WHALE SONG

UNTIL 1970, WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT THEY SANG. The military knew it—while listening, ever vigilant, for the approach of Russian submarines during the Cold War, they had been hearing and recording whale song for parts of a couple of decades—but in the world above, we heard nothing, knew nothing. When the first recordings finally emerged into a non-militarized world, the power of the surprise and the beauty of the songs, more than any other factor, gave birth to the modern environmental movement, which was able to clarify an entire generation’s angst and desperation into one crystalline response, one simple storyline.

Many already understood that the slaughter going on in the whaling industry was wrong; to know now that such immense and sentient animals made such beautiful, eerie songs, and yet to know nothing of the meaning of the songs, galvanized people into a unified, sacred rage, a green rage for peace. Slowly, they wound down the great grinding bloody gears of the war machine in Vietnam, battled the whaling industry to a near stop.

Rivers in the homeland were aflame with toxic solvents, corporations were honing to the point of gargantuan excess their ability to lie, the government was as corrupted as a washed-up seal carcass seething with maggots, and yet here, suddenly, was this beautiful, haunting sound that pierced the heart—an ancient song from the ancient world, the blue shimmering world in which all life began, but from which we had been cast, or had chosen, perhaps, to abandon.

No scientist in the world will tell you that we know yet why humpback whales sing. A friend of mine, David Rothenberg, has written a fascinating book, Thousand Mile Song, which analyzes whales’ music, and has found it to be the most complicated music in the world. He and others believe that whale songs can transmit vast distances underwater (hence the title of his book) and is enthralled with the discovery that, each year—after much trial and error, and much jazz-like riffing, with different males all around the hemispheres listening to one another, then answering back, making subtle variations—every humpback whale in the Northern Hemisphere finally and simultaneously and unanimously decides on the perfect arrangement that becomes their one song for the rest of that year. Their collaboration becomes the composition they all sing, the long, complicated underwater orchestra that fills the seas and drives lonely sailors mad with longing and other emotions they—we—cannot even name.

It’s a big argument. The prevailing belief appears to be that whale song, coming almost exclusively from males, is all about sexual selection: that the “best” singers—which might sometimes be a measure of creativity or intelligence—get the “best” or most females. The only trouble with this neat and simple theory is that no one has ever observed a female whale paying the least bit of attention to a singing male. (Often when they sing, the males gather in a group and hang upside down, vertically suspended in the blue, with their enormous heads tipped down.)

The fact that no one’s ever observed females responding doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Perhaps they go away for a while and think about what they have heard. Perhaps they’re making up their enormous and complicated minds.

There is one musician in the world—at least one—who thinks the humpback whales do not sing for purposes of sexual selection—or that that is not the primary reason—nor even that all birds do, nor even all insects, but that instead there is something else in the world, something perhaps equally as large; that just as there can be a thrumming desire to procreate—a summons to carry life forward—so too is there a twin and somewhat parallel desire to create beauty, to create art.

As you might imagine, this would be a pretty hard thing to prove.

David Rothenberg is a world-class clarinetist who was educated at Harvard and now teaches philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He’s recently recorded an album on the famous jazz label, ECM, and is known by many for his avant-garde music. Featured in the BBC documentary Why Birds Sing, he’s traveled around the world, playing his clarinet to different social animals—lyre birds in Australia, beluga whales in the Arctic—seeking to insinuate, gently, his own notes into their music, participating in creative, jazz-like fashion with whatever sounds they are creating.

His is not quite the pursuit of interspecies communication but more the qualitative exploration of his theory, his belief, that if music is about art, beauty, and emotions, then there might be a place for him to participate with other species, as if treading the invisible high-wire pathways that extend from one species to the next, crossing chasms previously thought to be impassable.

It is very important to him to believe that art exists for its own sake in the world: that it does not need justification or explanation by science. I’ve come to Hawaii to listen to him play his clarinet to the whales—he’s been here once previously, and has one recording of what he believes was a whale picking up on his, David’s, blue note—repeating it, improvising and adjusting, then appearing to lose interest and moving on—but with that one note now embedded in the skein of that whale’s music, and a part of the collective song that would emerge later that year. David’s artistic offering embedded in the one song. Like a sequence of DNA, a fragment of genome, twisting and glittering in the undersea light when sunstruck, illuminating a small portion of the ocean with his own emotion.

And why? Why does DR want art and beauty to have its own stand-alone reason for being, unjustified by anything other than its own existence? He believes this with the certainty of faith—ferocious though not arrogant faith—he knows it.

