Grayson (9 page)

I told myself to swim for twenty minutes and then I lifted my head.

I wasn’t making much progress. The pier was a mile away. It looked like a long-stem rose held out at arm’s length.

The sea surface was changing from a smooth, light silvery blue to a rumpled navy and white.

In the distance the wind was blowing stronger and the sea was becoming increasingly choppy. It felt like I was swimming uphill. And I knew I’d have to seriously watch for windsurfers and sailboats. If I wasn’t careful I could easily be run over or get a skeg in my head.

Wind gusted to twenty knots and tossed up more waves. The waves were hitting me in the face. It was hard to breathe, and I could barely see a foot in front of me.

“Grayson, I hope you can hear me. Please come back and swim with me. I need you.”

Grayson returned!

He surfaced beside me. He rolled over and floated like a runner who had just finished the last hundred-yard sprint of a marathon. He was
poofing
and
poofing
very quickly and deeply, as if he couldn’t catch his breath. His body was moving up and down as his lungs filled with air and pulled in more. His body was fighting to recover from a very deep dive.

“Grayson! I am so happy to see you! I was so afraid something had happened to you. But you’re back now, you’re back now, my dear little friend.” I felt such joy that he had returned.

Grayson floated with his head above the water, the two holes on top of his head opening and closing quickly as he breathed in and out. His pectoral flippers were gently flapping. He looked at me and made some chirping and clicking sounds.

“What are you trying to tell me, little whale?”

He tried to speak with me again. This time he grunted, then he repeated the grunts and turned away from me.

For a second my heart dropped to my feet. I thought he was going to swim away again.

“Grayson, don’t go. We’ll find your mother. Be patient. Sometimes you just have to believe. Sometimes that belief gets you where you want to go, sometimes it carries you a little closer, and then you discover another way.”

Grayson lay on his side. He looked tired. Waves were washing over his massive head; he was looking at me and he was listening to the water.

Tilting my ear into the water, so I could hear what he was listening to, I listened and heard something I’d never heard before.

It sounded like a hundred high-pitched sparrows singing through a hundred tiny megaphones turned up to the highest volume.

“What’s making that sound?” I asked.

I swam to within two feet of him and floated beside him. He looked as if he was anticipating something.

From behind us came a squeak. Grayson lifted his big gray head and he stared across the water. My eyes followed his gaze. There were long winding waves with
no beginning or end, just miles and miles of water, endless, ceaselessly moving water.

But I suddenly saw something cutting across the water, a dark dorsal fin moving very fast, at about twenty knots. Then I saw another and another. In a moment there were three more fins, then twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred ten, one hundred twenty, thirty, forty, sixty, seventy, one hundred eighty. There were two hundred and twenty dolphins, a sea of dark gray fins bobbing up and down as they raced across the sea, speeding toward Long Beach.

The fins were in the middle of their backs and varied in color from black to light gray. They were all outlined in black. The dolphins were between seven and a half and eight and a half feet long. Their bodies were beautifully cylindrical and they had a distinctive hourglass pattern on their sides and long, soft gray beaks. They also had dark lines that ran from behind their beaks to their heads and another black stripe that went from their jaws to their flippers. It was as if nature had outlined them to emphasize their beautifully
and elegantly streamlined shape. It took me a few minutes to realize that they were common dolphins.

They were stunning swimmers: Graceful, powerful, explosive, they dolphined through the water with complete efficiency. And they were so agile. In a second they could cut sharply left or right with only the slightest shift in their body positions and a series of quick flicks with their flukes and fins. Like cyclists, they drafted off one another. The lead dolphin worked the hardest, having to push against the resistance of the water; the next dolphins drafted off the ones in front of them and got a chance to rest and recover before they took the lead.

Loud and utterly animated, they whistled and squeaked directions. They swam beak to fluke, minimizing the drag, and when one dolphin cranked up the speed, the others followed. They were chattering in excited high pitches, and it sounded like they were laughing with glee. Their laughs came all the way up from their tails.

