Sitting with Whales

“LA-vah,” says the steerer. I reach my arms forward, dip and pull my paddle back one last time before bringing it in dripping and place it perpendicular across my lap. Chatter erupts as the six of us in the outrigger canoe coast closer to the whales. Theories of who, what, where, why travel back and forth, bow to stern. The final consensus is that there are three, a mother, her calf, and an escort.

It is February, 2007. I am spending three weeks on the southwest side of Maui, Hawaii. The whales are here. Humpbacks migrate from the north to the warm and shallow waters of the islands. Annually they begin arriving in December and are gone by April. The official Hawaiian Island whale count done the previous Saturday totaled 1200 animals. The seas of these paradise isles are alive with activity. The males rough it up with other males competing for a mate. The females impregnated last season give birth. The new mothers nurse and teach their young to swim and maneuver to fend off predators. Their activities are serious in terms of species survival, but to me it just looks like too much fun. Pectoral fins and flukes lift and slap sounding a “whack” that skips across the ocean’s surface. Whale bodies rocket out of the water, do a mid flight 180 degree twist and slam back with a huge splash. It’s all the drama of a great big movie on the great big screen.

The first afternoon after arrival in my rented condo community, a resident told me about the Maui Outrigger Club. It is a group of sun leathered, retired, fit, AARP-qualified people that canoe each morning. They offer short time visitors the opportunity to join for $25. With that fee one is able to canoe with them four times. I have gone several times, exhilarated with the human powered slice of boat slipping through the water. Each time I’m treated with a visit to a small herd of graceful swimming turkey platters, the turtles. They swim around a buoy that marks the half way point of an hour’s boat trip. These large oval creatures look comically prehistoric with their thick scaly skinned faces, droopy eyes, and wing-like appendages. I want to yell at them and say, “Smile, dammit”. Such grim looks, makes me think of a cranky teenager who has just been told he has to go with the family to Grammas on Saturday night.

This day we slide off the beach and navigate the incoming surf. The stroker (the person in the first seat who sets the pace) spots a whale’s blow off to the east. After 15 minutes of paddling through the warm salty inlet of Maalaea Bay, we arrive.

I read the picture books in my rental unit and absorbed a few facts about the Humpback. These island visitors are longer than a school bus and wider than the length of Toyota Camry. They weigh about 80,000 pounds. The newborn calf weighs 1500 pounds and consumes 50 pounds of milk a day. This is the sum total of actual facts, most of the rest, particularly that revolving around their behavior is purely speculation.

Several of my crewmates theorize the reason for the escort. This companion could be last year’s calf, now a yearling. It could be a male that is patiently waiting for this female to be done with the calf and take up with him, or it could be another older female just spending time with her pal.

The calf’s pectoral fins are exposed showing their white underside. The baby is feeding. The mother and escort lie still. There is an occasional blow that disturbs the quiet and sends a spray of stinking whale snot high into the air. It smells like a mucky saltwater beach at low tide, boiled down and intensified 10X.

The blue-green ocean holds the morning light bright deep below the surface. My eyes are well protected with dark polarized plastic lenses. My face and arms brown, and soak in the delicious tropical air. I scuff the residual beach sand off my feet and move out to perch upon the oka, one of the arms that attach to the ana (the outrigger). My weight on the oka stabilizes the boat and allows me a higher view of the whales, the three tar gray islets, that lie just off the other side of our canoe. The rules state that boaters are to keep a 100 foot distance between us and them. However, the threesome has now stirred and moves a bit closer to us. (They apparently have different rules.) I see the slick, a thin greasy skim that floats from their oily bodies. Gentle swells lift the boat up and then down; rolling water pushed by a force left long ago far out at sea. I dangle my legs and my toes dip in and out of the water with each rise and fall.

My body lulls with the sea in peaceful contemplation. It is so easy to tie all these human emotions and motivations to this trio of whales. Breathing in the beauty of this place, I fall in love with them. Anthropomorphic stories start playing out in my head. “Oh, a mom and her baby, such love and affection. So sweet she has a protector near by. They are all resting after a laborious birth, probably only a day or so ago.”

I dive deeper to a more meditative layer of thought. I visualize the earth, our planet, this particular outpost in the universe. Humankind, self appointed guardian, rules this messy heap. My lofty contemplation dissolves to the “Save the Whales” bumper sticker, and then cascades down the environmental gutter, the advertised trip to grizzly rack and ruin. Guilt pours in like the waves rushing across the grey gnarled reefs. I resign, desperate and powerless, and then I’m pissed that I’ve lost this poetic pause.

My perfect moment clunks a dull thud. I struggle to recapture the spiritual moment, but I’m stuck sucking the world in through my limited senses and experiences. Here are these whales. There is power within pulling them to this locale. They respond to urges deep with their being, beyond flesh, bone, and blubber. Their cycle of feeding, breeding, birthing, all done via some force unknown to me. My life’s motivations are muffled by thousands of years of humanication, culturization, knowallducation, datafixation, and quantifination.

I sit with whales. I breathe. My breath lifts and falls with the moving water below me. I tell myself to calm. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just be. I try to scrape clean the layers of unnecessary human attachment. I want to let go and feel pulled by some lost gentle attraction that will reveal my primal self. I sit with whales and breathe.

My aging flesh and bones warm. My eyes fill with the sun glinting from the glossy humped backs of the resting creatures. The blue sky is patched with clouds reflected on the water’s surface, wrinkled by pockets of wind. These small gusts blow into my ears the occasional calls of gulls and shrieks of children playing in the surf beachside. I sit with whales and breathe.

I lift and fall harmonious in syncopation with that of the whales, energized by the ocean. My own weight displaces this space in this sea. Perhaps this space may create a small ripple. Perhaps this ripple will generate a microscopic force. Perhaps this force will create a wave. Perhaps this wave, a wave of the purest desire, will breach the confines of my mortality. I sit with whales and breathe.

I sit with whales and breathe.