If you can believe in something, doesn’t that kind of mean it’s there? And if you have faith in it, doesn’t it also mean it’s there, and surely not just in you, but in others, even if in strands and waves that have not yet been finished being woven?

The important thing, I think, is that the whales are among the largest animals in the world, swimming around right beneath our noses, singing their hearts out. You can be in a little boat out in the ocean and can even hear them below—some of the sound waves rise, spread around the boat, and envelop you, yet there is no written record of the phenomenon, no acknowledgment in any of the world’s literature, no record of it in any of the world’s oral cultures. We just didn’t know. Maybe people thought it was just the sound the ocean made, or the beautiful grinding and squealing of an immense earth rotating.

The island’s beautiful, of course, as is the water; it’s Hawaii, after all. In February and March the humpbacks gather here to give birth in the warm shallow clear waters before resuming their journey north. They will pass back through in May, bound for Alaska, where they will feed on tons of krill—a tiny shrimp-like creature that blossoms under the winter sun into swarms that stretch a mile wide sometimes. (Humpbacks, like the largest of whales, are baleen feeders; a mature humpback can measure sixty feet and weigh fifty tons.)

Barnacles form along the whales’ sides, sometimes thousands of pounds’ worth; if the whales don’t find a way to shed them, the accrued weight would eventually sink even so powerful a creature as the humpback. It’s been theorized by some that the clear and relatively sterile waters around Hawaii starve the barnacles each year so that the scutes and plates of armor fall from the whales’ skin like jewelry being shed, the scales glittering where, in places, they line the bottom in the approximate shape of the great and sentient beings that once passed by overhead.

The whales—and the island of Maui, where they linger in March, as if on vacation—attract dreamers, do-gooders, strangeness. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, they come here, interesting people, and sometimes broken people, seeking a kind of repair, seeking something. Interesting people, wherever you throw a rock.

One of the grand dreamers is Dan Opitz, a diver and full-time self-financed filmmaker, who got a loan of two hundred fifty thousand dollars to make his third film, the acclaimed and award-winning Cracking the Humpback Code—a work of luminous mystery and reverence. Opitz, who is German, first became interested in diving and cetaceans when, for his fifteenth birthday, a girlfriend bought him a ticket that allowed him to swim with dolphins. These relatively small considered acts of generosity that end up changing lives.

A big man—hulking—he doesn’t do anything small. He’s not a Buddhist, but says if he were to believe in any kind of religion, that would be it. So when Dan decided to get a tattoo, he had one of the Buddha inked onto his back, life-sized, so that if you see him walking on the beach, it looks like the Buddha is going away from you.

When I say that he is a diver, I mean he doesn’t just paddle around in the coral with a snorkel, but goes to the deepest bottom of the ocean and walks around investigating the wrecked hulks of battleships and Japanese and American bombers that were shot down during Pearl Harbor days, with undersea coral frond-forests rising tall around him, waving gently in the ocean floor’s currents, as if stirred by a breeze. The propellers on the bombers are motionless, and seemingly little is different between sky and sea, save for the long stream of silver bubbles rising to the surface from Big Dan’s lungs.

His girlfriend (a different one) is in Germany, but he can’t stay away from the island, and the whales. He has a trim little boat and goes out on the water to watch and listen for the whales as often as he can, whenever he can. Just prior to my arrival, he and David had gone out listening and recording—not clarinet-playing. Dan is a stickler for the law, a tidy precision that seems at odds with his boundlessness. The Marine Mammals Act prohibits the harassment of whales and other mammals. David wouldn’t necessarily agree that playing music—certainly not his music!—is a harassment, but it’s important to Dan that he not venture whatsoever into any gray areas of the law.

Dan takes David and me upstairs in his suburban home to show us his dream, and it’s there that we understand why he has taken the yearly lease on this house, despite the fact that he’s absent for half the year. As one might imagine, rental properties in Maui aren’t cheap, and lone Dan doesn’t need all the extra space, all the extra bedrooms. In essence, he’s just paying for air. But when we go upstairs to the top floor, we understand why.

