A couple of weeks ago, Michaela and I were on the Oregon Coast,
camping at a state campground on the beach, next to Cape Lookout. While there, we
walked along the strand of beach - about five or six miles one way - from Lookout
to the next cape and the small town of Netarts. So, about a ten or
twelve-mile turnaround. It was raining. A light rain, as if we were moving
inside a cloud, water drops floating in the air in front of us, but there was
visibility of at least a half mile. Grey sky, grey waves, and the mosaic of
grey foam on the grey swells. Because the sunlight was filtered through so many
layers of grey, the light seemed to have no source, sometimes looked like it was
rising from everything.
And seals appeared, fishing. As they do (The last time we
saw seals was when we lived in Wales, almost six years ago). Their black heads
rose out of the swells, looked around, noted the two figures on the beach - the
only humans on the entire strand - black eyes curious for a few seconds, then
sank beneath the surface, to do some more hunting. Every so often, we could see
the dark figures spinning, sailing, inside a rising wave - so different from
the gravity-heavy bodies on land.
On the third day, it began to rain - real rain. Hard, cold
balls of rain, beating the tent, beating the car, beating the surrounding
trees. Being high desert creatures, we could handle the fog, the rain that
seemed to hang in the space between the red cedars, suspended in the perpetual grey light, (maybe causing the grey
light), but the hard rain was too much. We took down the tent and escaped down
the coast, south, to a motel perched on a cliff in Lincoln City, a small
tourist/fishing town.
Sightings
Standing on the balcony that first evening, watching waves
crash into a group of rocks about twenty yards out from the sand, seals once
again appeared; three heads, rising out of the waves, twisting this way and
that, their mermaid-dog eyes scanning the surface around them, then dipping
back below. It was funny, how we knew that they were fishing, or playing, or
both, chasing fish or prowling the bottom for crabs, but each time they
disappeared, it seemed like they were sinking back into a great mystery. As if
they were shadows inside the mind, appearing suddenly, speaking words in some
ancient language, the language of stones or trees, then sinking back into
oblivion. We know that oblivion, that void, belongs to us, that it's part of
our own mind, but it seems alien somehow, distant, like the light from the Andromeda
galaxy. There's no word for it. Why not call it Mystery.
We watched the seals move south until they were behind the
group of rocks, then, suddenly out the swell, right behind the rocks, a huge
body emerged, mottled, with a long snout. It turned on it's right side,
exposing half of its massive flank/belly, then slipped back beneath the waves.
For a few seconds afterwards, there was a huge black dorsal fin cutting the
surface, rivaling the size of some of the rocks nearby, and then it was gone.
We both looked at each other - what the hell had we just seen? At first, when I
first saw the length of that creature, I thought "White Shark"
because it rose in the place we last saw the seals. But there was no furious
churning in the sea, no blood on the surface. And the dorsal fin was black. How
could it be black if it was a white shark? Then we realized, at the same time,
that we had seen a gray whale. A baby - because it looked like it had been
"only" about twenty or twenty-five feet long. What we thought was the
black dorsal fin, was one of the tail-flukes as it plunged back below the
surface. The gray whale does not have a dorsal fin.
We were stunned, giddy as children. Then, seconds after the
baby had gone below, a larger whale surfaced nearby, still only about twenty
yards off the shoreline, and blew a large heart-shaped plume of spray into the
air. The long black back glistened, rolled, and then, it too, was gone. After
that, we saw a few other plumes further out, more rolling backs. We were
pointing, shouting, suddenly five-year's old, fresh-eyed, goofy, and full of
wonder. Call it an encounter with that almost useless word Mystery - when we are face to face with something that we can't hold,
contain, that's happened too quick for the mind to categorize into something
familiar.
