Moby Dick and Me

Perhaps I have always believed in the great value, even the sanctity, of books.  Certainly it has been so ever since I read my first one at the age of six, when my aunt gave me the Landmark series edition of The Wright Brothers.  I grew up to become an English teacher, figuring that any profession that allowed – required, even – me to read novels and poetry was without doubt one I should pursue.  After all, in college I read all of Moby-Dick.

By 1970 I had taught English for three years in a small day school in Evansville, Indiana, and taken a year’s leave after the second one to do graduate work at Indiana University.  That year was spent reading more wonderful books and studying in a linguistics class to discover the inner mechanics of language, courtesy the theories of Noam Chomsky.  In the fall of 1969 I rolled back into Evansville for my third year, with a new Master of Arts in English and a slightly used white GMC Carryall, which had been owned by the University’s athletic department to transport small teams to competitions.

There was a television program that year called Then Came Bronson, starring Michael Parks.  Bronson rode a motorcycle and traveled all over the place, rootless, questing for something.  Wherever he stopped, he bumped into new people and got involved with them, usually helping them through a rough patch.  For some reason, and not simply the motorcycle, I was captivated by the concept. I could do this, I thought.

So in June, 1970, I left Evansville and the school, on good terms with everyone. I spent the summer performing work on the Carryall.  It had a name by then, Moby Dick, natch.  As I explained to anyone who stood next to Moby long enough, he was big, white, and a whale of a deal.  A friend lettered Moby Dick on the driver’s side door, in gothic script.  Another friend helped install curtains.  I built a platform bed behind the driver’s seat.  Underneath were spaces for clothes, books, a typewriter, and a Coleman stove.

Moby, Me, and Two Young Friends

So I decided to do a Bronson:  to wander across the country, seeing whatever I could.  And I would write about it.  Approaching a fledgling weekly newspaper (for which my sister set the type), I offered to send them a short column each week about the adventures Moby and I were experiencing.  Maybe someday it might even make a book.

Moby and I left Maine in September, and eventually “Moby Dick and Me” began appearing in the Brunswick News.  It ran until the paper’s untimely collapse.  That wasn’t my fault; remember, it was a fledgling newspaper.  But I kept up the writing, sending pieces home so my family could hear about my travels.

Here is a piece from late in the trip.  It is particularly important today, for it eventually concerns the same city where these words are presently being written:  Long Beach, California.  Jane and I moved here a year ago.

Moby gazing intrepidly down a questionable section of the Pacific Coast Highway

 Long Beach, California, March 2, 1971:  Moby and I left Nogales, Arizona, heading northwest, and underwent a few minor adventures.  First, we stopped at Rio Rico, a town presently being built out of nothing but desert by the General Acceptance Corporation, a Florida-based development operation.  While I was in Mexico City, a young woman working for GAC, spotting me as an American, had picked me up on the street and treated me and a number of other gringos to a lunch and a tour of the Teotihuacan pyramids.  Of course they gave a big pitch on their project, a city they entitled “Rio Rico,” i.e. “Rich River.”  (They said that an underground river ran beneath it, and this water source made it rich.)   So, when I got nearby, I felt some small obligation to visit the place.  GAC is carving a 55,000-acre tract north of Nogales with plans for about 60,000 houses, six schools, shopping centers, town buildings, and recreational areas.  “The key to the future, young man,” said the salesman I talked with, “is planned, orderly development.”  I have to say, though, that about 54,850 of those acres of Rio Rico so far look a lot like plain old desert.

[Update: I just searched for a Florida development concern called General Acceptance Corporation but could find none, although the GAC name exists today as a consumer finance company located in Bloomington, Indiana.  As far as Rio Rico is concerned, the city does exist today, with a population of 18,962. There are six schools, as promised. Sadly, it is ranked #1 on the list of “Top 101 counties with the highest Particulate Matter” in Arizona by City-Data.com.  “Planned, orderly development” seems to have stalled; not many of those 60,000 houses ever got built.]

Further on, about thirty miles west of Tucson, we met unplanned, disorderly development in the form of Raymond O. Walker.  Ray, a widower and a disabled veteran, has taken his pension and retired to two-and-a-half acres of Arizona desert.  He lives in a trailer with two cats and ten dogs, seven of which arrived recently and unexpectedly.  A devout packrat, he has stacked huge piles of junk all over his lot: cars, gas tanks, crates of nuts and bolts, radios, televisions, Frigidaires.  He has some welding equipment that he plays with, and he regularly goes on week-long toots, emptying a steady progression of bottles of Lowenbrau.  Ray and I sat up drinking Lowenbrau and playing our harmonicas.

A couple days later, having driven through the tiny town of Why, Arizona, Moby and I crossed into California.  In Escondido, we saw a sign reading “Casa de Dios – Home for Senior Citizens.”  We wondered how comfortable a senior citizen would feel living in God’s house.  Might seem like He will stroll into the room at any moment to drag the citizen away from the Bingo and up to heaven.

Finally, we stopped in Long Beach to visit Howard McGovney, one of the motorcyclists we met on the ferry from La Paz to Mazatlan.  Howard runs a marine insurance agency in Seal Beach. He invited me to stay on his boat at the Long Beach Marina.

[Update:  Shortly after we moved to Long Beach in December, 2017, I recalled Howard’s kindness, and did a search for him.  I was disappointed to learn he had just died, on May 2, 2018.  He was ninety-six, so I have to believe he had had, as Reynolds Price has written, a long and happy life.]

Long Beach is the new home of the Queen Mary, that retired grande dame of the Cunard Line.  Moby and I drove out to see her at her recently acquired permanent docking facilities on Pier J in Long Beach Harbor.  The Queen casts an impressive shadow indeed.  She has an overall length of 1019.5 feet.  In her prime she could accommodate 1957 passengers, not to mention 1174 officers and crewmen.  Her gross tonnage was 81,237.

After twenty-five years of passenger service and six of war duty, the Queen has been settled at Long Beach.  Using money from city-owned oil holdings, the city is converting the ship into a marine museum/hotel complex.  The museum, designed in part by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, will occupy the lower decks and engine rooms.  The hotel, convention hall, shops, restaurants, and bars will be located above, on the top six decks.  The city anticipates that the Queen Mary will attract 2,500,000 tourists a year.

Long Beach’s development program has run into occasional snags.  Back in 1967, when the ship first arrived from the Atlantic, union disputes kept her out of drydock for more than six weeks.  The city last year came under attack from state officials, who want more of its oil revenue to go into California’s coffers and less into the Queen.  And last July the Diner’s Club, then the master lessee of the hotel complex, broke its contract with the city, an action which has resulted in a 139-million-dollar lawsuit.  Meanwhile a new lessee remains to be named.  Despite these problems, however, the Queen Mary arrived last week at Pier J and now plans to open her gangways for tours this April.  Her development, if not exactly planned or orderly, seems to be progressing with a kind of stately inevitability, as befits a lady of her size and situation.

[Of course, the Queen is still very much a part of Long Beach.  Jane and I have had a couple of dinners aboard her, and they were delightful.  And when we look out our balcony from our Ocean Boulevard apartment, we can see her in all her glory, still stately and still inevitable.]

The Queen Mary, as seen from our balcony