The view is stunning, breathtaking. A wall of light welcomes us, a wall of windows, and because it’s the highest house in the burbs, you can see out over all the other rooftops, and over the village of Paia, and over the waving tops of the palms, to the soothing blue rolling waves beyond. Even to a non-sailor it is bewitching—you feel everything that was previously tense within you loosen and dissolve, or realign. It’s almost impossible to look away from the vast blue ocean—it is like air—it seems that to look away would be to hold one’s breath, to cease breathing—and yet the aesthetics of the room itself, one long room with a gleaming wooden floor and white walls and so brightly lit, with a drafting table and neat desk and bank of sleek computers at the far end, also compete for a visitor’s attention, so that there is a confusion of grace, a bounty of the aesthetic, and a perfect, beautiful, delicate balance of the infinite blue sea and the life of the mind. The White Room is how I think of it, spare and elegant, cleansing and pure, and it’s up here where Dan does his biggest and deepest dreaming, his life’s dreaming.

His dream is to purchase an immense ice-breaking ship and refit it to become a magnificent research vessel, capable of following the whales all around the world, with laboratories and diving and filming capabilities, and fleets of tiny submarines that are able to be disgorged from the mother ship’s belly, like little guppies being born as the mother ship motors along in the depths, as the submarine pilots film and study the life aquatic.

He wants to take his footage and convert it to a big screen, but more: he wants to build a vast indoor viewing theater in which the 3D images of humpback whales are projected by light into the dark void just above the theatergoers’ heads, so that the whales are singing just above and all around the viewers, with the darkened theater filled with the sound of their singing.

“It would change people’s lives,” he says. “If they could only see the whales, and hear them, like I have.”

His hand trembles as he opens a manila folder that rests on his desk. In it is a mock-up of a brochure advertising the theater—as if the thing is not a dream, but has already been built. He has expensive, detailed blueprints of the whole operation, ship and theater. There in the White Room, he pulls up a web page that shows a couple of ships he’s interested in bidding on. There aren’t many ships in the world that big, it’s a lot easier to buy one used than to contract the building of one from scratch.

Will he get it done? I for one think that he will. I can’t remember the price tag—maybe $60 million—and I can see his vision, can see it becoming as big as Disneyland: changing people’s lives and consciousness, integrating science and technology with spirit.

He offers to take us out in his little boat later in the week, and we accept his kind offer. We leave him then, and leave the White Room, though even after we have driven away, it seems that I can still feel the dream throbbing, pulsing, from that one house, up in that lofty lookout, from which vantage a person can see so much farther.

We each and all have our weaknesses and wounds, our ridiculous flaws. I for one do not want to be the kind of person who makes fun of others about anything, and least of all about what should be the most sacrosanct thing, a person’s spirituality.

And yet it’s hard to take seriously—at first—that which we encounter the next day. David has lined up a couple of spots for us on what he calls “the hippie boat,” a charter outing filled with a ragtag collection of dreamers and do-gooders, among whom David with his clarinet, and me with my questions and doubts, are no more and no less eccentric. In the early morning cool, we’re being ferried in a tiny motorboat that sits anchored offshore like a pirate ship.

A green sea turtle treads water next to our boat, watching us, its eyes surprisingly like a human’s. The captain, Christine, is wiry and sun-weathered, maybe sixty-something. We’re the first ones on the boat—she gives us a hand up and puts us straight to work storing things, and now others are being ferried the short distance out to our boat, an eclectic mix of islanders who have saved for this one day of whale watching and others who have put it on their calendars and traveled thousands of miles. David made the journey last year and says that there was a naked cellist but that it doesn’t look like she’s here today.

Some of the passengers, however, are familiar to David. One fellow he remembers is a distant relative of Admiral Peary; he has an ivory narwhal tusk that was bequeathed to the family. The majority of the travelers are middle-aged women, but there are people of all ages. Everyone is white. Captain Christine takes her money from everyone, telling us that she feels there will be “major, major blessings” today. She’s a little harried, but who wouldn’t be, with forty strangers suddenly on board?

There are musical instruments everywhere: guitars, of course, and chimes, and cymbals, and any number of instruments I have never seen or heard before: crystal bowls with special pestles, which when run around the rim of the bowl will create a wailing, howling, eerie resonance. A young man climbs aboard with a giant golden multistringed instrument that looks like a crossbow, with an intricate lacing of wires: it’s a wind harp, which he will hold to the sky and tilt, as if summoning with those angles a music that already exists—that always exists—but which we cannot normally hear. As if he will catch such sound briefly in the net of his wires.

And finally, there is an immense seal of a man, also a repeat customer, known simply as Fish, who, other than carrying a hundred or so extra pounds, is a dead ringer for the late Jerry Garcia, and who is in the company of two attractive young women in small bikinis.