The waves battered the rocks, grey foam became grey birds,
merged with the failing grey light. Soon, we could see a few orange lights through
the cloud bank - trawlers or cargo ships. And the lights on a cape further to
the south came into focus through the flying fog. It reminded me of my years in
Belgium - the incredible beauty of eerie pink streetlights trying to cut
through the endless night fog. When I went out walking in the dark, the water
would collect on my eyelashes, run into my eyes, and turn the soft halos into
sharp lines, striated pink and orange, so that the lights resembled the iris of
an imagined alien eye. Glowing eyes in the night. As we looked down the coast
that night, the vapor blowing off the sea into our eyes, the lights became
striated in the same way…
The Gray Whale
The next day, after exploring some tide pools further down
the coast (around Devil's Punch Bowl) and experiencing, open-mouthed, the merciless
battering of waves against massive monoliths (Seal Rock), we ended up at the Whale
Watching Spoken Here Interpretive Center at Depoe Bay. The center - a small,
square, white building which sits out from the sea wall on the bay - is a
state-run facility designed to teach people about the many different types of
whales that pass by the Oregon coast. Just inside the door is a dry-erase board
that lists sightings of various whales over the last year. Because it was
closing, we quickly used the bathroom, then grabbed a brochure on the Gray Whale.
What did we know about the Gray Whale? Nada.
The Gray Whale is the most common whale seen from shore
along the west coast. It gets its name from the mottled color pattern. Some of
the pattern is present at birth, but most of it is caused by barnacles growing
in the skin or de-pigmented areas where barnacles have once been. The reach up
to 45 feet in length (longer than a school bus!).
The blow sprays up nearly 12 feet high and expels 400 liters
of air. Gray whales usually surface every 45 seconds as they swim, but will
often stay under for three to five minutes when they are eating. The eastern
pacific group of Gray Whales (there is a dwindling group on the western side of
the Pacific, off the Siberian coast) makes the longest migration of any mammal
on earth - from the Baja Peninsula in Mexico (where they give birth) to the Bering
Sea, off the Alaska Coast, and back. The round-trip migration is 10,000 miles
(16,000 km). They cover the entire migration pattern very close to shore,
staying in shallow water. There is speculation that they navigate by keeping
surf noises to one side or the other. No one really knows.
Because of this consistent pattern, it was easy for whalers
in the nineteenth century to hunt them down, from their calving lagoons all the
way to Alaska. In the 1850's it was said that navigation inside San Diego Bay
was judged hazardous because of so many breeding whales. But by 1873, the
whales had been so depleted that most of the shore whaling stations along the
west coast had been shut down. During the rest of the century, whaling continued
inside Mexican lagoons, until the Mexican government closed whaling down in the
early 1900's. What happened in the twentieth century is surprising: full
protection was granted to Gray Whales in 1937 by the League of Nations, and in
1946 by the International Whaling Commission. The Gray Whale recovered
sufficiently that it was taken off the endangered species list in 1994.
Vision
That evening we stood on our motel room balcony again and
scanned the grey ocean. There was a cloud bank about a half-mile out that
shifted with the wind. Every so often, we could see blue sky through the bank.
And whales began surfacing again! Heart-shaped blows beside the rocks, further
out to sea, to the south, to the north. We were ecstatic, pointing, laughing.
Because we'd read that the whales come up for air every three or five minutes,
we predicted where they would rise again, jumping up and down like birthday
party kids when we predicted correctly.
All this time, while we're sighting whales (at least 15 that
evening), down below, on the motel grass, next to the cliff, there was a man
sitting in a chair, wearing a hoodie to protect his head from the blowing wet
cold, drinking from a thermos, staring and tapping at his smart phone. He never
once looked out at the ocean. It was a strange experience - the juxtaposition
of the whales surfacing, blowing spray, disappearing, us dancing and pointing
and yelling, and the man in the chair staring at his cellphone. Every once in a
while, he'd put a bud in his ear and begin a conversation with someone on the
other end.
Whales continued to surface, to slip back below the surface,
monstrously long black backs rolling between waves, and he never once looked
out to sea. Had he seen this migration so many times in his life that he was no
longer impressed? No, I don't think he ever knew they were there. Would we have
been just as ignorant and oblivious if we hadn't seen the baby the day before?
Later that night I began thinking of what it takes to
preserve the world as it is. One third of all wild species is projected to be
extinct by the twenties. And I thought part of our ability to do something to
help alleviate the coming terrors of climate change, to slow down mass
extinction, has to do with our ability to first see what's there. To preserve what we've got left, we must be able to connect
it to our own lives, our own bodies - to viscerally feel that there is a world
out there, beyond the confines of our house or apartment walls, outside the
million occupations and delights of the net, beyond our network of friends or
business acquaintances and their concerns…and that we are an intricate part of
it.
