Of course, transcendent moments abound. We enlist the musician Laura Gibson to perform an angelic, a cappella version of a hymn from “The Sermon”:
In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints—
No more the whale did me confine.
The writer and filmmaker Arthur Bradford gives an impassioned version of Father Mapple’s sermon, gesticulating like a preacher, his powerful voice hitting all the heavy registers—But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
By chapter five the house is packed, though there’s an expected ebb and flow within the crowd. Most people drop in for a few chapters. One tall, bearded young gentleman shows up at Powell’s to purchase his first copy of Moby-Dick and happens to hear a loudspeaker announcement about the reading. He stays for the entire event, as does a sweet, soft-spoken woman in her fifties, who wears a contented expression of authentic awe for the better part of twenty-four hours.
Amy refers to them both as our new converts.
After the sixteenth chapter, we move the reading to Amy’s candlelit living room, where she’s draped a quilted harpoon over a podium, creating an oddly cozy, wake-like atmosphere.
Throughout the night and well into the next afternoon, one hundred people read the remaining 119 chapters.
In the dead hours of a February night, the sense of questing transforms into something more akin to a vigil, a midnight mass. As my energy dwindles, I’m continually astonished by Melville’s colossal creative vigor—his endless currents of Shakespearean prose; his stunning ear for sound, song, and syntax; his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from whaling to coconuts to metaphysics—and the staggering fact that he channeled and scribed and collaged such an immortal masterpiece in just two years.
There are also moments of deep, unshakable boredom, as when Melville conducts a long-winded taxonomy of whales in the “Cetology” section—a chapter that, in the light of day, I love for its genre-defying digressiveness but by one in the morning find tedious. And thus for me, though I fight it, there is a period of sleep.
Amy’s a hardier breed of Melville fan, someone I often describe as simply badass. A veteran antilogging activist, she’s spent many all-nighters one hundred feet up in old-growth Douglas firs, where nodding off might mean falling to your death, just as Ishmael warns during his reverie from high in the crow’s nest during the “Mast-Head” chapter. She stays awake the entire time, recording every minute on her laptop and posting frequent updates on the Take to the Ship website, even reading a few extra chapters for late-night no-shows.
After a few hours’ rest, I spontaneously agree to read “A Squeeze of the Hand” for another no-show. It’s an infamous chapter in which Ishmael describes rendering spermaceti oil by hand—squeezing sperm—with his shipmates, and how they sometimes mistake each other’s hands for sperm—let us squeeze ourselves into each other. Reading the chapter—a sweet and unctuous duty!—I find myself going a little unglued, maybe from the lack of sleep or as a result of immersion in Melville’s manic creation.
Like Ishmael squeezing spermaceti, I am overcome by a strange sort of insanity while reading the chapter—a few paragraphs in I begin bouncing from foot to foot, doing a crazy little jig.
While I read, Amy posts the following on the website:
Justin Hocking is getting a little excited with chapter 94—A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND.
Then, awaking from my brief Melvillian trance-dance, it hits me: I’m standing in front of a room full of people, getting intensely worked up while describing what amounts to a kind of cosmic circle jerk. Reading the line “I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it,” I’m overcome by what I dimly recognize as shame. You can only imagine how most prudish nineteenth-century readers might have reacted to this chapter during an era when, in many circles, it was taboo to mention the leg of a chair. On both aesthetic and emotional levels, writing Moby-Dick was a profound act of exposure and courage. With chapters like “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Melville invokes a classic dockyard bawdiness, but beyond the sailor’s antics there’s a sense of him jettisoning conventional decorum, defiantly jettisoning shame—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Melville’s brazenness buoys my own courage to write about things that will always carry a mild current of shame: the codependency issues and twelve-step program, the romance novels and the dark emotional periods. Whether or not Melville embodied this fact during his lifetime, he often grasped it within his writing: only by risking exposure and vulnerability do we find deep connection—such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling. And now, spotting my best friend, Gabriel, in the audience, making quick sketches of me and all the other readers, I find the resolve to continue reading, knowing full well that like anyone else worth having in my life, Gabriel has witnessed all of my most shameful falls from grace and has never so much as blinked—let us squeeze hands all round.
By nightfall, having traversed a literary Atlantic and Pacific, we arrive at the end.
The final full chapter—“The Chase—Third Day”—goes without question to Fred Nemo, a performance artist and dancer in his early sixties. Back in the nineties, Nemo performed unhinged improve dance pieces with the seminal Portland indie rock band Hazel—he’d often strip naked, shimmy into an evening gown, then break into animated lip synchs on an old-fashioned telephone, coiling himself in the phone cord and bouncing around the band members like a straitjacketed maniac.
With his unpredictable energy and his long, grizzled gray beard, he’s pure Ahab.
There’s a palpable shift in the room’s energy when Nemo steps up to the pulpit, clasping a five-foot-long, splintered oar in his left hand: the mad old captain is at the helm now, about to bring down the ship—the voyage is up. During his reading, he employs the oar to strong effect as harpoon, crutch, wizard’s staff, and wooden leg. Halfway through the chapter, Ahab lowers with the harpooners Daggoo and Queequeg; Moby-Dick charges and narrowly misses their boat, but turns flank, revealing the gruesome sight of Ahab’s mercenary agent, the Parsee, his corpse ripped to shreds and lashed by frayed harpoon lines to the white whale’s scarred underbelly.
