31. Rosalie. In her next entry, Sophie writes about how, while she was watching whales with Dock, he started to tell a story about a woman he’d known, Rosalie. Rosalie loved whales—she’d read everything about them and saw every movie that had a whale in it, and she had pictures of them all over her walls and collected little whale toys and figurines. Yet, Dock said, she’d never actually seen a whale in the flesh. So, one day, Dock arranged for him and Rosalie to go searching for whales, trading in his best fishing rod just in order to be able to pay for the boat. Right when they thought they should give up trying to see a whale and start to head back to shore, a gray whale appeared and slowly rose out of the water. Rosalie was amazed. Sophie asked what ever happened to Rosalie, and Dock responds that she married someone else.
Here, we learn something important about Dock’s past—we learn about the love of his life, Rosalie, and get the sense that losing Rosalie has greatly impacted his life. The story about Rosalie and the whale sighting shows another side of Dock: while he’s usually quiet and mellow, here he’s very talkative and passionate, recalling perhaps one the greatest moments of his life. Later, we will learn that Rosalie has played a role in directing the course of The Wanderer up the coast of North America—Rosalie essentially shapes the journey for Dock.