It’s a kind of semi-invisible “oil spill” taking place every day, in every ocean and on every beach in the world.
1 The term gyre reminds me of a William Butler Yeats poem, “The Second Coming,” that I’d seen in the New York City subway: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
THE WHALEBOAT
The decimation of whale life that commerce initiated, seen through the scaling lens of history, does not destroy the dignity of ordinary men in the fishery, their effort to work, to survive, to provide. It only instructs us in the infernal paradoxes of life.
∼ BARRY LOPEZ, About This Life, “THE WHALEBOAT’
After moving back west, I rediscover the writing of another Melville-obsessed Oregonian who used to live in New York. Barry Lopez was born in California, but after his mother remarried, his family relocated to Manhattan. Though he disliked New York at first, he ultimately benefited from his literary education in the city. He attended private school, where he was challenged academically, well beyond what he’d ever experienced back in California. He ended up reading Moby-Dick three times before college—a book that, as an eventual environmental writer, he found most akin to his own desire to “describe what happened, what I saw, when I went outside.” And while Moby-Dick is undeniably dark, Lopez also credits it as a major influence in his desire to contribute to what he calls the literature of hope.
His essay “The Whaleboat” orbits around his contemplation of a handcrafted model whaleboat on display in the study of his Oregon home—“it bore so well an elaborate and arcane history of human encounter with the wild.” He writes equally exquisite descriptions of the myriad woods and trees he can spy directly from his writing desk—red cedar, pine, spruce, his hardwood floor made from “ship-lapped Douglas fir.”
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what this richly complex essay is about—his work defies easy explanation or pigeonholing—but beyond wood and light, one continuous theme is a meditation on the difference between contemplation and action. He uses Melville’s Ishmael as a symbol of contemplation, and Ahab as one of action. What brought the Pequod down, according to Lopez, was Ahab’s ceaseless productivity, his relentless action and motion lust, combined with a total lack of contemplation. Lopez has some fairly pointed opinions about American culture’s general lack of contemplation:
In the modern era, launched from a pelagic vessel manned by men often unknown to one another at the start of a two-year voyage, [the Pequod’s] employment marked a shift from a community-based to a corporate-based technology designed to exploit nature. Its advent marked the beginning of the late Holocene die-off of nonhuman life. Ishmael, with his modern ironies about the “all-grasping Western world” and man “the money-making animal” worked here, pulling second oar in Starbuck’s boat.
But again, Lopez doesn’t come to any facile conclusions. He believes that both contemplation and action are necessary for a balanced world. He sympathizes with men in the historical whaling industry—ordinary men who, like Ishmael, were just trying to survive, provide for their families. Therein lies the paradox: the whaling industry, like so many modern corporations, was full of good, decent people just trying to make a living. I love the subtle wisdom of Lopez’s work, the acknowledgment of beauty and darkness in nature; reading him, I realize how dogmatic I’ve been in my revisionist critique of the whaling industry, in my attack on the contemporary oil industry. The truth is that the very keys I’m typing on now are made from petroleum; petroleum fueled all those trips from Brooklyn to Rockaway in my Toyota pickup, as it fuels ambulances, Meals on Wheels, the Buick that allows my elderly neighbor to drive herself to church every Sunday.
And my obsession with movement mirrors the larger culture’s obsession with action, frenetic commerce, relentless productivity—which are the reasons we need oil in the first place.
I’m not changing my mind about anything, or apologizing for my arguments. What I am doing is longing for balance, for wisdom, for the ability to fill a canvas with both light and dark. For the equanimity to write like Melville or Barry Lopez—who, at the end of his “Whaleboat” essay, ultimately transcends the political, concluding on a more mysterious note: “When I look at Mr. McCreery’s boat, when I imagine the oar blades plunged in the green transparency of a storm-raked sea, the boat cranking off a wave crest, six men straining in drenched motley wool and oilskins, their mouths agape, I know that life is wild, dangerous, beautiful.”
