The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

by Justin Hocking

  The small windows in which I can see to the shore reveal an alarming sight.

  Cedar has exited the water.

  He’s standing with Dana and Becky on the beach, watching me through the binoculars—the same pair I’d laughed at earlier—from what seems an impossible distance.

  I’m too petrified to look behind me, but I can hear the thundering of the huge breakers on the outside, the ones I’d gauged to be upward of thirteen feet—waves for which I am far from ready. I’ve ended up much farther out than I’d meant to, and now I’m getting chewed up—soon to be swallowed whole if I don’t act fast.

  I know my only chance is to catch a swell, hold fast, and ride it in on my stomach. I attempt this a few times only to find that, despite the thrashing each breaker gives me, I’m going nowhere.

  Worse than nowhere: the current’s pushing me farther from shore.

  I realize now I’m stuck in a rip current—and that like a reverse river of water, it’s carrying me out into the open, sledgehammering seas.

  I look up at Dana and Cedar and wave my arms in distress, but I’m too far out, buried behind wavebreak. The only soul in the water, the water getting deeper, the depth growing wider. Something in me cracks open, this tremendous dread—the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw.

  Describing Pip’s harrowing experience in the “Castaway” section, Melville writes, “But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” And though thousands of pieces of artwork have been made in the wake of Moby-Dick, one of the most memorable, for me, is at a Moby-Dick-themed art show in San Francisco; it consists of a single period—a period that the artist Kris Martin cut from the last line of Moby-Dick—pasted onto a blank white page:

  Caught up in a raging force so far beyond my control—a tiny dark speck in this vast white maw, a bit of wreck in the mid-Pacific—I’m further from any benevolent universal force—from God—than I’ve ever felt.

  I know from reading the warning signs at Rockaway that to escape a rip, you have to paddle parallel with the shore. But when I try this, the waves dump me sideways off my board, rolling me back under. Salt water floods my sinuses, burns my throat, triggers my autonomic drowning response—a second rip current of panic flowing backward through blood vessels, across tattered synaptic channels, inundating all the pulsing chambers of my chest.

  At the climax of Moby-Dick, Ahab has his final confrontation with the white whale after a three-day chase, the final chance for the retribution that he’s risked life and limb and an entire crew to wreak. Completely possessed now, he wrenches harpoons from the hands of his crew, spouting Bible verses and drawing down thunder and lightning from the heavens. In a line that, with the benefit of hindsight, Colin Powell might have used on President Bush on the eve of the Iraq invasion, Starbuck cries to his captain, “Oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

  After a bloody battle, Moby-Dick rams the Pequod, sending the ship and a hundred or more souls to the death cold depths. Ahab meets the worst fate of all; tethered around the neck to the great whale the way “Turkish mutes bowstring their victim,” he’s dragged under by his ancient foe. Only Ishmael survives, borne up from the sea in a buoyant coffin, a spiritual pilgrim reborn out of death to renewed life.

  Numb with cold and pain, laden by soaked neoprene, my arms are close to losing the battle against the current. The events of the past year are ballast, weighing me down in what may be a final culmination of my inability to marshal my resources.

  Exhausted, I lay my head down on my surfboard and pray like I’ve never prayed, begging for help. Still not fully believing—Where are You in all of this? But more uncomfortable than ever in my disbelief.

  I try a more acute angle toward shore, point my nose directly at the tiny figures of my friends—safety, comfort, hearthstone—back on the beach.

  One dead-arm stroke after another.

  Until my arms will no longer move under the weight of the wetsuit and sodden gloves.

  I try swimming beside the board, kicking with my legs. Which feels even more precarious, nothing between me and the yawning depths.

  Back on the board, I force my dead arms. Stroke after stroke.

  Until I reach the rip’s ragged edge, a thin shoulder of a wave propelling me a few feet forward. Where I windmill my arms, expending my last shred of energy for another ride on the edge.

