Today let’s talk about whales.
But first; sometimes when I’m driving at night I like to look inside the lit windows of the houses I pass and wonder about all of the people going about their lives. I wonder what they’re doing inside those houses, if they’re having dinner, watching TV, dreaming about a better life, secretly writing a masterpiece that no one will ever read or playing dominoes with their spouse of 70 years. I wonder what they think about, what they wish for, what they thought they would be when they grew up.
And that’s how whale watching felt. Whale watching was an item on my Mom’s bucket list and I was happy to help her cross it off even though I don’t seem to be making much progress on my own list. Out there on the water surrounded by nothing but blue sky and blue sea, it felt just like how I feel when I look at lit windows at night. Everyone is alive out there, everyone is living their own separate lives in their own separate places and we can’t know what goes on behind those closed doors, or that wavering surface of sea, beyond a glimpse through the window. We can’t know what goes on inside another creature’s soul.
We took a boat out to Stellwagen Bank, a popular feeding ground for humpback whales off the coast of Boston and saw two pods of 3 whales and a mother and calf. For the most part the adult whales ignored us and lived their lives like most of us do, passing by each other without a thought. But the calf was interested in us, and would “Spyhop” or pop its nose out of the water so it could get a look at us, and then proceed with rolls and flipper slaps that I can only assume was the calf’s attempt to communicate. Unfortunately we were too dumb to know what he was saying. But one time the calf spyhopped and I looked at him, and he looked at us, and for one split second when he hovered above the surface of the water in a shower of salt water droplets we both knew that we existed and that we were here, in this together.
I’ll end it with a quote from Annie Dillard’s Living Like Weasels essay because she says it better than I can:
“Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.”