The flight from JFK to Seattle is bumpy. I dig my fingernails into the skin of my thighs and promise God if she does not crash the plane, I’ll be grateful, I’ll finally accept that my life is not mundane but divine. After deplaning, I catch the Bellingham shuttle and ride several hours up the coast, stopping at, among other places, the Tulalip Casino, which sports a killer whale on its sign. At the Anacortes Ferry Terminal, I wait in a room—ticket window on one side, snack bar on the other—along with gray-haired people in casual clothing. Two young men, both with long ponytails. One wears a tie-dye T-shirt, the other a backpack. Three adorable little girls in matching Hello Kitty sweatshirts play around the feet of their mother, who wears a green sari with gold fringe.
The Salish Sea is the home waters of J2, Granny, and all the other wild Southern Residents. It is this sea Lolita was taken from four decades ago. The Salish includes the water around the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Seattle’s Puget Sound. Two snowcapped mountain ranges, the Cascades and the Olympic, border Puget Sound. A multitude of rivers flow into the Salish, including the Columbia, Nooksack, Dungeness, and Chilliwack. On the ferry deck, wind rushes over my ears as I look out over the water, covered with silver light, moving the surface in one pattern, then another. A cormorant lands on the ferry rail near me. I see its iridescent purple neck, its black head and beak, and, when it opens its mouth, its blood-red throat.
In Friday Harbor, after I check in to my hotel, I walk across the street to Herb’s, Friday Harbor’s answer to Moby-Dick’s Spouter-Inn. Wood cutouts of killer whales hang from every streetlight, and in the gift-shop window I see killer whale cookie cutters, tea towels, skateboards, and oven mitts. The art gallery window displays killer whale wind chimes, mailboxes, and belt buckles. Inside Herb’s there is no Melvillian wainscoting, no bulwark of an old-fashioned craft, no clam or fish chowder. Though the walls and ceiling of Herb’s are covered in knotty pine that does give a feeling of being trapped beneath a capsized ship. From the ceiling hang a dozen orange life preservers. A school of carved-wood salmon swim, suspended, over the beer taps.
The inhabitants of Herb’s are milder than Melville’s half-wild sailors in their raggedy coats, heads muffled with woolen comforters, and beards stiff with icicles. While there are a few shaggy young men with impressive cases of bedhead who, I’ll later learn, are kayak guides, the clientele at Herb’s is mostly made up of sunbaked locals and weekend sailors. Only my bartender looks seaworthy, with his black beard, red handkerchief, and plethora of faded green tattoos.
Beside my beer lies the Center for Whale Research’s Matriline ID Guide. I ordered the thick colored pamphlet, stapled at the spine, a year ago and already it’s well-worn. Killer whale pods contain several matrilines, four generations of females, great-grandmothers all the way to great-granddaughters as well as sons. Each of the seventy-eight Southern Residents has a photo, a close-up of its dorsal fin and saddle patch. Every dorsal, which is located midway on the whale back, is shaped somewhat differently. All are triangular, but some are taller, others shorter; some bow at the top, others look like what Melville described as a “Roman nose.” Many have nicks at the back of their dorsals from close encounters with boat propellers. The saddle patch is directly behind the dorsal, like a gigantic birthmark; each has a unique shape and color. Some resemble a cloud of wispy smoke; others are more white than gray, as if snow had fallen onto the Salish Sea and settled on individual whales.
The killer whale body is huge, five times as long as a human’s and 150 times our weight. Their bodies are large but also firm, muscular, and, to the human eye, wet, shining. Their backs are black and stomachs white, and these opposing colors are in perfect unity, like a Chinese yin-yang symbol. Their black pectoral fins jut from where the arms would be on a land mammal, like two flat paddles. Their tail flukes, mistaken for mermaid tails by early sailors, are bow shaped, indented in the middle. Just in front of their white oval eye patches are the small eyes, which, like human eyes, can be either brown or blue. Killer whale snouts, where a nose would be, narrow like a dolphin’s. Inside their pink mouths, their tongues are the size of a bath towel, and they have rows of large top and bottom teeth. Blowholes are located on the top of the head, a hollow opening the size of a cantaloupe covered with a flap of black skin that closes while they dive underwater. Killer whales, unlike humans, who breathe unconsciously, are conscious breathers. They must, when they need oxygen, rise to the surface, open the blowhole flap, expel a smelly gust of wet air, and suck in a new breath.
