The Lost Whale by Michael Parfit

Author:Michael Parfit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

May 2004

A few days later, I came back toward the Gold River docks from Mooyah Bay in a wind-conflicted sea, in the strange light made by heavy cloud cover and bursts of sunlight and the raging shine of rough water. The light made the sound and its mountains into a cathedral full of radiance and gloom, the kind of place where a man in a surplice like my father used to wear could give a sermon about sin and redemption that you would remember forever, for the weather as well as for the words.

We had driven out to Tuta Marina, but Luna hadn’t been there, so I had left Suzanne to drive back and took the little Zodiac back to Gold River the wet way.

We’d been up on the hillside at Lisa’s observation camp, talking with her. She had looked and listened for a little whale who was not there, then mused on how much more ancient whales are than humans.

“They have been in the oceans millions of years longer than we have been on Earth,” she said. “It is like, we can’t accept that. That is what I find. There is a dead stop and you can’t go beyond it somehow, and that is why we can’t really understand.”

This difficulty didn’t stop us from wondering, though. Whales are descended from land mammals that eased themselves back into the sea about fifty million years ago, long before the species that led to humans began to emerge. Since then, they had evolved into very different animals from us, dependent on sound for many of the things we do with sight. When you thought about that history, it seemed impossible that they could have anything in common with this upstart, upright creature that had to get so burdened with equipment in order to do anything with water that it appeared to be allergic to it.

And yet, though we had been so long apart in the flow of time, and were separated further in the great division of the planet into earth and sea, we offered something familiar enough in our gaze, in our presence—in something—that a lone orca could seek in us a way to ease his loneliness. And when our eyes connected, the same thing could happen to us.

“We know they have this awareness,” Lisa said. “We can sense it, you know, their presence.” She paused to think about it. “I mean, they kind of look through your otherness at you.”

As I got closer to the docks, after a lumpy trip in the Zodiac, I rode three-foot waves blown my way before a twenty-five-knot wind. As I came in, a hard wind eddied down off the mountainside as if born of the fierce light up there. It hit the water and threw every whitecap back in the waves’ faces, kicking spray into the air. I rode the Zodiac straight into the weird light and the crazy winds, every wave a spout ahead of me. But when the real whale put me on his back, I didn’t expect him.

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