CHAPTER 30

Blackfish

As a child Leda had a fascination with orcas. It started soon after seeing Free Willy, a film that had made an indelible impression on her. For years everything she owned was orca related: orca stuffed toys, orca stickers, orca T-shirts, and a plastic orca family that she played with in a tub of water. She soon decided she wanted to be a marine biologist when she grew up, and in the third grade she wrote an extensive report on the difference between transient and resident pods. This childhood interest, like so many others, fell away as time went on. By the fifth grade she no longer drew so many orcas on her notebooks, and by the sixth grade she no longer wanted to be a marine biologist. She still found the animals to be beautiful and mystifying all the way into her adulthood, and when someone would mention Free Willy she would say, “I loved that movie as a kid.”

When the trailer for Blackfish first came out John texted her from work. “There’s a movie coming out about SeaWorld and the orca that killed that lady,” he said. Then he sent her a link. Leda had forgotten all about that story. A few years before, there was a horrifying incident where an orca named Tilikum attacked and killed his trainer at SeaWorld. At the time, SeaWorld claimed that the attack was due to trainer error, saying that the whale had mistaken his trainer’s ponytail for a fish and had accidentally drowned her. Leda hadn’t given the tragedy much consideration. It was sad, but SeaWorld appeared to be handling it, and freak accidents around big animals were seemingly reasonable. It hadn’t stirred up any emotion in her beyond the feeling any tragedy would. But things were very different for her watching the trailer to Blackfish. The minute she clicked the link and the story line revealed itself she was captivated. It was then that she first learned that Tilikum had killed two other people previously and that he had been taken from the wild at a young age. She’d formerly believed that all of the whales now in captivity had been born there; this story of his capture and subsequent psychosis was disturbingly mesmerizing.

The rest of the week she spent hours online reading about the orcas. She watched videos and listened to interviews.

“Did you know Flipper killed herself?” she said to John.

“Really?”

“Yeah, she held her breath until she died. Apparently, after the show ended the studio just left her to live basically in squalor, and she died like that right in front of her trainer.”

“That’s horrifying,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “And it’s real.”

She ordered a book called Death at SeaWorld and had it overnighted from Amazon. She read it in one sitting.

“You finished it already?” John said the next morning.

“Yeah, I couldn’t put it down.”

“Leda, I think you’re obsessed.”

“I’m not obsessed,” she said, but when she thought about it she realized he was right. Hours of the day would just pass by, and she wouldn’t even notice it. It was as if she were doing research for some kind of report or really important paper for an academic journal, only she wasn’t writing anything for anyone. All the research she did was just to feed some kind of inexplicable thirst inside of her.

That Saturday they went to see the film. She hoped that seeing it would calm her and she wouldn’t care as much afterward. She got gummy bears and a Diet Coke. Once I see the movie then I’ll be over it, she thought, and ate a red gummy bear. The film was gripping and tragic. Tilikum’s life was one filled with fear and abuse and so much sorrow that it was almost unfathomable. The attack too had been completely misrepresented. He hadn’t accidently caught his trainer’s ponytail in his mouth, mistaking it for a fish, but rather deliberately grabbed her and dragged her into the pool, viciously thrashing her body around so violently that he dismembered her and actually scalped part of her skull. They had to pry his jaws open to get her mangled body out of his mouth. As the credits rolled Leda was still holding tight to the full bag of gummy bears. Her palm was sweaty against the plastic. That night she went home and watched the trailer again. If she could have watched the film again she would have.

The weeks to follow, she kept up with all of her research. She knew everything there was to know about the case on Tilikum. If she’d been asked to testify in court on the whale’s history she could have done so with great authority. She learned the lineages of all the whales and which pods the wild ones had been taken from. Occasionally, she’d remember things she’d learned in the report she’d written in the third grade. It was in those moments that she saw something in herself that was wild and untamable. It was as if deep inside she had buried this childhood obsession and all it took was something to reignite it for it to emerge just as strong as it ever was. That which she believed she’d outgrown was really just dormant and waiting. It scared her.

John began to worry.

“It’s not healthy for you to be home like this all day just watching whale videos,” he said.

“I don’t just watch whale videos all day,” she said.

“What I mean is, I just don’t think this is leading anywhere.”

“What leads anywhere?” she snapped. “What at all in life that you enjoy has any kind of real purpose?”

It was such an intense compulsion. What impression of herself could she have given off then? How could she explain giving up grad school and moving to San Francisco and what it meant to her to have John? Could she have painted an accurate picture of herself, lying in her bed watching YouTube videos of orcas? Was it any different from herself as a child with a plastic orca family? The father cruising this way, the mother leaping that way, the baby staying near. Could she have said anything of her life then besides starvation?

