A Girl Saves a Whale

Part One

Hi friends,

I’ve written about this encounter once before, in a bit of flash non-fiction last year called The Courage to be Helped. It occurred to me this week that I wanted to write about it again with fewer restraints (read: more words!), and I know many of you are new here, so I thought this was as good a time as any. (And how glad I am to have so many who are new here.)

Because of ALL THE WORDS, I’ve kindly broken it into two parts for you. The first one here is largely a narrative piece (a retelling of what happened) and the second part is more figurative- some imaginative play, some creative meaning-making, some wrestling with the Mystery of it all. What else could you expect from a scientist turned poet? Welcome to Touching the Elephant! ;)

Thanks for joining me here, I am overwhelmed by the authentic generosity of this community.

Warmly,

Kendall

Her ribs are showing, and no one in her world would ever think to tell her that she looks better than she ever has. No one is asking her what her secret is. No one is eying her with equal parts admiration and contempt, wondering if someday they, too, might be able to achieve such enviable lines with the right amount of discipline and good fortune.

When she glides by- slowly, laboriously, with the kind of palpable effort that you can feel in your own aching bones- all the beings in her world are, in the shadow of her passing, momentarily stilled by a deep sense of grief and helplessness.

This, of course, is the proper response to starvation.

Maybe, that is why, when I am restricting my calories again or I’ve worked out so hard that I need to press my palms against the walls on either side of the toilet just to lower my shaky legs into a sitting position, I imagine that I am swimming beside her, telling her about my situation. I make myself confess to her all the thoughts that swirl in my mind, the thoughts that disconnect me from my body, the thoughts that drown my sense of inherent worth. I want her to chastise me, to call me a fool. I want her to look me square in the eye and tell me that she has no compassion for my forced discomfort and hunger, not in a world where so many experience this against their will.

But she never does. She listens, and then she speaks as slowly as she swims, with soft, measured deliberation.

Of course she does, she is a whale. And a mother. Which is the most potent combination of wisdom and love that I can imagine.

Come with me, will you? Come swim with us. Maybe we both can learn a thing or two.

---

I met her when I was twenty-three. I met her because I was paying attention. It might have been luck, actually, but I don’t put much stock in random encounters. There is far too much magic animating the world to dismiss these moments as rudderless collisions.

I was gathering data on a whale watch ship, acting as both a biologist and naturalist, when the captain announced that we were “done with whales for the day” right around 3 o’clock. What a silly thing to say. Done with whales. As if we had just finished a satisfying meal and had now placed our forks across our plates to signal to the waiter that the table could be cleared. Whales are not a thing to be consumed, for goodness’ sake.

Little did he know.

Alas, he was the captain, and it was getting late. I might be the sort of insatiable person who never has her fill of whales, but the passengers expected to be back at the dock by five, so I tucked my camera into its padded bag and made a few more notes before putting away my clipboard for the day.

I made my way to the cabin to answer whatever pressing questions the people might have, and once they had settled down with their snacks and their buzzing recollections, I decided not to return to the wheelhouse with the crew, but to brave the bow instead.

Sometimes, I like to feel like the wind is drowning me. Filling me. Consuming me. Pressing me back like an aggressive lover. I’m most alive when I am being whipped about by the ocean’s briny breath, like it’s reminding me of some more ancient version of myself that lived with salt in my blood.

I sat there with my eyes closed, my head resting just under one of the wheelhouse windows, lost in the deafening rhythm of the wind and the water breaking across the keel, breaking me right open, the rough deck tattooing inverse goosebumps on my bare legs, when suddenly I felt a tug in the still waters of my consciousness. I opened my eyes and blinked several times, and some unknown force took me by the chin and turned my head slightly to the right, so that I caught the trailing end of her faint spout on the horizon just before it disappeared.

I leaned forward and raised my binoculars to my eyes, and I saw her.

Something was wrong.

I stood up and gestured to the captain, pointing in the direction I had last seen her breathe, and he squinted and raised his own scope to get a closer look, and by then I was opening the door to the wheelhouse, asking him if he saw what I just saw.

Is she trailing lines? he asked, and I confirmed that I thought I saw several buoys in her wake, and then we saw the second, smaller spout. Oh my God, she’s got a calf. I said, and by then he had switched off the autopilot and was turning the wheel starboard and we were a four-eyed creature scanning in perfect, unified tension.

She wasn’t hard to track, not by then. It became immediately, heartbreakingly evident that she could not dive.

We cut the engine within 50 yards of where she and her baby were swimming, and the passengers all began to trickle out of the cabin, looking to me for an explanation, so I gathered them up and explained that we’d just found a badly entangled whale, and that we needed to figure out what to do next.

What we did was call the coast guard, who then called a disentanglement team in Provincetown on the Cape. They asked if we could stay with the pair until the team arrived, so that we wouldn’t lose them.

Of course, we said. Of course we will. We’ll stay as long as we need to.

The passengers were mostly obliging. Those who were not were ignored. It’s not that we didn’t care about their dinner plans, it’s just that…. ok, we actually didn’t care about their dinner plans.