I’d hoped to memorize the dorsals. I’m particularly interested in the matriarchs. J16, a whale known as Slick who was born in 1972, has a classic dorsal with a saddle patch that looks like a roiling storm front. K12, also born in 1972, and known as Sequin, has a thick, squat dorsal and a faint, lacy saddle. L25, the eighty-five-year-old whale thought to be Lolita’s mother, has a straight dorsal with just the slightest top curve and a gauzy white saddle. I realize as I stare down at the pages of the Matriline ID Guide that it’s impossible: I will never be able to tell one whale from another. I won’t get close enough to see their saddle patches, and to my untrained eye, all the dorsals will look similar. I decide to concentrate on J2, Granny. Her dorsal is wide, with a large indentation in the center. The nick, probably from a boat propeller, is more curved than triangular. J2’s saddle itself is shaped like a small killer whale calf.
I’ve learned as much as I could about Granny. She was born in 1911, the same year as both Ginger Rogers and Mahalia Jackson. She was once seen with her pod as they drove transient whales that dared to hunt in J pod territory up onto the beach. In 2011 Granny started to travel with J37, Hy’Shaque. About a year later, when J37 had her first calf, some speculated that Granny may have been giving the new mother advice. Since then she is often seen near her great-grandson L87, a twenty-five-year-old whale who recently lost his mother. Granny’s been spotted playing with porpoises and babysitting younger members of her pod so their mothers could forage. Dr. Deborah Giles, the former director of research for the Center for Whale Research and the current resident scientist at the Friday Harbor Labs, told me that many times she’d seen J pod swimming down Haro Strait, with J2 slapping her tail flukes “like a schoolteacher blowing her whistle.” Quickly, not only J pod but also K and L pods would line up behind.
While J2 is the most iconic female, J1, who was thought to be Granny’s son and known as Ruffles, was the most iconic male until he died in 2011. Ruffles was easily recognizable from his huge wavy dorsal fin and the slow, deliberate way he dived. Known to whale scientists as “the big guy,” J1 loved to surf. “He’d make a beeline for the container ships,” Dr. Giles told me, “and bodysurf in the wake off their stern.” Younger male whales forage for the day in groups but at night return to their mother’s side. Relationships between matriarchs like Granny and their male sons are close. Older mothers catch salmon for their male offspring. The mother-son relationship is so crucial that when a mother dies, her son is eight times more likely to die in the year after. This could be because of the loss of food, but Dr. Giles speculates it could also be emotional: “While females have calves to care for, male whales’ main emotional bond throughout their lives is with their moms.” J1 while alive was “glued to” J2’s side. He was also the guardian of the greater pod. Once when J pod came up to a whale-watching boat, it was J1 who stayed the longest, making sure J42, the newborn Echo, and his mother, J16, known as Slick, were safely past the boat propeller before he swam off behind them.
Each whale has its own personality, its own physicality, and its own part in whale culture. Whales, like humans, have both vertical and horizontal culture. “Culture,” as Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell write in their 2015 book, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, “is a flow of information from one animal to another.” Vertical culture, the historical skills passed down from generation to generation, includes language, foraging techniques, and sexual and social behavior. Transient whales teach their calves to beach themselves, catch a seal, and then refloat back into a receding wave. Mothers have been seen on sealless beaches, teaching their calves this skill. The Southern Residents’ greeting ceremony is also learned. Each pod forms a long line, then after a moment of silence, K, L, and J pods begin to vocalize loudly and break into tight subgroups with their friends in other pods. This ritual, like square dancing or a religious ceremony, is taught by older pod members to younger ones.
Horizontal culture is a fad, something that develops quickly, catches on, and then passes through the community fast. Think pixie haircuts, Rollerblades, ant farms. The biggest fad to swerve through the Southern Resident community was in 1987. That summer, a female in K pod began to push around and play with a dead salmon. Within five weeks, nearly every member of K, L, and J pods had a dead salmon toy. By fall, though, the whales lost interest, and not one was seen pushing or carrying a dead salmon on its snout.