  Which delivers me closer to the white-water scrum, the impact zone.

  Another wave explodes behind me, rocketing me forward across the shallows, back to land.

  KOOKS

  Divine intervention and literary allusions aside, what I did was a total kook move, and in the end I simply got lucky. Two months later, in March, a surfer from California makes the same mistake I did, fatally misjudging the power of the Oregon coast in winter. His friends watch from the shore, pleading for help from the 911 dispatcher. But before the Coast Guard helicopters arrive, and though he’s tethered to a seven-foot flotation device, the ocean overpowers him.

  The dark Ahab force I’d been flirting with at Rockaway finally goes under that day in Pacific City, lashed to the white whale of my own hubris, my self-destructive tendencies, my anger and helplessness at what had happened to me at gunpoint that night in Denver. My true rebirth, I learn, had only begun that day in Rockaway when I rode my first hurricane swell. My inner Ahab was basically just a kook—a true, red-blooded American kook who shows up without permission on foreign shores and, ignoring warnings from the locals, dives into a dangerous situation, thinking he can avenge his own and the world’s resentments with his big guns and his go-it-alone attitude. Life is much better now that he’s been formally impeached by that most powerful of legislative bodies known as the Pacific.

  At the end of the film Waking Life, Richard Linklater posits the notion that we’re all living the same story. It’s an idea echoed by mystical writers like Philip K. Dick, Raymond Carver, Hafiz and Rumi, the exuberantly populist Walt Whitman, and, in his re-creation of Bible stories and sea yarns, Melville himself. The story is that through struggling with the vicissitudes of life and the threat of death, we move beyond ourselves, beyond the treachery and selfishness of our egos, and connect with something larger. We come to see that we are not separate, isolated individuals or even nations, but rather we’re inextricably connected to every living being, regardless of form or creed or religion, all of us like molecules of water pumping through the tide-beating heart of the singular sea. We eventually get over ourselves, learn from our mistakes, turn the other cheek, pull out the troops, forgive our enemies, embrace our shadow. We move from self-consciousness to earth-consciousness, sea-consciousness. That’s how we’re saved in the end; it’s how we escape to tell the tale and live the rest of our lives in relative peace and forever free from the tyranny of kooks, all of us.

  THE PASSAGE

  After my uncle John was thrown in prison, my aunt Ann worked night and day to secure his release. One hundred type written letters, one hundred phone calls to consulates and embassies, members of Congress and ambassadors.

  One hundred nights in a cell, then one hundred more.

  Until Ann’s work paid off.

  Upon his release, my uncle was surprised to find the sailboat in its slip, his name still on the title. He renamed her Sadhu, the Hindu word for a wandering holy person, and then quickly assembled a crew and charted a course through the Indian Ocean. They sailed through the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, where the crew was on high alert for pirates, so much so that they often motored at night, without running lights, to avoid detection. But a less-experienced crew member ran the boat aground off the Philippines. The propeller was destroyed; John spent two days underwater, trying to pry it off. Fortunately, a ship came and towed them to a remote harbor, where a logging company helped John repair the prop.

  As
the Sadhu motored out of the bay, armed men in a dugout canoe with a 150-horsepower outboard engine overtook their ship. This was the piracy my uncle feared; he could see from their scrappy uniforms that some were actually underpaid police officers. They demanded money in their broken English; they threatened to impound the ship if he didn’t comply. No one on board had much currency, so my uncle finally appeased them by handing over a pair of binoculars and all their foodstuffs, cans of soup and Spam.

  Free once more, he sailed on up the Philippine chain, to Taiwan, where he survived the first typhoon of the season. He battled another typhoon in Masaki Harbor, near Tokyo, sustaining enough damage that he had to lay over several weeks for additional repairs. Eventually he made a great circle route over the crest of the Pacific: they skirted the Aleutian Islands—islands that Rachel Carson names as the stormiest in the world—and crossed the Gulf of Alaska, finally threading through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound, to Seattle, where, on the day of his arrival, his family was there on the docks, waving, welcoming him home.

