WHALE SHARK

A GANG OF FRIENDS ON A BOAT IN THE GALÁPAGOS, A tiny stippling of new islands hundreds of miles from any other land. Sometimes it’s impossible, here in Darwin’s country, not to think of Bible stories: the Garden of Eden, Day One of life’s origins, etc.

We are sitting below deck, lunching, when a glistening black fin of a shape and size not known to us from previous days on the water—this is no porpoise, no dolphin—creases the glassy blue and noses along, the fin itself a small sailboat, with the slight turbulence fore and aft promising the existence of something big.

We have no idea how big.

We leap from the table. Though I don’t know this quite yet, we’re going in with the big fish—the biggest fish in the world, a whale shark: not a whale, not a mammal, just a cold-blooded gilled thing, a giant, weighing up to ten tons.

Our guide Juan is first up on the deck, where he begins passing out fins and masks. He hasn’t seen a whale shark in over a year.

It’s the closest I ever hope to come to an Abandon ship! order, and the adrenaline is as sweet as nectar. There’s no time to wriggle into the cumbersome wet suits; the crew is already boarding the Zodiacs: pandemonium, yearning. Was it this way for the whalers? I think that it was.

We pull up alongside the great body. The fin marks the spot. This is a creature spun into being by nothing more than the whirl of the world, and sun: following the currents of plankton, its mouth gaping.

We can see the shadow now beneath the fin. The whale shark turns—the Zodiacs’ motors are turned off, we’re drifting toward it—and because of this turning, the shallow raft is drifting right across the whale shark, all it has to do is ease upward a little bit and we will be skyborne, a boatful of whale riders, capsized—but the big fish does not panic, just keeps gliding along, and we pass over it.

We could reach our hands into the water, stick our arms in up to the elbows, and touch the giant fish. Thirty-five feet long.

Touch nothing in the Galápagos. To touch these things is to ruin them.

The fish—the world’s largest fish—is a plankton feeder; only that direct intermediary to the sun, phytoplankton, could provide enough steady biomass to fuel such a giant.

We leap-slip into the water as quickly and quietly—respectfully—as possible. I’m the first one in. I don’t know what to expect but I imagine that such a moment might not come in my life again soon. I pass from solid, raft, through the sky, air, and into the cold Humboldt current, liquid, in the time it takes to blink, and think half a thought or no thought at all, and then I’m all the way in. There are the silvery bubbles of my exhalation and fin-swirl, and all I can see is whale shark in front of me, as dark as a nightmare; as dark as the end of your life. As if the ocean has gone black. There is nothing anywhere but black, and it takes another half a thought to realize that the ocean has been transformed to one fish.

I’d been afraid that the sound of me, of us, would frighten and flare the fish; that it would plunge, would streak away.

But why should the sound of a pebble frighten anything? Why should a single feather frighten the largest fish in the world?

My heart is going faster than it has ever gone, being still, treading water. The last of the sun’s heat is leaving my body.

No other swimmers are yet in the water but the captain said Go, and I wanted to go, so I went.

The whale shark is not panicked, but neither is it coming over to introduce itself. It’s feeding, and basking—thermoregulating, after its night’s slumber in the icy depths—the water here, where the currents come together, is 1,300 meters deep—and I push out to meet it, and join it, and to see what will happen.

Rarely in life can I remember ever having entered anything so unknowingly, one where the complications of all my prior experience is rendered useless.

I join the fish at its right side. I paddle strongly, my flippers the opposite of its grace. The specks glow. They bewitch, a mix of firefly light and the yellow sideboard running lights of a great seagoing vessel.

Somehow, I find myself alongside its gills, and it is here that I encounter the startling intimacy of watching it breathe: the four plates of the gill coverings, each seeming the size of a doorway, the four plates pulsing in, out, in, out, as the whale shark drinks in the invisible broth of the sun. Tiny fish are swimming in and out of those giant gills, which open a few inches, then close. The fish swirl and disappear into the gills on the intake, then come scurrying back out, blown back out, current-swirled.

I’m hyperventilating, and don’t realize for a while that the panting sound is me. For a while, it seems to be the world’s sound. Sometimes I slow down, to examine the broad caudal fin, which, as it catches up with me, passes beneath me as would the wing of an airplane.

It is exactly like flying.

It is not a whale. It is not a mammal. It is not one of us, though we all came from the same place, long ago.

Something happens—I’m not sure what—and the whale shark begins pulling away: not in a gust or a surge, but simply another gear, so that I’m having to haul ass to keep up.

I’m acutely aware—swimming alongside her head like that—that she is aware of me; that I am neither her focus nor her concern. She could so easily outdistance me; could descend, could leap and breach, could whack me with fin or tail—could bite me, I suppose, or gum me with her truck-grill of a mouth, which time has shaped to be neither grinning nor frowning, but instead perpetually and perfectly scooped open, perpetually hungry, perpetually satisfied. Just swim. Follow the sun-path of plankton.

She pulls slightly past me. I’m back beside the tail, now, which unnerves me.

I do not want to be whacked by the whale shark’s tail. I stroke harder, to get back up to my earlier position, up by the head: and she slows, and allows me. And as I pass alongside her great speckled body, the sunlight through the water is refracted in the slight waves made by her and my passage, and creates a dappled effect upon those luminous spots, so that they seem to be moving, rearranging themselves on her body—migrating across her body—and this image floods me with peace.

