Call me a schlemiel. A dolt. An unlucky bungler. Last fall, when I signed on to write a novel based on nineteenth century letters for my MFA thesis, I began by reading Moby-Dick. I’d always wanted to crack the cover of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, published in 1851, and I thought it might be a good way to get a feel for the time period. You cross your eyes–mine did in more than one chapter. The unlucky part? It took a long time to read it. At page 595 Ahab finally spots the White Whale. Slogging through, I had to keep putting the book down to read other things. Which turned out all right, since each chapter stands on its own. There’s even one about a blacksmith.
The point is, Melville was writing about the general time period when my great-great grandfather sailed the Atlantic Ocean from the Rhineland-Palatinate to the United States. And while people think of the novel as being about Captain Ahab’s madness, the book is clearly an examination of the prevalent whaling industry and the massacre of these creatures of the ocean, as well as the inherent dangers of the men who hunt them.
Melville pauses at one point to exclaim:
“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”
So we find ourselves in the year 2010 crying for god’s sake, be economical with your oil! Not a gallon you burn, and not only the blood of men, women, and children is spilled, but the earth’s blood as well.
When my great-great grandfather arrived in Cleveland in 1857, oil refineries didn’t exist. Rockefeller would build the first oil refinery in 1861. During the Civil War, an oil boom began, causing a huge increase in the number of oil refineries in Ohio and Pennsylvania. From whale oil to crude oil–if only our fuel sources didn’t stink of greed and death.