I took a breath and put my head under the water.

It sounded like a canary and it began the same way a
male canary starts to sing: with a single tentative note, then a repeat of the note, then a movement up and down the scale and then all at once a burst into song, an aria filled with loud trills. And a second male joined in a duet duel, trying to out sing the first. Multiple voices joined in, adding whistles, squeaks, chatter, grunts, and clicks. It was a dolphin symphony. And it was in surround-sound, coming from all levels of the water column.

The singing came to an end and I thought the performance was over, but it was just beginning.

Two dolphins leaped two or three feet out of the water. They arced through the air. Suspended in the sky, they held their arc, and then they pointed their beaks and punched a hole in the water, entering it so cleanly they would have made an Olympic diver jealous.

Five more dolphins followed, leaping in complete synchrony. Below the water, the song changed to chatter. More voices, excited, joined in. It looked like the dolphins were passing messages to one another like a sports or business team setting up a play.

There was a long pause of nearly half a minute
while everyone moved into position. A loud trill sounded and a group of twelve or thirteen dolphins leaped out of the water simultaneously; another group followed, larger than the first, then a third, overlapping the previous one. More dolphin groups joined in. It was like watching a series of exploding blue, white, and silver fireworks in the late morning sky.

This, I thought, was the grand finale, but I was wrong. The dolphins were just doing their warm-ups, stretching out their fins and flukes.

The dolphins became more creative, fun, expressive, and daring. They sprinted across the water, leaping higher, arcing across the air, diving and doing faster head-first half turns, pirouettes, and wild, out-of-control spins. They wiped out. They slammed down on their sides and backs, and their dolphin friends, watching from the sidelines, were laughing hysterically. I could hear them. Then they started clowning around.

Two dolphins took off, racing against each other; then one leaped out of the water and tail-walked. He scooted across the water’s surface standing upright, and a split second later, the other dolphin followed.
He couldn’t sustain the tail-walk as long as the first so he landed right on top of the other with a big splash, as if he was doing an intentional cannonball on top of his buddy.

The first dolphin let out a series of clicks and cawing sounds. He nudged the other dolphin. The second dolphin pushed back. They bumped each other, they bumped again harder, they squeaked, chattered, and then sprinted against each other. Their dorsal fins cut through the water like razor blades slicing through canvas. They leaped up side by side and the first dolphin won again. Underwater, he sounded like he was cackling.

Seven more dolphins joined in, but after doing a few tail-walks, they changed the game. They started doing somersaults. They raced across the water, gaining speed, while the dolphins waiting their turns chattered and squeaked like cheerleaders. The dolphins launched into the air, tucked their heads, threw their tails over their heads, and splashed down on their backs or almost completed a full aerial somersault before they hit the water. And when they submerged they squeaked with delight.

Then I felt something moving below me. It was a dolphin, swimming only three feet down. She rolled over onto her back and looked up at me, and then she rolled over again. She turned sharply and circled back with four more dolphins swimming beside her. They were clicking and squeaking and chattering loudly.

They swam right under me and I wanted to reach out and touch them. More dolphins were joining in. They were swimming stacked three on top of one another with a foot of water between them. And they were chattering, as if giving directions to one another. Two dolphins rolled over quickly, flipper over flipper from one side to the other; the hourglass patterns on their bodies spiraled below me.

Time was spinning. I was losing track of time.

Where was Grayson?

Quickly I turned my head. Grayson was only ten feet from me and he seemed to be watching too.

We watched the dolphins playing for nearly five minutes. Then they disappeared and Grayson moved closer.

A flock of brown pelicans patroled the water. They were about fifty yards from us, gliding on their six-foot-long
wings, like mini-gliders, cruising six inches above the violet-blue ocean in single file until the lead pelican began flapping his wings fast. The tips of his wings looked like fingers, grabbing hold of the air while the wing blades themselves were pushing hard against the air to gain altitude.