The eye. With every stroke I’m aware of not wanting to spook the animal, am grateful to and respectful of her for allowing me to dink along beside her, as might a young sea lion or fur seal, playing (the things a giant has to put up with!)—and gradually, with my courage building, I swim up a little farther, to get a good look at the entrance to the cave that is her mouth.

Little blue fish hover in front of that cave, darting like butterflies—fish that are nearly the size of my hand, maybe a dozen of them—and I look slightly down and into the whale shark’s eye, which is looking into mine.

It’s the size of a marble. It’s the smallest thing in the world. It’s not much larger than mine—indeed, might be the same size. The eye is connected to the brain through an infinitude of circuits and pathways, but this animal has ten tons or more of other circuits and pathways, radiating from all parts of her body into that immense skull, immense brain, ancient and fishy though it may be.

We were all fish once.

How big is her heart, how big is her brain? Are we communicating; is she thinking, assessing, analyzing?

You can’t really know these things with a fish, can you? Hell, it’s hard enough to know them with another person, sometimes. The eye is there, the eye is seeing me—but does it know me, does it understand in any way my intent, my brief presence in the world?

I can’t say yes. I can’t say no.

We swim beside her for a long time. Half an hour? Two days?

At first I found that I was hyperventilating, working to keep up: taking short, choppy strokes, like a man shoveling coal into a furnace, or splitting firewood with an ax, while the whale shark glided, cruised, beautifully.

She was pulling slowly away, like an ocean liner leaving a port, one where you hold your ticket but you are not on the ship. It is going across the ocean on a grand adventure but you are not on it, and you find yourself running up the gangplank, you must not miss it. You might never even have realized, dreamed or intended, that the trip of a lifetime awaited, and yet you find nonetheless that you are holding a ticket, maybe the last of its kind, and the giant ship, its portals illuminated by the glow lamps of all the other travelers, each in their own berth, is pulling away, and you must not miss it.

I stroke harder; I must stay up. I don’t know why.

I swim alongside her for a long and delicious time.

How are group decisions made among any species? What unseen electricity exists between birds that swerve in flight as one? It comes to us in pretty much a moment—over the course of maybe thirty seconds—that it is time to let the great fish slide on past, no longer accompanied. Part of it is physical fatigue, but part of it is something else. It may be as simple as our brains having absorbed all the sugar they can hold, but I like to think it is more—that it is each of us knowing when it is time to leave even the finest of parties, and to let the host or hostess return to the dignity of solitude—and one by one and two by two we stop swimming and watch the whale continue on, swimming no faster and no slower than before, while we tread water—and feel deep within us that ancient chagrin of the fisherman whose line has snapped, whose net has broken. We let the big fish go.

The Galápagos are doomed, as was the first Garden of Eden, and as will be the last—the ants are coming, the wasps, the fleas and ticks, the goats and rats and cats, the man, the woman, the dark must arrive, the tribulation must begin—but how amazing to witness it from the other side, the side of before—these things to come. To look essentially at innocence, not in an individual, but in a world.

The eye will be drawn more and more to beauty, as we wreck ever more of it. The heart will be ever hungrier for awe, as it is blitzed and bred and corn-fed out of us.

We may yet, finally, one day learn how truly tiny we are, and in that revelation, know neither agony nor despair, but great peace, and—if we’re lucky—maybe even a thing like inexplicable love.

Where is the whale shark now? Is she warm, is she cold? Be assured that she is not thinking of us; that we came and went, in but part of a day.

Afterwards, we will talk about wanting to touch her, but not doing so. I’m glad I didn’t, but I wanted to.

Afterwards, each of us will have different experiences, which we will share, with near-religious fervor.

Terry, for instance, will tell of how when she slipped out of the Zodiac, she found herself right in front of the white-lipped giant mouth, the always-open mouth, and screamed underwater. Andrea will remember being brushed—not whacked—by the tail. We’ll read accounts of how divers have been injured and even killed by a swipe of the tail. “I knew it wasn’t somebody’s flipper,” she says.” There was no one else back there.”

What I remember is this: in a heated world, how ice cold the fish was: like a glacier. I did not touch her, but didn’t have to. There was this shell, this envelope of coldness, all around her, which, when you got too close—two, three, four feet—chilled you to the bone. As if the whale shark was made of ice, ten tons of ice, and was gliding along the surface, waiting to get warm. Which may be pretty much what was happening.

The other thing was also related to size.

If you got too close—two, three, four feet—you got pulled in. The sheer mass of her had its own gravity. I don’t mean you got pulled in emotionally; I mean there was a physical pull, a magnetism, and you could feel the great cold more deeply than ever before, could feel it sucking you in, so that in the next second, the next moment, you would be upon the whale shark, and know more fully the mass of that deep cold; and frightened—not quite terrified, but damn alarmed—you pulled away quickly, kicked back out away from that traveling giant lozenge of cold. A chill not quite like any other previously known.

We know that hard times are coming, in a warming world. We know that the changes will not be kind to us, nor to so much that is crafted, delicate, rare, and beautiful. I cannot change that. I cannot change that.

What could I do, what could I say, when the captain said Leap!, but leap?

And so another day passed, in which I changed nothing.