Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

57 OLIVER

Windy meets me on the shore of the weathered little beach at Gloucester. He hands me a neoprene wet suit and a yellow Helly-Hansen cap. Although he is a garrulous man by nature, in the midst of this throng of television and radio correspondents, he says nothing. He waits until I have stepped into the fifteen-foot inflatable Zodiac, until he has revved the outboard, and only then does he smile at me and say, “Who the hell would have expected Oliver Jones to be my guardian fucking angel?”

Windy McGill and I worked together at Woods Hole before it was fashionable to be involved in the cause of whales. We were the two gofers for the prestigious scientists; we were expected to fit in our own doctoral research around the time spent analyzing data or getting coffee for these other biologists. We discovered quite by accident that we had both been graduated from Harvard the same year; that we were both researching tidal communities for our doctorates; that we had been born a day apart at the same Boston hospital. It almost came as no surprise that our research turned in the same direction: towards humpbacks. Of course we’ve taken different tacks. Windy steers clear of whale songs; he’s worked on different methods of identification of humpbacks. At this point, he’s credited for the Provincetown research that is used to catalog entire generations of whales.

Windy pulls a bottle out of his pocket-cough medicine-and offers me a swig. I shake my head, and lean back against the bubbled bow of the little boat. Zodiacs tip at the drop of a hat, but I manage to strip and get the wet suit over my body. Windy watches me out of the corner of his eye. “Getting a little thick around the middle, Oliver?” he says, patting his own ribs. “Goddamned cushy California jobs.”

“Fuck you,” I say good-naturedly. “Tell me about this whale.”

“Her name is Marble. White markings on her neck and her fluke. Three years old. Got herself all tangled up in a gill net some asshole left behind.” He squints, and adjusts the rudder to the left. “I don’t know, Oliver. It took us two days just to find her out here. She’s testy and she’s tired, and I don’t know how much longer she’ll hold on. I’ll tell you this,” he says, “I’m glad you’re here. If I’d known you were back in Massachusetts, I would’ve called you in a minute.”

“Bullshit. You hate it when I steal your thunder.”

Windy and I discuss our intended course of action. The most pressing problem is knowing where exactly the gill net has become entangled on the whale. Windy’s primary observation-“around the jaw”-isn’t precise enough. Once this has been determined, it will be much easier to cut away the net. The assessment, however, is the most dangerous aspect of a whale rescue: one slap of a fluke or a fin is deadly. Last year, in northern California, a colleague was killed when he dove beneath a whale to determine the points of entanglement.

As we get further away from the Massachusetts shoreline, I begin to feel the prickling to which I am accustomed; the heady excitement of the unexpected. Few humans have seen it, the look in the eyes of a beached whale one has redirected towards the black ocean. Few humans understand that relief transcends verbal communication; that gratitude is not limited to our genus and species.

I spot the second Zodiac before Windy and direct him towards it. Four students are crowded into the little raft, along with Burt Samuels, a biologist who is getting too old for this. Twenty years ago, this man would command us to scrub sea lion shit from decaying study tanks and we would jump at his beck and call. And now we are defining the pace.

Marble rolls miserably on her side, feebly fanning the water with her dorsal fin. One of the students calls out to Windy-apparently three whales have been hovering nearby, waiting to learn the fate of Marble. One circles closer and sidles up to Marble, who rolls onto her belly. The second whale disappears beneath the water, unfurling the edges of its fluke. Gracefully, gently, it strokes Marble’s back with its tail. It caresses her several times, and then sinks and vanishes.

“I’m going in,” I say, pulling a mask over my face. We stop alongside the second Zodiac, which is slightly larger and which has an oxygen tank, ready to go. I adjust the harness and check my gauges, and then with the help of one of the students, I sit on the edge of the inflatable boat. “On three.” The oxygen mists against my skin. I look out through the mask, that familiar perspective of being on the inside of a fishbowl. One. Two. Three.

The rush and light of the world sizzles and then smoothes underwater. I adjust to breathing below the surface of the water; and then I blink and concentrate on finding the green gill net tangled about this massive wall of whale. I hear Marble moving, pendulous, creating unnatural currents. She sees me out of the corner of her eye, and she opens her mouth, creating a rush of seaweed and plankton from which I have to kick away.

I circle her tail first. I move quickly and steadfastly, noting mentally where the net is tangled (right fin, clear of the fluke). I hold my breath when I swim beneath her, praying to a God I am not sure I believe in. She is over thirty feet long, and she weighs well over fifty thousand pounds. Do not dive, I whisper. For God’s sake, Marble, do not dive.

