chapter five

BELUGA DO NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS

Russian Whale Music

 

 

 

 

BELUGA WHALES LIVE IN ALL THE WORLD’S ARCTIC SEAS. THEY ARE graceful and beautiful, enjoyed by everyone who meets them. Sailors called them “sea canaries” because they make so many sounds. They are kept in aquariums all over the world, but Russia is the best place to meet them musically in the wild.

“You should come with us to find the white whales of the White Sea,” says Rauno Lauhakangas, the Finnish physicist, when I reach him in the middle of a particularly tricky experiment in his laboratory. (Jim Nollman had given me his name.) “No government will bother us there. Next summer we’re going to have divers wearing white suits. We think white is an important color for the belugas, and they might like us more if we’re wearing white. And we hope to set up a directional hydrophone array so we can really hear which one is making which sounds.” He has already heard of my musical interests. “Playing music with them is fine. There are exactly seven spots in the White Sea where the belugas definitely congregate in the summer months. Next summer we’re trying out a new one, the island of Myagostrov, in the Republic of Karelia—What, you haven’t heard of it?—Be prepared for a journey back in time of at least one hundred years.”

At least we’d be far enough from anyone who might accuse us of breaking any laws if we tried to use music to communicate with a few white whales. In America and Canada the animals are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and anything one wants to do with them is carefully reviewed by a panel of scientists before it is approved. The Inuit are allowed to hunt them in their territories of Nunavut and Nunavik in Canada, but even they are not allowed to play tunes to them. Music-making is no longer considered research; with whales, science trumps art.

The beluga whale, whose name means “the white one” in Russian, might be one of the best species to try and make music with. Their wide range of whistles, clicks, and buzzes is far more diverse than the dolphins, whose sounds and behavior have been studied the most. In 1585 the Dutch traveler Adriaen Coenen wrote that their “voice sounds like the sighing of humans. . . . If a storm is imminent they play on the surface of the water and they are said to lament when they are caught. . . . They like to hear music played on the lute, harp, flute, and similar instruments.” Even in the sixteenth century people played concerts for the whales! For a long time people have sensed that these animals are intrigued enough by human life to enjoy listening to our songs.

There are many places where belugas are successfully kept in aquariums and marine parks, from Vancouver, Mystic, and Atlanta, to Valencia in Spain and Kanagawa in Japan. It was the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago that offered the most encouraging response when I asked them if I might play some music to their whales. Ken Ramirez, chief animal trainer and vice president of marine mammals, wrote me back a detailed series of questions to test the nature of my interest. Why belugas? I answered immediately: because they are known for their vocal ability and interactivity. How will you be communicating with them? Play the clarinet into a microphone, plug the microphone into an amplifier, the amp into an underwater speaker, dunk the speaker down into the pool and let the whales hear it. How will you record the interaction? Stick a hydrophone into the water and feed the results into a digital recorder.

Ramirez offered to let me spend three mornings among the whales, and he would accompany me the whole time. The Shedd was not the first aquarium I had contacted. Another facility initially gave me permission but then rescinded it, an order sent down straight from the director. I never did find out exactly why—they told me it had something to do with secret research their belugas were going to be part of, probably something highly classified.

It may also have had to do with the fact that there is deep disagreement among whale researchers and whale aficionados as to whether these animals should be kept in captivity at all. They may have thought I was an activist for beluga freedom. In the wild, white whales routinely travel hundreds, even thousands of miles through open water. Is keeping them in an exhibition pool the equivalent of prison? Zoos and aquariums alike have had to deal with such criticism in recent years, and there are several publicized cases of former dolphin trainers and whale scientists who have then turned their attention to the release of these animals, from Paul Spong to Rick O’Barry.

Yet the animal keepers and trainers I have met in aquariums and aviaries often have much more intimate knowledge of their charges than those who observe elusive creatures in the wild. They would have to, because in captivity animals depend on our attention to survive. Many of the details of animal behavior and physiology we have discovered could only be learned in the close confines of zoos and aquariums. Most people learn of whales from books, film, television, and recordings, but aquariums give many of us our first chance to see these animals in person, an experience deeper than any media image.

For Ken Ramirez, this is the most persuasive argument in defense of his facility. He is an inquisitive and dedicated caretaker of belugas and dolphins. While president of the International Association of Marine Animal Trainers, he assembled a seven-hundred-page book on incentive training. “I work with these animals every day, I feel I know them. It’s my job to make sure they are content. All of our whales are born in captivity,” he assures me. “It is doubtful they would find it easy to survive in the wild.”

One of the fundamental principles of his care for the belugas is enrichment, the idea that the animals’ lives can be improved by giving them new things to think about, to consider, to engage with: new toys, new tests, new games to play. Ramirez saw my interest in playing music to the belugas as a potentially enriching activity, as I would offer new sounds for them to consider. “When you bring an animal into an artificial environment, you are not replicating the wild. There is no substitute for the ocean. Part of good animal care is thinking about their health, nutrition, environment, and behavior. And we provide substitutes for what they’re missing. In the wild, animals are very active, because they’re always hunting for food and avoiding predators. We need to create activities that keep them physically fit and mentally stimulated.”

Ramirez and his staff try to enrich the lives of their belugas by offering them options that make life in captivity more fun. The whales can choose to swim from one pool to the next. If they want to play with a toy, they can. It’s up to them. He’s tried music many times before: “When we play music we open up gates, and allow the animals to move. Do they come close, or do they move away? We can find out whether they are attracted to particular sounds, or repelled by them. We observe what happens, and that’s how we learn.”

