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by Michelle A. Gilders
The clouds are so low that they obscure the mountains, covering the snow that coats the peaks year-round: white on white. The water does nothing to brighten the scene. The Strait, which separates Bay from Passage from Ocean, is dark, steeled gray and stippled with foam. Spray carries from the leading edge of wave after wave that breaks upon the surface, adding moisture to air already heavy with drizzle. The boat is jostled like a person in an unforgiving crowd. Salty spray makes the deck slick. The undulating motion rocks and pitches the vessel, rolling it violently, and then pitches it bow first deep into the waves so that the prow disappears beneath several feet of cold and oppressive water.
None of this should have been too troublesome, I have been through far worse storms, where waves crashed over the ship’s bridge, three stories high, and at night you had to strap yourself into your bunk to avoid an unceremonious ousting. Storms can be most invigorating when you allow your legs to absorb the impact of vessel verses water, and you breath deeply a combination of salty water vapor and adrenaline. The problem on this occasion, surrounded by the eerily hidden mountains of Glacier Bay and Icy Strait in Southeast Alaska, is that as the prow is thrust into the frigid waters, I am riding it.
With the captain of the vessel safe and dry in the wheel house, I am directing our passage from the bow. My oilskins glisten in the rain, and every time the boat dips low into a wave, my feet and legs are immersed. The cold has an edge to it that penetrates to the core. My fingers hurt to move. Summer in Alaska can be far more glacial than temperate. It is usually at this point that memories of Tahitian atolls, Hawaiian beaches and Caribbean sunsets come to the forefront of my mind, and I struggle to remember why I am putting my body through this punishment. Then the object of my particular obsession blasts from the water and neither the cold nor the wet seem important anymore.
There is magic in the substance of a whale: in its conformation, its attitude, and in its bearing. There is strength in its size, but it is carried with a quiet grandeur. There is no boasting in being a whale.
The weather did not bode well for whale-watching as we left Gustavus. The first hour of our voyage was uneventful, and the gray skies and sea hurt my eyes with their monotony. The mountains that surround these waters were invisible, vanished among the clouds as though they had never been. An explosion of white several kilometers distant changed the mood in an instant. The explosions continued. As we neared, the unmistakable form of a humpback whale, Megaptera noveangliae, took shape, reaffirming that these gray seas hide marvels as great as the eye can behold.
As the whale breached, his body arched in a sinuous curve. Water streamed from his throat grooves and off long tapering pectoral flippers. The animal twisted in mid-air, falling on his back amidst boiling water of his own making. Seconds passed and the whale thrust his head up out of the water, lunging forward, once, twice, three times, four. His head slapped heavily on the surface with cannon-like retorts. With a final lunge, the whale lifted his tail flukes and pounded the water’s surface. Water sprayed forth. Apparently tail-slapping matched head-lunging for the amount of fun it imparted, and the whale raised its tail repeatedly, beating the water into a maelstrom. It was an exhausting display to watch. I felt like cheering the whale on, encouraging its pageantry with exultations; with the wind tearing any sound from my lips before it reached my ears, I may have done just that. Without warning the commotion ended. The whale fluked and dove.
All was quiet. The sound of the crashing whale was replaced by the wind. I took deep breaths. Three minutes passed, then five. I scanned around the boat, my zone of interest widening as more minutes passed. Seven minutes later the whale breached right in front of us. We had hardly moved. The breach was followed by head-lunges, three, four, five, then tail slaps, then with a rounding of its vast humped back, the whale dove once again. Seven minutes later he breached. It was a routine and timing that he maintained for over an hour. The seven minute breaks gave me the chance to return to the wheel house to change film out of the spray before returning to my wet perch in time for the next breach.
