The ER doc gives him a thorough exam, runs an EKG. “Have you been swimming a lot lately?” he asks.
“Not really,” Paul says. “I’ve been surfing every weekend, though.”
“That would do it,” the doctor says. “There’s nothing wrong with you internally; it looks like you just overexerted your chest muscles.”
“Stoke stroke strikes again,” Natalie says.
Then, on the way home from the hospital, she begs Paul to take her to the beach that evening.
“Who’s the one with stoke stroke now?” he says, but agrees on a beach run, even though the doctor suggested staying off his board for two weeks.
That evening Natalie stays out even longer than I do. She struggles to get her long legs beneath her, but she seems perfectly content—thrilled even—to ride waves in on her stomach. Determined to get her upright, Paul and I stand shirtless and barefoot in the shallows, the glassy sand reflecting a brick-red sunset. We cheer her on, over and over, until she finally stands up and rides one in, dripping wet and beaming.
THE DUKE
Fortunately for Hawaii and the world, there was a great resurgence of surfing in the early 1900s, led largely by Duke P. Kahanamoku, the un disputed Father of Surfing. The Duke grew up beachside at Waikiki and was the essence of a waterman—an excellent swimmer, fisherman, sailor, and lifeguard. According to surfer Tom Blake, “His exceptionally fine massive leg development does not come from riding in autos, but plowing through the sand barefooted, in his youth. His well-muscled shoulders and arms came from the surfboard work…. Duke religiously avoids arousing anyone’s ill will towards him; he is kind, tolerant with all and is well thought of by his fellows.” Early in his career, Duke rode sixteen-foot-long, 116-pound finless surfboards made from redwood or Hawaiian koa (the same type of wood used in the manufacture of authentic Hawaiian ukuleles). In 1912 he traveled to the Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. Accustomed to swimming in the open ocean, he learned to flip turn off the walls off a pool just weeks before the competition. Even so, he handily won the gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle.
In the summer of 1912, on the way back from winning the Olympic gold, Duke Kahanamoku gave a swimming demonstration at Far Rockaway. Disagreement persists over whether or not he also surfed Rockaway. According to surf/skate historian C. R. Stecyk, when someone asked him what he thought of the waves on Long Island, the Duke said What waves? I like to think he did surf, making Rockaway one of the very first mainland American spots to be ridden, nearly a hundred years ago, decades before the development of California breaks like Malibu or Rincon. What we know for certain is that he imbued the place with the aloha spirit, a spirit that’s still very much alive at Rockaway today. In 1990 a street near Rockaway Boulevard was rechristened in his honor: Duke Kahanamoku Way. And in a 2007 edition of the Surfer’s Journal, writer Andrew Kid documents his midwinter visit to Rockaway, where he discovers surprisingly nice waves and deserted lineups, and describes the feeling he gets there as very Duke.
THE PIT
Along with the stoke stroke, I’m plagued by another ailment more common to New Yorkers: lack of cash flow. As rent payments devour my savings and increase my credit card debt, I become a little desperate, in the way only freelance writers can. So when my boss offers to make me his full-time assistant, I jump at the opportunity for steady income and benefits.
Plus, he’s one of the most authentically nice bosses imaginable—a rare find in Manhattan’s business district.
But my first morning of full-time work, a fortysomething coworker from New Jersey walks past my cubicle toward her own windowless office, where she spends her days editing romance and thrillers.
“Congrats on the new job,” she says. “And welcome to wage slavery.”
That weekend, out at the beach with an old friend from Colorado, he tells me what I increasingly know to be true, especially for a motion-obsessed person like myself: that New York is filled with many traps.
And then a few weeks later, the same coworker who gave me such a hearty welcome mentions something about me being in the Pit.
“What do you mean, ‘the Pit’?” I ask.
“Oh no,” she says. “You’re in the Pit and you don’t even know it.”
