Grayson (3 page)

The sun was taking forever to rise. I was stuck in perpetual darkness. All I wanted was to get home, take a very long hot shower, and have something warm and delicious for breakfast.

Usually I loved swimming in the open ocean, but I was having a tough morning. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that something really big was swimming nearby. I couldn’t concentrate. I kept lifting my head to look for fins. I knew this was slowing me down;
lifting my head was causing my hips to drop and that created more drag. But I wanted to know what was swimming with me.

The urge to get out of the water became stronger. I wanted to get out, but I knew I had to make myself stay in and continue swimming: I reminded myself that I had to control my fear, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to accomplish bigger goals later. I would have felt differently if I was certain there was an immediate danger.

Taking another deep breath, I swam with my head up and looked at the sky.

There were soft blue and yellow lights on top of the oil rigs on the islands off the shore of Long Beach, about three miles away. The oil islands were built to make the oil rigs more aesthetically appealing. The metal oil rigs were hidden behind walls, and waterfalls were constructed to diminish the sounds of drilling. At night the structures and waterfalls were illuminated with blue, green, pink, and yellow lights and they looked magical. I used these lights as reference points to help keep me swimming in a straight line. I gazed deeper into the blurry gray sky.

Turning my head to take a breath, I looked back under my arm at the eastern sky, hoping for sunlight.

Beyond the pier, the horizon was a thick black line where the sea and sky were pressed together like a giant eyelid, but high above a tiny yellow light flickered. There the horizon grew lighter, brighter, and softened. I rolled onto my back and slowly back-stroked.

A wedge of red light parted the horizon.

The rose-colored sun moved slowly and majestically above the horizon. The giant eye was opening.

There was a discernible pause, a stunning peace, as if the sun and earth were silently shifting into sync. Then the sun climbed smoothly into the sky, casting a river of wavery rose light upon the water’s surface. A long warm breath of wind ruffled the gray sea.

Seagulls stretched their wings, flapped them quickly, and cried loudly as they chased other gulls off the beach before lifting into flight and flying in a sweeping circle, squawking loudly as they headed toward a fishing boat. Tiny sanderlings raced in a big flock to the water’s edge, hopping on one foot like they were jumping on pogo sticks. As they neared the
water’s edge, they dropped the other foot and scurried across the sand like wind-up toys, their tiny gray wings tucked against their backs. They chased the receding waves, whose long white lacy manes were glowing pink. The sanderlings poked holes in the sand with their short beaks, searching for sand crabs, while sandpipers trotted down from the high-tide line and stood on tall legs in knee-deep water, plunging their bills into softer sand in search of larger sand crabs. Seven pelicans flew overhead in single file, surfing the air currents created by the long rolling waves. Their wings were stretched out five feet wide, and they were underlit with rosy gold.

As the sun rose higher it turned tangerine and pushed the band of ruby red higher into the sky. The ocean resonated with color and warmth as I rolled back onto my stomach and swam across converging pools of red, orange, yellow, and gold.

Energy and warmth flowed across my back and shoulders. I was moving fast and free, feeling the power and lift of my arms and the strength deep within my body. My breathing was back to normal and finally this was fun again.

Pulling my hands directly under my body, I increased my lift in the water so that more of my back and legs was exposed to the sun’s warmth. It would bake the chill out of my cold muscles.

On a breath, I swiveled my head around and looked over my right shoulder. Two strokes later, I breathed to my right side and watched the homes along Ocean Avenue slide behind me. My arm strokes were long and fluid. I slid on my stomach past the large pink Spanish-style house with the dark terra-cotta tiles, which marked the quarter-mile point. Just a quarter mile more to swim. I reached, pulled, pushed, reached pulled pushed, with each arm stroke past the streets perpendicular to Ocean Avenue, counting them off, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, as I approached the Seal Beach pier, breathing every three strokes, listening to my bubbles roll into the water and to the rush of the waves like the breath of the sea. In and out we breathed together.