The Shedd Aquarium is a beautiful facility right on the shore of Lake Michigan, and the beluga habitat is its centerpiece. With mock evergreens and plastic rocks, we’re supposed to feel we are on the coast of Alaska or somewhere north where these astonishingly white whales cavort in the wild. Here they migrate only from one observation pool to the next, rarely standing still. How does Ramirez know they are happy? “Just as with dogs and cats, when you spend enough time with particular animals, you learn what they need. An animal that is attentive and engaged, she’s happy. One that sits silently in a corner, barely moving, is not.” The sounds of piped-in loons and imaginary waves echo around us, and if you look out the giant latticed windows to the gray-green surface of Lake Michigan, it is not hard to imagine that you are somewhere real and outdoors, maybe even the White Sea.

I imagine a beluga leaping out of his tank, sliding over the rocks and disappearing into the great, gray lake. How would he like it out there? He could swim through the locks to his compatriots in the St. Lawrence estuary, the most polluted population of belugas in the world, isolated from the rest of their kind who move through much wider swaths of sea far to the north. These aquarium whales are probably much healthier than those in that vast estuary a thousand miles to the east. Who is better off? What is captivity to these animals who have known no other life and bring such joy and amazement to all the parents and children who visit them?

Some people believe no cetaceans should be kept in captivity, arguing that zoos by their very nature are a cruel form of prison. Ramirez has heard such talk for years, and he does not agree: “This profession has come a long way.” The first captive dolphins and whales were kept purely to put on a show. But today they are seen as tools of conservation and ecological awareness. “What we try to do is to help our guests see how this animal fits into an ecosystem,” says Ramirez. “The actions we have right here on this lake have to do with this animal’s natural habitat thousands of miles away. If you care about an animal you have to do more than care about that one individual, you have to learn to be concerned about the whole ecology: the fish that animal eats, the shoreline, the pollution in the water. It’s not hard to get people to care about a killer whale, a panda, or a condor. But habitats are being destroyed—people are less motivated by the environment as a surrounding whole. That’s why we have recreated the geology and botany of the Arctic right here, indoors.”

Ramirez doesn’t mind the public critique of aquariums. “One of the things that the protest movement did is put a lot of scrutiny on our facilities. Today the type of people who work here are very different than they once were. These are very compassionate, caring individuals. There is no one who cares more about the health, happiness of these animals than those of us who work with them on a daily basis. We and the animal liberation activists care about the same things, but we diverge somewhat on how to reach our goals. Maybe we should all work together and quit fighting each other!”

I assemble all my gear and lay it out on the wet concrete floor. The whales are already giving me curious looks. The hydrophone is dropped down inside a mesh net so they won’t try to swallow it—I’d heard some other aquaria had lost some equipment that way! The underwater speaker is only a few pounds in weight, but we’re advised to hang it off a rope rather than let its own cable hold it down there. The rest is above water. I put on a pair of full-coverage padded headphones and immediately hear a rumbling rush of scratches and waves. Who would imagine a calm aquarium could produce so much noise? It’s an intimate setting, a far cry from shivering on the deck of the sailboat on the Johnstone Strait.

I spend three long mornings wearing these phones, listening in on the underpool world. There are sporadic beluga honks, whistles, burps, and shrieks. I try the clarinet, and the louder, more glistening soprano saxophone. Sometimes the whales seem to notice that shinier instrument. It’s louder, and a bit more impressive to look at. They come out of the water to check it out up close. I don’t play it as well as I do the clarinet, so for me trying it is more of an homage to Paul Winter and Wayne Shorter than anything else.

On the first day, no response from the whales. But Ken thinks otherwise: “Look, every time you stop, here comes our pregnant whale. She always looks at you while you play, and she always comes over when you stop.”

I wanted more. “Is this as noisy as they get?”

Ken smiled, “Oh no, sometimes it’s just a cacophony of sound here. So loud you can’t hear yourself talk.”

Second day, many hours, quizzical whale looks, hours of recording, still no audible answer. I just keep trying.

Only on the third day do I get a result. One particular note, a G just above middle C. The pregnant whale hears me play that sound, and a few seconds later, she appears to copy it almost exactly. Look at this sonogram in figure 6, and you can see the similarities and differences between the sax note and the whale note. The clarinet is in gray and the whale is in black:

FIG. 6. THE CLARINET PLAYS TWO NOTES IN GRAY; THE BELUGA COPIES THEM IMMEDIATELY. YOU CAN HEAR THIS EXAMPLE AT WWW.THOUSANDMILESONG.COM.

I play “buweeah, buweeah,” and I hear back “heyaaah, heyaaah.” The sonogram shows that the overtone structure, the timbre or color of the whale’s sound, is quite close to what I am doing—not just the pitch, but the phrasing as well. To me the whale has definitely listened and learned. Why? Does something about that sound matter to her in particular?

Belugas are well known to play games with sound. “I worked at another facility once where we used a dog whistle to let the animals know that we liked what they did,” says Ramirez. These whistles can be adjusted so they are within the range of human hearing, or so high that only dolphins and whales can hear them. “The belugas would watch our dolphins in our performances, and they would imitate our whistle so they could manipulate what the dolphins were doing. They seemed to time it well so it would cause the dolphins to mess up. . . . Perhaps they had the pleasure of watching a dolphin get confused!”

Maybe they hoped to confuse me too. I travel through music, and I would travel with these cetaceans and see where the sounds would take me. On that third day in Chicago I got six seconds of hope. Later the clarinet and beluga seemed to interact around a coherent rhythm:

FIG. 7. RHYTHMIC INTERPLAY BETWEEN CLARINET IN GRAY AND BELUGA IN BLACK.