She decided that the only thing to do was to go on a trip to see the whales in person. John hadn’t accrued a ton of vacation time at Google yet, but she figured they’d be able to manage a long weekend. San Juan Island in Puget Sound wasn’t too far away from San Francisco, so it seemed perfect. She looked up what the best time of year to go was and where to stay. She found a small house for rent. That night she showed John a link to the whale watch she wanted to go on. John thought the trip would be fun.

“I think it would be good for both of us to get away,” he said.

She e-mailed the people with the house for rent and found that it was booked for the next three months straight. By the time it would be empty, the whales would have already left for winter. She looked for somewhere else to stay, but everything affordable had already been booked. She Googled “best place to see orcas,” and that’s when she found Telegraph Cove in British Columbia. The area was almost completely desolate. There was fishing, and of course the orcas, but little else. She found a few houses for rent that were much more affordable than the places on San Juan. She decided to e-mail about one of the properties, a good-sized house on Cormorant Island in the village of Alert Bay. She e-mailed:

Hi,

I was looking to rent your house for the weekend of the 22nd. It would be for myself and my boyfriend. We’re coming from San Francisco and are looking to stay for two nights. Let me know what your availability is like.

Thanks so much,

Leda

The next morning she woke up to this e-mail:

Hi Leda give me a call 778-432-0092 —Pat

The e-mail was so short and curt. When she read it she was half asleep, and her first reaction was a mix of embarrassment and anger. She reread her own e-mail, which seemed so long-winded in comparison with Pat’s. Maybe this is what’s wrong with me. That I say too many things and try too hard. Maybe I should be direct like Pat, she thought. Pat seems like a bitch.

But when she called Pat, Pat wasn’t a bitch at all.

“Hello,” Pat said.

“Hi, umm, is this Pat?” Leda said.

“Yes.” Her voice was warm sounding, like that of a woman who was good at baking or blow jobs. Even from the few words she’d spoken Leda could hear her thick Canadian accent.

“This is Leda, ummm. I e-mailed earlier about the house for rent?”

“Oh, yes, hi! I should have known when I saw the area code. So you’re coming from San Francisco, eh?” she said.

“Yes, uh huh.”

“So were you planning on flying into Port Hardy?”

“I hadn’t really figured that out yet. I was thinking of just driving up from Seattle.”

“Oh, that would be really hard to do, honestly.”

“Really?”

“Yes, see, that’s why I asked, because I saw that you were wanting just the two nights and the thing of it is that, and it’s beautiful here so don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not easy to get to. You’d really need to fly in and even then you’d be cutting your time super short because, you know, the traveling just takes a long time out here. So, you know, I just wanted to be sure you’d know kind of what you’re getting into with it.”

“Yeah, I guess I haven’t really looked into the whole thing enough.” Leda could hear a level of disappointment in her own voice that she hadn’t anticipated. It was then that she realized just how sad she was. How different her life had become, and not just the external of it. Her own voice held wavelengths that were too deep to ignore.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Pat said in her warm, capable-sounding tone. “It’s just beautiful here. And driving up through British Columbia would just be a phenomenal trip. Just breathtaking, but you need more time with it.”

“Yeah, see, originally we were going to go to San Juan Island, but it’s pretty booked up at this point. See, I just really want to see the orcas. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a child.” Leda searched for the right words to express what she was meaning, but all she could think of was, “It’s just something I really want to do.”

“Yeah,” Pat said. “San Juan is really beautiful too. I think if you could find anywhere at all to stay there, that would be your best bet. I don’t want to discourage you, but, you know, I just wanted to let you know about what a trek it is and all. I just want you to get your money’s worth, you know. I don’t want you to waste your time.”

“No, I appreciate that.” Leda listened to the way Pat had said “waste your time” and “discourage.” She wished that what she’d really said was I love whales too or You’ll get to see the whales.

After John got home they scoured tons of travel websites for places to stay on San Juan. John was adamant about them finding a place. Even as Leda gave up on the search, he kept looking. She thought that was really sweet. In the end they decided they’d just go next summer.

“Even if we’re back in Boston,” he said.

But she knew as he said it that they wouldn’t be back in Boston at all.

That night Leda couldn’t sleep. She stayed awake and wrote a short story about a woman who wanted to see whales so she drove up all the way through British Columbia with her boyfriend and then when she got there, right to Telegraph Cove, right to Johnstone Strait, she walked out of the car and into the water and just walked and walked until she disappeared into the water. Her boyfriend screamed and called for her, but all he could see was the piercing black backs of orcas coming up for air.

—

Two weeks later Leda got a job at a coffee shop.