Call me Ishmael
My teen years were spent in our family's new home on Charolais Road in Kelowna, part of a new development near the Guisachan Heritage Park. What is more memorable, for me, is that one road in the subdivision was named after the developer's daughter: Rhondda Crescent.
Dear god, that poor girl likely spent a large part of her young life trying very hard to avoid letting people make the connection between her unusually spelled name and that unusually spelled street.
What prompted this memory was house hunting on Vancouver and Gabriola Islands. As is usually the case these days we have an agent watching things for us, and multiple auto-searches that e-mail us new listings. Some good, some bad, some inexplicable. House hunting is really not entirely pleasant.
Last week we heard of a place that, while not perfect, showed real potential in terms of location and price. We liked the character - though more photos would be useful - but were stopped dead by one thing: the address.
765 Captain Ahab's Terrace. If, like me, you've actually read Moby Dick, that name is beyond absurd. I'd like to believe that this was unintentional - hey, there are whales in the waters around Gabriola Island - but I also wonder of it was intended to be funny.
Wikipedia has a good description of Ahab, and you'll understand why a "Terrace" feels very wrong.
Captain Ahab is a fictional character and one of the protagonists in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). He is the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship Pequod. On a previous voyage, the white whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab's leg and he now wears a prosthetic leg made out of ivory. The whaling voyage of the Pequod ends up as a hunt for revenge on the whale, as Ahab forces the crew members to support his fanatical mission. When Moby Dick is finally sighted, Ahab's hatred robs him of all caution, and the whale drags him to his death beneath the sea and sinks the Pequod.
Needless to say, Captain Ahab's Terrace intersects with Moby Dick's Way.
Also included in this development are:
Whalebone Drive, Pequod Crescent, Starbuck Lane, Tashtego Crescent, and both Queequeg Place and Queequeg Turnabout.
On one hand, I admire the commitment to honouring Melville's classic novel and its characters, but on the other hand... what were they thinking?