EKKOLI; OR, THE WHALE
By the winter of 1805, members of the Lewis and Clark expedition had reached their westernmost destination: the Oregon coast. They established a winter camp, Fort Clatsop, near the Columbia River, where they hoped abundant elk and wildlife would sustain them through the Northwest’s damp dark months.
Finding little game for hunting, however, the unhappy party subsisted mainly on dog meat.
That is, until some Clatsop Indians offered them a gift of fresh blubber, stripped from a beached whale. Hungry for more—for anything besides dog—William Clark, Sacagawea, and other explorers set off in search of the whale. After the treacherous ascent of Tillamook Head, they descended southward, crossing Ecola Creek, which Clark named after the Chinook word for whale—ekkoli.
Emerging from a dense thicket onto the sandy beach, Clark and the others discovered, instead of an abundant supply of meat, a completely stripped, 105-foot-long whale carcass—an empty white corridor of bones. The local Tillamook villagers had harvested the entire creature, utilizing every part of its body, the way they’d been doing for eons. They were now busy tending beach bonfires, rendering blubber into rich oil.
When approached by Clark and his men, the villagers were understandably reluctant to part with their spoils.
Just over two hundred years later, Lisa Mae and I venture west from Portland, to Ecola State Park. The road up from Cannon Beach winds through a dense rain forest, home to moss-covered spruce, western hemlock, Douglas fir, western red cedar. The forest floor is carpeted in moss and ferns and dappled with sunlight, giving the place a kind of mystical charm, so much so that Lisa Mae and I name it “fairyland.”
We park in a lot just above Indian Beach, the exact spot where Clark found the whale carcass. Like Clark and his Corps of Discovery, Lisa Mae and I are on our own quest.
In our case, the sustenance we need is surf.
And in Oregon, there’s always plenty to be found.
From the parking lot, we watch waves scroll in off the horizon, spilling white across the cove, like snowdrifts that soon dissolve on the sand’s sun-fired glaze. To the south, two tree-lined spits of land reach out, slowly surrendering haystack rocks to the Pacific.
We unload surfboards and wetsuits and take a wooden footbridge across Canyon Creek. Above the water’s surface, cliff swallows make tight circular turns, banking and planing and diving for insects, sunlight sparking their iridescent blue tail feathers. Much higher, over Tillamook Head, seagulls prowl for scraps, and above them, way up in the troposphere, a pair of bald eagles carve ever-widening spirals.
This is what rings my bell: walking barefoot down a wooded trail, surfboard under my arm, side by side with Lisa Mae.
But it also stirs up some fear. I never completely get over my experience at Pacific City. But maybe this is a good thing: the same forces that give this coastline such unbounded beauty make it a relatively dangerous place to surf, requiring strong paddling skills and a healthy respect for the sea.
There’s a riptide by the rocky cliffs on the north side of the beach, and although it makes me uncomfortable, the waves are small and manageable today, so after suiting up and wading in, I let it pull me outside, and then paddle safely to the south, away from the rip, where the good waves roll in. And I notice how surrendering myself to the current, letting it ferry me outside, helps conserv
e my arm strength for the hard part—the actual catching of waves.
I’ve handed down my old board to Lisa Mae and graduated to a shorter model, a six-foot-eight-inch swallowtail—a board that performs much better than my huge beginner model, which Lisa Mae nicknames “the garage door.” It’s a kind of revelation: dropping in on a wave, banking a big bottom turn and carving back up the face, over and over, pumping for speed, staying close to the curl, my fingertips communing with the water. I’ve even figured out how to turn up the face just as the wave closes out, snapping off the lip and then floating on top, riding it down like a foamy escalator. I’ll probably never be a great surfer, but I have my moments, times when I feel almost as comfortable surfing as I do on a skateboard.
For me—a person who used to be scared of the ocean, and who still has a very healthy fear—this is more than enough. And whereas in New York I needed surfing to stay sane, here in Oregon it’s just something I do when time permits, when the conditions are right.
I still love it, maybe more than ever, but the obsession has unclenched its jaws, released me from its dark, twisting interior.