Glancing to my left, I watched the gray thirty-foot-tall wind-bent trunks of the palm trees that lined Eighth Street sway in the morning breeze; the clusters of dark green leaves on top of the trees were waving
like a dozen hands, applauding the start of the day. And I wanted to applaud, too. It was almost over. I was almost there, almost finished with this long, cold, and difficult three-hour workout. I felt a sense of relief and a sense of accomplishment. I had been able to push myself, and stay focused, and complete the workout. And I was beginning to realize that I needed to not only prepare physically for something, but mentally as well.

The white clock tower with the bright orange tile roof atop City Hall read eight o’clock. With the morning’s distraction, I was way off my pace: three minutes late. I was annoyed with myself. I told myself: Put your head down and sprint the last two hundred yards. Go. Go. Go. Pick up your pace. Pull stronger. Grab more water. Faster. Faster. Burn. Set the water on fire. Go. Go. Go. Reach for the stars. Go. Harder. You can do it. Ahh. Bring it home now. Go. Almost there. Yes, you’ve got it!

Reaching the pier, I rolled over on my back, sucking air. I swam backstroke slowly, trying to catch my breath. I was spent, cooling down, sore, tired, hungry, and eager to get home and finish my homework. I saw
Steve standing outside the bait shop. He was an old friend, a man in his sixties who ran the bait shop. He had worked there for as long as I could remember. He knew just about everybody and just about everybody knew and loved him.

Steve made a point of checking on me while I was swimming, especially in the darkness of early morning. He always tried to look nonchalant, as if he weren’t watching out for me, but I could sense he was there. More than that: His silhouette beneath the soft white lights on the pier was easy to recognize. Steve always wore a short navy blue jacket that his broad shoulders filled out. He walked with an easy gait, even though his back was slightly bent with arthritis, and he was a little hard of hearing.

Whenever Steve saw me working out, he radioed the local commercial fishermen and the captain of the large boat that transported workers to the oil rigs that lay a mile and a half to nine miles offshore; Steve wanted to make sure they didn’t run over me.

Usually I swam near “zero tower,” the lifeguard station about halfway down the pier. That way I stayed well out of the way of boat traffic. My normal course
was a half-mile stretch from the pier to the jetty and a half mile back again to the pier. Sometimes my workouts were three miles long and sometimes I swam as many as twelve miles. It depended on what I was training for. No matter how long the workout, I would always stop at the pier for at least ten seconds to catch my breath and check my lap time. And I always checked to see if Steve was outside.

I looked forward to seeing him. It made me feel like I had someone out there with me. It made me realize how much I appreciated him and how much I missed him when he had a day off.

Sometimes he’d be busy and just wave and sometimes I’d swim over to see him and talk. It slowed my workouts down a little, but I looked at it as a way to get a slightly longer rest, which gave me the motivation to swim faster on the next mile. We often joked. I loved to make him laugh. And I loved watching his silver gray head bob up and down, and seeing his mustache curl under his nose.

Steve knew more about the ocean than anyone I had ever met. He studied it every day, not out of a
sense of duty, but out of curiosity and joy. He always wanted to learn something new and share whatever he discovered.

He spent a lot of his day swapping stories with local fishermen, with researchers and lifeguards. He saw the life, the seasonal changes, the natural signs and changing conditions within the ocean that no one else seemed to notice. He had a sixth sense about the sea.

Even in the blackness of early morning, Steve knew where I was in the ocean. He could spot me up to half a mile away. He saw through the darkness and across still or rough black water. He stood on the pier watching for the tiny neon blue sparks my hands made when they hit the water. There were zillions and zillions of light-emitting zooplankton and phytoplankton in the ocean.

When anything swam through the water—fish, seals, other marine mammals, or human beings—they left trails of bright shimmering light. The brightness of the light changed with the warmth of the water and the amount of plankton in the area. Sometimes the phosphorescence was so bright it was like looking
deep into the Milky Way on a clear crisp winter’s night, like swimming through a sky full of dazzling stars shooting across the black sky. And when there were fewer plankton in the water it was like swimming through the soft luminous light cast by Japanese lanterns. And sometimes, when the water was colder and the plankton was scarce, the trails were like the soft glow of candles in the distance.