Language is the most important part of cultural transference. Killer whales make a rich variety of echolocation clicks and calls. The calls follow different patterns and are a communication system similar to Morse code. Each pod has more than a hundred calls. Some of them are shared by all the pods; others are unique to individual pods. The whales produce sounds by forcing air through various nasal sacs and cavities; the sounds reverberate up through the whale’s fatty forehead and are beamed out acoustically like a ray of sonar.
Erich Hoyt, one of the first people to study whale language in the 1970s, recorded whale calls, then tried, by slowing down the notes, to replicate them on his synthesizer. He reports that on one boat trip with a film crew, several whales became fascinated with the underwater hydrophone attached to the bottom of the boat. They directed a series of tense vocalizations toward the hydrophone. Hoyt flipped on the tape recorder, turned up the volume pots on the synthesizer, and pressed the keys in the pattern that mimicked the calls. “Two seconds went by,” Hoyt writes, “and then it came: A chorus of whales—three, maybe four—sang out a clear, perfect imitation of what I had just played to them.” What astounded Hoyt was that rather than making their original call, the whales duplicated Hoyt’s slower, stilted human version.
Sex is also an important and frequent part of whale life. “The whales are very tactile,” Giles tells me, “very sensuous.” Groups of young males have been seen playing together with their penises, known as sea snakes—six feet long and as thick as a fire hose—draped over one another. Mature males find breeding partners in other pods. The matriarchs, like killer whales in general, appreciate sexual pleasure and seek it out. “It was not unusual to see sex play going on,” Giles tells me, “and see that J2 was in the mix.” Older females may train the younger males in sexual technique. They may use sex to relieve tension in their pods, or they may just like sex. “In their culture,” Giles says, “they don’t have that human taboo: don’t sleep with old women.”
When sex does lead to procreation, whale birth is a communal affair. After a female whale gives birth, multiple females, including matriarchs, gather around the newborn and lift it up to the surface for its first breath. “There are so many females,” the whale scientist Alexander Morton wrote, “there is no telling who the mother was, they touch the baby all over.” The tooth marks on the head of J50 when she was born may mean that the baby was breech and that an older female, maybe even Granny, served as midwife, pulling the calf out of the mother.
I’m the first to arrive at the Friday Harbor traffic circle, in front of the ferry dock, where I’m supposed to meet the van that will take me whale-watching. I sit on a bench and read The Unprofessionals, a 2008 novel by Julie Hecht that features a menopausal narrator: “It was the second month of living without a soul and I was getting used to the feeling. The obliteration of the self had begun two years before—probably it had begun many years before—but now I was at the brink of being seriously over forty-nine and it was all coming to fruition.”
At Smallpox Bay, which has a black stone beach and empties into Haro Strait, we park the van, unload the kayaks, and carry them down to the beach. The guides—Matt, a college student with long red hair held back in a ponytail; and Will, a recent graduate from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—tell us how to wear our life preservers, put on the spray skirt, hold our paddle, and feather the blade sideways if we’re taking a break. Beside me there is a young couple: the man, after being asked if he likes whales, turns around and pulls up his shirt to show off his humpback tattoo. Another couple, in expensive gear, works at Animal Planet. The only other single person is a woman near my own age, a Broadway producer. She has dyed-black hair and tight, pale skin. We compare gear, our Gore-Tex jackets and neoprene shoes. Matt tells us never to stand up in the kayak. He demonstrates the straddle-butt drop, and side swing-in. Will explains that if we see whales, we’ll quickly do what is called “rafting up”: pull our boats close together and hold on to each other’s paddles. This way we are less likely to tip over.
I’m in front and Matt is in back as we push out, stern first, into the shallow water. An egret grasps a silver fish and tips its head back so that the fish slips inside its beak and down its long neck. Out in the bay the water is rougher. I’m surprised how low the kayak sits in the water, how the boat shifts and bumps on every swell. We paddle toward Lime Kiln Lighthouse, home of the hydrophone I’ve been listening to for months. Matt points out an eagle’s nest high up in a pine tree and the eagle itself, sitting in the top branches of the crooked, red-barked madrone tree. The colors are divergent: yellow grass, red bark, the deep green leaves, and then the water, which is slate blue with swatches of viridian.
