was to have an Irish Catholic name, after my father’s Irish lineage on the McCarthy side. The second child was to take on a Scottish given and middle name, following my mother’s Presbyterian Stuart lineage.
    During the early years of his marriage to my mother, Dad worked for a number of newspapers. By late 1947 he was employed as a feature writer for the Tacoma Times . He had grown a beard, and when going out on assignments in the blustery northwest weather often wore a trench coat and fedora, while carrying a large Kodak Medalist camera slung over one shoulder.
    In my father’s lifetime there were many incidents involving his driving. He was, in fact, something of a notorious motor vehicle operator wherever he lived—mostly involving speeding incidents. In some neighborhoods, people learned to watch out for him as he raced by, and reined in their children and pets.
    If someone were to ask me if he was a good driver, however, I would have to admit with all candor, “Yes. But he scared the hell out of me.” He had remarkably good reactions, something inherited by my older sister, Penny, who became, among her other accomplishments, a trophy-winning jeep racer. Like my father and sister, I, too, have excellent reactions.
    There are a number of stories in our family when those reactions came into play. Nothing compares, however, with the occasion in 1948 when my father was driving his mother-in-law Marguerite’s big 1937 Oldsmobile. I, barely a year old, sat on the backseat with my “Nanna” Marguerite, while my mother and father sat in front. Dad claimed for years afterward that he came around the fateful turn at only forty-five miles an hour, but one of the passengers told it differently.
    According to my mother, none of us were wearing seat belts, and he had the Olds going more than seventy. She’d been watching the speedometer climb, but had not said anything to him about it. It was a two-lane highway. They rounded a turn and were suddenly confronted with a flimsy two-by-four barricade in front of a bridge, with the workers sitting alongside the road having lunch. Pieces of bridge deck were missing.
    Dad could either go off the road or attempt a daredevil jump over the gap. He decided in a split second to attempt a leap, similar to one he had seen performed by a circus clown at the wheel of a tiny motorized car. He floored the accelerator. The big car crashed through the barricade onto bridge decking, then went airborne for an instant before all four rubber tires smacked down on the other side.
    Frank Herbert stopped the car and waved merrily to the stunned workers, then sped off.
    â€œWhat fun!” Mom exclaimed. But she lit a cigarette nervously, and noticed her hands shaking. Uncharacteristically, Marguerite was quiet in the back, and admitted later she’d been terrified. It all happened so quickly she said she barely had time to grab me.
    My father said at least eight solutions appeared before him when he rounded the turn and saw the barricade, in what could not have amounted to more than a tenth of a second. He compared it with a dream, in which a series of events that seemed to take a long time were in reality crammed into only a few seconds. During the emergency he weighed each option calmly and decided upon the one that worked. He said he visualized the successful leap.
    It has been said that art imitates life. Years later, in his