  PORTLAND

  By early spring I start to settle into my new position at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. With help from my friendly, heavily tattooed coworker Georgia, we create a new outreach program, designed to teach teenagers about media literacy, critical thinking, and creative writing, including a viewing of Tough Guise—a film that deconstructs the way our culture and popular media encourage men and boys to mask their vulnerabilities with toughness and violence. I also find that I have a modest talent for grant writing; I’m able to raise enough money to implement this new initiative, which Georgia names the Media Action Project, in six or seven public schools and youth treatment centers.

  On a warm evening in March, Kelly Peach, an IPRC volunteer, and I sit in the conference room and chat while she works on a zine containing her drawings of sea creatures—macro views of diatoms and plankton and rare, deep-sea jellyfish. She tells me she went to school in Santa Cruz, where she spent every spare moment at the beach, gazing into tide pools, conducting research, even learning to surf. She also explains that she’s just been offered a full ride for graduate school in marine biology back down in Santa Cruz.

  “I’m really excited about it,” she says, “but I’ve only been in Portland for less than a year, and I’m really not ready to leave. I mean, I still can’t get over how ridiculously fun it is here.” Back on the East Coast, most conversations involved some sort of complaining about the subway, about hectic work schedules or the terrible weather or the hunt for a decent therapist—all the colossal inconveniences of living in a place like New York.

  But in Portland, all anyone talks about it is how awesome Portland is.

  The self-congratulatory talk can get old—and my first few weeks in Portland have been anything but fun.

  But there’s something to it. Compared to New York, Portland feels like a quiet ecotopia, where even the cab drivers never honk; where, within a one-block radius, there are outdoor food carts selling Korean barbecue, Thai noodles, vegan bratwurst, and authentic Mexican food. And where I can hike into Forest Park—the largest urban park in the world, so large that people can and do get lost there for days at a time—and eat my Japanese bento lunch under the shade of redwoods and Douglas firs.

  In New York, despite my close friendships and all the progress I made at surfing and in recovery, I still never felt at home, not really, even after three full years.

  In Portland it takes about three months.

  The paradox, though, is that it was New York, not Portland, that transformed me into an ocean-obsessed surfer and environmentalist.

  Kelly tells me that after graduate school, she plans to move back up to Portland, maybe start a nonprofit geared toward teaching inner-city kids about the ocean. Sitting with her, listening to her plans for things that I want to be a part of, I realize that for the first time in a very long time, I actually feel lighthearted. Although I’m ma king a fraction of what I made back in New York, I’m also saving about $900 a month on rent. Granted, the kitchen of the house I’m living in has been completely ripped out during a remodel, but I’m saving enough that I can eat out every night. I also save on transportation costs by riding my father’s hand-me-down 1973 Schwinn Super Le Tour—given to me as a gif since my old bike was stolen just before I left Brooklyn. I consider getting rid of my truck, but Portland’s one downside is the hour-and-a-half drive to the beach—although it’s a beautiful drive through forests and farmlands and vineyards, all these rolling green vistas like you’d imagine seeing in New Zealand.

  Along with Kelly, I spend time with Gabriel and his family, and my old friend Dan, the tattoo artist, and my stepbrother Tim and his family, who live just a few blocks away. And I meet people like Moe Bowstern, who works summers on an Alaskan salmon boat, then spends winters in Portland working on her writing and artwork, and who leads the crowd in singing sea shanties at IPRC benefits. And Dan Hack, who turns out to be my very distant cousin, both of us descendants of Hockings in Land’s End, Cornwall, both of us having fulfilled some genetic imperative to migrate west across the continent, to finally settle down in a lush, forested place near the sea.