Will points out a fried-egg jellyfish, translucent pale blue with a yolk-like center. Purple stars cling to rocks below the tide line. We rest in a patch of bull kelp, each plant like a giant scallion with a large glassy bulb and long flat stems floating underneath. Matt tells us about the seals we see lying out on the rocks, chunks of fat covered in sleek fur. I’m beginning to understand that rather than being a whale-watching trip, this is more of a nature tour. When we paddle back into the bay for our lunch break, it’s clear we’re not going to see whales. I eat my energy bar and put on my sunglasses to hide my disappointment.
The graduate student who watched the 751 hours of whale footage—the basis for the whale menopause study—got interested in the Southern Residents while working as an intern at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island. “They each had their own personality,” Emma Foster told me. “Some are playful, others shy.” Foster spent her weekdays watching whales on the center’s boat and found herself drawn, even on her days off, to Lime Kiln Point State Park, where she watched for whales from shore. “It’s the most amazing feeling seeing them,” she said, “very addictive and very strange.” Unlike me, Foster memorized the dorsals and saddle patches of all the Southern Residents. What she learned from watching the footage, taken over fifteen years, was that in times of food scarcity, when the salmon supply was low, it was the oldest post-reproductive females that led their pods.
After lunch we load back into the kayaks. The wind is less severe now, the water placid. Smooth. As we clear the bay mouth and move out into the Salish Sea, the guy with the humpback tattoo says he thinks he sees whales to the west. I see them, small black-and-white shapes, breaching and spy-hopping. Matt has us raft up. I grip my neighbor’s paddle. Will holds on to the bull kelp, rooted in the seafloor, so we don’t drift. Matt says if there were more time he’d tuck us into a nearby cove. The whales are moving fast, making their serpentine way in and out of the water. Their dorsal fins are bigger than I imagined, towering over the sea. Massive heads push giant pillows of rippled water in front of them. Each time they rise, breaking the surface, the sea streams off their backs like rainwater sheeting off a tilted roof. The theater lady is worried they are swimming directly at us. Could we capsize? Matt reminds us to hold each other’s paddles tight. I feel the kayak rise up a little in the water.
As the whales swim closer, talking stops. The concentration is acute, singular. I feel my pulse speed up, my heart shaking my rib cage. Two whales surface ten feet in front of our kayak, their eye patches so white they glow and their dorsal fins stretching high in the air. Kawouf! Their blowholes go off one after another. The kayaks jumble together on the confused sea. I am a small land creature floating on the edge of a vast ocean populated by giants. When I look down, I see several whales swimming beneath our boats, white tummies moving under translucent green water. Our kayak rises up and in front of me, only a few feet away, is a massive killer whale. Kawouf! I see a brown eye looking directly at me, the shining, numinous expanse of body. “It’s Granny,” Matt says. “I see the notch.”
In the van on the way back, silence continues. I feel blissed-out, sleepy. When I get back to my hotel room, I call up people on the East Coast to tell them I’ve seen Granny. I feel a strong need to share. But each time I tell the story of the huge black-and-white creatures surrounding our raft of yellow kayaks, I feel, after I put down the phone, a sense of loss, of somehow selling out the experience, making the encounter sound like yet another entertainment. When I describe the whales as vibrant, muscular, huge, the whales become visual objects separate from myself. But what I actually felt was a dilation.
I’d later learn what I’d experienced is known by local boat captains and naturalists as an orca-gasm. “When the whales surface, people first get quiet,” one guide tells me. “Then they make sex sounds, heavy breathing, aahs, oohs, and ‘oh my god.’” Seeing whales is not passive but an embodied experience. “When the whales breach,” one park ranger told a researcher, “it’s like a climax. People don’t get this way about foxes.”
I have trouble falling asleep that night. There is the usual menopausal sleeplessness. It is stuffy, my room has no air-conditioning to combat Washington State’s rare heat wave, and I can hear music coming out of Herb’s across the street. Whenever anyone leaves or enters, noise flares out. Mostly I am still high off seeing Granny. J2 is a holy, mythological beast, one who gave off a powerful charge.