Unnerved by this ghastly sight, Ahab drops his harpoon. At this moment, Nemo slams the oar down on the hardwood floor, the thunder of this dramatic action booming through the floorboards, startling us into military attention.
In the final showdown, a full fourteen pages into the chapter, Nemo’s voice begins to falter, from the vocal burn of speaking aloud Melville’s incandescent prose, and also the pathos of Ahab’s struggle—Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! At the grand culmination of our twenty-four-hour journey—filled with so much light and dark, so many dives and breaches—the collapse of Fred’s voice feels entirely appropriate, imbuing the novel and Ahab with a shattered grace, especially as he lifts the oar above his head and howls the mad captain’s last line—Thus, I give up the spear!
His incarnation of Ahab is not so much a kook as a heroically flawed, fully human being, wounded to the core.
Amy—the true mastermind behind this event—delivers the Epilogue: one did survive the wreck. Among us crew members is the momentous sense of having endured, a feeling I carry for days after the reading—the lived experience of Moby-Dick as a survival story.
Amy finishes the final lines and then we break into exalted applause, all of us embracing our shipmates, and most of all Fred, the man who went down with his vessel, who so poignantly draped the great shroud of the sea across the day’s dark finale.
THE EVENING OF MY LAST NIGHT ON EARTH
Just a few blocks from my house, there’s a business with a large red sign that reads Disaster Restoration.
And just beyond this
is a yoga studio, where I meet a woman named Lisa Mae. She’s an instructor there, and totally beautiful—and as it turns out, also from New York City. We have a slow, healthy courtship, beginning with a trip to Portland’s new aerial tram, which we ride three times in a row, chatting about our families and gazing out on the blurry-bright city lights. She tells me about a recent yoga retreat she led down in Costa Rica, where she rekindled her interest in surfing. She originally learned to surf during school in San Diego; in fact, we’re surprised to learn we went to rival high schools at exactly the same time, although being something of a brainiac, she graduated early and went off at age seventeen to NYU, where she double-majored in religious studies and philosophy.
Our parallel trajectories across the country, from Southern California to New York City and back across to the Pacific Northwest, and the way we hit it off so well—and also the way her smile lights up her whole face—are all very intriguing. But after going for a drink at a pub, I drive her back home, giving her a hug and a gentlemanly goodnight kiss on the cheek. This is something I learned in recovery—how to actually date someone, without too much intensity, especially in the beginning.
In early March, a month or so after we first meet, Lisa Mae and I go cross-country skiing. We take her Subaru up to Trillium Lake, near my old snowboard camp on Mount Hood. There’s a book of Rumi poems on her dashboard; while she drives, I read one out loud.
“I’ve never had a guy read Rumi to me,” she says.
“I’ve never met a girl with a copy of Rumi on her dashboard.”
I choose Trillium Lake as a flat, easy trail for Lisa Mae, who’s never cross-countried before. What I didn’t anticipate, though, was that the main access road to Trillium would be closed in winter, so we have to ski down a steep hill to reach the lake trail. Lisa Mae ends up falling on her ass every hundred feet or so; she mostly laughs it off, but it’s apparent that she wonders if maybe I’m trying to kill her. And this being only our third or so date, I’m afraid I might have indeed killed my chances.
But she’s a good sport, especially once we reach the mellow lake trail, where she gets the hang of gliding along in the snow.
She does great until I pick up the pace, moving a couple meters ahead of her. As we bend south around the frozen lake, Mount Hood appears, a brilliant castle of frost. But then something catches my attention, a small dark shape on the snow, directly in Lisa Mae’s track. Moving in closer, I realize it’s some kind of lizard, lying right there in the snow.
I stop and poke at it with my pole, but it doesn’t move.
“Hey, Lisa Mae,” I shout back. “Watch out. There’s some kind of snow gecko in your path.”
But this doesn’t register, and by the time she spots the lizard thing she lets out a little shriek and tries to stop but instead sort of spazzes out and falls right on her ass again. I take my skis off to help her up.
“What is that thing?” she asks, laughing again.
“I guess it’s some sort of amphibian. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Back on our skis, we move in closer to investigate. The snow gecko is brown on the top, with a reddish underbelly. About the size of my palm. It remains totally motionless—half-frozen, it seems—even after I pick it up. Turning it upside down, I can see that it’s actually still breathing. After examining it closely, wondering how the hell it got here, I move it off the trail, out of harm’s way.
On the way home, Lisa Mae and I visit the Kennedy School—an old grade school in North Portland that’s been converted into a hotel with several restaurants, taverns, a movie theater, and a public soaking pool. The pool’s located in a hidden courtyard, surrounded by palm trees; it’s like a large hot tub, the entire underwater surface finished in terra cotta and dark blue mosaic tiles.
