The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (8 page)

During the warmer months in the city I have a Saturday ritual: wake up early, step into flip-flops, and ride my bike over to Atlas coffee shop, where I spend four or five hours drinking tea and working on my novel. Because this novel is, to my increasing distress, basically going nowhere, I do my best not to zone out on the watery parts of the world atlas hanging on the café wall. During frequent breaks I check the surf report on my laptop, and maybe call Asa to see if he’s down for a beach run. In the afternoon I head back and visit with Paul in his studio while he works on a painting. As Paul finishes up, I visit our next-door neighbors, Jill and Luke, an Australian couple who work as photographers for
Teen Vogue
. Luke grew up surfing, and will only go out when the waves are overhead, but he’s always up for checking the surf report or watching YouTube surfing clips on his giant Mac monitor.

Once Paul cleans his brushes, we pack the boards in my truck or the Surfmobile and drive out to Rockaway for a late-afternoon session. Like me, Paul grew up skateboarding, so he’s a quick study. During the height of summer, he surfs hard for several weekends straight, until he has a bout of sharp chest pain that keeps him out of the water. When the pain doesn’t subside after a couple days, he worries that maybe he’s having heart or lung trouble, possibly a result of his daily pack of Parliaments. One morning it’s so bad he thinks he might be having a heart attack, so Natalie and I rush him to the hospital.

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.

F
ortunately 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
.

A
long 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.”

T
he 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.