How I Came to Hate Sailing

Orrin Onken
7 min readFeb 25, 2020

It started with Moby Dick.

I was in college and twenty years old — about the same age as Ishmael and the only age at which one can actually revel in Melville’s masterpiece. The book was assigned reading, but once I began I could not stop and plowed straight through, skipping both college classes and personal hygiene until I reached the end.

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Orrin Onken

I am a retired elder law attorney who lives near Portland, Oregon. I write legal mysteries for Salish Ponds Press and articles about being old.