The gray, more pure tones in figure 7 are the clarinet; the resonant whistle-honks in black are the whale. I see a common pulse here, though not as much as in the first example. Here instead is a more complementary, rhythmic engagement.

Belugas make more varied sounds than any other whale, many easy for humans to hear above the water. Because of the vast complexity of beluga sounds, it has proven difficult for humans to categorize them well. Cheri Ann Recchia described the basic kinds of sounds made by the captive belugas she studied in an aquarium as clicks, yelps, chirps, whistles, trills, screams, and buzzsaw. In the early 1980s, Canadian scientists Becky Sjare and Thomas Smith conducted an exhaustive survey of the vocal repertoire of wild white whales summering in Cunningham Inlet off Baffin Island, and they found clicks, pulses, noises, trills, and a variety of whistles they described in great detail. Some sounded like fragments of scales, with clear pitches, and others were whoops and cries, rising up, falling down, in various clear patterns. Some warbled all over the place. They found no real correlation between particular sounds and particular behaviors.

The whistles, which may have signature qualities for dolphins, seem in belugas to be closer to the forms and shapes used by killer whales, equally easy for humans to hear. Whether they have the same clan-identifying functions is unknown. In fact, for all the statistics collected around beluga sounds, their complex music or language seems more inscrutable than the code of any other whale.

My brief interactions with the whales have put me in a good mood. (Perhaps I’m easy to please. You could get that much with birds just whistling out your kitchen window.) Mostly it’s the strangeness of the experience of wearing headphones for many hours and listening to the noisy rumblings of the underwater world, straining to hear the sounds of sea canaries bounding from pool to pool, bouncing off the blue-green walls, subjects in benign experiments where they are endlessly loved by passersby. True, one might also feel sadness at the sight of cetacean prisoners in a castle moat, with gawkers harassing the trapped white whales. But I’m more with Ken, feeling playfulness in the beasts, a tendency to explore. Hreeaaah! Hreeaaah! What would their cousins do in the wild? It was time to go to Russia to find out.

 

Rauno’s plans are coming together. “I don’t think the white suits will yet be ready this summer,” he apologizes. “We are going to focus on your interests, playing sound to the whales. I am really curious as to what they will do.”

Officially, Rauno is a physicist, designing experiments for the new supercollider at CERN in Geneva. But he has been interested in whales ever since he took his eight-year-old son whale watching in Norway fifteen years ago. On the drive home to Finland the boy said, “Papa, couldn’t we do something to save those whales?” Rauno thought a moment and decided, “Yes, we can. It won’t even be all that difficult.” This was in 1990, the very earliest days of the Internet, at first a way for scientists to keep close contact with each other all over the world. The Web itself was developed at CERN, and one of the very first not-quite-academic web pages was Rauno’s “whale watching web,” which he still maintains (www.whaleweb.org). Even now the site looks like one of the world’s first web pages—all text, no animations, pop-ups, or ads.

“To me the Internet is just a map,” says Rauno. “At first my site was just a place to present information on whale-watching companies all over the world. Then it expanded with pages on whales in literature, proverbs, pictures, and sounds. If I look back to my own childhood, I remember a photograph in a Finnish Readers Digest of the dolphin brain compared to a human brain, and they were so similar. An article by John Lilly, I believe.”

When not ensconced deep in the laboratory, Lauhakangas travels around the world, often to areas frequented by whales where the local human inhabitants haven’t given much thought to the great animals as assets to tourism. Rauno then helps the locals start up whale watching as a locally owned industry. He’s done this in the Azores and Iceland, and now he hopes to do the same in Karelia, one of the lesser-known Russian republics. Just east of Finland, it is well within reach of thousands of potential ecotourists.

“We are taking along a photographer and videographer,” he announces. “We will document the whole experiment and spread the word that the white whales are out there. A few groups a season would be enough to bring some prosperity to the tiny village of Kolezhma, from which we will set out onto the White Sea.”

“Only a few tourists would be enough?”

“The average annual income in this place is probably a few hundred dollars a year. This will be the beginnings of capitalism for this beautiful place. And the market economy is the most powerful vehicle for change that humans have yet invented.”

 

“This time I have got the documents certifying that none of our equipment is radioactive,” Rauno smiles, as we are scrutinized by Russian border guards near Joensuu. “I forgot those last time.” The journey to Kolezhma from the Finnish border takes about two days driving on roads of questionable quality. We pass through the capital city of Petrozavodsk, where no one has yet bothered to take down the statue of Lenin, and there is still an avenue called Pravda Street. In a late-night student bar a guy leans over to me and says, “You know, it is so nice to hear English spoken here. No one ever comes to visit this city, and it is quite a nice place, don’t you think? Seven new outdoor cafés opened up on Lenin Avenue just this year!” It has been a long time since I’ve been anywhere outside the United States and met someone actually excited to see an American.

North the next day the drive is nearly all through deserted spruce forest, home to little more than undernourished moose and squirrels. We turn along the Stalin Canal, dug by hand in the early days of the Russian Revolution, a massive testament to forced human labor. It is a man-made river of tears. “We prefer not to dwell on this history,” says our young guide Alexander Velikoselsky, who is practicing his juice harp to play to the whales. Boing, boing, boing. We pass a crumbling museum of petroglyphs, a concrete edifice built to protect an important story-rock, now boarded up because there is no money to keep it open. Russia has many more things to worry about than its history, whether ancient or modern.

