White whales: Maybe just leave them alone

Everyone knows Captain Ahab, but do you remember Captain Boomer?

I recently re-read Moby Dick and I feel like Captain Boomer deserves more credit for his life choices.

He appears in Chapter 100, when Ahab’s Pequod meets an English whaling ship called the Samuel Enderby. “SHIP AHOY!” cried Ahab. “HAST SEEN THE WHITE WHALE?”

Boomer, on the Samuel Enderby, held up his prosthetic arm, which was made of sperm whale bone, just like Ahab’s leg. “See you this?” he replied.

Well! That got Ahab pretty excited and he took a boat over to the Samuel Enderby to hear all about it. “SPIN ME THE YARN!” he insisted.

So Boomer told him how he was hunting whales and then Moby Dick came along in a “boiling rage” and smashed up his boat. And how in all of the chaos the barb of a spare harpoon caught his arm and ripped through it down to his wrist.

Whales: They can really mess you up. Stop hunting them already.

Then the ship’s surgeon described how he had to amputate the arm, although the story kind of went off the rails at this point because he and Boomer were joking around so much.

Ahab was getting impatient. “WHAT BECAME OF THE WHITE WHALE?” he demanded. And Boomer said that oh, he was still around, they had seen him a couple of times.

Ahab, now highly excited, asked if they tried to hunt him again and Boomer was like hahaha yeah no. “Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm?” he said.

The ship’s surgeon noticed that Ahab did not look well. “This man’s blood — bring the thermometer! — it’s at the boiling point!”

“AVAST!” Ahab roared and knocked him aside. (“Is your Captain crazy?” Boomer whispered to one of the Pequod’s sailors.)

Ahab went back to his boat in a huff and we all know what happened to him. Presumably Boomer kept doing his thing without getting dragged down to the depths of the sea by the white whale who sunk his ship.

The moral of the story is that a white whale doesn’t have to be the thing that consumes and ultimately destroys you and everyone around you.

Instead it can be the thing in your past that messed you up pretty good, but then you recovered and moved on. Just like Captain Boomer.