Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

A motorcycle swerves on the other side of the road. It comes close enough to alarm my father and to break my concentration. The Doppler effect, I think, listening to the engine scream lower and lower as it disappears. But it doesn’t really disappear. It just leaves my field of vision, temporarily.

  My mother catches my eye: Be strong for me. Be strong for me. This silent chant fills the car. There is something to be said for the fact that my father cannot hear a thing. My mother’s thoughts come in waves, pulling me towards her like a tide: I love you. I love you.

  7 S AM

  You are not going to believe this, but when I was a kid my father had this old radio upstairs in the barn that didn’t work, and I always figured if we ever got it going we’d hear all those old radio things: Amos and Andy, Pepsodent commercials, fireside chats. I imagined the voices would crackle like lousy phone connections, swallowing their own syllables. I used to bug my father daily to twist a green wire around a yellow one, or to poke at the huge pitted speaker, but he’d tell me to do whatever else I was supposed to be doing and that was the end of that.

  My dad was almost fifty when I was born, and this radio was a thing from his heyday, I don’t know, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. It looked just like you are picturing it: large, wooden carved, slick shiny mahogany inlaid with brass, a speaker bigger than my face, a dial that was cracked by a fall. My father, knotted, patient, would follow me up to the hayloft to the ledge where the radio sat, impressive as a contemporary jukebox. I begged him to tinker with it, to make it run as he had the tractor and the hand-pump (he was like that), I begged because I wanted to hear his story.

  My father had told me time and time again he had no patience for electric things, as he called them. He told me to put my time to better use. But this radio, it had mystery. What it was doing in a hayloft, I don’t know.

  When I was fourteen I took a book on electronics out of the library and began to fidget with all the black and red snaked wires I could find in my house. I became fascinated with tangles. I took apart my alarm clock and put it back together. I took apart the telephone and put it back together. I even dismantled the conveyor belt we used to sort the apples for market. I began to wonder about the insides of other things. I did all this without attracting the attention of my father. Then I removed the back panel of the radio one Sunday and, scared of going further, left it right next to the radio for the next day.

  But that was the night that the apples began to rot. It was the strangest thing. We had a hundred acres, and this disease, it was a plague, really, spread from east to west, slowly, hitting about twenty acres overnight, our best trees. We spent the next day spraying and pruning and trying all the other tricks in the book. The second night, the Macouns began to fall from the trees. My father took up smoking, which he’d quit. He checked the balance in the savings account. In the middle of the night I sneaked up to the hayloft. I lay in the piles of dry grass and timothy, imagining the Big Band swing sounds, the sweet Andrews Sisters, filling the arched roof and settling over the pickled beams. Then I screwed the back plate onto the radio.

  Don’t expect miracles, we lost half our crop that year. It had nothing to do with the damn radio; it was a parasite whose scientific name I have forgotten. At fourteen, what did I know? Little white things, like potato bugs, only more deadly. When my parents moved to Florida six years ago I had the radio fixed. I was twenty, I still expected to hear Herb Alpert, and I got Madonna. I laughed when I heard her, garbled, like an old gramophone.

  It had nothing to do with the apples, did I say that already?

  8 O LIVER

  (From an article Oliver sits down to write for the Journal of Mammology:)

  I hope they never come back.

  Detailed analysis of humpback whale songs from the low- to midlatitude waters of the eastern North Pacific (Payne et al., 1983) and the western North Atlantic have shown that the songs change rapidly and progressively over time, obeying unwritten laws of change.

  Previously, humpback whales were thought to sing only during the winter months, when they occupy low-latitude wintering grounds, and during migration to and from these grounds ( Thompson et al., 1979 , and others). Our observations between June and August in the high-latitude feeding area of Stellwagen Bank seemed to confirm these reports. In approximately 14h of recording during the mid-season, we heard only unpatterned sounds and no songs.

  She must be coming back, or she wouldn’t have taken Rebecca. But you won’t find Oliver Jones apologizing. She’s the one at fault here. She’s the one who is to blame. I still have her mark on my face.

  Until recently the only complete humpback whale songs recorded on high-latitude feeding grounds in any season were those reported by McSweeney et al. (1983) from two recordings made in southeast Alaskan waters in late August and early September. These recordings, which were the result of listening for 155 days during five summers, showed abbreviated versions of the wintering ground song of humpback whales from the eastern North Pacific, and contained the same material sung in the same order as the Hawaiian songs from the surrounding winter seasons.

  I don’t know what has gotten into her lately. She isn’t acting like she usually does. Lately she has been there when I least expect her, demanding, anticipating things I cannot give. She should know what this all means to a scientist-the hunt, the track, the thrill of it. And now. She struck me-hard.

  The strange thing: her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes-like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.

  We report here the first recordings of complete humpback whale songs on the high-latitude feeding grounds in the North Atlantic, along with evidence to suggest that a) whales apparently start singing before migration and b) singing on the high-latitude feeding grounds is common in autumn. Our observations and recordings were made near Stellwagen Bank, Massachusetts, an elongate region of shallows lying north of Cape Cod in the southern Gulf of Maine. Each year this area is occupied by a seasonally returning population of humpback whales (Mayo, 1982,3) that feeds in the region (Hain et al., 1981).

  The last time it was autumn. It was late September when she left and took the child. After the crash, when I saw her at the hospital, she looked broken, that’s the turn of phrase, like tempered glass that has been splintered. Who would have believed it: happening again. But this husband kept his promise. Oliver Jones did not hit her. She gave herself reason to leave. What was it-run it back through your mind like a cassette, get to the point where the outbreak occurred: the sting, my laughter. Then come the words, the affirmation of the past she tries to run from: like father like daughter like father like daughter.

  We described song structure using established terminology: briefly, humpback whale songs are composed of a sequence of discrete themes that are repeated in a predicable order; each sequence of themes is considered a song; and all songs sung by a single whale without a break longer than one minute make up a song session (Jones, 1970).

  I know her past and it has remained largely unspoken, but the truth is the truth. Like father, like daughter-I surprise myself-it sounds malicious. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. She strikes me, I strike her. Is it possible one can physically move a person with one’s words?

  Preliminary analysis of the recordings from the three days in autumn of 1988 shows that all three contain complete humpback whale songs. Comparisons with songs from March, the end of the winter season, show that the November songs closely resemble the song from the end of the winter season before, which agrees with the hypothesis (Jones, 1983) that songs change primarily when they are being sung and not during the quiet summer.

  Picture this: Oliver Jones, sitting on the steps in his sumptuous-San Diego home, trying to write an article for a professional journal and being distracted by headlights that pass by. Oliver Jones, deserted by his family for reasons he cannot comprehend. Oliver Jones, defending himself from a crazed wife with the power