She goes on to explain that the Pit is the configuration of low-walled cubicles at the center of the editorial department, the collection of shabby desks and PCs where all the freelancers and editorial assistants toil.
“It’s called the Pit because there are no windows,” she says. “No privacy. Nothing but the stench of rotting careers. I hope you make it out alive.”
THE MIDLAND OILING MUSEUM
For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.
∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
The more time I spend in the Pit, the more my preoccupation with the ocean deepens, as does my obsession with Moby-Dick—the story of Ishmael, another disgruntled young New Yorker with a deep spiritual longing for the sea. One weekend when the waves are bad, I make a trip north to Arrowhead, the Melville family estate in the Berkshires, the place where Herman relocated his family from New York City and wrote Moby-Dick, partly on the encouragement of his new country neighbor and spiritual mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
From the window of Melville’s second-floor study, you can see a flat, white, whale-shaped rock bluff to the north, the fabled Mount Greylock from which he drew inspiration for his literary leviathan. It was at Arrowhead that Melville completed his masterwork and, free from the confinements of the city, lived thirteen years in relative contentment. In a letter to a friend, Melville expressed his disdain for Manhattan life: “What are you doing there, My Beloved, among the bricks and cobblestone boulders? … For heaven’s sake, come out from among those Hittites and Hodites—give up mortar for ever.”
But financial struggle plagued Melville’s writing career—Moby-Dick earned the author less than $600 in his lifetime. On the knife-edge of insolvency, he sold Arrowhead to his brother, moved his family back to the city, and took a job as a customs clerk. Confined to a desk near the docks for the next twenty years, the same man who sailed the world and produced one of the greatest novels ever written now toiled six days a week at four dollars a day, with only two weeks off a year—the exact amount of vacation time I’m allotted by my publishing company 150 years later. Battling traffic on the way back to the city on a Sunday before a long, dull workweek in the Pit, I can almost feel him in the car with me, riding shotgun, silent and sullen—sick with his own failure—especially in the urban wasteland that is the eastbound turnpike through Yonkers and the South Bronx.
Weeks later, on a solo surfing trip up to Cape Cod, I make a similar pilgrimage to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a fascinating repository of nineteenth-century maritime artwork, scrimshaw, harpoons, and various whaling implements, plus a half-scale re-creation of a successful whaling ship, the Lagoda. The museum makes concrete much of what I’ve gleaned about the historic whaling industry from reading and rereading Moby-Dick. What most intrigues me—but is given somewhat short shrift by the museum—is the industry’s gross unsustainability. In two or three hundred years, U.S. whaling corporations fished out entire oceans and severely depleted the global whale population, cutting a critical lifeline for many indigenous peoples, who had harvested whales sustainably for two thousand years or more. Whereas native peoples in Asia and the Americas had a deep reverence for the whale, nineteenth-century Americans had a more entrepreneurial attitude toward whaling. After being tapped for spermaceti oil and ambergris and stripped of blubber, immense sperm whale carcasses were dumped unceremoniously back into the sea. Baleen from right whales was used to make hoop skirts and corsets (also known as “whalebone prisons”); ambergris was a key ingredient in the production of perfume, the same substance that Melville’s contemporary Walt Whitman “knew and loved,” but ultimately considered a useless vanity.
Aside from indulging
American superficiality, by and large the most profitable aspect of the whale was oil—whaling was, in fact, the original “Big Oil” industry. In 1853, just two years after the publication of Moby-Dick, the industry had its most successful season: eight thousand kills rendered hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and netted $11 million. Spermaceti was used as a clean, clear-burning, Benjamin Franklin–endorsed lamp oil and illuminant, providing light for the developed world. And like its dirty, crude oil descendant, whale oil lubricated the furious machinery of the industrial revolution. In Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson writes, “So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby-Dick, consider whaling. Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop … the whaleship as factory, the whaleboat the precision instrument.”