Our bodies are from
this earth. Nowhere else. Our eyes developed from a red spot organelle with
light sensitive crystals in the euglena (a single-celled micro-organism)
wriggling around in the first sea, allowing it to turn towards light, creating
the ability to discern light from dark. The euglena is one of our ancestors. To see is not just about visual perception, but also about
vision. I mean the word vision here as "the act or power of
imagination." The ability to understand and feel that we are connected -
to the Euglena, to the Gray Whale - and that we contain much of earth's evolution
within our bodies (and so our brains…and so our thoughts…).
To see is the ability to understand that what happens
to the rest of the earth will happen to us. To
see is to acknowledge that we have started dealing with climate change much
too late to stop much of the destruction. But to see is also the ability to take in the history of the Gray Whale…and see that something can be done. Something
WAS done. Gray Whales on the west coast of North America did not disappear
forever. It took a long time, almost a century, but they came back from
near-extinction. To see is the acknowledgment that we need to be in it
for the long haul.
And when they all die
out…
Almost everyone I know feels unsettled. A growing unquiet
has been developing over the last two decades. We can't help but feel that
something is wrong. Amiss. The more that goes missing in the world, the more we
feel something missing inside us. Because we are so a part of this earth (I'll
say it again: our bodies share DNA with almost everything else on earth), I
think the more animals and plants become extinct, the more holes develop in the
human psyche. Back in the mid-noughties, I had this horrifying idea that our
dreams are intimately connected to all the creatures of the earth - especially
those that prowl at night and those that move in the deepest depths of the sea
(with their strange phosphorescent lures). And I thought: "If they die out,
we will cease to dream…" And
everyone knows what happens when a person is deprived of REM dream sleep - they
go mad.
It doesn't matter whether this is true or not. The idea is pointing
to an actual reality: as mass extinction continues and the waters rise in some
places and the water disappears in others, and parts of the ocean die, human
consciousness becomes more desperate, full of terror, and so narrows its focus
- to a child-like ideology or a blinkered, one-dimensional life…or a tiny
screen. It's a kind of madness.
Mystery
In 2010, a Gray Whale was sighted in the Mediterranean, off
the coast of Israel. In 2013, another one was sighted off the Namibian coast. Some
Scientists think they might have been trying to repopulate old breeding grounds
that have not been used for centuries (they were once plentiful in the North
Atlantic). They both may have crossed from the north Pacific to the Atlantic
via the opened-up North-west Passage (due to melting of Arctic sea ice).
And then there was the case of one traveling 22,000
kilometers from the west Pacific to the east, during a six-month period in 2011
and 2012. The whale known as Varvara (Barbara) made her way from her whales'
primary feeding grounds off Russia's Sakhalin Island all the way across the
Pacific Ocean to Baja, Mexico and back again. Again, there's speculation about
why, but scientists don't really know what's going on.
After I read these reports I returned to those evenings, standing
on the balcony of the motel in Lincoln City, pointing and laughing at the great
plumes of spray, sighting something that is mostly out of sight, beneath the
surface, scooping sections of the bottom, filtering the mud from the amphipods (shrimp-like animals) with baleen, worlds within worlds down there...and the four strange finger bones inside the
flippers...and the strange finger bones pointing at the whale…
What we don't know
could fill the universe…and does.
Whales Weep Not!
1885 - 1930
They say the sea is
cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of
all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the
wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive
beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the
sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow,
there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!
And they rock, and
they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the
seven seas,
and through the salt
they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics
tremble they with love
and roll with
massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull
lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed
of the sea,
as mountain pressing
on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward
roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches
strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the
soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s
fathomless body.
And over the bridge
of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning
archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels
of bliss
from him to her, from
her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales
in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of
whales in the waters, old hierarchies.
And enormous mother
whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with
strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales
gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger
threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves
like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their
huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens
in the sea, in the salt
where God is also
love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the
wife of whales
most happy, happy
she!
and Venus among the
fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay,
delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female
tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy
blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
Notes:
Books:
Gray
Whales: Wandering Giants by Robert H. Busch
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