Christine gives us an exuberant pep talk, telling us that we belong to the Cetacean Nation now. As best as I can tell, the prevailing sentiment if not full spirituality on the boat is an earnest amalgamation of Buddhism, Christianity, druidism, paganism, animism, and Zoroastrianism. A not-very-nice part of me—a part that is made uncomfortable by a spirituality that appears to be wholly untempered by doubt, and therefore, to my possibly narrow way of thinking, suspect and of lesser value—wonders if they’re so desperate that they’re buying it hook, line, and sinker, grabbing at any life raft tossed to them in an extremely turbulent sea.

If I cannot feel unreserved compassion for them, then the least I can do, it would seem, would be to avoid judging them. From time to time I glance over at David as if to say, These are your people, musicians all, but David’s expression is inscrutable, hidden behind his dark glasses; if anything, he seems to be enjoying himself hugely.

We begin to see whales immediately. Their bull-like heads breach the surface in the distance, their broad black backs gleam and glint like obsidian under the sun, and finally, at the end of each dive, their wide tails, the last thing to disappear from sight, appear to pause, wave, waggle before sliding back down into the mysterious blue. We cheer whenever we see one, and Christine unabashedly steers the boat toward each one, upping the engine’s rpm.

But the whales are shy—there are other boats about, too, playing our game. Surely all of these whales have been hunted by tourists before, and they submerge before we can draw close to them, disappearing well before we breach the hundred-yard viewing limit decreed by law.

There is of course a loophole—you can pilot your boat at an angle that might intersect with the whale’s path, then shut your motor off and drift, essentially blocking their way—and if the whales choose to continue on with their established trajectory in such a way as to bring them within that hundred-yard buffer, then a boat captain is not likely to be prosecuted, for in theory the final approach is of the whale’s choosing.

Slowly, the musicians have been coalescing, repositioning themselves so that they can all see each other, and as if through some unspoken internal communication and consensus they begin warming up, each playing their various instruments; gradually they ease into what sounds like some olden folk tune. For musicians possessing such an odd miscellany of instruments, and to have never played together before, it doesn’t sound half bad—other than the lyrics, which are an endless refrain of “We are family . . . We are family . . . We are family.”

No, we’re not, I think churlishly. But they’re happy—literally, rhapsodic—and again the sound, with David climbing in now with his clarinet, is pretty good, especially out there on the water, with the wind washing over us and the boat flying across the waves.

And then something amazing happens.

A pair of whales—a mother and a big yearling—appear off to our right, just within the hundred-yard distance. They’re breaching, leaping clear of the water—a formidable launch for such enormous creatures—and though we could be wrong about this, it seems that there is somehow a synchrony or match between their joy and ours: between our music and their willingness to associate with us.

The musicians, delighted with what they have summoned—the most enthusiastic audience ever!—play louder and with more verve. David, who has been laying back and letting the other musicians take the lead, is playing the heck out of his clarinet now, a wild, wailing, joyous sound, improvising and yet accompanying the guitarists and bell ringers and drummers and bowl rubbers and mandolins wonderfully—and with each pulse, each blast, the whales edge closer, alarmingly so, until we can see the joy in their eyes with each leap, the mirth. They’re right alongside the boat, leaping again and again, spending themselves against the sky and encouraging the musicians to play louder and faster and better, which they are doing—David is playing out of his mind—and with each new ascension of his effort and his talent, the whales leap ever higher, so that even to my skeptical mind there is no doubt whatsoever that it is an accompaniment, a duet of sorts—whales and humans, music and dance—and although our boat is traveling fast, they are staying with us, even surging ahead of us; teasing us, it seems, racing us.

Why should it amuse us so, that they are spirited, and capable of knowing joy, and of communicating? What brutal and perverse shell have we placed around all other forms of life, steadfastly ignoring or stubbornly denying that their cultures and spirits, their days and nights, are meaningless, compared to our lofty own?

Such denial across the generations does not inflate or build up our own importance or position of relevance. Instead, it demeans it.

To swim and soar as the whales are soaring this day—to do that even one day in our lives—would surely alter, transform, our existence—would be a life changer, a great whoosh of almost unbearable joy, the experience of a lifetime—and yet their unending days, across the decades, may well be filled with this intensity, joy, sweetness. They may be living at a level we cannot even comprehend enough to know envy, and perhaps for us this is a mercy. All we really know how to do thus far in the relationship is to kill them.