As America grew, so did the demand for whale oil, but soon demand outpaced supply. As whale populations dwindled—as we reached a kind of nineteenth-century Peak Whale—voyages to distant seas like the South Pacific and even the Arctic became necessary. The New Bedford museum evokes this era with a series of haunting, sublime paintings of whaling ships dwarfed by icebergs. Two-year voyages became the norm, as did the increasingly dehumanizing and dangerous aspects of life aboard a whaler. In the mid-1800s close to one-third of all American whaling hands deserted their ships—just as Melville abandoned the Acushnet. Another death knell for the industry was the discovery of petroleum near Titusville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1850s. Originally developed as a cheaper replacement for whale oil, petroleum soon inundated the modern world, its omnipresence fueling the rise of the automobile, petrochemicals, and plastics.1
My next stop at the Whaling Museum is the auditorium, where an educational film called “The City That Lit the World” plays on a constant loop. Though it occasionally references Moby-Dick, the film is narrated in an un ironic tone of nostalgia and patriotism, as if ridding the ocean of whales was a national pastime of which every red-blooded American should be proud. And while largely attributing the demise of whaling to the discovery of petroleum, without mentioning overfishing, the film fails to make any spiritual links between the two unsustainable industries—to point out what seems obvious to me: that history is repeating itself.
As I wander the small deck of the Lagoda, wondering how it compared in size and shape to Melville’s Pequod, I can’t help but imagine our current national leader and his vice president as a pair of deranged Ahabs, forcefully steering the American military into the dangerous waters of Iraq—an ill-conceived detour from our original mission. It’s a depressing vision, until I remember that in the end, Ahab’s own madness is the source of his undoing, in a watery demise that makes Ophelia’s seem painless—a grim allegory of the way nature roots out hubris.
Maybe someday, I hope, I might bring my own children to a Texas attraction called the Midland Oiling Museum, where visitors will marvel at display cases lined with hundreds of old dipsticks, dirty oil filters, cans of Pennzoil and Valvoline. The larger rooms will contain antiquated oil derricks, photos of defunct refineries, well-preserved gas station pumps, lovingly restored Cadillac Escalades, and a half-scale model of the Exxon Valdez. All of this will be presided over by large painted portraits of the long-deposed Bush dynasty, Dick Cheney, and members of the Saudi oil cartel, edged with gilded frames and tastefully illuminated by recessed lighting. We will all stand around smiling, pointing, feigning interest while patronizing curators wax nostalgic about the relatively short lifespan of such a wasteful, violent, environmentally toxic, yet wholeheartedly American enterprise.
1 Through his cold-blooded exploitation of the petroleum industry, monopolist John D. Rockefeller became the nation’s first billionaire. His company Standard Oil was often portrayed in the popular media not as a whale but as a giant octopus, with its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of American life and labor. Standard Oil still exists today, largely in the form of subsidiaries such as Exxon and Chevron—the main culprits behind the Greenpoint oil spill.
THE SERMON (ALL SOULS)
I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals…. Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
I read somewhere that if you mention God at a Manhattan dinner party you’ll silence the room; mention God twice and you’ll never be invited back.
It’s for this reason—plus the fact that my roommates are non-religious and suspicious of anyone they think might be in a cult—that I sneak quietly out of my apartment on a Sunday morning. Walking past Neckface graffiti, children’s clothing stores stocked with infant-sized AC/DC T-shirts, record shops, and trendy pan-Asian restaurants, it’s a safe bet that of all my fashionable Brooklyn brethren, I’m the only one headed for church. The streets are mostly deserted, save for a few wasted-looking souls in tight jeans and leather jackets, just now heading home from strangers’ beds or coked-out afterparties on the Lower East Side.
My secret morning sojourn is partly research-based: I’m headed for All Souls Unitarian, where Melville and his family were members. Exiting the number 4 train at Eighty-Second after a long ride, I walk a few blocks north and find the old stone church, adorned with a regal purple banner above a wide staircase. As I pass through the corner entrance, a cordial volunteer offers me a service pamphlet. The main chapel’s vaulted white ceiling soars high above me, the whole room spartan and clean and bright. I take a seat and read the pamphlet, which explains that Unitarian tradition calls for transparent windows rather than stained glass, to “let the Light in.”
