“[B]e on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.” - Moby-Dick
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Suspended high above the cliffs of California’s coast, waves crashed below as Mom’s steady voice recounted Ishmael’s tale of Queequeg, the Pequod, Ahab and The Whale. Her flashlight danced upon the nylon walls of our tent each time she turned the page. We were intermittently homeless all across the west coast after fleeing when my father threatened to kill us. Mom had had a restraining order, but a piece of paper is only as effective as the time it takes for police to arrive and correctly judge the situation. So my dad stalked us. In the months before we ran away, I would find Mom lying prone on the front porch in a sniper position with her gun. My dad held in her sights as she waited for the cops to arrive. Usually hours. I locked the front door and made lunch for my siblings, doing my best to keep them preoccupied with craft projects so they wouldn’t wander outside and risk getting caught in the crossfire of my parents’ ongoing divorce.
After we ran away, Mom tried to cheer us up with her slurred Cockney pirate impression of Captain Ahab. Her eyes still red from crying all afternoon at the beach, she punctuated the end of each day by reading another chapter. My mother was lost at sea when we ran away from my father. And we her stowaways. She read Moby-Dick so many times that when I turned the angsty age of thirteen, I knew Melville’s classic by heart.
Always on the move, in fear that my dad would find us and kill us as he had promised, we always ran to a new body of water. Lake Powell, Virgin River, Salish Sea, Pacific Ocean. I plunged into their liquid arms and threw my preteen body against the glassy walls of hollow waves. I found respite in nearly drowning and giving up control over anything. Humboldt County’s waves pummeled me under, washing my mind clear of every fear and worry. My family was the Pequod with its broken masts rattling with whalebone. My father Ahab, and I, The Whale. I swallowed salty water, offering my limp anorexic body to whatever forces could decide a fate for me. Any fate at all. I wanted to become inconsequential. Pushed down into the sand as another wave crested, I thought of how the Pacific was named in 1520 by Ferdinand Magellan because of how peaceful he thought it looked.
Mom read to us by flashlight on the cracked clay banks of Lake Powell where she nearly died of sun poisoning in our red Coleman tent. The roar of speed boats and yachts racing across the manmade lake drowned out the sound of my mother’s fevered whimpers as I dabbed aloe vera on her festering blisters. I stepped around an army of ants to dip a T-shirt in the lake’s water. Folding the cool damp cotton to her forehead, I reassured Mom that her fever hallucinations were not real. She recovered a few days later and decided that we should drive somewhere with trees. Somewhere that the sun does not kill you. She closed her eyes in terror and gripped the steering wheel with a cigarette balanced between her delicate white knuckles as we drove along the steep ridges of the Grand Canyon. I screamed when she veered into the other lane because her eyes were closed. “Let me drive!” I cried. “No!” she screamed back at me and jerked the wheel across the yellow line. She relaxed as we coasted through the cliff tunnel built high above Zion’s Virgin River. It was magnificent. My brother and sister and I pressed our faces to the glass, gazing down at the valley below. Gasping each time we passed by a “window” blasted into the mountainside. A few days later, I almost drowned. I jumped in as the river’s current pulled my sister under. Coughing and breathless, I stared at the glassy water slip over the rock, transfixed. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want my little sister to die. The next day I screamed from the riverbank as a water moccasin swam beside my sister’s head. “You’re teasing!” she laughed. The snake slithered across the surface of the water. It gracefully raised its head to sniff her hair with its delicate tongue. I held my breath and my sister continued laughing, thinking I was pantomiming fear. Deciding better on it, the snake turned away from Annie’s ear. It writhed toward a gaping maw of tree roots that dangled above the opposite bank. And disappeared.
Exhausted from living nomadically on the run with three children, Mom was finally asked for help. Very selectively, she told her family details of the mafioso husband she had unwittingly married. We fled to my aunt and uncle’s house in the rolling hills near Folsom Prison where we slept side-by-side in a walk-in closet. “Like sardines,” Mom smiled hopefully and snuggled beside us to read as we fell asleep in the closet. It felt like we were in the hull of a ship, insulated by coat hangers swaying heavy with my uncle’s dress shirts. My younger siblings’ tired eyes blinked heavily. Hours later I yelped like Queequeg, waking in alarm. My brother lurched his body out of the closet, his foot stamping painfully into my kidney. I laid awake, waiting for him to return back to the hull of the closet.
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“Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries -- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” - Moby-Dick
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I pressed the phone to my ear and gazed out the window at a robin. “The quarantine reminds me of sailing. Like staring out a porthole,” I told my friend.
“Not for me,” she said, “I was always in such close quarters with the crew when I sailed. Never so alone like this.”
“That makes sense,” I agreed, remembering when I sailed alone in a skiff near Vancouver Island as a teenager, unable to keep up the solo endurance for more than a few hours. With the exception of kayaking or sailing a small dinghy, boats are densely social places where it’s impossible to get any privacy. When crewing a ship, a single miscommunication can lead to everyone’s death. “I started reading Moby-Dick again,” I told her. “I’m sure I’ve read it a hundred times at this point, but it seems fitting for a pandemic somehow. Moby-Dick always brings me comfort in uncertain times.” We talked about the serene loneliness of the ocean and the abrupt isolation of sheltering from a pandemic. I hung up the phone. A robin flitted outside the window. I opened my book and turned the page, burying my worries in the lilting cadence of Melville’s verse.
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I instinctively reached for Moby-Dick and began reading it to my family when the coronavirus quarantine began. It brought back preteen memories of Queequeg’s fierce empathy, the jovial rhythm of Ishmael’s wordiness, feeding laurel leaves to banana slugs with my brother and sister on the coast, and watching rays of sunlight filter through the cathedral of trees. The California Redwoods were the first place where I felt safe, hiding from my dad deep in the forest.
So much has been written about Moby-Dick. I scarcely feel qualified to contribute anything noteworthy to the Melvillian canon without a PhD trailing behind my name. But The Whale always brings me comfort in times of uncertainty. And each time I read it, it tells me something new. Like a new wave cresting its own unique shape, I watch my states of panic rise and fall. Like Ishmael, I do not want to be a helpless passenger, lost in a purposeless doldrum state of melancholy. Nor do I wish to be Ahab, struck insane with abject rage. I choose to be water instead of the Pequod vessel. I embrace uncertainty in the face of fear. And sometimes, I feel hopeful. With each anxious breath, I choose to be The Whale.