Eventually—soon enough—they tire of us. Rolling over on their sides, they waggle their flippers at us and then roll away, peeling away like fighter jet pilots in a stunt, and submerge, vanishing back into their world—two of the largest creatures in the world becoming invisible again.

But for a long time, what they cast over us lingers.

Later in the day, we stop and anchor for the end-of-cruise swim. Captain Christine attaches a long lateral rope between the anchor rope and the ship. She opens a trunk filled with flippers, masks, and snorkels and invites us all to dive in and “become one with Mother Ocean,” but to be sure not to swim beyond the tether of the rope. No small number of the travelers slip out of their swimsuits, though others of us, more chaste, remain suited.

Whales—three of them—appear again, though only briefly. Whether we have summoned them or have coincidentally stopped in one of their resting places, I don’t know; they are visible only briefly. Not all of us see them, but Fish does.

With a single wild war cry of “Whale!” he goes running half the length of the ship and launches himself as if out into the void, the world’s most enthusiastic human cannonball.

He is out there above the ocean for a long time, soaring, improbably huge and round—for just a moment, it seems that he is never going to descend, will instead only keep traveling out and up into the sky, fueled by nothing more than his own exuberance—though finally, the spell of his ascent dissolves, the caul or corona of his magic dust frays and corrodes, and he becomes leaden, collides with the sea like the Fish he is, in a great mushrooming plume of spray.

A few swimmers were in the water already. Some of them, with their masks, will report later that they were close to the whales—were nearly among them, underwater—but that when Fish hit, the whales bolted like minnows.

Again, I’m of two minds: I do not want the whales to want to be among us, I want them to remain isolated and protected, unchanged by the relentlessness and bottomlessness of our needs, our emotional claims: the broth of our damning paradoxes and unpredictabilities. And yet if I could have gotten my mask and flippers on in time, and been one of the first out of the boat, I just as surely would have wanted to be one of the swimmers out there with the whales, even if for the most fleeting of moments: to see the broad streak of black amid the blue, a flash of white belly streaking away.

Everything is connected, but we do not have to embrace every physical thing in the world to know that this is so. If a song—inaudible to us—can travel a thousand miles underwater, then so too surely can there be other connections that we cannot see or hear or otherwise know, between all things. Little wonder that we, such newcomers to this infinite garden, sometimes feel confused, befuddled by the bounty of choices, and other times gridlocked, dead-ended, struggling against the occasionally snug though other times lax embrace of all those other invisible wires and strands.

We swim for a while, the stronger swimmers drifting out away from the safety tether of the rope, while the less confident among us stay very close to that strong central strand, its yellow length anomalous in the dazzling clearwater blue. A discordance, but one to which we cling, like barnacles.

We putter along in our fins and masks, singly and in groups of twos and threes. The cloudless sun bathes the ocean equally, yet radial zodiac spires of blue and green and yellow and white light spin before us at the near surface, falling away to the deepest and most bottomless blue imaginable. I know that at the very bottom it’s black, but my eyes can’t see the bottom; for me, there is only blue, everywhere.

Other swimmers pass through the bouncing, spinning zodiac of wave-lulled light, their pale naked bodies made graceful as mermaids by the giant extended fins they are wearing.

At first I can only hear the amplified rasps of my own irregular breathing, as I repeatedly blow out gusts and gurgles of wave-sloshed snorkel infill—each breath a struggle, yet there is no option but to keep on going, the ocean is too beautiful. But gradually I become more accustomed to the rhythm of the breathing, and in the quiet spaces between my own whale-like puffs, and when I hold my breath and stop struggling, dog-paddling, kicking and stroking, and instead just drift, I hear it, the singing.

It is all around me, beneath me and above me—I am surrounded by it, am floating in it. I do not claim to understand what it is saying, nor how many whales are singing, nor how far away they are: but I am in it, and it is beautiful, and—this is the most striking impression—there is very much the feeling that if I hang around just a little longer, I will come to understand it. The distance between their communication and mine is vast, but it feels that the knowledge is near.

Perhaps David is right. Perhaps if their songs are only about beauty, then indeed that is a near thing within us: a thing we may not yet have fully embraced, but which lies within our already-developed range of abilities, or on the near cusp of them.

One more image, one more song, one more kindness. We’re close, and as I drift there, listening, I don’t want to leave.

