Jonah never made it

In my favorite chapter of my favorite book, I encountered for the first time the name “Tarshish”.  The book is Moby Dick, that comic, tragic , profane and mystical explosion of a work which I return to every decade or so and always find fresh.  The chapter, number 9, is titled “The Sermon”, and in it the author tells of Father Mapple, the deacon of the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford, preaching a sermon on the subject of the book of Jonah.  It is Melville at the top of his craft, as sublime a bit of American prose as has ever been written, and I recommend it and the entire book to you wholeheartedly.  As Father Mapple, a former sailor and harpooner, now in the “hardy winter of a healthy old age” and long dedicated to the ministry warms to his topic he says the following:

“With this sin of disobedience in him Jonah still further flouts at God by seeking to flee from him.  He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.  He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here.  By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city that the modern Cadiz.  That’s the opinion of learned men.  And where is Cadiz, shipmates?  Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days…”

And here, courtesy of the United States Navy and orders to Naval Hospital Rota, Spain, I sit.  Cadiz appears, from where I am writing,  in misty chiaroscuro across the bay that bears its name. The air is alive with the sounds of unfamiliar birds (okay, there are some starlings and song sparrows too), and the Sunday morning breeze ruffles the leaves of trees whose names I don’t know.  Sunday in Tarshish - on the borders of the ancient kingdom of Tartessus, perhaps the origin of fabled Atlantis.  Isn’t life interesting!  

I don’t know that I’ve fled anything in particular, certainly not the Lord Most High’s order to go and preach, although I suppose that we all flee something in our past whether explicitly recalled or not.  I’ve come instead to complete something.  By the end of two years spent here I will have finished 30 years in the Navy Medical Corps - the statutory end of a military career.  That number still amazes me, or it does so until I pass a looking glass.  Seriously though, it feels like I’ve been doing this a while…but only a while, not 3 decades of my allotted span.  It has flown, or flowed, or something  and even when that inexplicably wizened face peers out at me from the bathroom mirror it’s hard to feel that 30 years have passed.  Maudlin rumination aside though, here I am to serve out the last portion of my career, to make ready for whatever is next and to spend a little time getting acquainted with old Tartessus and its surroundings.

I made my way here accompanied by my step-dog, Charlie, from San Diego this past Thursday, on a combination of commercial and chartered military flights, with only a moderate amount  of confusion, delay and anxiety.  I shan’t bore you with an account except to observe, as occurred to me during a seemingly interminable wait for bus transportation at a Virginia Beach hotel, that the military does a superb job of preparing one to go to arbitrary places at arbitrary times and to wait there with only vague expectation of relief.  It is superb training for life, and once indoctrinated one becomes as one enlightened.  What doth it profit one to worry and fret and importune the heavens?  Be satisfied that you are where you are meant to be, and that no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  It’s all about letting go.

My wife, my high-school age son, and my basenji  - 27 pounds of delightful curly tailed wickedness named Khufu -  will follow in a few weeks as final exams (for the boy) permit. My first task therefore is find us a house, with a dog-appropriate yard, near the base, and I shall be embarking on that in the next weeks.  After that there will be settling into the demands of doing anesthesia in a small overseas military hospital - my third time in that particular role - as well as jumping in to assist with whatever administrative stuff I can help out with.  But as time permits, I can’t wait to get out and explore this fascinating area.  So much stuff I’m interested in intersects at this peninsula.  Here are some of the earliest cave paintings known; the remnants of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans; a few traces of the Visigothic kingdom; the rich heritage of Al-Andalus; the complicated legacy of the Reconquista and everything implied by the fateful year 1492; the Spanish Armada; the battle of Trafalgar; Wellington’s Peninsular Campaigns; the Spanish Civil War…and I’ve only scratched the surface!

If you’re interested, my hope is to limber up some creative writing muscles not much used since the days of “Djohn’s Djibouti Djournal”, my fitfully maintained account of a deployment to the Horn of Africa some years ago, and to give something of an account of our time here.  So, if you would care to join me for an irregularly irregular series of reflections on my experiences here in Spain, please be my  very welcome guest.  Let’s make the voyage to farTarshish that Jonah never completed, and see what revelations might yet await his arrival.  Vaminos!