Grayson (4 page)

Lifting his huge fluke, the baby whale slid below the water’s surface silently, like a cat stalking a bird.

Swimming under the water offered less resistance for him than swimming on the surface. Below the water, he swam more efficiently. His eyesight underwater was okay but it was limited by the clarity of the water, so like a submariner, he used sonar to tell
where he was in the water. By vocalizing, he emitted sound waves that bounced off whatever lay beneath the ocean. By listening to the sound waves that echoed back off the underwater objects, he could tell where he was underwater and what was around him. I wondered if he could also use his sonar to see in his mind’s eye what he was hearing in the water—the way a musician reads music, so that he could hear and at the same time see what he was hearing, and then be able to distinguish the sounds more clearly.

The baby whale swam under me and I could feel waves of water peeling off his body and rolling under my legs and feet. Putting my face into the water, I looked down. He was about fifteen feet below me and if whales can smile I think he was smiling. He was moving his fluke (tail fin) up and down and slipping through the transparent gray water effortlessly with so much power and efficiency.

About two-thirds of the way down his back I noticed a small hump and then behind the hump near his fluke were six small knuckles. They really looked more like giant dimples. I wanted to touch them. And
I wondered if the dimples on his body were like the dimples on a golf ball or like the ones on the wings of a plane that are made by severe hail storms. The dimples allow more wind to travel over the surface at a faster rate, which gives the ball and the plane more lift in the air. I wondered if the dimples on his back enabled water to travel over his body more quickly and if that gave him more lift than having a regular dorsal fin. I watched him swim.

He flew effortlessly through the water, rolling over underwater and making a slow giant spiral. Pointing his head up and dropping his fluke behind him, he kicked a few times, displacing so much water so quickly that he rocketed to the surface. Then he suddenly dove, rolling flipper over flipper like a crop duster doing wild and daring aerial maneuvers.

Despite his youth and size, the baby whale was in control of his flight through the water. He had learned to swim within an hour of his birth and it was obvious he was a natural. But he had refined his technique by practicing with his mother in the warm blue lagoons off Baja, Mexico. He knew just how far to kick his tail
fin and when to hold his long soaring glide and how to alter his flipper position to turn precisely one way or the other.

The baby whale surfaced and immediately spouted. The spout rose four feet into the air. I couldn’t help but smile. It was hard to believe that he was swimming so close to me. It was amazing to watch him. He seemed to be showing off or even trying to get me to play with him.

When he took a breath he floated easily on the surface. I watched the two holes on top of his head open and close. The lungs in his back must have been as large as two weather balloons. And that, plus his body fat, helped him rest on the water’s surface and float with just the two holes in his head above the waterline so he could rest and breathe.

I wanted to get closer to see him, to see him better, to see what he was all about.

Turning his massive gray head, he looked directly at me with bright clear brown eyes the size of two enormous chestnuts. His face was mostly dark gray except for a couple of large white splotches near his chin, and he had vibrissae—small whiskers—on his
face. The vibrissae were like a cat’s whiskers, and he used them like a cat to sense what was around him.

He seemed to be gentle, but his size was intimidating. I’d never before been in the water with a being that was so large. I swam closer. I had heard that baby gray whales sometimes let people pet them and I really wanted to see what he felt like.

The baby whale rolled onto his side and floated. His body was breathtaking, perfectly streamlined. His mouth was large, stretching from one side of his head to the other and he held it slightly open, as if giving me a gentle smile. But he didn’t open it far enough to enable me to see the baleen that he would eventually use to feed from the muddy ocean bottom. His head was large and his body was very elongated. In relation to the size of his body, his fluke and pectoral flippers were very short. He reminded me of a giant and gentle dachshund puppy. The fins on either side of his body were perfectly shaped, just like canoe paddles, with points at the tips that enabled him to capture the water down to the tips of his flippers.

He watched me swim breaststroke with my head above water. I swam slowly, keeping my eyes on him. I
didn’t want to scare him, or myself, but I wanted to check him out and see if he was healthy.

His skin looked smooth and clear and a lot like a gray wet suit, but it glistened in the sunlight. There weren’t any fishing lines wrapped around his body; no debris was attached to him. He seemed to be physically all right.

I wondered if he was afraid. How scary it must be for him to be alone in the ocean, to be alone in such an enormous place. There were other fish and whales out there, but there was only one whale that was important to him. The one he depended on. The one he loved.

I wanted to reassure him so I swam closer.

The baby whale rolled over onto his stomach and the wave from his movement pushed me backward. He looked into my eyes as if he was trying to understand who I was and what I was doing there.

I was wondering the same thing about him and I had to ask in a soft voice so I wouldn’t scare him, “What happened to you, little whale? Where is your mother? How did you get lost?”

If only I could speak his language. If only I could
find out what had happened. Most of all, I wanted to be able to tell him not to worry, that I would try to help. Two hearts in pursuit of the same thing were far stronger than one alone.

The baby whale knew this even though we couldn’t speak. Something had brought us together; something much bigger than the two of us.

The whale dove and I pressed my face deep into the water so I could watch him. He was close, five feet from me. Holding as still as I could, I floated on my stomach. He didn’t come any closer. He was so big. He seemed to sense that I was a little unsure of him. It surprised me that he didn’t seem the least afraid of me.

He floated below the surface.

How do you do that? I wondered. I tried, but couldn’t stay at his level. I popped back to the surface like a rubber duck.

He seemed to be listening to something, perhaps to some other whales somewhere nearby. Whales communicate at some frequencies that are too low for human beings to hear.

The baby whale inched closer.

“Don’t worry, little one, we’ll help you,” I said underwater in a weird watery and garbled voice.