  SHIPMATES

  My new workplace is located directly above a bookstore called Reading Frenzy, in many ways the epicenter of Portland’s vibrant indie lit scene. I spend my lunch breaks there, perusing zines and comics, or across the street at Powell’s City of Books. One of the largest physical bookstores in the world, Powell’s spans an entire city block, and, unlike most retailers, stocks both new and used titles on the same shelves. For this reason their Melville section is uncommonly robust. It’s the first place I gravitate during daily visits, where I search for rare Moby-Dick editions or obscure Melville criticism. I haunt the section so often that I start to think of myself as kind of freelance Moby-Dick salesperson, offering unsolicited advice on the cheapest, most portable version (Signet Classics); the most pedantic version, with poorly laid out text and some stuffy critical essays, but an impressive illustrated section on whaling and whalecraft (Norton Critical Edition); or my all-time favorite version, with artful typesetting and abundant illustrations by Rockwell Kent that give it the feel of a prototypical graphic novel (Modern Library Classics).

  Beyond having such an expansive Melville section, Powell’s Books was literally built on a foundation of Moby-Dick. A sandstone pillar shaped like a stack of classic books supports the store’s northwest entrance: The Mahabharata, Hamlet, War and Peace, Psalms, The Odyssey, and The Whale. The Whale was the title of the English first edition of Moby-Dick; according to the founder’s legend, a leather-bound version of The Whale was one of owner Michael Powell’s first great finds as a rare-book dealer. Copies of the first American edition now sell for upward of $40,000, so it’s not a stretch to assume that The Whale provided some of the seed money that established what many consider to be America’s finest independent bookstore.

  It’s fitting, then, that some fellow Melville freaks and I persuade Powell’s to host the first part of a twenty-four-hour marathon reading of Moby-Dick.

  The lead crew members on this epic, semilunatic undertaking—which we name “Take to the Ship”—include my new friend Amy, an environmental activist who happens to have been a close high school friend of Asa Ellis’s; a writer/researcher named Tom; and the writer Kevin Sampsell, who moonlights as the manager of Powell’s impressive small press section.

  The first five hours take place in the third-floor Powell’s reading room, where we enlist sixteen local artists and writers to bring the book breathing to life. After I welcome on board the audience—whom I call shipmates—I read the first chapter, “Loomings,” which contains some of my favorite lines—Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? The entire section reckons with this particular madness; it’s a sorting out of Ishmael’s cracked motives for signing on to “this shabby part of a whaling voyage,” just as, a few paragraphs
into our eight-hundred-page undertaking, I wonder just what the hell I’m getting myself into here—a question I’m sure many audience members share, as do the intrepid runners of actual, 26.2-mile, foot-pounding marathons.

  By chapter’s end, we have the answer: Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. At the heart of the book—and in the hearts of us marathoners—lies an obsessive quest for even a glimmer of knowledge of the deep mystery within ourselves and within nature. Here at the start, the room feels electrified by a powerful sense that we’ve put in motion something large and important and a little frightening—twenty-four straight hours—but this is also what draws us shipmates together: like Queequeg and Ishmael, we sit shoulder to shoulder, pulling oars together on an insane task—I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.

  And I can’t help but feel that somewhere, from whatever inscrutable vantage point, Melville might appreciate what we’re doing here—that we’re part of a vibrant ongoing revival that in so many ways redeems his literary spirit, his decades of toiling in relative obscurity. If Moby-Dick was far too postmodern for Melville’s contemporaries (one hundred years before the term postmodern even existed), those of us living in the internet age are perhaps more comfortable channeling its polyphonic host of voices, its endlessly digressive, hyperlink-like associative riffs.

  Two chapters later, actor Mykle Hansen performs “The Spouter-Inn.” His animated, irreverent delivery of lines like “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”—and his description of the tattooed harpooner Queequeg inadvertently crawling into bed with Ishmael—elicit waves of laughter. I hadn’t anticipated the way that, in the right hands, live reading can so enhance the book’s bizarre humor, its radical weirdness.