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April 17, 2007

“Boggy, Soggy, Squitchy”

These enviable words, belonging to Herman Melville, describe Ishmael’s encounter with a certain strange painting at the Spouter-Inn (ch. 3) – and describe the effects of our weeklong nor’easter. Central Park, I hear, registered over seven inches of rain, a month’s worth falling in one day. The East Coast is boggy, soggy and squitchy indeed.
Last Thursday I sloshed down to the South Street Seaport, to join a discussion group on Moby-Dick. The Melville Gallery, on Water Street, is part of the seaport museum, and only an anchor’s throw from the very spot where Melville had set Moby-Dick in type. Much about Melville goes on down here, I’m discovering.
The weather certainly was appropriate for a maritime immersion. Strange how the environment seems to mimic whatever’s in mind: As I zagged along squitchily, the route became increasingly
Melvillian. As if to embellish the swelling downpour, the large stone fountain in City Hall Park was redundantly spouting geysers, just like a head-to-head quartet of invisible whales. The swaying lanterns at each spout resembled “yard-arms…[each] tipped with a pallid fire [ch. 119]. The bare branches of the plane trees looked like tangles of masthead rigging, manned by beady-eyed squirrels on the lookout for whales -- or worms.
The protracted rain obfuscates time and space like a shaggy grey beard a face; its long twilight confounds familiar daylight pointers and erases the horizon. The Hudson has become brim full, crashing and churning against the bulwarks, breakers sending chilling sprays over the low guardrail. The normally placid waves of the river were white-capped, as was the vaporous ocean beyond the Statue of Liberty. Pilings that before were always high and dry (haven to an endangered species of barnacles, which has halted the renovation of the pier), were all but underwater. The sky itself, mirroring the aqueous commotion, teemed with gaseous whitecaps. A few mad gulls wheeled between sea and sky. All arrayed in every hue and cry of gray.
To quote the refrain from the seaman’s song in ch. 119: “Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!”

Posted by Jane on 2:29 PM | Comments (0)