This was not a warm, fuzzy feeling. “One does not meet oneself,” the naturalist Loren Eiseley has written, “until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.” Granny’s eye was watchful, removed, judicious, and uneasy. “The animal looks at us,” Derrida writes, “and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.”
For years I’d been reading the transcendentalists, those lovable Victorian hippies. I’d read Emerson’s essay “Nature” slowly, stopping to meditate on favorite passages: “Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain.” I wanted, as the transcendentalists had, to feel the divine in nature. “Nature,” Thoreau writes, “is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.” Now I was realizing that nature was not full of divinity, that the transcendentalists had not gone far enough. Nature itself was divinity. Galway Kinnell writes, “If the things and creatures that live on earth don’t possess mystery, there isn’t any.”
As a minister’s daughter, I have always thought a lot about the spiritual realm. I’m continually reading books on the roots of Christianity, Sufi cults, and Buddhist masters. I make retreats to monasteries and listen to theological podcasts. None of this makes me spiritually smarter. Actually I’m sort of dense when it comes to religion. Faith is not natural to me. Confronted by the whale, much of my theology seemed speculative, even flimsy. I want both the “more” that William James writes about but also the “real” that J2 engenders.
When I wake later, the music has stopped. I look out my window at the textured glass shade of the streetlight, the bright edge of a building, one window’s inky shine. I know I should sleep, but my new position in the universe is making my brain feel as if it is on fire. And not because of hormonal withdrawal. I don’t want time to keep going forward, separating me from the whales, from Granny. I felt a little as I had the night after my daughter was born. After pushing out a creature wet with saltwater and blood, I felt at life’s oceanic center. Every minute moving forward separated me from an experience too big to absorb. It was a real thing, though it could not be represented as value but only, as the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion explained, as the “impossible,” like birth, death, eros, God. Seeing J2 was like having my daughter, an event outside human evaluation.
The transport plan for freeing Lolita from her tourist-trap captivity in Miami reads like a science fiction novel. Lolita will be lifted by crane in a sling specifically made for her massive body. The pectoral fin cutouts will be lined with “anti-rubbing fabric.” On the cargo plane, preferably a Boeing C-17 Globemaster, her tank will be kept cool with ice cubes. The team of vets and trainers who will go along with her, all in matching wet suits, will repeatedly spread moisturizer on her dorsal fin, as well as spray her with water. Using a suction cup, vets will continuously monitor Lolita’s heart.
Once Lolita’s plane touches down in Seattle, she will be renamed Tokita, the original Salish name given to her by the veterinarian who selected her out of Puget Sound for the Seaquarium. She will be transported by truck and ferry to Orca Island. Once in her sea pen, Lolita will be trained to disassociate humans from feeding. She will learn to forage for live salmon. Within time, L pod, which includes both her mother, L25—Ocean Sun—and three other members of her pod that witnessed her brutal 1970 capture, will swim near enough for Lolita to hear their vocalizations. The hope is that Lolita will respond, which would bring L pod closer. “The reunion to follow,” reads the Orca Network release document, “would be an unprecedented event in the collective memory of Lolita and her family.”
When I first learned of Lolita’s captivity and the plan to set her free, I assumed she’d be released in a matter of months. Protesters turn dozens of cars away from the Seaquarium every Saturday and Sunday, and negative press is longstanding and persistent. Many times I fantasized of being near the sea pen, on Orca Island, when Lolita was lowered into her home waters. But though animal advocates continue to protest and litigate for her release, I see now that the Seaquarium will never release Lolita. The company that owns the Seaquarium, Palace Entertainment, also owns Boomers Long Island, Story Land, Dutch Wonderland, and a place called Wet ’n Wild, as well as fifty other amusement parks. In 2007 Palace Entertainment was sold to the Spanish company Parques Reunidos for $330 million. On its investors’ webpage, the company reports that after a dip in 2015, attendance at all its parks is now on the rise. Earnings for 2016 were more than $584 million.
