`Wedded For Ever'

The sky above the cloudiest city in the United States was blank and blue on Saturday as we cruised Elliott Bay, the blue-green harbor around which Seattle is built. We stood on the top deck of the tour boat admiring the skyline, the ships and the sense of immense, concentrated wealth. I began the one-hour tour with Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break” clanging in my head but soon moved on to a grander work from the 19th century.

A crew member on the P.A. system was our guide. His spiel was boosterish but studded with factoids, as they’re known. For instance, the tallest building in Seattle, the 76-story Columbia Center, is home to more lawyers than all of Japan. Casually, our host noted that Seattle was formally settled on Nov. 13, 1851, when Arthur A. Denny and company arrived and stayed, becoming the first permanent white settlers.

I had to double-check but that date sounded familiar. Sure enough, one day later, on Nov. 14, 1851, Harper and Brothers in New York City published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale – the first American edition. Robert Bentley of London had published an English edition a month earlier. What to make of this? It’s an amusing and meaningless near-convergence of events, nothing more, the sort of thing one thinks about while pondering the blue-green waters of Elliott Bay. As Ishmael says:

“Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”