We sit there soaking our tired muscles—especially Lisa Mae, who has a very sore ass—and laughing about our odd encounter with the snow gecko. There are a few other soakers in the pool, including a fortyish guy in steamed-up glasses, sitting just across from us. He apologizes for eavesdropping and explains that he’s a wildlife biologist, that he’s curious to hear more about this snow gecko. Still curious myself, I describe it for him.
“What you saw was a rough-skinned newt,” he says. “They’re not uncommon in Oregon, although it’s rare to see one so early in the spring—probably a result of climate change. The interesting thing about rough-skinned newts is that they’re one of the most poisonous animals on the planet.”
“Come on,” Lisa Mae says, a little of her New York accent revealing itself. “You’re totally shitting us.”
He explains that one one-thousandth of the poison contained in the skin of these newts is enough to kill a grown man.
“Seriously,” Lisa Mae says. “You’re serious?”
“They don’t bite or anything. You’d have to actually swallow an entire newt for the poison to kick in. Either that or lick its skin.”
This freaks me out a little bit, as I recall handling the thing with my bare hands.
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” the biologist says, “as long as you washed your hands afterward.”
But I didn’t wash my hands, and then, just twenty minutes later, Lisa Mae and I had sat in her car eating a lunch consisting mostly of finger foods: baby carrots and celery with peanut butter and salad wraps.
We drive back to Lisa Mae’s house, where a quick internet search confirms the biologist’s identification and his claim about the rough-skinned newt. She reads me an online account of some yahoos down in Coos Bay, Oregon. During a drunken camping trip, they dared one of their buddies to swallow an entire newt.
So he did.
And died within ten minutes.
“Holy shit,” Lisa Mae says.
“Holy shit is right,” I say. “I totally handled that thing.”
“So I guess this is it for you?” she says, leading me over to the couch.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” I say, playing along.
“This might be your last night on earth,” she says, smiling. “So what would you like to do?”
“Well …” I say, coyly, reaching over for her, tucking a dark ringlet of hair behind her ear.
“It’s okay,” she says, smiling, “I’m game.”
So I lean over and kiss her—my final request.
And although it might be my last night alive, we end up taking our time, because in reality there is no urgency between us, no sense of dire need—both of us having emerged whole from respective periods of darkness. Instead of raw lust there is a kind of playful attraction; in place of intensity there is an easy intimacy, made possible in part by our offbeat senses of humor, our shared bicoastal sensibilities, our synched-up spirituality.
More than anything, it feels like we have all the time in the world.
THE SPILL
In May of 2010, while a hundred thousand gallons of oil bleed daily from an of shore well into the Gulf of Mexico, I spend a two-week writing residency at an art and ecology center off the central coast of Oregon. Surfers in particular have a gut-level reaction to offshore oil spills and beach contaminations. I feel sick about the news from the Gulf Coast, more so after hearing radio interviews with fishermen and tour guides, people whose entire lives and livelihoods are threatened by the spill. But at the same time, being here in Oregon, where the sea is clean and cold, and there are no offshore oil derricks, I feel somewhat removed from events unfolding in the south.
One evening after writing, I paddle my surfboard across the mouth of the Salmon River to a sandy spit that marks the confluence of river and sea. On the lee side of the grassy but formidable Cascade Head, and without an access road from the south, the beach is accessible only by river, and therefore deserted, nearly untouched.
It’s cloudy on the coast, the ocean like brushed cement. But on the edges, over the mountains, the sky’s gleaming.
After surfing the chaotic river-mouth break, I comb the beach, finding charred driftwood, barnacle-studded limpet shells,
exquisitely preserved crab carapaces, sea felt, and a rare, twisted length of bull kelp. And also, tucked behind some rocks, two weatherworn plastic water bottles and the remnants of a Styrofoam drift net float. It’s not enough to make the beach feel egregiously polluted, but here they are, on what had seemed like the most pristine beach I’ve ever seen. It occurs to me here, seemingly for the first time, that plastic is a petroleum-based substance.
A fellow resident and sculptor points me toward the center’s library, to which the Surfrider Foundation donated a copy of a documentary called Synthetic Seas. The film shows an ocean map of areas seriously affected by plastic contamination—an expanse the size of the contiguous United States, Canada, and Alaska combined. Within the boundaries of this area are two concentrated garbage patches, or “gyres.”1 There’s some dispute over their dimensions—some say they’re only the size of Delaware; others claim they’re larger than Texas. Regardless of their actual magnitude, it’s just like Sadie told me: giant atolls of trash poisoning the sea.
Unlike crude oil, the plastic in these gyres and elsewhere doesn’t eventually absorb into the sea. Plastic never really goes away; according to the film, every piece of plastic ever made still exists somewhere on the earth or in our seas. And while they don’t fully reabsorb, ocean-bound plastics do slowly leach micron-sized particles into the water; these particles are then ingested by fish and birds, which are in turn ingested by larger mammals. To make matters worse, floating plastic waste absorbs and concentrates other harmful toxins like PCBs at 100,000 times the normal levels. These chemicals—most of which bind to estrogen receptors—move up the food chain, eventually reaching the humans who created them, where they can cause cancer and may harm female reproductive processes.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 23