Lolita, if free, could be a post-reproductive pod leader, one of the matriarchs whose leadership is helping scientists understand why menopause has evolved. According to Darwinian fitness, a creature will continue to breed until it dies, having as many offspring as possible. Menopause, with its midlife cessation of fertility, goes against this most powerful of precepts. There are a number of theories that try to explain why menopause developed. Extended longevity was the first and is still the most pervasive theory—the idea that we simply outlive our fertility, that menopause exists only because we should be dead. Proponents of this theory argue that in earlier times women did not live much past their fifties. But new research has shown that high infant-mortality rates skewed statistics and that there has always been a portion of women who lived well past menopause. The theory of reproductive conflict proposes that rather than compete with our adult daughters, we lose the ability to reproduce. Our energies, according to this theory, are better spent supporting our daughters’ fertility than competing with it. Mate choice theory claims that because all men, younger and older, prefer younger women, older women eventually evolved out of reproducing. Mate choice has been heavily disputed, because while men claim to prefer younger partners, many primates, including chimpanzees, prefer older ones.
I’ve renamed the patriarch hypothesis, championed by Harvard’s Frank Marlowe, the Hugh Hefner hypothesis. This theory proposes that once males become capable of maintaining high status and reproductive access beyond their prime, selection favors the extension of maximum life span. The longevity gene is not on the Y male chromosome but on the X female one. In other words, we are dragged along into menopause and beyond because men began to live longer to fuck younger women: “As his mate reached menopause, a male tried to acquire a younger female, and the higher-status males succeeded in doing so. Selection then favored even greater longevity in males who could double their fitness by starting a second family with a new wife.”
As you might have guessed, all the above theories were both discovered by and propagated by men, and were tested mostly using computer simulation and game theory. Kristen Hawkes, the expander of the grandmother hypothesis, based her research on living tribes of hunters and gatherers. In the 1980s, Hawkes studied the Aché, a group of nomadic hunters and gatherers in Paraguay. It was there she noticed that the men of the tribe were not providing enough food for their families: “The meat from the hunt was divided between all in a community and was also sporadic.” Hawkes went on to study the Hadza hunters and gatherers in Tanzania. There she began to figure out how families got the food they needed: “They were right in front of us. These old ladies who were just dynamos. Women in their sixties and seventies bringing in as much or more food—tubers and berries—for their families as younger women.” The grandmother hypothesis states that older women stop having babies at midlife so they can be free to provide for their daughters’ offspring and also advise the community at large. “You can’t really call women who are past their childbearing years post-reproductive,” Hawkes says, “because while they may not be fertile, there is a lot of evidence that they are doing important things for the reproduction of their genes.”
“I find it fascinating,” Darren Croft, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Exeter, told me, “that the same reproductive strategy evolved in both humans and killer whales.” Croft calls menopause “a big evolutionary puzzle.” His killer whale research, along with that of Emma Foster, showed the worth of post-reproductive pod leaders: “The oldest and most experienced individuals were those most likely to know when and where to find food.” Just as in the whale pods, older women were “key in hunter-gatherer communities.” These individuals can improve the ability of groups to solve problems and respond to potential dangers. This transfer of information is the key to the selection of menopause. “It’s amazing,” Croft told me, “how much the whales tell us about ourselves.”
After I see J2, Granny, leading her pod up Haro Strait, I assume I’ll see whales again a few days later on my three-day camping trip. This time my guide is Sam, a serious young man with hazel eyes and ginger hair and beard. Our group includes a doctor couple from Colorado, both CrossFit champions in their over-seventy age group; a scientist who studies bees; and her partner, a French expert on artificial intelligence. Then there is Wayne, an Ohio prison guard, and his daughter Vickie, a competitive cheerleader. As we gear up and pack the kayaks, Vickie, who is wearing a SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt and an orca necklace and earrings, takes frequent selfies of herself smiling.
We paddle nearly four hours, ten miles over wild, roiling water into Reid Harbor to Stuart Island, a campsite once used as a Salish summer residence. The trees soar around a dozen campsites and a raised clapboard outhouse. The bay scintillates in the dimming sunlight. I set up my tent, roll out my sleeping bag. I listen to Wayne and the doctors talk outside my tent about Jesus. The male doctor, who is an obstetrician, says that whenever he delivers a baby, he feels the presence and glory of Jesus. Why Jesus? I write in the little notebook I pull out of my dry bag. Why not the wonders and glory of the female body?
