At least I think it was.

It felt long enough to qualify as a prison sentence.

Somebody in New Texas told me it was a classic, which usually means a dead man wrote it and living people pretend to enjoy it out of guilt.

So I read it anyway.

Or most of it.

Hard to say.

Books get slippery when you’re tired, half hungry, and trying to read by bad light while something mechanical is dripping behind the wall.

Still, I got the idea.

There was a whale.

A captain.

And enough talk about whaling to make a sane man pray for the whale to win.

Melville had a powerful mind.

Unfortunately, he also had opinions about every damn thing connected to a whale.

Its skin.

Its bones.

Its head.

Its habits.

Its classification.

Its place in the universe.

By the time he was done, I felt like I had been trapped in a room with a man who had once seen a whale and never recovered.

But underneath all that, there was something real.

Ahab.

That old lunatic understood something Bat Country understands too: once obsession gets into a man deep enough, it starts eating everybody around him.

That’s the part I remembered.

Not the whale facts.

Not the ship parts.

Not the lectures disguised as chapters.

Just the simple truth that a man with one idea in his head can turn a whole crew into kindling.

That happens down here too.

Different monsters.

Same problem.

No, I’ve never hunted a whale.

But I’ve met men who would have gotten along with Ahab just fine.

And that’s close enough.