From my solitary back-row seat, I check out the artwork hanging above the altar. A large, three-dimensional piece made from hundreds of intertwining strings, it apparently represents the unity and interconnectedness of all things, like a more elaborate version of the cross-shaped “God eye” I made from popsicle sticks and orange yarn back in Sunday school. The shape of this Unitarian “God eye” is vaguely reminiscent of a Christian cross, but the overall effect is ambiguous—an apt symbol for the Unitarians’ ambivalence about Jesus and the Christian faith.
I feel a little awkward about being here—I’m one of the few single, youngish people in the room—but flipping through a Unitarian hymnal gives me some encouragement. Many of the hymns are adaptations of writings from the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist chants, Native American stories, and two of my favorite transcendental writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both famous Unitarians. I like the idea of this inclusive, literary brand of worship, especially since it involved Melville, who isn’t easily classified as a Unitarian or Transcendentalist, but nonetheless was concerned with the history and future of Christianity.
Though Melville’s connection to Unitarianism is questionable (Melville scholar Herschel Walker claims that Melville “hated Unitarianism” and only attended to appease his wife), his hope for a more universal, inclusive approach to religion is written all over Moby-Dick. It’s evident in Ishmael’s embracing of the tattooed pagan Queequeg, and also in his knowledge of Eastern ideas like meditation. It’s likely that Melville, like his Berkshire neighbors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, drew from his knowledge of mystical Asian texts like the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, and was moved by the description and actual practice of meditation. And like Emerson and Thoreau, Melville cited the fourteenth-century Sufi poet Hafiz as an influence. Like other famous ecstatics—Rumi, Ramakrishna, and Saint Francis—Hafiz believed that all individuals contain a spark of the divine: “You are a divine elephant with amnesia / Trying to live in an ant / Hole. / Sweetheart, O sweetheart / You are God in / Drag!” In letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, after reading the older writer’s positive response to Moby-Dick, Melville evokes similar feelings of mystic union: “I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and
mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book … I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.”
A young minister named Galen Guengerich leads the Sunday service at All Souls Unitarian. Dressed in a billowy maroon robe that seems straight out of a Harvard commencement ceremony, he looks handsome, pedigreed, slightly reserved but altogether kind, like a pious member of the Kennedy family. Given his appearance, it comes as a surprise that his service centers around the lyrics from a recent Green Day hit, a melodramatic ballad of urban alienation conveyed via the familiar trope of a solitary, defeated soul walking down Hollywood’s broken-dream boulevards. I first heard it playing at the deli counter of the Midtown skyscraper where I work, and it’s annoying in the way most Green Day songs are, but now that I’m living a somewhat isolated life in a shadowy leviathan of a city, I can relate to the sense of loneliness the song evokes. The point of Guengerich’s talk is that in a community like All Souls, you don’t have to go it alone, that you can instead walk together with others on a spiritual journey, connected and supported, with life’s dark paths illuminated by collective grace. The lecture is polished and sincere, and I appreciate his attempt to reach out to a younger crowd, however transparent the effort. I’ve never much liked Green Day, especially compared to my favorite hardcore punk bands like Minor Threat, Fugazi, or Hot Snakes. But looking around the room at mostly gray heads, I have to give Guengerich props for risking this pop-culture reference. Of the few young people in attendance, I imagine most are probably more familiar with Coldplay or even Vivaldi than with Green Day. It’s a safe bet that I’m the only one in the room with remotely punk rock roots: the only one with multiple tattoos, or who’s seen Fugazi live from the front row of a Wyoming cowboy bar, or who’s skated Burnside solo on a rainy Christmas Eve.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 6