At the picnic table in the middle of our campsite I chop vegetables for our dinner while Sam sets up the propane stove. He tells me about the program he just came from in Panama where he studied pygmy sloths and the Ph.D. program in ecological behavior and evolution he’ll attend at U.C. San Diego in the fall. He works efficiently, unpacking the plastic tubs of cooking supplies, fry pan, jar of salsa, tin plates, and blue enamel coffee mugs. Vickie comes over. She tells us she got interested in orcas by watching the film Free Willy. For a while she played the SeaWorld live-cam day and night. After she saw the film Blackfish, she realized captivity was wrong. This trip to see the whales, a trip Vickie’s father has saved up for, is a high school graduation present.
After dinner, while everyone is sitting around the campfire, Wayne corners me on my way back from the outhouse. He heard me say that my father was a minister, that I teach college, and that I have a complicated relationship with faith. Wayne tells me he has a video he wants to send me. In it, a former Stanford professor talks about how his education made it hard for him to accept Jesus. “Once the professor put that aside,” Wayne tells me, “he and Jesus could be friends.”
Do I want to be friends with Jesus? I’ve certainly spent a lot of time thinking about him, even being jealous of his singular connection to the divine. At the moment, if I was forced to pick a Jesus story, it would be the one about the woman with the flow of blood in the book of Mark. Also known in Greek as haemorrhoissa, “bleeding woman.” Various translations list the blood flow as discharge, hemorrhaging, and—my favorite—flux. The woman with a flux of blood. This woman has lived for years in a constant state of uncleanness, according to Jewish law. This woman touches the fringe of Jesus’s robe. She doesn’t need his hands to rest on her head or to feel the warmth of his caress. The bleeding woman’s own agency stops the flow of blood. She does not need to befriend Jesus in order to be made whole.
On the second day, as we paddle from Stuart to Posey Island, Sam tells us about the challenges faced by the endangered Southern Residents. Noise pollution both stresses the whales out and makes it hard for them to forage and navigate. Pollution. Toxins, including PCBs collected in female killer whales, are off-loaded in breast milk, making survival rates of calves extremely low. Food scarcity. Salmon are diminishing both in number and size. Reasons for this include overfishing, dams that block natural spawning patterns, and disease. Wild salmon break into coastal sea pens, where salmon are farmed, and catch infestations, most commonly flesh-eating lice. A recent scientific report, Sam tells us, speculates that in one hundred years, if salmon scarcity continues, the Southern Residents will become extinct.
“Like the others,” writes W. S. Merwin in his poem “The Last One,” “the last one fell into its shadow. / It fell into its shadow on the water. / They took it away its shadow stayed on the water.”
Posey Island, at the mouth of Roche Harbor, is tiny. Just big enough for a half dozen campsites and an outhouse. The coastline is jagged black rock. Seals, like small bald men, swim by. It’s cold, overcast. Vickie is grumpy because we haven’t seen orcas. I’ve pitched my tent on the other side of the island, away from the others, and after dinner, around sunset, Sam comes around and sits out on the rocks. He’s frustrated. The hardest part of his job is managing people’s expectations about seeing whales. People have asked him, When do you let the whales out?—as if the Salish Sea were one big SeaWorld. They’ve said sadly, We only saw a humpback. Some want their money back if no whales are spotted. What frustrates him most is when people see the whales and are still disappointed. “People,” he tells me, “have lost the ability to understand the concept of wild.”
Sam asks, since he knows I’ve read a dozen books on cetaceans, if I think the whales have spiritual lives. I tell him about the sun ritual in Alexander Morton’s book Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us. Morton worked in the 1970s with the SeaWorld orcas Corky and Orky. Every morning before the sun rose, the two whales squirted water at a spot where the water met the tank wall. Morton writes, “They licked that spot with their thick pink tongues and spy-hopped next to it.” As the sun rose, the first ray of light crept down the tank side and touched the water in the exact spot the whales had marked. “Through the months the spot moved in response to the earth’s rotation, but the whales always knew just where the first shaft of light would hit the water.” Sam tells a story, relayed to him by another guide, of seeing a killer whale mother carrying her dead calf around on her rostrum. Eventually she tried to wedge the dead baby into a crevice in the shoreline rock, much like a pallbearer might place a coffin inside a mausoleum.