Steve could tell how far I was from the pier by the size of the sparks my hands made when they hit the water; he knew my pace and when to expect my arrival.

When I looked at the pier, he wasn’t where he normally stood. He was farther out. I knew something was wrong.

Steve was jumping up and down, rapidly waving his dark blue baseball cap and shouting. The morning breeze was tearing his words apart and carrying them away from me.

Cupping my ear, I gestured I couldn’t hear him.

Quickly he pointed to something behind me.

Spinning halfway around I felt the water. Something was swimming under me. Was it a white shark?

Without hesitating, I sprinted for shore. Glancing over my right shoulder, I saw that Steve was vigorously shaking his head.

I stopped. I didn’t want to. I was confused. What was he trying to tell me?

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “You can’t swim to shore!”

“Why not?” I was baffled and wanted to get out so badly.

“That’s a baby whale following you. He’s been swimming with you for the last mile. If you swim into shore, he’ll follow you. He’ll run aground. The weight of his body on the beach will collapse his lungs and he will die.”

“I don’t see anything. Not even a fin,” I said, searching the water.

Steve waved me over to him. When I was right below him, he explained, “Gray whales don’t have dorsal fins. They have six to twelve knuckles along their back that they use for steering. I’m not surprised you didn’t see the baby gray. They’re hard to spot in the water. They’re dark gray or black and they sort of blend in with the color of the ocean.”

Early spring is when whales migrate, and the baby whale must have been swimming up from Mexico with his mother and somehow gotten separated from her. At that age they don’t really know how to use their sonar effectively. Usually mother whales keep
their babies very close to them and don’t let them out of their sight. During their two- to three-month-long migrations the mothers let the young ones ride in their slipstream. By the time gray whales reach their summer feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas, the mother and baby will have swum between seven and eight thousand miles, swimming at a rate of two to six miles per hour. And in the autumn, they swim seven thousand miles back to Mexico, never sleeping and rarely eating, so that pregnant females can give birth in Baja where the water is warm and the lagoons are protected. These lagoons are great places for baby whales to learn how to swim. The male whales travel ahead of the mothers and their babies, who swim more slowly; eventually they all meet in the Bering Strait or the Chukchi Sea. When Steve told me whales travel up to fourteen thousand miles a year, more than halfway around the world, I was flabbergasted; I was tired after only a three-mile sprint.

He told me that gray whales are made to swim great distances so they can reach their summer feeding grounds in cold Arctic waters. The adults are filter feeders. They eat by moving along the ocean floor
sucking in silt and fish, squeezing the sediment and water out through the baleen and capturing the tube-worms or shrimp.

But the baby grays can’t feed like this. They are totally dependent on their mothers for the first eight months of their lives. They drink up to fifty gallons of milk throughout the day. This is their only food, so if they lose their mothers in the early months of their lives they will become dehydrated and then starve to death.

They need the milk for energy each day and also so they can put on the body fat that will keep them warm in Arctic waters. Their mother’s milk is fifty-three percent fat, twice as rich as the richest ice cream.

Steve continued scanning the ocean for the baby whale. He said that gray whales were known as devilfish. There are historical accounts of gray whales that when harpooned violently attacked the fishermen and their ships. Gray whales are also protective of their young. But if not threatened, they are huge, gentle beings.

Suddenly coming from the north was a long, loud
poof
, and then another
poof
and a third, louder
poof
.

It was the baby whale. He was about twenty-five yards from us. He was breathing: a white heart-shaped plume of mist was shooting, loudly, four feet above the water through the two holes on top of his head. The air smelled salty and oily, quite different from the breath of a minke whale, which smells like a cat’s after a fish dinner.

Treading water, I watched the baby whale. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

He swam within ten yards of me. He was huge, maybe eighteen feet long, the length of a small sailboat. And he had to be at least three, maybe four feet wide. He was breathing deeply, spacing his breaths about fifteen seconds apart. The volume of air he exhaled made me even more aware of his magnificent size.