New Mexico Sunset: April 20, 2011
Photo by Emily A. Lee
April 7, 2011
Whale Whisperer
A peruser of my blogs may wonder why somebody living in the desert calls her site “A Tumbleweed Over the Deep Blue Sea.” Truth is, I love both. The US desert is less visibly crowded by human beings than seashores. It’s darned hard to live near a seashore these days. For instance, such clutter has sprung up around the area where I grew up, the south shore of Massachusetts. Not to mention the clutter that’s spread into the seas.
One drizzly summer evening in the early 1990s my family took a moonlight whale watching voyage out of Boston Harbor. Who’d suspect such a thing would help point me at the high desert of New Mexico a couple of years later? In a way, it did.
Clambering up a cleated ramp to the boat on my crutches late that damp afternoon I was accompanied by my daughter, who was six at the time, and my husband. Apprehensive, hoping that the same gritty surface on the ramp would be repeated on the decks. But it wasn’t and the crutches did what they usually do when encountering slick, smooth surfaces. They hydroplaned and in a millisecond there was I, nose pressed against the painted deck, about to receive the attention of various members of the ship’s crew. What to say? “Sounds a bit hollow when you walk on this, just checking the soundness”? How about, “Glimpsed a dolphin off the railing, got low quick for a better look”?
Pretty much anything was better than the truth -- I was an idiot for thinking I could walk on the slippery deck without trouble. Sensing the practical wheels turning in their heads, though, I figured I’d head off potential suggestions that I either come back when it wasn’t drizzly or use a wheelchair. “Gosh, who’d ever have expected it to be so slick? If you all don’t mind, I’ll just get myself into the cabin and watch from there” is what came out. Their relief was palpable. [Later two strong fellows carried me off the ship -- marginally better to my way of seeing things then than being rolled around in a wheelchair.]
What mother would want her kid stuck in a cabin when she could be out at the railing watching for flukes and breeches? Not I. So, sentenced by nobody but myself and Mother Nature to spend the three hour voyage sitting inside and missing all the excitement, I tried hard to console myself with the idea of how much fun the child and husband would be having. Out there, not worrying about slippery decks and hydroplaning crutches. Harrumph.
Amusing myself by observing the few other passengers in the large cabin, it became clear that here were the less intrepid souls -- with one exception besides myself. Especially clear when a grey faced man sat on the bench behind mine long enough to lose his cookies, wander off and leave the area with a nasty smell... I hauled myself to my feet and moved forward a couple of rows. The other reasonably intrepid soul in the area was the former lieutenant governor of the state of Massachusetts, the first woman in the history of the state to hold a constitutional office. Evelyn Murphy, wearing the inward look of a person deep in the enjoyment of not being recognized. I left her alone. .... She went on to a terrific career in academia, business, and wrote a book in 2005 entitled "Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It."
Soon enough happy calls of “Over here!” “There he goes!”, “A spout, a spout!”, “Oh, wow!” and “Dolphins!” picked up. Peering out the windows, my view was of the backs of the crowd at the bow, various arms waving towards one side. Though it was still light enough to see the water surface around us, in a short while anybody inside our dimly lighted cabin would be viewing mostly our own reflections.
I got mad. Then I got busy. Sending messages.
Animal communication, according to the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, “is any behavior on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behaviour of another animal.”
Humpbacks were out there. Those on deck could see the occasional fluke or spout above the surface. From my angle only one thing would be visible -- a breech. Clearing my mind of the smelly air, the shouts, the peaceful politician, the impinging darkness, I sensed a giant shape close by, and aimed a thought at it: “Dear whale, there is somebody here who would like so very much to see you. You are so grand, and free! How lovely it would feel to rise up out of that heavy water for a minute right... over there... Splash down and do it all again...”
This went through my mind for a minute or two. There came excited sounds from the people in front of the cabin and... Just precisely out the window where I had a fine view: A great shape rising, rising, turning, a flipper visible in silhouette against the darkening sea horizon, the sound of a roaring great splash... Another huge dark shape curving up, up, up, over the horizon, down, down, down... Silver spray and droplets everywhere, illumined by fading sun and rising moon.
To say I was stunned would be an understatement, however true it was. My dad, during my childhood, had sometimes mentioned receiving messages about loved ones from animals. Later on I moved thousands of miles away from my parents and failed to communicate often enough to soothe their concerns. Months later, during a visit home, for instance, he told me that a covey of bobwhite quail had walked up to him one twilight in the wooded area behind the family house. They lingered, pecking around as though he wasn’t close by. One glanced up at him, unperturbed. Suddenly he felt a great relief because at that moment he knew I was doing fine, wherever I was. He had not been thinking about me when he encountered the quail, either.
After the whales put on their show for me (or so I felt, anyhow), I often wondered what I could do for them. It wasn’t long before I began getting an idea that the whales were doing their best to let me, any caring people, know. That is to say, at times when I’d be resting, or nothing in particular was in my mind, there would pop up an image of nets floating in the sea, plastic bottles, cans, water mucky instead of clear. The kinds of things that would definitely distress and even harm you if you happened to be living in that debris-filled, polluted water.
By then, fortunately, the cleanup of Boston Harbor was underway. Fishing practices in George’s Bank beyond it, changed. The governments of Canada and the United States adopted a moratorium on drilling for oil in that area. This made me feel somewhat better about the messages which continued to pop into my mind long after we’d moved to the southwest.
Some things, like Boston’s raw sewage that had been going into the sea for about a hundred years, got better, and other things, such as millions of tons of trash in the water, got worse. Worse to the point that there are now huge swirls of rubbish and sludge in Atlantic and Pacific gyres, spreading across hundreds of miles. Poisoning and killing fish, birds, marine mammals and humans alike.
When I was a kid we used to read Edward Rowe Snow's wonderful sea tales about pirate ships and sunken treasures. As one seller of his out-of-print books puts it today, "tales focusing on unusual and macabre events concerning the fate of men and ships". Now it would be better news to hear about a clean gyre than a recovered Whydah!
http://www.gyrecleanup.org/cleanup-plan/
http://www.gyrecleanup.org/
http://www.projectkaisei.org/index.aspx
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/travel-outdoors/clean-pacific-garbage-patch.html
A reading recommendation for those who also love the oceans of the world, history and natural history -- Patrick O'Brian's 20-volume series about the British Navy in the years during and after the Napoleonic Wars. This is sometimes referred to as the Master and Commander Series. You may end up like me, re-reading the series every couple of years!
Also, check out the dining dog video of the Dogs & Friends link page!