That night at the campfire, two groups emerge. Wayne, Vickie, and the doctors are talking again about Jesus, his extreme suffering, how lucky we are to have someone who suffered like that for us. This makes me crazy. First of all, why would you want someone to suffer for you? Second, every single day, as well as throughout history, there are people who suffer as much as if not more than Jesus. The other group consists of Sam and the scientist couple. Their conversation centers around new DNA testing, how it’s delineating new species. A western blackbird species has now been discovered to be two separate species. Neither conversation holds me. I drift down the path to the other side of the island, where my tent is pitched. I lie down inside my sleeping bag, prop my head up on my backpack, and look out at the silvered water. The stars are myriad, like salt spilled on violet paper. My arms ache from the hours of paddling, and I still feel, like after a long car trip, that I’m moving, gliding over the rolling water, both at odds and at one with the sea.
In the morning we break camp. Vickie asks Sam when we will see whales. Sam is sheepish, telling her he heard on the shortwave radio that J pod had been seen in Haro Strait. The whole way back home to Smallpox Bay, around Henry Island, past Mosquito Pass, and back into Haro Strait, as I paddle, the wind is in my face, pushing my hair back, making it impossible to hear anything anyone says. The current is behind us, but it does not feel like it. The waves are tall, and each time the tip of our kayak flaps down, I’m pelted with a sharp spray of saltwater.
After we’ve unloaded the kayaks and stored the gear in the van, we eat lunch on a bluff over Smallpox Bay. Vickie sits away from the group on a metal bench, her face turned in profile toward the sea, her arms folded across her chest and her forehead bunched. When her father joins her, she shrugs off his arm and runs down the path back toward the van. The rest of us look at one another; the Colorado doctors are seasoned campers, enthusiastic about the trip, whales or no whales, and the scientists understand that animals will not show themselves on a human schedule.
Wayne and Vickie sit in the back of the van weeping. Wayne holds his hand over his face and Vickie’s shoulders shake; it’s a forlorn misery, as if they’ve been abandoned by their savior. I’m the first, beside them, back in the van. I’d like to separate myself from Vickie, but I am also a whale-watching pilgrim, vulnerable and seeking. I flew across the country; took a shuttle, then a ferry; and finally climbed into a kayak in order to get close to the whales. I dreamt of an audience with the great matriarch J2 and I was not denied. If I had not seen Granny, I too would have wept.
All trip, Wayne has been pressing his theology on me. Now I offer a bit of my own. “Whales are like God,” I say. “Not seeing them is just as important as seeing them.” They both look at me, not at my face but at the space just above my head, like babies do. “Here is the great difficulty,” Alan Watts writes, “in passing from the symbol and the idea of God and into God himself. It is that God is pure life, and we are terrified of such life because we cannot hold it or possess it, and we will not know what it will do to us.”
The Leviathan, the whale, above all other creatures, is a stand-in for God. A placeholder. Ahab loses his life in trying to control the white whale. After Jonah refuses to obey divine instruction, God sends the whale to swallow him. The verbs used to connote God’s relationship with the whale vary according to biblical translation. On BibleGateway.com, I consider the various versions. In the English Standard, God appointed the whale, as if God were an upper-level manager moving his creature to a new post. In the International Version, God provided the whale: God as the ultimate prop master. The Lord prepared the whale in the King James Version: God as film director working with a difficult Method actor. Prepared is clearest. God trains his divine emissary to do his bidding. Still, the accuracy is off. God and whale are not separate but one. I offer my own crude translation: God, the whale, swallowed me.
Back in Brooklyn I have a dream that I’m sitting in a cavernous room, writing at a small desk, like the IKEA one I use upstate. Far above my head in a corner I see books, volumes lined up according to subject. I am in a library. My desk shifts, the legs sinking into plush pink carpet. I scribble words on a legal pad. After a while I look up again. I see a line of emaciated stone saints. I am in a cathedral, not a library. I write some more. It’s the third time I look up that I see the gigantic, rounded rib bones and, above my head, the long and elegant spine.