But the door is ajar, we wander in. No windows, only bars and cracked glass. The glyphs themselves are protected under sawdust and burlap. “Never mind that,” smiles Rauno. “The most interesting petroglyph is not on this rock, but in the woods just one kilometer from here. I saw it in a book years ago, but found the location by chance. I brought Jim Nollman here six years ago and we made this rubbing”:

FIG. 8. THE MYSTERIOUS PETROGLYPH LINKING HUMAN AND BELUGA.

“The location is a carefully guarded secret. This image on the rock is our holy grail.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, what do you see here?”

“Well I can see the nose, that’s definitely a beluga, perhaps breaching the surface of the sea. A hunter has his arms and legs flayed, he’s ready to strike with his spear.”

“Look again,” Rauno grins. “In science we look for the root of things, the truth extracted out of all the extra information.”

“All right, let’s just say it’s not a spear. Maybe it’s a didgeridoo, he’s blowing deep buzzing tones into the water. But the natives here never played any instrument like that.”

“Well,” counters Lauhakangas, “nearly a thousand years ago we have the testament of Bishop Adam of Bremen, who was the first literate European to chronicle these regions. And I quote: ‘All people in the Far North are Christians, except those who live on the coasts of the Ocean above the Polar Circle. It is told that they have the wisdom to know what each one is doing in whatever part of the world; and they call whales to the beaches by murmuring powerful charms. They know many things by experience, which are only told in the Bible about wizards.’ So, long ago, the people by this Arctic sea may have spoken with the whales. No one alive remembers.”

Gazing across the road to the old canal I can see why. The recent history is so much darker, built on so much death. In the twenty months it took to build this canal, two hundred thousand people died. The petroglyph seems to come from another world.

“Notice what is in his hands!” glares Rauno. “The rattles of a shaman. He looks much more like he is dancing than hunting.”

“I still think the natives would have had a much more prosaic use for that whale. They wanted to eat him. Shamanic or not, animals first and foremost meant food.”

“So whose fins are between the legs?” Rauno shot back.

“What legs?”

“I think you’re missing it completely.”

“How do you mean.”

“Notice her breasts.”

“Whose breasts?”

“Don’t play dumb, that is a woman giving birth to a whale!”

 

The Chukchi of Siberia speak of a woman who fell in love with a bowhead whale. This bowhead saw her walking along the rocky shore and turned himself into a young man. He would stay for a while, then return to the sea, disappear for a time, and always come back. This species, like the humpback, sings a plaintive song, one phrase up, one down. Whooop, eroop, whoop, eroop. The woman was entranced by this melody and could not forget it.

The woman who married a whale gave birth to human children and whale children. The boys and girls played on the rocky beach in the sun. The baby whales swam in the lagoon by the village, but when they grew too big, they would disappear out to sea and join the pods that swam by the village a few times a year.

She would always tell her human children, “The sea gives us our food, but remember your brothers the whales and your cousins the porpoises live there. Never hunt them, but watch over them. Sing to them.”

Her children grew up, then they had children of their own, all human. The village prospered until one very tough winter. There was little to eat. One grandson told another, “Why don’t we kill a whale? There’s certainly enough meat and fat on even one to get us through this season.”

“Remember what Grandma said,” replied his human brother. “Those whales are part of our family. We must leave them alone.”

“What kind of brothers are they?” said the other. “They are long and huge, they live under the sea, and they don’t know a word of human speech.”

“But we can sing to them, and they listen.”

“You sing. I’m not going to die of starvation.” With that he paddled out into the sea. Soon one whale swam slowly up to his boat, as they were used to doing. It wasn’t very hard to spear him.

When they dragged the dead bowhead back to shore the killer went to his grandmother, proud he had found food to save his people. “I killed a whale, grandmother. There is meat and blubber for all to eat.” The woman who married a whale already knew what had happened. Then she cried. “You killed your brother, just because he doesn’t look like you.”

She closed her eyes and died.

The Chukchi sigh. It all went downhill from there. Now even when a human kills another human, no one is really surprised.

 

It could have turned out differently. Maybe the woman who married a whale gives birth to a child with a special sensitivity to the sea. Maybe he grows up to be like the ancient Greek musician Arion, who played his lyre to the dolphins of the Mediterranean, belugas of the warm waters. They were always happy to see him and swirled around him whenever his music began.

One day Arion was captured by a band of pirates, who granted the poet one last wish before they made him walk the plank. He started to sing the dolphins’ favorite song, and as he was pushed into the water they gathered around him, ready to carry him safely to shore. The pirates had never seen anything like this, and they were moved to give up their wicked ways, spending the rest of their days singing and dancing, having lost the will to kill and fight.

That was six thousand years ago, just two thousand years before this petroglyph was carved into the Karelian stone. Edmund Spenser encapsulated the story in a poem:

Then was there heard a most celestial sound
Of dainty music which did next ensue,
And, on the floating waters as enthroned,
Arion with his harp unto him drew
The ears and hearts of all that goodly crew;
Even when as yet the dolphin which him bore
Through the Aegean Seas from pirates’ view,
Stood still, by him astonished at his love,
And all the raging seas for joy forgot to roar.

Albrecht Dürer drew this same moment, but his cetacean is a kind of vicious-looking evil beast, more like a sea warthog than anything real:

FIG. 9. WHAT ALBRECHT DÜRER THOUGHT A DOLPHIN LOOKED LIKE.

It’s a far cry from the gentle inquisitive faces of the smooth, white belugas who we were hoping to attract with sound, and a long way from Rauno’s petroglyph.

