A Seperate Reality

When last we spoke, the young KWarrior had rejected the religious views of his family and his youth. But the search for Absolute Truth was still deeply rooted in my mind. Science was my tool-box. Logic was now the scale, by which all things were measured. But I was not going to be fooled again. Just because it was written in a book, even a science book, it was proof of nothng! I would not accept anything on blind faith again. The Scientific Method had rules. And the Science books in school were filled with copious violations of the method, and I questioned everything that was written down as a proof, without the principal of repeated observation being adhered to!
I was also an insatiable reader. My Senior English Teacher handed out a two page list of books (Approximately 125 titles) from which we were required to pick ten, and and read for the year. Great books. Some old, others relatively new. Steinbeck, Stoker, Dickens, Melville, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, J. Fenimore Cooper, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, George Washington Carver, Harriet B. Stowe, Abbie Hoffman, Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Sun Tsu, John A. Stormer, Robert Louis Stevenson and Geoffrey Chaucer.
By the mid-term I had read every book on the list. But I'm no speed reader. And I was curious beyond just the story being told. The facts around the story were of great interest to me. But back in 197?, there was no Information Superhighway. And if there had been, it is very unlikely that an on ramp would have existed in Podunk, North Carolina. But I had a library card and a very recent edition of The Encyclopedia Americana. So my quest for truth required a little more leg work than it takes today. However in those days I had two good legs and wasn't afraid to use them.
One good example of my quest for knowledge and truth came about after reading the Herman Melville classic "Moby Dick." It was a story of a Sea Captain on a quest to kill a whale. This wasn't your average "Free Willy" whale. This was a blood thirsty, man killing, ship wrecking, white whale. The story was filled to the brim with genuine naughtical terms. It almost required a dictionary to get through. And it was quite apparent that Herman had some practical experience as an able bodied seaman. The biggest question asked by the English teacher, "What  was the motivation behind Melville's villainy of the whale? Or, "What did the whale represent?" And literary commentators have hundreds of opinions on that subject. But only history holds the truth. Melville did go to sea as a deck hand on a Massachusetts whaling ship. But the Whale attack was not a far flung story of vivid imagination. It had roots in reality. On November 20, 1820 a Nantucket Whaling Ship named "Essex" was repeatedly rammed and sunk by a large sperm whale while the Essex was killing members of its pod. Most of the crew was lost to the sea and treachery at the hands of other survivors. And approximately three months later another whaler named Daufin found two survivors in a small boat. While a British merchant ship found and rescued others on an uninhabited island in the Pitcairns. Melville's story was strange, Yet true. So my answer to the questions, was; "Whales are sentient, intelligent creatures that were capable of revenge and grief."
Okay so maybe I was a nerd. and a hippie! But I lettered in Football, Wrestling and Baseball. I apologize to those of you who thought this was going to be a story of a person who fought the bullies and stereotyping of my outward appearances. That may be a story for another time. This story is about my quest for  TRUTH. The whole Truth and nothing but ULTIMATE TRUTH!