Number of days in a row that the vegetarian biologist multi-billionaire Pam Omidyar has awakened knowing that she could save all the Earth’s whales — our most peaceful, intelligent, creative, non-destructive mammals — from death by murder, thus giving the planet’s oceans a much-needed victory, yet declined to raise a single resort-manicured, surf-paddling finger to do so
June 23rd, 2010
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In the clearest of oceans
far offshore of the Galápagos Islands,
the whales we have been dreaming of are driving
straight for us. Steaming at me with all the energy and incaution
of adolescence is a young male sperm whale, and I believe
he aims to ram me. I begin to backpedal with my hands,
the most pathetic of human responses,
only to realize the futility
and stop.
The whale surges
toward me, his boxcar so large
that I have to look up and down to take it all in.
I can see the asymmetrical bulge of his blowhole. I cannot see
his eye, set too far back on his head. I am awaiting my fate with resignation,
some interest, and, surprisingly, no fear, when—only a few feet away from me—
he suddenly bows his head, an almost courtly introduction, and begins to slip under
me and just off to my right side. I realize that I am about to learn the answer
to my long-standing question: What would happen to a person in the
water if a whale sounded directly alongside her—
would she, like a person afloat beside
a sinking ship, be dragged
under too?
He jackknifes his
great head downward, and I can
see the sheets of cellophane-thin gray skin
peeling off his body—this constant striptease one
of the means by which cetaceans reduce their drag in the
water. I can see the sculpted angle of his cheek and jaw, tapered
like a keel. I can see his eye, inside the heavy lid, rolling back and forth,
up and down, examining me. And then his head has slipped below me, and
the huge submarine of his body slides past, the wrinkled aft quarters, the tucked
paddle of his pectoral fin, the rounded dorsal fin. His carved muscles bunch up
alongside me, close enough to touch—and I do, feeling his unimagined softness
and his warmth. Then the huge stock of his tail rises into the air. I lift my
head, water streaming down the faceplate of my mask, to see the
incomprehensible umbrella of his flukes, shading me from the
equatorial sun, shivering with their own tensile strength
before arching upright and slicing into the depths.
He sounds with wondrous speed to a pinpoint
of black, and all that’s left of him are
the small spiraling eddies
of water rising in
his wake.