Maybe the woman is giving birth to a whale. Maybe a shaman is becoming a whale himself through magical incantations, murmuring charms. “Of course,” admits Rauno, “the early-twentieth-century treatises on Karelian petroglyphs just describe this picture as a hunter pursuing a whale. They had a more limited imagination back then. I believe each generation interprets ancient art in a new way, to meet its needs. We need the whales for something else today.”

 

At the edge of the sea, in the crumbling industrial town of Belomorsk, we turn east on a tiny dirt road for the two-hour drive to Kolezhma. The farther we go, the emptier the landscape becomes. Nothing but close-knit evergreen trees, mile after mile. The dirt track crosses streams and swamps, on rickety bridges made entirely of wood, huge straight timbers. We stop to check each one for missing slats before we proceed. They all seem okay, some just barely so.

At the end of the fifty-mile road is the outpost of Kolezhma, more beautiful and distant than one could imagine. Everything is made out of weathered, unpainted wood. There is one tiny shop that is closed. It’s not clear what people can do out here except endure, keep going, grow their own food, and stay alive. Several hundred remain here, and hardly anyone leaves.

“Look at this, we’re back in the Russia of nineteenth-century novels.” Rauno has big ideas. “This place is going to be the whale-watching capital of the White Sea!” he gestures wildly. “There’s nowhere in Finland like this, people will pay many euros to see it, and that’s the only choice,” now with a sinister grin, “because nothing can stop the green snake of Das Kapitalismus from rearing its ugly head.”

Green snake?

“The whales as they are can bring prosperity here. Come, I will show you! The boat is ready for our transport to the island of Myagostrov. It’s a pagan holy place. Show some respect, Anna,” he gestures to our photographer. “No woman has ever been allowed on this island before.”

We load our gear into a rusty, green metal boat that resembles an above-water submarine, hurrying aboard because the trip can only be made when the tide is still high. The water’s surface is as smooth and gray as the sky. It looks like it should be cold out but the temperature is nearly ninety degrees. The Arctic gets warmer than you think.

It’s a slow two-hour boat ride to the northern tip of Myagostrov Island. Sitting inside the hull I feel I’m stuck in a World War II submarine. The rocky point is marked “Cape Beluga” on the map, since this is one of the seven known spots in the White Sea where belugas congregate in summer. A mile to the west we find a series of weather-beaten cabins; one of them looks brand new.

“That’s the sauna,” beams Rauno. “They built it all in one day last week, just for us.”

“Jesus, I hope it’s not too Russian,” says Gari, our video man.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the kind of place where they also keep animals or hang the salamis up to dry.”

The boat can’t get too close to shore, so we anchor a hundred yards out, take off our shoes, and start carrying in the huge amount of gear we’ve got box by box: boat batteries, invertors, video equipment, five cases of beer (one for each day, essential for all traveling Finns), sleeping bags, food, hydrophones, saxophones. We’re walking through mud and over slick, smelly, algae-ridden rocks. The shore is awash with mosquitoes and flies. “Careful,” warns one of the Lechki brothers, the guys from the village who have organized this trip for us, “the woods are full of tiny poisonous snakes.”

Inside the cabin it’s even warmer than outside! Who knew you could sweat this much so close to the Arctic Circle? At night it’s so hot and the bugs buzz so ferociously around our ears that sleep is well nigh impossible. Plus it never gets dark. I’m hiding in my down bag to keep the bugs at bay, perspiring profusely. Who could think of a sauna in this weather? I keep telling myself as soon as the hour gets reasonable, I’ll just get up and plunge into the sea. Finally it’s 4:30 a.m.—that seems late enough. I jump out of the bag, and dash outside, the sweat dripping off me as the mosquitoes scatter. I can run, but cannot hide. The sea is a quarter mile off, the tide is so low. Nothing to do but wait.

As the sun rises high we’re too excited to complain. We take a dinghy over to the cape to install the hydrophones and the speaker. It’s a different world over there, smooth pink granite, a nice breeze, just a few deer flies to reckon with. The hydrophones are dangled from buoys with ropes. The underwater speaker is suspended from a pole that looks like a broken fishing rod. The tide comes quickly up.

On the hill above us we notice a small wooden lean-to. Three figures stand there, silently watching us. A ten-minute run up the lichen-covered boulders and we find Russian photographer and whale expert Aleksandr Agafonov, a bushy-bearded fellow with a wide-brimmed hat and a plaid shirt. We expected he would be there, along with two young assistants. He was sent by the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow to spend a month watching these very same belugas from this craggy hilltop. I offer him a copy of the book Dolphin Societies, which contains several papers from the Shirshov Institute translated into English on the behavior of dolphins. Agafonov is one of the authors, and he’s never seen this volume before.

“Da,” he smiles. “We will watch and listen to the whales. And we shall listen to you making music with the whales. It will be interesting to all.”

On the horizon to the north I glimpse a low trace of land, about seventy miles away. The Solovetsky Islands were the central administrative facility of the Soviet prison camp system. Solzhenitsyn called them the Gulag Archipelago. Now the offices have been returned to their original purpose, a key monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church. It is another good place to watch for beluga whales.

I get out my soprano saxophone, since that worked best at the Shedd. Put on the headphones, listen to the rumble and thlack of wave against rock. This is no placid sea today. I take in the noise, wait, and wait. Then, I hear them. Rasps and squeaks, clicks like a strange radio broadcast from a planet far away. “Guys, get the cameras out, they’re coming.”

