We climbed into the small fishing boat, a 20-foot panga repurposed for whale watching in the winter months, were the first ones on the water. One morning within minutes of watching whale blows, a mother and her calf approached our boat. The mother paused to spyhop, lifting her long barnacle encrusted head above the water to better observe us. A swirl of ripples and she was gone. We peered over the side to see her gray outline blurred the color of spring moss by the refracted watery sunlight. Mother and baby rolled over and round each other, rose in an explosion of breath and water vapor that coated our hands and faces in a greasy, fish-smelling mist. The baby, with all the exuberance of a 20-foot toddler, swam toward us and thrust his face within inches of mine. In amazement, I did what any mother would do in close proximity to a baby. I held his cheeks in my hands and planted a kiss on his snout. The skin was cool, rubbery smooth and I tasted saltiness on my lips. The calf continued to nudge our boat, playfully curious, while the mother looked on like any proud, solicitous parent.
This was the rhythm of our days. Drift in the company of these gray whales who inhabit a realm of superlatives with their forty-five foot, thirty-five ton bodies, three hundred pound hearts and tongues that can weigh as much as a small car. Who undertake the longest annual migration of any mammal, swimming the Pacific Coast from their summer feeding grounds in Alaska, to the winter warm lagoons of Baja where their calves are born and nurtured. Known as “friendlies” for their interactions with people, this moniker belies a darker, more brutal history of the 19th and early 20th century when gray whales were hunted relentlessly for their blubber and baleen to fuel a lucrative economy. Every morning our boat passed the rusted remains of the encampment where the last of the whale carcasses were processed in 1969, the population on the brink of extinction. And I wondered, when these whales were called creatures, beasts, devilfish did it make it easier to drive harpoons into the soft flesh of their bodies? Render them for their baleen, their blubber, their meat. I tried to imagine the bay crowded with whaling boats, floating whale corpses with identifying claim flags planted in their backs, calves wandering aimlessly in search of their mothers. Our last day on Magdalena Bay, we drifted on still water the glossy blue of jay feathers. Watched a thread of pelican skim across the bow of our boat. High overhead a frigate bird on outstretched wings and V shaped tail was silhouetted black on blue. We’re startled by an explosive whale blow next to the boat. A heart shaped fog of warm breath hung in the air as she sank below the surface to rub her gentle length along our twenty foot hull. The boat swayed and I leaned over the side, watched her slowly rise, hang inches below the surface, body tilted sideways to better scrutinize me through a baseball size eye. Gray whales can live to be seventy-five. I wondered if she was alive when her kind was hunted still. Did she remember those brutal interactions? What atonement could I offer? I took off my sunglasses. I wanted to be seen by her. I wanted her to know we could be humbled, brought to our knees in reverence for lives other than our own. I reached out a hand to touch her rubbery coolness. Tiny bristles sprouted along her jawline. Her skin was studded with barnacles, delicate white filigree marks etched on gray where some had worn away. Her mouth opened slightly into the curve of a smile and specks of ocean sediment drifted from the baleen fringing her jaw like a giant comb. I imagined her feeding on the bottom of the lagoon, mouth opened wide to scrape at the layers of mud, throat pleats bulging, tongue squeezing out the watery goop leaving windrows of tiny crustaceans trapped in her baleen. She rolled upright, exhaled, then sank into the blue-black depths.
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AuthorNature-loving hiker, backpacker, cyclist, skier, kayaker, wife, mother, grandmother, dog mom, chicken mom and beekeeper. I am learning to follow the sage advice of poet Mary Oliver. Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ArchivesCategories |