Whale Watching and Whispering
A couple of weeks ago, a friend emailed me about his first time communicating with whales. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it his experience, not dreaming that I would be in a position just a few days later to hear whale songs for the first time myself off the coast of Mau’i in the Hawaiian Islands! We weren’t in the water ourselves, but our guide with the Pacific Whale Foundation’s PacWhale Eco Adventures cruise dropped a microphone down so we could eavesdrop.
Thank you, Kelly Brown, for this inimitable description of your swim with the whales. May you get to relive this wonderful experience many times in the future!
On my daily swim out past wavebreak and down to the rocks at the southern end of the beach, about3/4 mile away, one day turning around I wanted to stretch out, and thought I’d do my “whale” stroke. It’s a kind of lazy, one-armed, side-angled butterfly including, while diving down, making the deepest sound I can. Coming up from my first stroke I had the thought: I wonder if anyone heard me. I dove down again and listened. Someone had.
A voice, faint, plaintive yet serene, reached through the water. From maybe a hundred yards away, or a hundred miles—no way to know—but its reverberance was stirring. I went up for air, dove down and tried to imitate what I’d heard, waited, and heard a response—or was it an inquiry? A pretty dull conversation for the whale, no doubt, as I just tried to repeat what I heard, but we sustained this back-and-forth for the length of my mostly underwater, sounding swim back.
Maybe it was entirely in my mind, the whale oblivious to me, but it didn’t seem so, and it involved a throbbing bodily knowledge. I lingered to continue this resonant exchange, struck by the closeness of reverberance and reverence (just an erb! away). The sounds were growing louder, and I half expected a massive form to emerge from the murk, to meet its icy eye. I swam toward the deep to meet it, and scanned the surface for any signs. Nothing but its enigmatic idiom buzzing through me. The feeling, again, was probably awe, a vastness, balanced on a smallness, a limitation, the two depending on each other. Its queries got quieter and quieter, and offering adios in my comically obtuse whaletalk, I turned to paddle back through the surf to shore, giddily suffused, cradling the encounter.
I feel like if I’m lucky enough to have experiences like these I must be doing something right.