I lie beneath her on my back, floating motionless. I know that I should get out of the way as quickly as possible, but what a view. It makes you hold your breath, such beauty. Right there, the creamy white of her belly, nicked with scars and barnacles and grooved at the jaw like a zinc sinkboard.

What I would give to be one of them. For a little while, I could trade in my legs for a massive form, a mighty tail. I could run with them along the mountains of the ocean, calling out, understanding. I could sing in the quiet of night with absolute certainty that there would be someone waiting to hear me. I could find her; I could mate for life.

With three sharp kicks of my fins I swim up to Marble. Keeping my distance, I mark where the gill net has tangled in her mouth, caught no doubt across the baleen. I do not think we will be able to cut it entirely without compromising our own safety. Most likely we will have to rip the net so that she is at least free, and then Marble will have to adapt. Whales have an incredible propensity for adaptation. Think how many have spent years living with broken harpoons in their thick skin.

When I surface I am pulled into the second Zodiac by two young marine biology students. I roll onto my stomach on the floor of the boat, which shivers like jello with every twitch of Marble’s body. I pull the mask off, unhook the harness with the tank. “It’s tangled around her right fin and pretty much woven through her baleen,” I say. Then I notice the television camera looking down at me. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s okay, Oliver,” Windy says, “Anne’s from the Center. She’s videotaping for our files.”

I sit up, panting. I watch the lens zoom closer. “Do you mind?” Still dripping, I crawl into Windy’s Zodiac. I instruct the students in the other boat to start hanging buoys around the whale in any manner they can-looping, hooking, anything, just so it doesn’t hurt her any more. The idea here is to tire her out, keep her floating at the surface so that we have a chance to cut away the net. Windy and I rope a few large sailing buoys around Marble’s tail.

“Okay,” I say, surveying the whale, now edged in pink floating balls like a decorated Christmas tree. “I want you to get the hell out of the way.” I say this expressly to Samuels, although I mean everyone in his boat. One of the students backs the second Zodiac several hundred feet away, leaving Windy and me alone alongside Marble.

I lean out of the boat, an arm’s length away from the soft surface-of Marble’s skin. At this point she is so exhausted she doesn’t try to fight as I snip at the net with a grappling hook, leaving entire chunks of it still tangled in her baleen. “You need to get closer to her,” I say, as we approach her fin. “I can’t reach the net.”

“I can’t get any closer without going right over her.”

“Then go over her. Just watch your engine.”

Windy and I argue this point, but in the long run he does move the tiny craft over the tip of Marble’s fin. I am confident that at this point she is tired enough to let us go about our business. I lean out of the boat and try to unravel the gill net.

Suddenly I am pitched backward. Marble exhales through her blowhole, a fetid combination of stale water and algae, and whacks the edge of the boat with her fin. She hits us twice so forcefully that the Zodiac rises and pitches, on the verge of overturning. “Fuck,” Windy cries, holding onto the rubber handles on the inside of the boat. The students in the other Zodiac begin to scream, and I hear it quite clearly, as if their voices have been attached to a speaker in our boat. Then I realize our Zodiac has been thrown into the air. I am tossed onto my back, on top of Windy, who is lying face down in the boat. It is purely by chance that the inflatable raft landed face up, rather than face down, in the freezing depths of this ocean, in the nether region of a whale. “Get off me,” Windy says. He sits up gently and rubs his arm. “I told you we shouldn’t go over her.”

“Is the engine all right?”

“Screw the engine. Are you all right?”

I grin as he takes inventory of his limbs. “I’m better than you,” I say.

“You are not.”

“Always was.”

“Bullshit,” Windy says. He fiddles with the Evinrude and starts it again. “Where do you want to go?”

This time, Windy approaches from the back of the whale, sneakingup between the fin and the lower half of the body. After several passes with the grappling hook Marble is free. Windy and I pass around the perimeter of the whale one last time, unhooking the buoys. Then we rev the boat’s engine backwards, floating several hundred feet north of the whale. It takes Marble several minutes to realize she is unencumbered, and then finally she sinks several feet below the surface of the water and swims off. About a quarter mile away, she is joined by a small group of whales. As they are leaving, Marble arches and dives, holding up the underside of her fluke and slapping it against the water with such force that we are all caught in the spray.

Windy and I watch Marble swim away into the swirling eddies of Stellwagen Bank. “Christ, that’s beautiful,” he says, and I put my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m only going to say this once,” he says, smiling, “so you’d better listen up. I want to thank you, Oliver. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Sure you could have.”

“You’re right. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun.” He laughs and guns the engine toward the shore. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch. I would have taken a dive to check the location of the net, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have taken a nap under the belly of a twenty-five-ton whale.”