One more image. A few days later, David and Dan Opitz and I are out on the water in Dan’s clean little boat. His trailer is fixed, and the water is as slick as obsidian. How can this be the ocean? I have never seen such stillness, not even in the sky. We’ve brought recording equipment and have lowered the microphone over the edge, are sitting there in the flat bright heat sunning ourselves like fishermen, waiting. We each are wearing huge padded earphones, listening to the indecipherable clicks and squeals of humpbacks that are out there somewhere, singing about who knows what. Soon they will be leaving these crystalline waters, making their own slow and steady progress into the future, one foot at a time, one more mile, one more season, one more song.

Cracking the humpback code, Dan Opitz calls his goal. He thinks it will happen, though I can’t imagine the science and brain technology that will be required. The magnitude of the effort seems laughably at odds with the three of us lying there in repose, listening and basking, and with the water so glass-slicked smooth, for as far as we can see.

The headphones are uncomfortable and the songs are distant, Dan says; the noisy chatter and clatter, the maddening whine of outboard motors dominates the soundscape, and we take the earphones off and break for lunch, lazy and sleepy and floating as if on a lake of peace. There are some scientists who speculate that whale song travels along precise frequencies of thermoclines in the ocean—mysterious contours where all the water is some certain temperature—following that horizontal plane all the way around the world, preserved within that one thin sandwich of special temperature or even chemistry, like digital light trapped within a fiber-optic cable. We don’t know, we don’t know anything.

I’m up in the bow. Dan and David are crunching potato chips; they can’t hear it at first. I can’t tell if I’m imagining it, replaying the sounds of earlier recordings in my mind, but it seems to me that I can hear it, a whale singing.

“Listen,” I ask them, “do you hear it? Is it a whale?”

They stop chewing for a moment. “It is a whale,” Dan says, “and it’s right beneath the boat.”

I’m hard of hearing—too many chainsaws, concerts, lawn mowers, and shotguns in my youth, without ear protection. I’m not used to hearing things others can’t hear. But Dan and Davis are scrambling to turn on the recorder again, the hull of the boat is acting like a receiver. The sound is striking the hull and coming up all around me, faint and muted but—even I can tell—close.

A whale breaches, fifty yards out. No one ever tires of the miracle of it. A smaller whale breaches next to the first one, but not a baby, not a calf. Dan Opitz is very excited, says they’re two males. He doesn’t have any idea what they’re doing. Getting ready for their journey, he guesses.

The whales begin swimming toward us slowly, coming straight at our anchored broadside: not with aggression, but with a leisurely luffing. The big one is in front, and the smaller one trails him. Dan is photographing them, eager to see their tails, the white markings on which are as distinct as our own fingerprints. Photographer, moviemaker, cruise ship naturalist, dreamer: will his theater and research vessel ever get built? There is so little time left in any one life, and here we are out on the flat water, kicking back, drifting, listening, instead of him out trying to raise all that money.

The largest whale submerges—the elegant double-yoke white markings look like the whiteness of glaciers—but then he surfaces again, as if he had known that Dan wanted to photograph the tail, and now he keeps coming.

He’s not going fast, but he’s so much bigger than the little boat that if he even touches it, he’ll tip it over. But there is no aggression. I don’t know what it is; it’s something from the other world, something from the world below.

We watch. There’s nothing else to do. It’s too beautiful to turn away, too beautiful to protest, too beautiful to be frightened.

When he is within about ten yards, he turns to the right, a perfect ninety-degree right-angle maneuver, and tracks a short distance parallel to our boat, then makes a perfect ninety-degree left turn, as if tracing a cookie-cutter rectangle around us—as if, in a cartoon, we might suddenly fall through a trap door he has cut in the surface of the ocean, following an imaginary or invisible dotted line—and the smaller whale behind him, as if following some chemical or electrical wake, travels precisely the same path, with what seems like mechanical replication.

Both whales are massive, and though they are warm-blooded, the thing I remember is how chilled they were: how coldness emanated from them, radiating as if from a block of ice, as the colder water from the farther deep—the singing deep—slid from their backs, and that temperature difference stirred and washed over us.

They proceeded carefully, delicately, around our boat, showed us their tails—their identities, or the only way our brute species knows to identify them—and then slid back down into their world again.

We just looked at one another. Dan was somewhere between peace and awe, but safely just this side of rapture. There wasn’t anything to say, really. We sat there a while longer in the perfect blue and listened for them to begin singing again, but if they did, we couldn’t hear it. In a few days they would all be gone, gathering and massing in some secret place—some unknowable place—and leaving on their long journey, while we sat there, anchored in the motionless blue, bathed by beauty, washed by beauty, and tried, as hard as we could, to understand it.