Grayson by Lynne Cox

Author:Lynne Cox [Cox, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-49575-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

six

There was no sign of the whale’s mother by the jetty, underwater, or anywhere else so I started swimming back toward the pier, hoping the baby whale would follow. He didn’t.

I thought that if I could communicate with him he would come with me, like a dog responding to a familiar whistle. I thought that maybe if I could try to speak in his language he would understand. I tried to repeat his chirp. It was pathetic. It didn’t sound anything like him. I tried to grunt, a really big grunt, but all I got was a noseful of saltwater and tears in my goggles from the salty sting. I returned to the surface to clear the water out of my nose.

And it finally occurred to me: No matter what I sounded like, I didn’t know what his sounds meant, and even if I could imitate them, I wasn’t going to be anything more to him than his echo.

Unable to figure out a different approach, I resumed my swim back to the pier.

Sometimes it makes sense to try something again and keep it simple. A moment later, the baby whale took the lead.

When we reached the pier, Steve was waiting there along with a group of fishermen and a handful of locals and tourists. Steve said that one of the fishermen on an offshore boat thought he had sighted the mother whale near one of the oil rigs.

The oil rig was about a mile and a half offshore and it was almost in a direct line with the pier. I had swum out there only once before, during an open-water race, but at that time, I had had a paddler with me on a long paddleboard. He had helped me stay on course, and he had watched for danger.

But the baby whale had already turned and started to head offshore. He looked over at me as if to say, Please come swim with me.

I knew it made no sense to follow him. I could think of many reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t, but I didn’t want him to go off alone.

Sometimes things just don’t make sense, sometimes there’s no reason to explain how or why I wanted to do them; I only knew that I had to, I had to try. Without trying I would never know what could happen. It was like reading a great mystery and never knowing how it finished, always wondering who did it. Sometimes the things that make the least sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense to me.

Maybe I knew this, too, because I didn’t always fit in. I was shy and large, and I believed that I had to work hard and study hard to do well. I had different friends—from computer wizards to the guys on the water polo team and the girls on the swim team to friends in drama and music—but I didn’t fit into any one group. I had things I knew I wanted to do and didn’t play the teenage boy and girl games.

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