The pelican climbed sharply, moving like a rock climber up a rock face, nearly straight up. Eight pelicans followed. When they reached twenty feet above the ocean, the lead pelican tucked his neck against his chest. His heavy beak and large pouch pulled him forward and he dove fast.

At the very last moment he opened his beak and tucked his wings back. He hit the water with a huge splash; his yellow feathered crown disappeared beneath the water, then he emerged with about half a dozen anchovy in his pouch. He squeezed out the water, tilted his head back, and swallowed the fish whole. His companions followed and caught pouchfuls of anchovy. Seagulls appeared out of nowhere. Squawking loudly and dive-bombing the pelicans, the seagulls attempted to steal fish from them. They tried to intimidate the pelicans so they’d drop the fish, and
they tried to steal the fish right out of the pelicans’ pouches.

The birds signaled it was breakfast time. From where we were floating Grayson and I could see a massive school of anchovy. Their small bodies were flickering bright silver and gold in the yellow sunlight and they were moving across the water in schools that stretched half a mile into the distance.

The dolphins reappeared, and split into three groups: Some went to the right, others to the left, and some came up from behind. They encircled the fish, working together, and herded the anchovy into a tight ball. Some had breakfast, some continued to play, and I watched them with delight and fascination. They were so bright, social, animated; most of all, it seemed like dolphins just wanted to have fun. They made me smile and remember my first dolphin encounter.

Once when I was training with a friend off Surfside, one beach south of Seal Beach, two common dolphins swam up from behind him.

He had no idea that they were beside him. I had just ridden a wave into shore and I was heading back out
when I saw him on the crest of the wave, riding in the froth while inside the transparent green wave were two dolphins, one on either side of my friend. In the green wave their crescent forms were a darker grayish green, and as the wave lifted them it revealed their size. They were huge. They must have been eight feet long and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. Each dolphin was within a hand’s reach of my friend. They knew exactly what they were doing. I think I saw them smiling through the wave.

My friend must have sensed their presence. He glanced over his left shoulder to see what was beside him. When he saw the huge gray form, he looked startled, and when he looked over his right shoulder, he panicked. His arms were whipping around his head. He was trying to swim through the air, trying to grab hold of anything to get out of the wave and onto shore. I was laughing so hard I started crying.

The two common dolphins kicked out before the wave broke, before they could be thrown onto the beach, but my friend was riding in the white water, spinning his arms in the froth as fast as he could. He pulled off his goggles, turned, and looked back, and
then he saw the dolphins: three more had joined them. They were riding in the next wave. He shook his head, and we laughed very hard and immediately went out to play with them.

Grayson had been watching the dolphins closely, and he had been listening to them talking. He had been making his own sounds. A group of five or six dolphins swam to within ten feet of us. They looked right at us. We held one another in our eyes. I laughed. It was so amazing to see them so close, to see the thrust of tail fins, the power generated by that motion, and to feel the pressure of the water against my legs. Grayson felt it too. He stayed beside me.

Curious, the dolphins swam a few feet closer. They squeaked and chattered more loudly, and in a higher pitch, with more excitement in their voices. Grayson clicked slowly and he made a low grunt and some rasping sounds. They sounded different from one another, as if they came from very different countries, but it seemed as if the dolphins were listening underwater, and squeaking and clicking back to Grayson. Maybe the sounds were a foreign language to him, or maybe he understood the feelings or maybe he felt
their sonar. In some way they seemed to be communicating and Grayson seemed to be listening and making sounds back to them. Then the dolphins turned and rejoined their herd moving north.

Grayson then swam toward them. His movement through the water looked like the wave his body formed as he swam through the water. He was so strong and fast. He was exquisite, more beautiful than any of the dolphins. He was gentle and friendly, trusting and sweet. And he had become very special to me. Somehow I think he knew that.