Although she avoids the rip, Lisa Mae eventually makes it outside. Sitting on our boards, we joke around, making sideways fists and milking the surface of the sea, splashing each other, until we spot a good wave and ride it in together, working every section all the way to shore, where we turn back around, hungry for more.
After surfing, we hike up the Clatsop Trail, following Indian Creek upward through dense salal shrubs, salmonberry, oxalis, maiden hair ferns. Farther up the trail, giant Sitka spruce stand with lower limbs stretched horizontally from their trunks, like great mossy arms welcoming us into the wild, like candelabras lighting our way.
An Oregon State Parks guidepost explains that this wind-battered forest is in constant flux. As trees age, they’re likely to get toppled by howling ocean winds. But seedlings grow in patches of sunlight created by windthrown trees, the same way that shadowy parts of ourselves finally collapse, making room for new growth. And like Whitman’s idea of grass as “hair of graves,” spruce saplings often grow directly on the great trunks of fallen trees. Sometimes the dead host tree rots away, and new trees, called “clothespin spruce,” are left with hollow archways in their trunks—like tiny, negative-space cathedrals in which is written the universal story of life arising from death. It reminds me of the way that Melville—whose life was nothing if not windthrown—left behind such a monolithic body of work, the fertile ground for a thousand offshoots—for modernists writers like Joyce and Woolf and everyone who followed, for so many visual artists and even improvisational jazz musicians, for filmmakers and scientists, for environmentalists like Barry Lopez; his legacy and corpus like the negative but light-filled core of the great, grizzled tree that is American culture.
And after my own long descent—my Brooklyn-based Nekyia and my severe humbling by the Pacific—I can’t help but sympathize with Melville’s most legendary human character. During Shakespearean soliloquies at the end of Moby-Dick, in “The Symphony,” Ahab reveals his human side; he laments his young wife—“I widowed that poor girl when I married her”; he has a moment of connection with his beleaguered first mate—“Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye.” In Starbuck’s eyes he sees the capacity for warmth, for love of family and hearth and home, and although he can’t experience it himself, he orders Starbuck not to lower during the final whale hunt, that he may preserve the good mate’s life.
“Oh, my Captain! my Captain!” Starbuck cries in response, “noble soul! grand old heart, after all!” I feel some of the same reverence for my own obsessive shadow side, for the dark, watery soul work it forced on me in New York, combined with compassion for the part of me that wanted to die—the part that did drown that day at Pacific City. Jung never advocated that we sublimate or destroy our shadows—just as Ahab is the driving narrative force behind Moby-Dick, so is our darkness an important source of power. What Jung called for instead was that we bring the shadow up into the light, so that it doesn’t pilot us from down below. Up into the light, where we can embrace it—the way we all embraced Fred Nemo after his embodiment of Ahab—where we might revere the paradoxical strength it gives us, the complexity and depth: grand old heart, after all.
But my still-young heart is always with the survivor. My favorite Moby-Dick passages belong to Ishmael—his ecstatic rhapsodies about the ocean and whales; his longing for universality, for union with nature, with the divine. Lisa Mae and I live together now, in a little Craftsman bungalow with a big front porch, and directly below our attic bedroom is the temple room, where she keeps a rambling altar populated by half the Hindu pantheon—Sita and Ram, Hanuman, Lakshmi, and Krishna, but also the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Buddha, all of them surrounded by flowers, fruit, votives, and beads. At night, before we fall asleep, she reads me poems by Hafiz, perhaps the same verses that Melville read two centuries ago, verses about whales and the sea, verses about the transcendent God beyond God.
Though the Tillamook villagers were hesitant to trade away their precious whale oil, Captain Clark and his men eventually bartered for three hundred pounds of blubber and a few gallons of oil. On January 8, 1806, Clark wrote in his journal: “Small as this stock is I prise it highly; and thank providence for directing the whale to us; and think him much more kind to us than he was to Jonah, having sent this monster to be swallowed by us in sted of swallowing of us as Jonah’s did.”
