It was late October and we were up in Umegashima, climbing up to Bara-no-dan and enjoying the colors.

Elsewhere, the school teacher, Ishmael, was “growing grim about the mouth” and “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses.” Soon, “a damp, drizzly November” was playing havoc with his soul, and the deep, dark sea was pulling at him. Before he knew it, he’d committed himself to a whaling voyage—really,  a mad attempt to grasp “the ungraspable phantom of life.”

The ungraspable phantom of life. In this case, the whale, Moby Dick. The white whale, Moby Dick.

Ishmael tells us that, sometimes, “whiteness refiningly enhances beauty”—but when it’s divorced from its “more kindly associations,” and “coupled with any object terrible in itself,” it heightens terror “to the furthest bounds.”

Thus, he says, not even the “fierce-fanged tiger . . . can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.” Thus, he says, the white albatross elicits such a “pale dread.”

Finally, Ishmael says, it’s white‘s “visible absence of color” and white‘s colorless “indefiniteness” that make it capable of terrifying so. That’s why, he says, when you look up at the “white depths of the milky way,” you will feel so intensely “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe”—why you feel as if you’ve been stabbed from behind “with the thought of annihilation.”

And that’s all the explanation we need, he tells us, for “the fiery hunt” for the white whale.

Really?

Well, Ishmael, I can understand you taking the one trip. I can understand diving deep once, trying once to get a firm hold on that “ungraspable phantom of life”—but more than one trip is a bit silly, don’t you think? I mean, risk your life searching the seven seas once and you learn, don’t you, that ungraspable means, well, “ungraspable”?

So next time I hope you’ll give the white annihilation gig a miss. I mean, for you, white is so horrifying, so exasperating, so mind-boggling—why not head for where the color is?

Yeah, why not come with us next time we head for the mountains? Why not come to Shizuoka and enjoy the fall colors? We’d be glad to have you. No mind-boggling, I assure you. Just simple joy.

But just like you had to get your sea legs, you’ll have to get your mountain legs. I think it’s worth it, though.

Do you hear me? Why go looking for annihilation? Annihilation will find you soon enough. 

Just imagine this. Ahab is raging. Moby Dick has sounded, and Ahab, standing in his whale boat, his arm cocked, the harpoon aimed, waits for him to surface—waits for the white horror, “the ungraspable phantom,” the back-stabbing annihilator, to surface. Oh, the joy of murder!

But Moby Dick doesn’t rise from the dark depths. And then, out of the corner of his eye, Ahab sees, floating just beneath the surface, a single red leaf.  For a moment, he thinks he might harpoon it. But he doesn’t. And before he knows it, he’s dropped the harpoon. He’s hanging himself over the side of the boat. He’s scooping up the leaf in his hand.

“Back to the ship!” he screams. “We’re heading home! If we hurry we can catch the last of the maples!”

Yeah, yeah, I hear you chuckling. “What kind of adventure tale would that make!”

But I know you know I’m right. Do we really want to see Ahab fling his harpoon at Moby Dick? Do we really want to see the harpoon line wrap around Ahab’s neck? Is there any real fun in that? Do we really want to see him pulled down to a damp and dark death?

Isn’t he our friend, too? Wouldn’t you rather see him walking the ridge, looking across at the mountain opposite, the sun setting the colors aglow?

Give it some thought.

In the case I don’t hear from you, Ishmael, I’m sending you a photo we took during our October 26 hike. If you have to fixate on white, don’t you think you might as well fixate on it while its hooked up with its “more kindly associations”?