Why was the whale expending all that energy with such impressive leaps and displays above the waves? Was he sending a message to whales we could not see? Was he displaying to our vessel, or to other distant ships? Or was he simply thrilling at the way it felt to jump clear of the water and land with a tremendous splash? And what was he doing for each of those seven minutes that he vanished beneath us? Was this whale playing hide-and-seek with us? Like a child jumping through puddles on a rainy day, the whale leapt over storm waves and plunged below them, perhaps marveling at the silence beneath the surge. This was a whale playing with an invisible friend or staging a fight with some unseen foe. This was exuberance magnified a hundred fold, and I felt privileged to have witnessed this fragment of a whale’s life.
The oceans cover three-quarters of our planet, and yet they remain alien to us. The majority of the world’s human population lives within 160 kilometers of the coast, and yet the ocean is viewed as a barrier to be crossed, rarely a three dimensional habitat to be explored. We make tentative excursions into the depths, expanding our knowledge with each voyage, but often we come back with more questions than answers; it seems that we can only catch rare glimpses of lives lived outside our own realm. We have learned most of what we know of cetaceans: length, weight, and their base utilitarian uses, from the destructive harvesting of whaling. But what of the minds that exist in the waters? The interactions between species? The evolutionary pressures that have fostered diversity? What of the simple wonder of the deep?
Four billion years ago, life began in the water. This aqueous medium, with its high specific heat and high density, is an ideal environment for life. Rich in the Earth’s elements, sea water contains eighty-four of the 103 elements found on Earth. Water cradles life. It transports life amid vast currents and gyres that encompass the globe. These same currents facilitated the movement of people from land to land, and fostered great cultures among island nations.
The oceans send forth rain clouds to wash the land, watering our crops with liquid and dissolved nutrients. They ameliorate our climate by absorbing the sun’s heat and releasing it slowly, dampening the extremes. Waves redesign our coasts. Where rivers and oceans meet vast deltas form to give a rich interface between land and sea.
Storms invigorate us when viewed from safety and terrify us when not. Myths of ghost ships, vanishing vessels, mermaids, selkies, sea serpents and torrential floods color the cultures of people wherever they have looked upon the infinite expanse and felt small or vulnerable. The ocean is contradictory. It is solace and threat. It is constant and changeable. It is all things at all times.
We treat the ocean as though it will always be there, as it is today. But the history of whaling should serve as a warning. What we do not value above the purely utilitarian, we risk losing to those eager for quick profits, and that which we view as free and boundless is exploited without mercy. We may never regain the populations of whales that once roamed the seas. With their removal, the balance of the ecosystem was changed, perhaps forever. What would the world be like without the blue whale or the humpback? Without the yellowfin tuna or whale shark? What would the world be like without the Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, or myriad works of art? If the objects that emerge from the human mind are invaluable, how much more important are those that can never be recreated or restored?
The oceans contain an estimated ten million species, although only 295,000 have been identified; ninety percent of the Earth’s biomass resides in the sea. These numbers are suggestive of the importance of the blue-green, translucent, emerald, opaque, gray ever-changing liquid that forms the heart of our misnamed planet, but still they cannot capture the inherent mystery of the ocean: the mystery that comes from watching a blue whale exhale a cloud of vapor 9 meters high, from listening to songs sung in the dark depths, watching orca hunt fur seals on some remote beach, or the gentle interaction between a gray whale and her newborn calf.
The cold eye of science calls for the protection of the oceans for selfish reasons of human wants and needs, but in reality our obligation to conserve is both moral and personal. What do we risk losing if we do not? Forget for a moment, that the oceans feed us, water us, and protect us from rising temperatures. They foster our imagination, they feed our spirit, and they enhance our cultures with myth and legend. They allow us to immerse our minds in the midst of creatures that are so different from the human, and yet that share an evolutionary heritage with our own species. The loss of a single one would diminish us all, for it would diminish some of the mystery of life itself.
The next time you marvel at the power of the ocean, or the color of the water, the breaking of waves on a beach, or the brilliance of a sunset at sea, consider what lies just below the surface: the whales, the fish, the plankton. They may be out of sight, but they should never be forgotten.
© 1999 michelle@michellegilders.com
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