THEY COME IN the late autumn, passing the islands in droves. I have seen them sliding through the sea like nightmares. Despite their size, the whales have an elusive quality. They camouflage themselves as waves, as clouds, as islets, as reflections of light. Blue whales. Gray whales. More than once I have found myself staring at what appears to be an empty ocean, only to observe a column of mist rising against the sky—a gasping exhalation—and realize the sea is full of bodies.
Mick is our whale expert. It is his job to count and catalog the animals’ numbers, to keep track of the males, females, and juveniles. They are heading north in search of krill. Baleen whales, the largest animals on earth, survive by eating some of the smallest. They are traveling to the ice caps, where there are fields of krill so dense they make the water opaque. Mick has been there. He has seen gray whales swimming blindly in a bath of food, singing to one another in apparent joy.
The humpbacks are his favorite. They move in family groupings, forming intense bonds. Nomadic by nature, they lack any notion of permanence or home. They are the opera singers of the aquatic world, yet most of their music falls into the subsonic or supersonic range, beyond human hearing. Our ears are paltry, tiny things. My whole body could fit into a humpback’s lung.
Before people filled the ocean with noise—boats churning, oil rigs thrumming, undersea cables vibrating—whales were able to sing across the entire planet. Mick told me this. I was struck by the image, not of the animal, but of the music itself. A single, throbbing note. I imagined the vibration passing through forests of kelp, setting jellyfish to movement, tricking shellfish with its resemblance to thunder so they cowered in their homespun caves. One strong note over sandy, wave-swept terrain—the oceanic equivalent of deserts—where nothing could grow and no fish lingered. One strong note over coral reefs and canyons, teasing dolphins into an answering chatter, bothering the seabirds where they rested between sea and sky. Finally this music would find its audience: another whale, clear on the other side of the world.
The presence of these animals has unsettled me. They are not predators, and they are not prey. They exist outside the food chain. In some ways, they exist outside normal space and time. They live in a realm of large, slow things—tides, storms, and magnetic currents. They often plunge into the inky depths of the ocean, down where the sunlight fails. They inhabit a blue world, away from land, dipping from water to air and back again, sliding between darkness and glow. It is rare for them to come close enough to the coast to be seen by human eyes. The Farallon Islands are unusual in this way, as in so many others. Autumn in this place is Whale Season.
It is November. Early November, I think, though I can’t be sure. I haven’t looked at the calendar in quite some time.
Thus far, I have failed to photograph the whales. I have tried, but they have defeated me. They are always too far away to succumb to my telephoto lens. They are too big to fit into the frame. There is something inartistic about their bodies, too. Some quality is lost in translation. Their ears and eyes vanish among their barnacles and scars. Their mouths are oddly shaped. Their blowholes are grotesque orifices, falling somewhere in appearance between a volcano and a rectum. Even the babies aren’t photogenic. Gray whales are fifteen feet long when they’re born, clocking in at two thousand pounds.
Undaunted, I continue to work. I have climbed Lighthouse Hill and sat on the slope for hours, looking to the west, where the whales pass by at irregular, unpredictable intervals. They are mysterious. They have been cropping up in my dreams, swimming through the moonless oceans of my mind, swishing their tails, displacing gallons of water, singing loudly enough to wake me.
The other day, I saw a blue whale. I was high on the hill, trying to plant my tripod on the crumbling granite. The creature rose up without warning. The noise caught my attention first—the whistling gasp of its breath. Fifty feet from shore. A rare thing. A marvel. It was bigger than a building, bigger than a dinosaur. I knew the numbers—the amount of school buses that would balance out its body on a scale, the quantity of football fields that would constitute its spine.
But I could not capture this girth on film. I got a snapshot of its nose. Its maw, mottled with algae. A gigantic flipper flinging droplets like throwing stars. The tail, off-kilter. It reminded me of the parable about an elephant in a dark room. One person touches the trunk and describes the animal as a tree, the next touches the torso and describes the animal as a wall, and the third touches the tail and describes the animal as a rope. My photographs were similarly fragmented. Only pieces, rather than the whole. No grandeur. No force. No sense of power and size.
