When all else fails, go and visit the whales
I’d always thought, in a previous lifetime, that I’d been a star pitcher, a Lefty Grove or Cy Young, but no, sorry, the old woman said, sifting through the tea leaves as we sat in her darkened parlor. “You weren’t a baseball player, you were a child of the seaports and a harpooner aboard the Essex.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Then what were you doing late last night, standing on the overpass above the freeway?”
“I don’t know; it’s just something I like to do.”
“You don’t know why?”
“No.”
“It’s because the sound of the cars passing underneath reminds you of the faraway sounds of the sea.”
“Wait, do you mean to say…”
The psychic-priestess was right. When I’m standing on deck and the captain barks into his megaphone that there’s a whale dead ahead, at 12 o’clock, or on the right at 2 o’clock, my arm automatically rises up above my head as if I’m about to throw something. When people look at me funny I just smile and pretend I’m yawning and stretching.
I generally go out on a harbor cruise or a whale watching trip upwards of 400 times a year. For me, nothing compares with the mewing gulls, the floating pockets of seabirds, the water flecked and dappled with sunlight, and the bell-buoys that are the wind chimes of the sea.
This past Sunday was a little different in that we could see the tremendous billows of smoke rising from up near Ventura and Santa Barbara where the wildfires have raged for the past two weeks. Even without my spyglass it looked like a fierce volcanic eruption.
Assuming (correctly) that I was at heart an ancient mariner, a young boy tentatively approached and asked if I thought we’d see a lot of whales.
“Sure, kid. But if we don’t it’s because they’re all in church.”
I then regaled him with enchanting tales about the deep blue sea, even though we were a mere three, four miles off the coast:
“During a storm, sonny, the sea is a casket without a lid.”
His eyes opened wide.
“Here,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “take this and press it up to your ear. Most seashells only contain the sound of the ocean, but if you listen to this one you’ll also hear a few gulls and a couple of harbor seals.”
“There, that’s the Valley of Lost Souls, and that one’s the Church of the Unredeemed.”
“I thought it’s Wayfarers Chapel…”
“And there’s Pirates’ Landing.”
“No it’s not; that’s Inspiration Point.”
Mostly, however, I like to brood alone at the back of the boat and simply gaze into the water. There is, after all, as Albert Camus mentions in “The First Man,” “…the soft ceaseless murmur of sunlight on the sea,” or, as Knut Hamsun describes it in “Rosa,” the “shadows the seabirds cast upon the water in their flight. They were like shadows made by breath, like blowing on velvet.”
And because, as Jorge Amado writes in “Tereza Batista,” “The sea is a road that never ends,” there’s always that bittersweet feeling when we return to port, which is the beginning, the end, and the promise of all highways.