What can I tell you about the next two hours? The sun sank lower and lower on the horizon and the shadow of our boat lengthened on the surface of the sea as we slowly paralleled their trajectory. I could not, would not, take my eyes off of them. My heart stretched long across the water as well, reaching for them, wanting to offer some kind of reassurance.

She couldn’t open her mouth. The net was wrapped so tightly around her head, her jaw was sealed shut. It had been there so long that parts of it were buried in her skin, which was raw and red and perpetually seeping. One long, white pectoral fin was also immobile, trapped against her side. She had use of her flukes, but three large buoys trailed behind her like an ungainly webbed train, chaining her to the surface.

She was painfully thin, her exhalations labored and wheezy.

It’s impossible to know when she had swum through this ghost net, how long she’d been bearing this impossible burden. Too long… far too long.

What I did know was that she had likely departed from these cold, nutrient rich northern waters sometime the previous fall, some nine or ten months prior, and that she had most likely not eaten a single fish since then. All humpbacks fast on their migratory routes— a journey propelled by the primal need to breed— which is truly mind-boggling. Can you imagine swimming 3000 miles, giving birth, and then swimming 3000 miles back again while nursing a baby, on little more than grit and determination? These whales intuitively know that they need to birth their calves in warm waters so that their little blubber-less bodies have a chance to flourish, so they push themselves nearly to the point of death every year to ensure the next generation will survive. But no matter how beguiling those crystal clear bays might be, warm tropical waters are devoid of the kind of plankton-rich nutirients required to fuel the body of a 30 ton whale. So, once the babies have fattened up on their mother’s milk (which is as thick as cream cheese with a whopping 30-50% fat content), gaining up to a hundred pounds a day in the first few months of their lives, the whales begin to swim north again, no doubt dreaming of the 3000 pounds of krill and fish that they’ll consume on daily basis once they arrive back in their hallowed feeding grounds.

The breastfeeding mothers arrive especially ravenous. Now that I have experienced the kind of hunger that producing milk brings on, my astonishment at this feat has skyrocketed. And so has my heartbreak in thinking back on that poor, entangled mother.

She did it. She swam the 6000 miles round trip, gave birth, and raised a very healthy calf, all while completely entangled. She continued to feed him through the web of ropes that kept her captive, surrounded by fish that she could not eat. She was hanging onto whatever life she still possessed in order to give her growing calf a shot at living.

Sometimes, I think that my whole purpose in life was to notice her that day. Everything else has been doodles on the back of the test that I completed in the summer of 2004, the test where the only question was “Will you listen to the tug or ignore it?” I checked the box that said “LISTEN”— I opened my eyes and turned my head slightly to the right and made the call and stood vigil over her until help arrived. That was it. Now here I am, 20 years later, just making art in the margins and trying to be more loving to fill the rest of my short time on earth.

The disentanglement team came skipping over the horizon in a bright orange zodiac just as the sun was kissing the horizon.

They had hooks and gaffs and straight blades and serrated ones and we all held our breath wondering if she would fight them. Thiers is a very dangerous job- one flick of a tail or a slammed down fluke could sink their boat, could kill a person in an instant.

But she didn’t fight. She surrendered. She was perfectly still as they sawed and tugged at the lines that had bound her for so long. Her calf swam in circles around both of our boats, and she occasionally let out a trumpet call, which sounds just like a stern elephant vocalization, to reign him back in. Other than that, the only sounds were the occasional gasp from an onlooker and the lapping of water and a few clipped exchanges between the three heroes on the zodiac.

And then, after about 20 minutes of precise, strategic, sometimes hail-Mary cutting, she was free. The last of the buoys were dragged aboard the small orange vessel and she seemed to know it right away because she stretched like a great, sinuous leviathan and I let out my breath and the tension flew out of my chest like a once-caged bird.

I’ve never been more rapt or relieved in my life.

What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.

She sunk below the surface, her flukes waving and then thrusting her emaciated body downwards, and then she rose up and breached in a great arc, slamming down in the space between our two boats.

I thought about how it must have felt for her to stretch out both of her great wings as she took flight that very first time. I think about it often.

I began to weep as a cheer rose up from everyone on the ship, even the stoic captain, and then her calf breached in her wake, and we lost it all over again. We were a howl of witness in that moment, an ecstatic audience to a life reborn.

That mother and calf breached twenty-two times right beside our boat.

I think that joy must be a greater source of strength than anything in nature, because there is no rational accounting for this kind of energetic behavior in a whale that has not eaten in ten months, a creature on the brink of starvation.

Twenty-two and counting by the time we fired up our engine and headed home by the light of the rising moon. Still they were leaping out of the water, celebrating in the wake of our ship, as I stood on the stern and pressed my hand to my chest with my heart beating in my throat.

Still they are celebrating every time I close my eyes, all these years later.

I saved her once, and she has saved me a thousand times since then.

The only photo I got of her that day— flukes battered but free. I remember being out of film and hoping that the last shot would come through anyway. Remember those days?

To be continued in Part II: A Whale Saves a Girl.