“Yes you would,” I say. “When an opportunity like that presents itself, you don’t fight it.”

“You’re still crazy.”

“You’re jealous. You wish you could fight off the paparazzi.”

Windy rubs his forehead with his hand. “Christ. All the reporters. I forgot. How come nobody gives a damn about a whale until it’s in trouble, and then it become a national event?”

I smile. “I don’t mind talking to the networks.”

“Since when?”

“Since I’m trying to find Jane.” I don’t look at Windy when I say this. “Jane left me. She took my kid and she left. I’m under the impression she’s in Massachusetts, but I don’t know where for sure. So I figure if I make myself into a media hero, I can ask her back over the nightly news.”

“Jane left you? Jane left you?” He cuts the engine so that we are sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, the other Zodiac speeding off ahead of us. “I’m sorry you came here at all. You should have been looking for her.”

“You didn’t ask me,” I remind him. “I invited myself.”

“Is there anything I can do? You know you’re welcome to stay with me as long as you want.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. The only thing you can do for me right now is get me back to all those cameras and microphones.” The boat rocks back and forth, tossed by a passing wave. “I’ve got to get her back, you know,” I say, more to myself than to Windy.

“You will,” he says.

When we come closer to shore Windy lifts up the engine and lets us drift in with the tide. The crowd of newspeople runs down to the edge of the beach. “Dr. Jones,” they call. “Dr. Jones!”

I have heard that sound so many times; the pitch of twenty, thirty voices singing my name. I can feel the old college rush of adrenaline when I consciously register that it is me they are all waiting to meet. I used to hear that marvelous sound and think that this was my ticket to the top. Then I would go home and tell Jane, and she would ask all the right questions: How many reporters were there? Did you talk long? Will it be on the news? Were any of them pretty?

None like you, Jane.

I step off the boat seconds before Windy, who walks me up the beach with his arm around my shoulders. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, interrupted briefly by a hacking cough, “I’d like to introduce Dr. Oliver Jones, affiliated with the San Diego Center for Coastal Studies. Dr. Jones is singularly responsible for the rescue of Marble, the humpback that has been entangled in fishing nets for several days.”

It comes in a rush, the push of the microphones and the incoherent bubble of twenty different questions being asked at once. I hold up my hands and take a deep breath. “I’ll be happy to answer,” I say quietly, knowing well that first impressions last the longest, “but you need to speak one at a time.”

I point to a young black man in a yellow rain slicker. “Dr. Jones, can you describe the procedure used to disentangle the whale?” As I start to answer, I see Windy pass behind the throng of reporters. He signals an O.K. sign to me. He takes his cough syrup from his pocket and makes his way towards the group of students who were in the other Zodiac.

I tell them where the net was caught. I tell them we used a grappling hook to cut it away. I tell them about the whale that came up to Marble and stroked her gently, and I let them know such tenderness is often exhibited among humpbacks. I tell them everything they want to know and then finally someone asks the question I have been waiting to hear.

“Dr. Jones,” the man says, “was this a case of being in the right place at the right time? Or did you come here expressly to help the whale?”

“I didn’t know about the whale until I heard of its plight through the efforts of you good folks. I’m in Massachusetts on a different sort of rescue mission. I have been traveling across the country looking for my wife Jane and my daughter Rebecca. I have reason to believe that they are in Massachusetts; unfortunately, it is a very big state and I don’t know where. If you’ll indulge me, I was hoping you’d allow me to send a message to them.”

I pause long enough to let the cameras start rolling again. I clear my throat and look as honestly as one can into the blind eye of a TV camera. “Jane,” I say, and I realize that it comes out sounding like a question. “I need you. I hope you can see this, and I hope you and Rebecca are all right. I can’t stand being without you. I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me, but I came to save this whale because I knew you’d hear about it on the news and I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to remember how it used to be-we postponed our honeymoon because of a whale, don’t you remember that? Don’t you remember how we cheered and hugged each other when we saw it swimming again, miles off the coast? Well, I saved a whale today. And I want you to know it wasn’t any fun without you. If you’re watching this, I hope you’ll let me know where you are. Call the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies- they’ll know how to get in touch with me.”

A reporter interrupts. “Do you have a picture?”

I nod and pull my wallet out of my pocket. I open to a photo taken of Jane and Rebecca less than a year ago. “Can you get this?” I hold it up towards the cameras. “If anyone out there has seen my wife, or this little girl, please call in.” I stare at the grey cataract eyes of the television cameras. Jane’s eyes are grey too, I think, surprised that I can still picture them so vividly. “I love you,” I say. “I don’t care if the whole world knows.”