January 5, 1997
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this
sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul
beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the
buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these
sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter's Fields of all
four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow
unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned
dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls,
lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds;
the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. --Chapter
111 (The Pacific) - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I parked the
car on Johnnycake Hill and opened the door to the cry of gulls. I
walked past the Seamen's Bethel and across the cobblestone street to
the whaling museum, clutching my new Modern Library edition of
Moby Dick, which I'd bought especially for the marathon. Nancy
clutched her much-annotated childhood copy, which unlike mine, had
not disintegrated in the intervening years. We approached the Lagoda
Room like pilgrims come to the holy place. I really felt some kind of
spiritual electricity linking us immediately to the readers at the
podium. Chapter 96 (The Try-Works) was in progress when we took our
seats next to an enormous jawbone.
The Lagoda Room is huge. Smack in the center is a half scale
replica of a whaling ship named the Lagoda (hence the name). Cases of
whaling artifacts and tools line both side walls. A mural depicting a
white whale in with a pod of others dominates and dwarfs everything
in the room, even the Lagoda. Part of the room is devoted to Moby
Dick: a map of the voyage of the Pequod and the voyage of the
Acushnet, portraits of
Melville and Toby Greene,
copies of various editions of Moby Dick in various languages,
copies of the Rockwell Kent illustrations... Moby Dick related
artifacts all over the museum are marked with a white whale logo and
the appropriate quote from the text. You can even take a self-guided
Moby Dick walking tour.The museum also houses exhibits
relating to New Bedford's history in
whaling and other
industries (glass, toys, etc.) and its ethnic heritage (Azores, Cape
Verde). There's a lot to take in and we definitely couldn't absorb it
all. The Lagoda Room was set up for the reading with a semi-circle of
chairs facing two podiums, on on either side of the Lagoda's stern.
Readers were from all walks of life: 3 great-great-grandsons of
Herman Melville, Congressman Barney Frank, representatives of the
Wampanoag tribe, daughters of Cape Verdean whalers, daughter of a
whaler from Bequia, Nancy's old roommate Stephen Cabral who is now an
anthropologist, an Azorean woman in a maroon velvet dress and
matching hat - who read in Portuguese, selectmen from the surrounding
towns, representatives of newspapers and tv/radio stations, just
plain Melville fans... We never got to read even though we stood by
for the whole day, because everyone showed up for their assigned
slots. Besides running into Stephen Cabral, we also ran into another
of Nancy's old roommates, Candace Leigh who is a deputy director of
the museum. I ran into an old friend as well, who was there so his
son could play on the Lagoda not for the reading at all. Turns out
he's going to quit his high tech job and take his wife and kids
sailing for a year! He wanted to know if I wanted to work on his boat
this spring - sanding and scraping and the like. I may well do that.
So the day felt like a reunion in addition to a pilgrimage. I guess
that's how pilgrimages work.
I followed along in my new Modern Library edition, enjoying the
sounds of the words. Some of the readers were excellent at expressing
the passion with their voices. I experienced something close to a
high when they were reading the chapter about measuring the whale's
bones and I realized I was leaning on a jawbone that was more than
twice my height! That and looking at the map of the Acushnet's voyage
and the Pequod's voyage and suddenly understanding the vastness of
the oceans made the day for me. And to think Melville wrote a whole
chapter on the possible decline of the whale population due to over
hunting is just mind blowing. I have to say that experiencing the
novel like this was infinitely better than when I read it 8th grade.
We subsisted on coffee and the pastries provided for the readers.
I spilled an entire cup of coffee on the floor of the Lagoda Room -
fortunately not on an exhibit - but other than that we did ok. We did
finally go out to lunch at the nearby Java Bean Cafe when we realized
woman does not live by malasadas alone. I had a cherry-almond caffe
latte with lunch. I won't do that again. At the cafe and in the
streets around the historic area we ran into many more pilgrims
clutching their copies of the book. I had no idea so many people
loved this book so much. When I stopped for gas before driving down
to New Bedford that morning, the guy pumping my gas noticed my copy
and exclaimed: "Moby Dick! I've read that 17 times!". He got
so excited talking about Moby Dick that he didn't notice there
was something wrong with the pump and it had stopped far short of
filling my tank. I would've talked to him more but I really needed
the gas for the trip. Same kind of thing happened when I bought my
new copy on Friday. I told the folks at Andover Bookstore about the
marathon and they got all excited. Then they told me the store's book
group is discussing Moby Dick this month, which is why I
couldn't find any paperback copies on the shelf. They gave me the
schedule for the book discussion.
At some point in the afternoon, we realized we had to stay til the
bitter end. As Nancy put it: "We can't leave! There are people still
alive on the Pequod!". I agreed. We stayed. It was wonderful. The guy
who read the last chapter was an incredibly expressive reader. At the
end of the day I really felt like I'd experienced something special.
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