The whiteness of belugas is beautiful, but anyone steeped in whale lore will remember how Ishmael tells us the very color of Moby Dick the White Whale is his most terrible feature, “not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors . . . a dumb blankness, full of meaning—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” The White Sea is not white at all but a dull gray, or a deep colorlessness, that adds in hollowness with thoughts of the terrible human history played out on these shores: war, incarceration, torture, fear. That’s all over, and we’re lucky the white whales remain to remind us that nature can be pure. Whales do not do such terrible things to each other; that’s why John Lilly thought they were far more intelligent than we are.

The younger whales are gray, blending in with the sad surface of the sea. Through the headphones I eavesdrop on their noisy, vibrant world. Above there is the heavy thumping of the waves bashing on the rocks, in splendid downward sweeps. High whistles at the limits of human hearing. Pings and bleeps, new senses of rhythm and order, new beauties in tone and kick. I strain to pick out the whales above the wash of underwater noise. White noise in the depths of white noise. Rauno says it’s a bit like trying to find new particles in the printouts from linear accelerators. “Although in physics,” he smiles, “there is a lot more noise than this. A hundred times more.”

Is there anything musical in these sounds? Easy to say no: they’re clicking to make sense of the things they encounter in a dark environment. Belugas can hardly see, but they can clearly detect the outlines of an object behind an underwater wall. The military knows these whales have amazing detection abilities. Their echolocation, far more powerful and directional than dolphins, enables belugas to find their way through cloudy seas under noisy, breaking ice. They click to find their way, and whistle to signal; signature vowels and social signs gather the pod. What’s musical about that? Foreign languages are inscrutable, able to be decoded. But foreign music? It still has a beat we can follow.

FIG. 10. HOW I PLAYED ALONG WITH BELUGAS WHILE STANDING ON A KARELIAN SHORE.

A whale sings, a clarinet rings. The sounds overlap and connect. I smile, listen, and play again. I imagine the whale is responding to me, yet another human conceit. Why would a white whale care for us? They hardly know we’re here, near the Arctic Circle, where a steady breeze offers some relief from the sweltering heat. I can’t sit still, I have to get up, move around, dance a bit while I reach out to the whales, remembering an old Karelian proverb: Kundele korvilla ela peržiel, “Listen with your ears, not your ass.”

Agafonov comes running down from the hilltop. “Yes, we have been listening. The belugas are definitely responding. Perhaps music is a better way for humans to communicate to these whales.” The tapes will be sent to Moscow. The great Vsevolod Bel’kovich, doyen of Russian whale science, will listen to them, and analyze. We will find out what’s going on, we will get to the bottom of this. Whale-human music has begun.

The belugas scream, wail, cry, and click. It is an alien improvisation, within a strange style that is right here, reachable in our time. The more I listen to the belugas and find my own multiphonic shrieks that merge with theirs, the more I learn to taste this new underwater music. John Cage called the interconnected patterns of sound all around the strands of a vast natural symphony, where overlapping intention forms the music of what happens. Days alone with headphones trying to reach out to belugas and my whole notion of what can be music begins to change. I listen beyond the edge of my species, trying to find my part in the underwater soundscape.

 

We spend several days in the sweltering cabin and eagerly wake up every morning to walk along the shore to Cape Beluga. When the sea is rocky and rough, the waves sharp and white, whales do not appear. When the water is smooth, the distant islands seem to float on the surface. At high tide, the whales appear, right on schedule. It might be night or day, but it is nearly always light this far north. When they hear me play, some kind of aural response happens. This isn’t science, so I can’t be rigorous or conclusive about it; I have hardly any data. I listen to decide if the result of our encounter is musically interesting.

At one point I try the same middle G the whale in Chicago copied after hearing it for three days. Right away there is a response! Either that sound is easy for belugas to master, or it is already a tone that means something to them. Either way, I feel as if I’m getting through. The whale and I share a sound for a moment or two.

The project is getting results. “This I like,” beams Rauno, lying back on the warm rocks enjoying the sun. “I need this kind of experiment as a break from all that tinkering in the lab.”

“You speak often of Das Kapitalismus, Rauno, but you don’t seem much interested in making money yourself.”

“Capitalism is like gravity. Somebody starts to figure out how to make money, his brain will be taken over by Das Kapital, and there is no time to think of anything else. I do not like that.”

“So capitalism makes things happen if we don’t let it consume us?” I guess that is what Marx was actually trying to teach us.

“People cannot be fenced in this free world, but they can be educated.” Rauno stands up and stretches, then starts to pack up his stuff. “Now we have to get back to the village, the Kolezhma Beluga Festival is upon us.”

“What festival?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you. We’re going to have a little event for the village, show them what we’ve been up to. When I mentioned this to Elena at the Karelia Tourist office in downtown Petrozavodsk, she was at first concerned, ‘What, a festival in Kolezhma, population three hundred? Well, why not! Let’s make it a tradition.’ You and I must invite Agafonov as well, to give an impromptu presentation. Look, I’ve made a poster for the occasion”:

FIG. 11. THE KOLEZHMA BELUGA FESTIVAL.

“See, you can zoom in on Google Earth right onto the village. Look at those long buildings from above in the wilderness. You think they are secret military installations? I heard they are old mink barns . . . They used to feed belugas to the minks to fatten them up. I left the time blank so I could surprise you.”

Rauno is never at a loss for surprises.

When the boat comes to pick us up we hear there has been a terrible storm in Kolezhma. Power has been out, several roofs have been ripped off their frames. The Lechkis look quite shaken. Nature here is more extreme than it looks. On the journey back we are all a bit apprehensive, but when we arrive at the village the sun is out, everyone seems in a good mood. The store is open today, and we stock up on cakes and vodka. As we carry our equipment to the village hall, at every turn more little boys turn and follow us. By the time we reach the old wooden door we have quite an entourage, like pied pipers of whale music.

