Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

Windy pulls a bottle out of his pocket-cough medicine-and offers me a swig. I shake my head, and lean back against the bubbled bow of the little boat. Zodiacs tip at the drop of a hat, but I manage to strip and get the wet suit over my body. Windy watches me out of the corner of his eye. “Getting a little thick around the middle, Oliver?” he says, patting his own ribs. “Goddamned cushy California jobs.”

  “Fuck you,” I say good-naturedly. “Tell me about this whale.”

  “Her name is Marble. White markings on her neck and her fluke. Three years old. Got herself all tangled up in a gill net some asshole left behind.” He squints, and adjusts the rudder to the left. “I don’t know, Oliver. It took us two days just to find her out here. She’s testy and she’s tired, and I don’t know how much longer she’ll hold on. I’ll tell you this,” he says, “I’m glad you’re here. If I’d known you were back in Massachusetts, I would’ve called you in a minute.”

  “Bullshit. You hate it when I steal your thunder.”

  Windy and I discuss our intended course of action. The most pressing problem is knowing where exactly the gill net has become entangled on the whale. Windy’s primary observation-“around the jaw”-isn’t precise enough. Once this has been determined, it will be much easier to cut away the net. The assessment, however, is the most dangerous aspect of a whale rescue: one slap of a fluke or a fin is deadly. Last year, in northern California, a colleague was killed when he dove beneath a whale to determine the points of entanglement.

  As we get further away from the Massachusetts shoreline, I begin to feel the prickling to which I am accustomed; the heady excitement of the unexpected. Few humans have seen it, the look in the eyes of a beached whale one has redirected towards the black ocean. Few humans understand that relief transcends verbal communication; that gratitude is not limited to our genus and species.

  I spot the second Zodiac before Windy and direct him towards it. Four students are crowded into the little raft, along with Burt Samuels, a biologist who is getting too old for this. Twenty years ago, this man would command us to scrub sea lion shit from decaying study tanks and we would jump at his beck and call. And now we are defining the pace.

  Marble rolls miserably on her side, feebly fanning the water with her dorsal fin. One of the students calls out to Windy-apparently three whales have been hovering nearby, waiting to learn the fate of Marble. One circles closer and sidles up to Marble, who rolls onto her belly. The second whale disappears beneath the water, unfurling the edges of its fluke. Gracefully, gently, it strokes Marble’s back with its tail. It caresses her several times, and then sinks and vanishes.

  “I’m going in,” I say, pulling a mask over my face. We stop alongside the second Zodiac, which is slightly larger and which has an oxygen tank, ready to go. I adjust the harness and check my gauges, and then with the help of one of the students, I sit on the edge of the inflatable boat. “On three.” The oxygen mists against my skin. I look out through the mask, that familiar perspective of being on the inside of a fishbowl. One. Two. Three.

  The rush and light of the world sizzles and then smoothes underwater. I adjust to breathing below the surface of the water; and then I blink and concentrate on finding the green gill net tangled about this massive wall of whale. I hear Marble moving, pendulous, creating unnatural currents. She sees me out of the corner of her eye, and she opens her mouth, creating a rush of seaweed and plankton from which I have to kick away.

  I circle her tail first. I move quickly and steadfastly, noting mentally where the net is tangled (right fin, clear of the fluke). I hold my breath when I swim beneath her, praying to a God I am not sure I believe in. She is over thirty feet long, and she weighs well over fifty thousand pounds. Do not dive, I whisper. For God’s sake, Marble, do not dive.

  I lie beneath her on my back, floating motionless. I know that I should get out of the way as quickly as possible, but what a view. It makes you hold your breath, such beauty. Right there, the creamy white of her belly, nicked with scars and barnacles and grooved at the jaw like a zinc sinkboard.

  What I would give to be one of them. For a little while, I could trade in my legs for a massive form, a mighty tail. I could run with them along the mountains of the ocean, calling out, understanding. I could sing in the quiet of night with absolute certainty that there would be someone waiting to hear me. I could find her; I could mate for life.

  With three sharp kicks of my fins I swim up to Marble. Keeping my distance, I mark where the gill net has tangled in her mouth, caught no doubt across the baleen. I do not think we will be able to cut it entirely without compromising our own safety. Most likely we will have to rip the net so that she is at least free, and then Marble will have to adapt. Whales have an incredible propensity for adaptation. Think how many have spent years living with broken harpoons in their thick skin.

  When I surface I am pulled into the second Zodiac by two young marine biology students. I roll onto my stomach on the floor of the boat, which shivers like jello with every twitch of Marble’s body. I pull the mask off, unhook the harness with the tank. “It’s tangled around her right fin and pretty much woven through her baleen,” I say. Then I notice the television camera looking down at me. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s okay, Oliver,” Windy says, “Anne’s from the Center. She’s videotaping for our files.”

  I sit up, panting. I watch the lens zoom closer. “Do you mind?” Still dripping, I crawl into Windy’s Zodiac. I instruct the students in the other boat to start hanging buoys around the whale in any manner they can-looping, hooking, anything, just so it doesn’t hurt her any more. The idea here is to tire her out, keep her floating at the surface so that we have a chance to cut away the net. Windy and I rope a few large sailing buoys around Marble’s tail.

  “Okay,” I say, surveying the whale, now edged in pink floating balls like a decorated Christmas tree. “I want you to get the hell out of the way.” I say this expressly to Samuels, although I mean everyone in his boat. One of the students backs the second Zodiac several hundred feet away, leaving Windy and me alone alongside Marble.

  I lean out of the boat, an arm’s length away from the soft surface-of Marble’s skin. At this point she is so exhausted she doesn’t try to fight as I snip at the net with a grappling hook, leaving entire chunks of it still tangled in her baleen. “You need to get closer to her,” I say, as we approach her fin. “I can’t reach the net.”

  “I can’t get any closer without going right over her.”

  “Then go over her. Just watch your engine.”

  Windy and I argue this point, but in the long run he does move the tiny craft over the tip of Marble’s fin. I am confident that at this point she is tired enough to let us go about our business. I lean out of the boat and try to unravel the gill net.

  Suddenly I am pitched backward. Marble exhales through her blowhole, a fetid combination of stale water and algae, and whacks the edge of the boat with her fin. She hits us twice so forcefully that the Zodiac rises and pitches, on the verge of overturning. “Fuck,” Windy cries, holding onto the rubber handles on the inside of the boat. The students in the other Zodiac begin to scream, and I hear it quite clearly, as if their voices have been attached to a speaker in our boat. Then I realize our Zodiac has been thrown into the air. I am tossed onto my back, on top of Windy, who is lying face down in the boat. It is purely by chance that the inflatable raft landed face up, rather than face down, in the freezing depths of this ocean, in the nether region of a whale. “Get off me,” Windy says. He sits up gently and rubs his arm. “I told you we shouldn’t go over her.”

  “Is the engine all right?”

  “Screw the engine. Are you all right?”

  I grin as he takes inventory of his limbs. “I’m better than you,” I say.

  “You are not.”

  “Always was.”

  “Bullshit,” Windy says. He fiddles with the Evinrude and starts it again. “Where do you want to go?”

  This time, Windy approaches from the back of the whale, sneakingup between the fin and the lower half of the body. After several passes with the