I was scrolling through the images I had taken—all unsuccessful and unbeautiful—when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned so swiftly that I lost my footing. Andrew stood there grinning. His red cap was askew, the gold emblem winking at me. I skidded down the slope, flinging out a hand. Andrew caught my arm. He pulled me up, then yanked me against him. He wrapped me in a hug.
“Poor Melissa,” he said. “Always falling down.”
“Let me go.”
He tightened his hold. My camera was pinned between us, digging into my chest.
“You’re hurting me,” I said.
He released me, stepping back. I shivered.
There was a scuffle, and Lucy appeared on the hill. I was glad to see her—a novel sensation. She was panting, her cheeks scarlet from exertion. A coil of hair trailed across her cheek. Her expression was mulish.
“You walk too fast,” she said to Andrew. “You never wait for me.”
“Look who I found,” he said.
Lucy glanced up, wiping her brow with her sleeve.
“Oh, mouse girl,” she said. “Have you seen any burrowing owls?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this.
“They’re an invasive species,” Andrew explained. “They feed on the mice.”
“They don’t belong here,” Lucy said. “We chase them off, but they always come back. It’s a constant battle.”
“Oh,” I said.
She turned away. “Let’s check Garbage Gulch, babe. I saw a couple there yesterday.”
She did not say goodbye to me. She marched down the slope, her braid swinging behind her. Andrew blew me a kiss.
THAT EVENING, LUCY brought the octopus into the living room. We were all downstairs, as we are every evening, seven bodies crammed into the tiny space, Galen and Forest reading on opposite ends of the couch, Mick scribbling notes about whales in the daily log, Andrew at the table, Charlene washing dishes. I was sitting on the floor, scrolling again through the images on my digital camera, deleting the duds. This is a nightly ritual. It will be months before I will be able to convert my pictures into prints. For now, they remain in a half-real state, glimmering on the screen, stored in electronic impulses in the memory card, more idea than art.
I was aware of Andrew’s gaze on my back. Galen’s noisy breathing. The odor of Mick’s sweat. The restless jiggle of Forest’s legs. There is no peace here, no solitude. I have not yet learned to tune out the constant presence of the others. I will have to acquire this skill soon, for the sake of my sanity.
Then Lucy laughed. The sound startled me. She was standing in her bedroom doorway with something cupped in her hands. She set the octopus on the floor. Evidently she had removed him from the aquarium on her bureau. She flicked the damp off her fingers. For a moment, Oliver stayed curled in a protective ball. His suckers were flipped outward, rumpled like lace. One yellow eye gleamed.
He unfolded all at once, a remarkable gesture, eight legs tumbling in every direction. The sac of his body sagged like a deflated balloon. No bones. He had no bones. He began to drag himself right toward me.
I got to my feet, backing away. I bumped into the couch. Oliver changed color, his flesh darkening from sandy ochre to furious red. The same hue as Andrew’s stocking cap. His progress made a surprising amount of noise. Suck and slide. Slither and coil. Suddenly, he changed direction. One long arm snaked to the side and tugged. His body rolled over, the skin puckered with dust.
“He can’t breathe,” I said. “Won’t he die?”
Lucy did not answer. She was watching her pet with something like pride. I found that I was standing by Mick, my fingers hooked in his sweater.
“He’s fine,” Mick said. “They can hold their breath for thirty minutes or so. Look at him run! He’s trying to find a way out of here.”
There was something both hopeful and hopeless in the scene. The octopus did not know that he was half a mile inland. He did not know about the obstacles he would have to overcome to return to the ocean. Acres of sharp, uneven granite. Gallons of dry, unforgiving air. The predatory seabirds overhead. The detached, amused gaze of the biologists. The octopus was unaware of how trapped he truly was.
“There’s no escape,” Lucy said.