As I take out my equipment on stage, the little boys refuse to leave. They want to be part of the show, sitting beside me, grabbing at the flutes and the microphones. All of a sudden the room goes dark—the power is out again. A generator is found. Power returns, but with a motor’s rumble. I play the sounds of belugas and other whales, making music with and around them. Sasha Velikoselsky joins on juice harp and Gari Saarimaki is on guitar. More than a hundred villagers are here, nearly half the population. Not much else going on in town that night I guess. The smiling whales glisten and sing.

Agafonov is next, and he speaks softly and carefully on why he has spent a month doing nothing but watching these white animals. He shows a video in which two groups of four parallel whales approach each other, turn away from the shore, and then all go off together in a line of eight. It looks very organized. His team has collected careful data on the movement and appearance of the whales, every day. Rhythmic, repetitive work. Great patience is needed to conduct it.

Then Rauno introduces the Russian language version of a film he helped to make with Canadian director Patricia Sims, Beluga Speaking Across Time. This documentary begins with our petroglyph and goes on to describe differences in the way Canadians and Russians understand the beluga whale. In Canada the natives still hunt and eat the beluga; in Karelia that is long forgotten. The film shows Bel’kovich in his leather jacket getting out of a black Volga limo, going into his laboratory to reveal the various James Bond-type contraptions he has invented to study dolphins and belugas.

After the festival is over, the village returns to quiet and we retreat to the Kolezhma Cultural Center to unwind. Vodka is passed all around. Rauno proposes a toast: “To the beautiful icon from Solovetsky Island, depicting the founding of the monastery, a pilgrimage site for all devout Russian Orthodox, by Gherman and Savvatiy of Kirillo-Belozersky, arriving across the sea accompanied by two white beluga whales.”

“Wait a moment,” says Svetlana, one of Agafonov’s assistants. “I worked for six years in the archives of the Solovetsky Monastery. There is no such icon painting, there is no such story.”

“Kippis,” smiles Rauno, holding his glass up again. I know he has a way with the truth. Each generation reinteprets history for its own ends. And in Russia no salud is innocent.

“To your shamanlike sounds crying out to the belugas,” intones Agafonov. “Like the throat-songs of Tuva, the quality of the sound matters more than any meaning.”

After another shot of vodka I glance out over the thick forests to the colorless sea, with another Karelian proverb in mind. Mägi mägenke ei yhty yhtei, a ristsikanz ristsikanzanke yhtyu—“Mountains never meet, but men do.”

 

We may all be friends now but there used to be many walls between the East and West, and these walls extended to the world of dolphins and whales. If the Americans were tapping dolphin intelligence for nefarious military purposes, then you can be sure the Russians were too. And they knew of the echolocation abilities of belugas for a long time, so the Russians were training their secret underwater weapons for decades before any Americans knew these whales had vowel sounds. As we had dolphin facilities in Mugu and Loma, they had their animals in the Black Sea off Crimea. We only know about this because one got out.

In 1992 vacationers on the Turkish coast of the Black Sea were treated to an astonishing site: a beluga whale, one that seemed unafraid of humans and eager to take fish from people’s hands. Such an animal was totally unknown in the wild in that part of the world. Everyone assumed he had escaped from an aquarium, and the only one somewhat close was a former Soviet military facility in the new Republic of Ukraine, a thousand miles away. Was this whale a Communist spy? What military secrets did he know?

The first white whale to appear in Turkey became a national sensation. Schoolchildren all across Europe and the Middle East learned his name, which the media had decided was now Aydin. Soon an official message came from the government of Ukraine: “Yes, that whale escaped, and he belongs to us. His name is Briz, he was born in the Sea of Okhotsk off Sakalin in 1984, captured by helicopter in 1987. We are coming to Turkey to get him.”

As in the case of Keiko, the children of the country mobilized in support of the whale. Could money be raised to support his rehabilitation and return to the wild? Nobody wanted him back in a military facility in the Crimea. Except for the Russians, who sailed their ship during the night to Turkey and collected the whale to bring him home. But more and more children from all over Europe wrote letters to the Ukrainian government. Look, said the Ukrainians, we’ve put that whale in an oceanarium, where he is performing shows for little children like you. He’s not in the Navy anymore. And if you want him, just give us $80,000, the going rate for a beluga in Japan. Although this was a tiny fraction of Keiko’s price, none of this whale’s fans had enough money.

As luck would have it, a huge storm lashed against the Crimean coast, and Aydin/Briz escaped again. The whole saga was beginning to sound like a Lou Reed song. The Soviet beluga swam right back to Turkey, and the nation was overjoyed. His picture was in all the papers. Restaurants sprouted up called White Whale, and this national hero was praised as an alien who truly deserved Turkish citizenship. Later that year the Turkish government passed a law decreeing that no white whale can ever be captured again in Turkish waters for any purpose, and to this day at least one beluga whale freely roams the Black Sea.

 

Moscow in winter is famous for bitter cold and heavy snow, but this winter, as in much of the world these days, it is warm enough to be only gray and rainy. I see none of the opulent excess too often described in the Western press, just crowds of people shuffling through gray streets, crumbling buildings, heavy traffic, and the sense that here is a system that no longer works.

