“Got a whale of a tale to tell ya, lads, a whale of a tale or two-o.”
Some of you will remember that catchy tune, sung by Kirk Douglas in the 1954 Jules Verne based movie, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” I certainly remember not only the tune, but Kirk’s red and white stripped T-shirt (the movie was in Technicolor!) as well as his finely tuned and expertly played ukulele Man, how I loved that movie - what nine-year-old boy wouldn’t? - for, though it didn’t have a lot of whales, it had the giantest of giant squids… about the size of Seattle’s Space Needle.
I grew up, if not on a sea that plunged down 20,000 leagues (that equals 60,000 miles, so more than twice the circumference of the earth!), at least on Puget Sound, with a depth of over 900 feet in places, and with giant Pacific octopuses that have an arm span of up to 20 feet. Not impressive when compared to Kirk’s squid, maybe, but impressive in its own right, yes?
We had whales, too, of the killer variety, Orcas that my dad called “blackfish,” which we saw far more often than people do today. When I was ten or eleven and out in the bay fishing for salmon by myself one time, a blackfish surfaced near me, twice as long as my boat and also looking for salmon. That’ll get a kid’s attention… It got the attention of the salmon, too, who ran for their lives.
What I’ve been thinking about lately is how, during the first couple of decades of my life, whenever I ‘required a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off’ I often went to sea, if only for a few days of fishing on Puget Sound or out in the Pacific off the coast of Washington State. Salmon were the quarry at the front of my mind, but at the back of it I was seeking an irrefutably spiritual engagement with non-human life, with life that goes about its business unconcerned with us.
After those early years, ego got in the way (read ‘clouds’ if you want another song lyric in this essay), whereupon the only fulfillment that interested me was what I strived for when I dove into the novels I was forever trying to write. It was my belief that I had to find a deep engagement with what it meant to be human in those books, otherwise they - and by extension me - weren’t worth anything. In a word, I wanted to ‘wear’ those books like a soldier wears medals, wear them as if they had been pinned to my chest by some ephemeral (but literary) commander in chief.
It’s a pitiful thing to admit, but there it is.
Two Mondays ago, however, when certain members of my family and I stepped on a boat docked in Long Beach, California, to do what is nominally called “Whale Watching,” all that changed. I say ‘nominally’ because there were no promises… you might not see anything at all.
The day was clear, the ocean calm, windy and chilly when the ship motored out toward Catalina Island at 20 knots an hour, but otherwise the world seemed quiet, as if we had entered the realm of ‘settled’ natural law. I couldn’t help thinking back to those earlier days on smaller vessels, days when my quarry was salmon and there also were no promises, when the chances of getting ‘skunked’ was better that fifty percent. So if we got skunked this time, too, if we saw no whales, it would be okay with me, if not with my grandsons, who stood at the ship’s prow like little mastheads, their eyes scanning the waters for clusters of frantic birds, an unnaturally swirling chop, or, best of all, a spout coming from an air hungry mammal.
We saw two fin whales first, playing a couple of hundred yards off our starboard bow, so the captain turned us in that direction and we watched them for a while. I hadn’t known about fin whales, but learned that they were filter feeders, grew to around 75 feet and 100,000 pounds - a good bit longer and a good bit heavier than our boat.
My grandsons were delighted, especially the six-year old.
Rather quickly after that we came upon three humpbacks surfacing and diving, showing themselves to us in a grand exhibition of tail-fluke risings, dancing for us, exposing their beautiful undersides. I want to say that if watching someone like Baryshnikov is ‘magnificence’ personified, then seeing those humpbacks was a “whaleified” version of the same. Can I get away with saying that?
I was satisfied with our sightings as we headed back to Long Beach until, rising from the depths of at least 20,000 leagues and looking like what Moby Dick must have looked like to the guy I paraphrased up in paragraph four, what to our wandering eyes should appear but a stunning and mammoth blue whale, its sheer transcendence clarifying something in me about as clearly as the arrival of Zeus might have, were he suddenly to join our ranks from Mt. Olympus.
Here are the facts: A blue whale is the largest creature ever to have lived on earth. Its maximum length is 100 feet and it weighs as much as 330,000 pounds. As many as thirty-three elephants can fit inside one of them, depending on the size of the elephants, I guess, and it eats around 8,000 pounds of krill per day.
But it wasn’t the facts that clarified something in me, it was the transcendence, the stopping of things, the outright disconnected yet irrefutable spirituality of this beautiful entity.
And what was the something that was clarified?
That my own ego is a puny thing, that I should not so much have been after what it means to be human in my books, as what it means to be a God like this big blue fellow, to whom our failures and triumphs, our lows and highs, are so deeply irrelevant.
I don’t know how long it will last, this clarification, but I hope it sticks with me for a while.
Postscript…
After all this talk of misplaced egos, we nevertheless find the holidays upon us.… Chanukah and Christmas! Please consider getting a copy of my recent novel, The Grievers’ Group, for your friends and loved ones, since literary fiction is at least as endangered as any whale.
A lot to digest here, Richard, but - what a thrilling day for you all and especially your grandsons! I've long been interested in krill (yes, I'm a bit odd) and what you write about the huge consumption of it by whales got me wondering whether this is a problem for the planet, krill being so vital to us. The answer I've found online is fascinating: the decline in the whale population actually causes a decline in krill. And here's the other side of it; "Think of these large whales as mobile krill processing plants,” Savoca added. “Each fin whale or blue whale is the size of a commercial airliner. So, in the first half of the 20th century, before whaling, there were an additional one million of these 737-sized krill processing plants moving around the Southern Ocean eating, pooping, and fertilizing.” Whales are actually, apparently, krill-processing plants! Thank you for stimulating my krill investigation, Richard!
Many years ago I thought a lot of foolish things, John.