I love this part of the story, the way the Indians made the white men do something they’re otherwise reluctant to do: actually share in a very small portion. And also that Clark contents himself with this modest portion, that he gives effusive thanks for it. If only all Americans who followed in Clark’s wake had the same economy in their use of oil, the same reverence and gratitude for nature, the same respect for the natives. Perhaps then we might not have been swallowed, as Clark says, into the proverbial belly of the whale, into this ocean-killing belly of oil in which we now find ourselves.
Reaching the top of Tillamook Head, Lisa Mae and I discover a hiker’s camp, a circle of small wooden bunkhouses, picnic tables, and a central fire pit. We follow the trail west, past the ruins of a World War II radar station, through a dripping copse of Sitka spruce, descending to the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse viewpoint. A series of steep muddy steps leads us down to a cordoned-off ledge, perched on the edge of a cliff, the same spot that Clark described as “the grandest and most pleasing prospects which my eyes ever surveyed, in my front a boundless Ocean.”
The sun was out all morning at the south-facing Indian Beach, but here at the summit a thick fog bank veils the sea, giving us the mysterious feeling of standing on the edge of the known world. We can’t see the ocean through the haze, but we can hear its susurrations on the shore below, feel its misty presence on our skin, imagine the way it fills up the horizon and how it, like fog, shrouds the earth’s body, reflecting light on the surface but remaining impenetrably dark beneath, down in the deep soul of the world.
EPILOGUE
As promised, Dawn moves out to Portland after leaving Brooklyn and doing a stint in L.A. Though she’s perhaps the most employable of all my New York surfing friends, she has trouble landing a job in Portland, where the market is saturated with young creatives, never more so than during a recession. She takes this in stride, puts herself on what she calls her month-long yoga retreat, sometimes practicing with us at Lisa Mae’s studio. We surf on the weekends, and as always her cheery fearlessness emboldens me to try new things, to surf new spots, to paddle farther outside than I would alone.
Toward the end of the summer of 2009, I take a personal writing retreat at a friend’s cabin up in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. For several days my work circles around Andy Kessler and memories of our Montauk surf trips. Three years since I’ve seen him, and after spending so many days writing about him, I realize how much I miss his company. Once I’m back in cell-phone range on the drive back to Portla
nd, I give him a ring. It’s good to hear his voice, even on his voicemail. I leave a long message, tell him what I’ve been up to, ask him to call me back when he has a chance.
Two days later, Dawn calls.
“I’ve got some hard news,” she says.
My first thought is that she’s been offered a position back in New York or L.A., that she’ll be leaving Portland after only a month. But this turns out not to be the case; just a few days later she lands a good job back in the fashion industry.
Her news is about Andy Kessler.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Dawn whispers. “Apparently what happened is that he got stung by a wasp out at Montauk and went into anaphylactic shock. They tried to get him to the hospital but it was already too late.”
It takes a few seconds for this to register.
What the fuck? is my first—and best—and most Kessler-like response to such an absurd series of events, leading to the death of someone who’d already conquered such formidable demons, a person whose life was oriented around helping other people, encouraging kids to skate, taking it easy out in the ocean.
It happened on a Monday, so Dawn and I wait most of the week for word of funeral arrangements. I get in touch with Sadie’s fiancé, who sounds totally stunned, especially since he happened to be on his way out to visit Andy that same day. Sadie’s on a surf trip in Mexico at the time, but she cuts the trip short and flies home to help organize the memorial. She takes it especially hard; Andy was a kind of father figure to her—a healthy version of the biological father she lost. Having lost his own family and looking up to Andy as a kind of wily uncle figure, Kyle Grodin takes it equally hard.
We get the final word on Wednesday or Thursday: there’s a paddle-out memorial planned at Montauk on Friday and a memorial party at the Autumn Bowl on Saturday night. But this late in the week, I can’t find plane tickets for much less than a grand. Lisa Mae and I are just about to buy tickets for a surf trip to Costa Rica, and on my nonprofit director’s salary, I really can’t afford both. I feel guilty about this, and concerned that I need to go pay my proper respects. But while skating Burnside with my friend Bryce—another of Andy’s longtime skate compatriots—I try to listen for Andy’s opinion on the matter.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 24