Lifting my head, I took a breath and looked up for Steve on the pier. He was leaning against the railing, shielding his light blue eyes with his hand, protecting them from the searing white sunlight.

He dropped his hand and said, “I don’t see any sign of her.”

“How do you think he got lost?”

“He is pretty young. He’s between three and four months old. He may not have been listening to his mother. He’d still be learning how to use his sonar.”

Steve scanned the water again, swiveling his head from one side to the other.

At that moment, I realized how difficult it would be to find a whale in the ocean. Even something so big was actually so little in the vast sea.

The baby whale looked up at me through the water with his big brown doelike eyes. I felt something like a tingle, like the sound waves emitted by a wind instrument but without any music. I wondered if he was using his sonar on me. Could he use his sonar for
something more than figuring out where he was? Could he use it to read what was in someone’s heart?

“Do you think his mother’s somewhere nearby?” I asked Steve.

“I do. I don’t think she abandoned him. He looks healthy and seems to be swimming well. He’s breathing without any difficulty. Something may have happened to his mother. She may have been injured.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to imagine that. I wanted to believe that she was okay and we would be able to find her.

A thought is energy, and as it is transmitted, it is multiplied. Thoughts can either be positive, negative, or neutral, and they may travel all the way around the world as energy, affecting the way other people, and perhaps other beings, think. If I thought negatively, then I would put out negative energy, but if I thought positively, I would put out positive energy, expanding the possibilities of what could happen. It was very much like actors improvising: If they work together, stay in the moment, respond to one another in a positive way, they keep their skit going, moving forward,
but as soon as someone puts forth something negative, the improvisation shuts down.

I needed to improvise, to stay in the moment, to remain positive, because I thought the baby whale would pick up on my energy. Maybe that’s how he found me in the first place.

Steve understood this. He said, “The baby’s mother has to be searching for him. She’s probably calling him right now. A whale’s vocalizations travel great distances under the water. She may be calling out his name, if whales have names. And I bet she’s very worried.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to see her if she’s in the area? How big do you think she’ll be?” I asked.

“If she’s nearby we’ll see her. Male whales average thirty-five to forty-five feet long. Females are a few feet longer and they weigh between twenty and thirty-five tons.

“I think you should swim back to the jetty,” Steve suggested. “That’s probably where he lost her. Try swimming. He might follow you, like a puppy.”

The baby whale was swimming near the pier pilings. Even though I was trying to keep the negative
thoughts at bay, I didn’t want to follow him under the pier. I didn’t like swimming into the shadows. There were all sorts of sinister things under the pier, things that liked to reach out and grab you.

There was always fishing line, which often got tangled around the pilings, stretching across from one to another. The fishing line was invisible, so when I swam between the pilings, I could get tangled up in it. This freaked me out, especially when I felt an incoming wave. I knew that if I didn’t get free of the lines the wave would smash me against the rough, dark brown wooden pilings, which were covered with white, razor-sharp barnacles and purple and black mussels. Both could shred the skin like a cheese grater.

Being under the pier made me feel anxious. The old fishing lines often had rusty hooks dangling right at face level. Worse than that was the colony of pier crabs that scurried sideways on the pilings over the barnacles and mussels with their arms stretched out, waving back and forth over their heads, ready to pinch anyone who got too close. Once a friend told me that a pier crab had pinched him. I didn’t want to have a similar experience.

More than that, it took considerable skill to maneuver through the pier. There were five rows of pilings in some sections and four rows in others. In some cases it was better to go straight through the pier right between the pilings; in other cases, it was better to swim through on a diagonal. When a wave hit, it didn’t matter which way you went. The key was to make it through without being rammed into a piling and really getting hurt.

When I saw the baby whale swimming toward the pier, I wanted to yell out to him, Don’t swim there!

But he had no fear. Instead, he threaded his way through the pier, increasing his exposure time and possible danger.

But he made it through without a snag, and so I followed, riding a wave through the pier as he had done. And I laughed. It was so much fun. The more I tried, the more I could do, and if I listened and watched, I knew I could learn a lot from the whale.

Glancing back, I noticed a dark navy line of water paralleling the beach. The wave was building, increasing in height as the bottom of it hit the ocean floor. The wave hit the pier with so much force it shook.

The wave grew to five feet, caught the baby whale, suspended him in the air, and propelled him toward the beach like a flying log.

All I could see was the breaking back of the wave. And again I wanted to warn him: Watch out for that wave or it will beach you. You have to swim fast to get outside the break.

But the whale simply dropped his fluke, so he was vertical in the water, and used his tail like a giant brake, immediately stopping his forward momentum. He bailed out of the wave before it crashed and swam effortlessly toward me.

And as he swam, he was immersed in the water. He was one with it and his swimming motions came from the core of his body. His head moved down into the water, the top of it tracing a U. His body followed his head until he reached the bottom of the U, then he slightly arched his back and did an enormous kick with his fluke. That kick thrust his body forward and he slid through the water cleanly with a circle of tiny waves surrounding his upper body. His dolphin kick was beautiful and efficient, and he was totally balanced in the water.

He swam the most beautiful butterfly I had ever seen, but instead of pulling his flippers up over his head, which he wasn’t built to do, he kept his pectoral flippers by his sides, using them for steering and turning. He deepened the sideways U by diving deeper with the thrust of his fluke. With a stronger push of his fluke he could dive faster and deeper. He danced with the water and then at times seemed to be part of it.

Taking a breath, I dove under the water and watched him coming toward me. He knew precisely how to move his fluke, balance his body, rotate, and stretch his body and breathe. He had great flexibility and a natural feeling for the water. He knew how to use his flippers, how to hold them out to gain more lift or drag and how to steer. He was the greatest and the most beautiful swimmer I had ever seen. And in only four months he knew more about the ocean world than I would ever know in a lifetime.