I suppose the modern equivalent is the school book fair. Whether it is a physical event or kids bringing home the order forms for their parents to peruse, the intoxicating nature of books can be seen from a very early age.
For me, it was the RIF program in elementary school. Reading is Fundamental was a program that allowed kids the inescapable pleasure of walking into a roomful of books and picking one out to take home FOR FREE! You got that young’uns….it was FREE. The seventies may have had environmental pollution, gas lines, Three Mile Island, and Jodie Foster playing child “prostitutes” at the movies, but it also had a magical space where a kid could pick out a book of their own choosing, without parental intervention, for free.
I was interested in whales a long time before RIF came around. Probably my interest in whales came from Mrs. Clarke at Garner Elementary School in Clio, Michigan. During rainy days or special days or whatever her motivation, Mrs. Clarke would play the reel to reel movies of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I loved Mrs. Clarke. I loved her encouragement, her kindness, and her ability to inspire kids to explore what interested them. For me, I was absolutely rapt. Maybe the other kids in class were climbing the walls, I don’t know. All I saw was an absolutely fantastical world that I wanted to be a part of.
It was midway through third grade that I was wrestling with how I could get to the ocean and what job I could do. I learned about marine biology, scuba diving, the US Navy and the Merchant Marines. By hook or by crook, I was going to get there.
As an adult with access to Youtube, I have gone back and watched the old episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. One of the episodes on whales and whaling actually showed very little of the whales, by modern standards. The video technology of the seventies just wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t until I walked into that RIF book fair that the final puzzle piece fell into place.
It was Farley Mowat’s A Whale For The Killing that did it. It was an actual grown up book, which appealed to me. It had “whale” in the title, which also appealed to me. And when the teacher overseeing the book fair stopped me momentarily and asked “are you sure that’s going to be the right book for you?” I knew it was the right book for me.
I had picked the book up and I had read the quote on the first page. Later on, I wrote that quote down several times over the years as it moved me so much:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
As a third grader, it was very heavy and I loved it. I then read the book and sobbed. I then watched the movie and sobbed even harder. It was a fight between the powerful and the powerless.
I must admit, I got a little moxie back when, quite a few years later, I read Moby Dick. Once, twice, and yet again.
I always was rooting for the whale.
Man vs. Nature. Good vs. Evil. The powerless vs. the powerful. As a third grader in Clio, Michigan in Mrs. Clarke’s class on a rainy day, I was already drawing my own conclusions.