She saw the whales just once. It was in the middle of some long-lost October, when the air over the Pacific Coast blew just thick enough to be felt and just warm enough that it didn’t raise the tiny hairs on her skin. That first night, she took a deep breath and took off everything she was wearing and walked out to the edge of the cliff, far beyond where the yellow lights of the little hotel could find her. At her feet, the unfinished hem of the Oregon coast fell away in a half-hewn tumble of grass and rock. Beyond that, the ocean was simply a bigger darkness, its angry mood known only through the groan and hiss with which it thrashed at the shore.
They’d told her the whales were out there. They told her that when she first arrived, after dark, having planned to drive through the night to San Francisco, but deciding on a whim to book the last room at the quaint little hotel instead. The door to the lobby was locked, but the owner let her in. The whales were out there, the owner said. Too dark to see them now, but most mornings, by the promenade, at the little tables where you’d take breakfast, you could look out over the whole bay and see the whales as they came up for air, rising above the waves.
For the whales, the bay was a rest stop, of sorts, a place to eat as they made their long annual journeys from warm equatorial waters to frigid glacial coasts. Only a handful were year-round residents. The same was true for the people. For them, the whales were good business. They brought in many visitors. The whole town, in fact, seemed to exist as a tribute to the whales. There were whale t-shirts in the shops. Ceramic whales decorated the shelves of the little hotel’s lobby. In the windows of chintzy restaurants, paintings of frolicking whales watched over tourists eating fried shrimp and congealed cheese in potato skin boats.
One tour company took skiffs out on the water, to see the whales up close. They had an office near the middle of town. To entice customers, they posted videos of successful outings on their website. Each video played out more or less the same: here are the tourists in life jackets, leaning over the lip of the boat, heads on a swivel. Here is a sudden churn in the water. Here, a massive body part breaks the surface, a tail or a flipper or, if they are especially lucky, a whole head, rising up, twisting once in the air and crashing down into the water again. Now the tourists are drenched. Now they scream. Now they laugh, wildly, with an exhilarated abandon, veins coursing with the adrenaline of having come so close to something so massive.
That first night, she looked at the tour company’s website. She looked at its pamphlets. Maybe she’d get a spot on one of those boats, she thought, and the whales would come to her too. Maybe she’d scream to see them, and maybe she’d laugh. Maybe you can’t help it, in a moment of contact with bodies so vast you can only see them in pieces. Maybe it’s just like that.
She wondered what the whales looked like, in the flesh. She’d never seen one before, except as a picture on a page. She wondered what they thought about the tourists who squeal in the world above the surface. Cetaceans are smart, they must know things, they must understand that they are being visited, and being seen. That first night, in the darkness, she swore she could feel them, waiting somewhere out in the waves.
Inside her little hotel room, even though the ocean was right outside the window, every painting on the walls showed only the sea.
The next morning, she and her companion sat by the promenade, at the little wooden table. They picked at their hashbrowns and watched the water. They were excited at first, and then anxious, and then disappointed. They saw nothing. Only the heaves of grey water washing towards and then away from the shore. They finished their breakfasts.
“Did you see the whales playing?” another hotel guest said, as she passed by their table.
They shook their heads. The woman paused, and looked out over the bay. “There,” she said, pointing at a plume of white spray, one that sprouted in the air for just a moment before the wind cleaned it away. A breath, lasting no longer. And then, a dozen metres away and just a few seconds later, there was another.
The woman smiled. “That’s how you find ‘em,” she said. “Look for the spouts when they come up.”
Once you knew how to see the whales, finding them was easy. You could guess, by the number and timing of the spouts, how many were out there in the waves, and in what configurations. There was a pair here, a single one there, and over there, closer to the horizon, a few all together, circling to scoop up the tiny krill that floated in the bay. If your eyes moved quickly enough to the plume, you could see a flash of their bodies too. Just a hint of their shape, a smooth and rounded grey against the rough chops of water, the arcing hump of a time-battered back.
As she watched, she began to smile, and then to laugh, and then she felt like a child again, consumed by a delight that cost nothing and took nothing. A delight borne of simply existing, the kind that, over time, you forget how to have.
What she never got over was how these animals, massive, great ancient beasts the size of school buses, looked so tiny in the roll and crest of the waves. She thought about how some of their cousins spend their lives penned in pools. She thought about the hubris inherent in the idea that we can contain something so uncontainable, to think we can claim that which was never ours, and never of our world.
The ocean was too rough to take the tour boats out that day. She didn't care. Instead, she sat on the edge of the coast, spray in her lungs, salt in her hair, and let her mind run out with the tides, spreading out through the water, diluting until it merged with the sea. Unknown, unexplored, the great cradle of life from which, long ago, some ancestral creature had emerged and, over time, forgot how to return.
Oh, how it would be, if we could go back to the sea.
And then, in the back of her mind, she heard a question echoing through the hallways of time, as if spoken by a million voices, all of them afraid and uncertain but speaking, just on this occasion, as if they were one.
Are we alone in the universe?
We were never alone, we just didn’t see.
I don’t know why I’m writing this in the third person. Maybe because it was so beautiful, it feels as if it happened to someone else. But that’s the way of all memories, right? You reach for them, cling to them, repeat them to yourself as a parent telling a bedtime story, defining the characters, refining the event. Hoping they will teach you something, show you something, build you a framework for how life is supposed to be.
But you are not the things that happened to you, whether perfect or painful, beautiful or tragic. You are not the places you’ve been, or the things that you’ve seen. You are, always, only exactly what and where you are, and then, in a heartbeat, that too slips under the waves, and becomes nothing more than a story.
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