The subways are grand and precise, Stalin’s pride. They still run on time. The rush of bodies underground is like nowhere else I have been except New York. I’ve come to visit Agafonov, who, when not watching Arctic whales, lives with his mother in a tiny apartment. “I’m fifty years old, and I’ve been married twice,” he smiles. “Neither of my wives could appreciate how much work I have to do.” Agafonov studies belugas only part of the time. His main job is at the Russian Union of Art Photographers, of which he is the president. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no longer much support for culture or science. “But we are free, and this is much better. We Russians always find a way to get by.”

The photographers’ union used to be in a grand old house, but now it is in the basement of an apartment building near the Tekhnika subway stop. Nicer, says Agafonov, than the Oceanology Institute. Here he has gathered several of Russia’s best whale researchers to present their work and hear what we found the previous summer in the White Sea.

We shuffle into a dingy apartment building and head downstairs to a basement office crowded with coffee-table photo books and posters of famous images of Russian history. “Under Communism our office was in a beautiful mansion,” Agafonov admits. “Now we must be content with this.” On a desk are bowls of pickled herring and plates of salami. Bottles of wine and vodka await us.

Vladimir Baranov shows a video he made off of Solovetsky, with a special seafloor-mounted camera, of svelte white whales nuzzling each other in the White Sea. Beluga mating in action. “Da, look he slidez up next to her and then sticks it in, voila! Then he svims away, and back, does it von more time just to be sure!” The distorted grainy color looks like something from an early cinema archive, even though it was just made a few years ago. “Zhis video is especially popular with the ladies,” and he takes another swig of vodka.

Roman Belikov is one of the brightest young whale scientists in Moscow, just finishing his Ph.D. He presents the comprehensive work on beluga sounds he has been doing along with Bel’kovich, the most extensive analysis of these sounds in any country. Bel’kovich himself is in the hospital and cannot join us. They have begun to draw some conclusions. Bel’kovich and Belikov found six basic types of beluga sound: “creak, bleat, chirp, squeak, whistle, and vowel.” In social interaction between whales there is more bleating, chirping, and whistling. There is plenty of chirping during beluga sex, but absolutely no bleating. The most vowel sounds are heard during peaceful swimming.

The vowels are the one kind of sound the Russians found that was not similarly categorized by Canadian scientists. It is a sound few other researchers have identified in any other whale, or any other animal, for that matter. It’s an ingenious way to give a complex, noisy sound a clearly recognizable identity, like the vowels of human languages. The particular shape of the overtones in the sound, called “formants” by speech pathologists, are what give each vowel its quality. In the belugas, the Russians heard these basic vowels: ah, eh, uh, o, u, and ee. That whale in Chicago who copied my saxophone note seemed to be making an eh sound. Bel’kovich and Belikov believe these vowel sounds can be the key to identifying individual whales interacting in a group, because they seem to be distinctive, not shared. Instead of the signature whistles found in dolphins, belugas may have signature vowels.

I play my two best recordings from the previous summer. Unlike the orca duets, which were simple and direct, these beluga encounters are windows into a much more cacophonous underwater world. On the first recording, the belugas whistle and growl in the midst of the noisy thlacks of waves against rock. The clarinet sounds like an interloper in a world of crazy noise. No sound they make can be characterized, no tone I try out has a place. We’re playing at and around each other, and I am slowly lured in.

In the second recording the human world is muffled. There is wind and a tentative clarinet. Once again there is that searching note G. Faintly in the background, in the other channel, the whale answers. I’ve carried my one syllable from Chicago to Myagostrov, and I hear it echoing back. Months later now in Moscow, the same note resounds in my head. It’s there, but it’s hollow. We don’t know what it means.

I ask the Russians whether music has any place in the attempt to understand the world of beluga sound, since it seems that Western scientists have cast such a woolly approach off decades ago. “We believe,” says Belikov, “that some of the sounds of belugas are specifically indicative of their emotional state.” Does a whale with such a wide range of possible sounds have more emotions than those with a more limited repertoire? Not necessarily, but they certainly have a greater range of expression. If we decode such sounds, will they lose their allure and turn into message in our ears? Of course not. Vocalizing is what belugas do, it is their very nature.

The beluga, like Moscow, does not believe in tears. But they do believe in sound. It takes a little more effort to find music in it, but when we do, beauty starts to appear. “Beluga sounds are a very complicated subject for investigation,” says Belikov. “Perhaps we will one day be able to know as much about their meaning as we do about orca sounds, but I have some doubts. If everything would be so easy than all problems would have been already resolved. Everything is very elusive in beluga signals.”

Agafonov presents the sounds and videos he has assembled from the previous summer’s extensive observations. It is a catalog of fabulous noises that no one understands. The clarinet and the whale? “I’m afraid there is not yet enough data. You must come back with us next summer. And maybe the summer after that.”

Baranov pours another round. “Let us vatch the film again, zhis time with musik only, very relaxing,” and a strange dissonant soundtrack now comes on, with dark electronic chords. The whales cavort around the camera, look us in the eye, and wonder what strange machines we will come up with next. A middle G swirls around in my head; the whales cry up and around it, occasionally copying that one simple tone.

Rauno offers up his latest discovery, an ancient song from the Finnish folkorist Elias Lönnrot, compiler of the national epic Kalevala. Deep in the midst of his collected writings, the whale-watching physicist has found a whale lyric, the single reference to them in hundreds of pages, lying in wait for someone to notice:

There are three high mountains
Three high falls
Three eddies in the water.
A fire on each eddy
A man beside each fire
A piece of whale in each man’s body.

“And that doesn’t mean we should eat them,” Rauno raises his glass once more. “In the White Sea they remember us, and their songs have found a place in our hearts.”