Last night, Dad announced that he’d offered to host a TV crew from the Today Show who were looking for a good location to film a segment about Kevin and the orcas. After checking with the houseboat management, he’d gotten the okay—good publicity, they said—and the early hour was set to broadcast the program live to the East Coast.
A horn beeps and I duck outside, shutting the door behind. In the foggy morning air, I can just barely see the dull orange and white of Kevin’s van, parked up the road alongside the ramp. Pulling my jacket closer around me, I feel my way out to the end of the dock.
“The locals have been so cooperative,” Kevin is telling the crew. “But the weekend boaters … let’s just say I’m not sure out-of-towners are getting the message. We won’t take lightly any activities that stress the whales.”
I wander over to the dock edge and peer down into the water. It’s pitch-black, and sloshes and gurgles, mixing with the creaking sounds of the wooden dock. As I walk back past the houseboat, the back door of the van swings open, flooding the road with light.
“Hello?” Naomi calls out. She crouches down and peers out, giving her eyes time to adjust to the darkness.
“It’s just me, Marisa.”
“What an ungodly hour to be up,” she groans, hopping down from the van. “Whose bright idea was this? Too early even for whales … and too cold.”
Together, we watch the crew set up to film Kevin out at the far end of the marina dock, where the view is the best. A light mist is falling. Over the inlet, a thick layer of fog lies low, blanketing the water. This has always been my favorite part of the day—the time when everything wakes up and the whole world seems new and fresh and anything seems possible.
After awhile, it gets boring; there’s too much starting and stopping to check mechanical stuff. I can tell the TV crew were hoping they might get some shots of the whales, but there’s no chance of that—not here, so close to the mouth of the channel.
Finally, Naomi gestures behind her to the glowing interior of the van. “Want to come inside? I have other stuff to do.”
I nod and follow her, curious. I know Kevin’s been using the van as his home away from home, sleeping down at the boat launch, but I’m totally not prepared for what’s inside. The van’s backseats have been removed and the whole space is jam-packed with equipment—a jumble of hydrophones, recorders, tapes, and a lot of other stuff I don’t recognize. Plus there’s all the usual things you’d need if you’re basically living in a van—mounds of clothes, most of it pretty grungy, toothpaste, soap, a stray shoe or two, along with piles of journals, books, and magazines everywhere. I even spot a hammer and open box of nails. A rolled up sleeping bag is shoved into one corner, but I have no clue where Kevin would ever find a flat surface to use it.
“Pretty crazy, isn’t it?” Naomi laughs, seeing me take it all in. She clears a space in one corner so we can sit. “He is totally obsessed … really. Whales are his whole life. Next time your mother tells you to clean your room, tell her about this place.”
I blink, and try to think of something to say, but Naomi is already busy with something else. Two hydrophones lie on the floor at my feet—long black cords with a big bulge on one end. They remind me of the bull kelp that washes up all along Northwest beaches. I know what hydrophones do, but not really how they work. I pick one up and examine it, stretching it out to its full length.
“It’s a simple thing, crude almost,” Naomi explains. “The navy made them to listen for submarines. Easy to use, you just toss them over the side of the boat. But boy, what they let you hear is phenomenal.” She turns and pulls some cassette tapes out from under a pile of socks. “Here … I made these near the shore by Chico Creek. Lots of activity out there. Seems whenever a pod is scattered around over a large area, something’s usually up, like they’re planning some kind of group effort. Want to listen?”
I take the headphones and place them over my ears. Naomi plugs in a second pair for herself, pops in yesterday’s tape, and presses the “Play” button.
In an instant I’m transported into another time and place. Just like that day on the inlet when the whales surrounded our raft, my head, heart, and soul are filled with the sound of whale song. Except this time the effect is complete since the headphones block out any other sound.
At first, the short, sharp calls just sound like noise, but when I listen more closely I can tell there’s more going on. One whale will make a sound and another will answer with the same or almost the same call. Sometimes the calls are soft and musical, something like ow-ow-eeeee-ah-ah-ow-eeeee. If you didn’t know they were whales, you’d guess it was the call of a tiny bird—maybe a robin.
But other sounds are deep and growly, like they came from a totally different animal. Some sound like the whales are chomping or chewing, and still others—pops, clicks, and snaps—remind me of a machine or some of the electronic music Dad sometimes plays. Together, all the sounds blend, weave, and merge, creating a whole new audio world. The weirdest thing is, at times, it almost feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation.
Naomi flicks off the recorder button and exhales deeply. “They get to me every time, no matter how often I hear them. Imagine hearing those sounds while sailing in the middle of an ocean on a boat with a wooden hull. Spooky. The early seamen thought they were the ghosts of drowned sailors.” She turns the lights back up and the van floods with artificial light.
“Do different sounds mean different things?”
“Sort of, but we’re not entirely sure. There are three types: clicks, whistles, and calls. We know for certain that the clicks are used for echolocation. You know what that is, right?” she asks, and I nod. “So when the orcas are tracking prey or navigating through narrow channels, or even checking out someone in a kayak, you’ll hear the clicking sound.”
“What about the whistles and calls?”
“Those are tricky. Calls are actually a series of clicks; we call them ‘pulse trains.’ Obviously, they’re communicating something. We think there might be a difference of meaning depending on the tone, but that’s just educated guessing.”
Through the windows of the van, I can see the day lightening.
“The thing that makes this all so fascinating, of course, is that each pod, in fact sometimes, each sub-pod, has its own dialect, its own discrete set of specific clicks, whistles, and calls.”
“What do you mean?”
Naomi leans toward me, her elbows on her knees. She clicks on the recorder again, and yesterday’s recorded squawks and whistles fill the space of the van.
“L-25 sub-pod, the guys out there now, can recognize each other by their own set of shared calls that they learned as babies from their mothers. Think about that. One of the first whales captured and put on display in Seattle kept making the same calls in captivity as the rest of L Pod still swimming out in the wild. It’s like every sub-pod has their own language.”
Imagine—nobody can understand you, but you keep on talking. I think of Mom’s letter that I threw away and feel a fresh pang of guilt.
Then I remember something important.
“Naomi?”
“Hmm?”
“That day, out near the Narrows, when the speedboat cut off the pod? Two whales pointed their tails straight up out of the water, then smacked them down on the surface. What does that mean?”
“Were there young ones around?”
I nod yes, pretty certain one of the calves was Muncher.
“That’s called lobtailing,” Naomi tells me. “It’s pretty rare to see it since it’s usually to warn off predators, and our Southern Resident orcas have such a benevolent relationship with humans. But if the calves are threatened, by anything, and that day sure was a terror, the adults will lobtail.”
Lobtailing. Seems like a good word to work into a conversation with Tal.
“Okay, ready for some more?” Naomi asks, handing me the headphones again.
I put them back on and suddenly an e
ar-splitting screech tears into my eardrums. I quickly rip them off, dropping them to the floor of the van.
“Sorry,” Naomi says, looking sheepish, “I had the volume up high so you could hear details.”
“What was that?”
“That, my dear, was the sound of an outboard motor cutting close by the hydrophone.” She shakes her head and sighs. “Sound is amplified underwater. We don’t hear half of what the whales hear.”
That day at the Narrows, that motorboat cut off the whales—the memory flashes into my mind again—is that the kind of noise the pod heard underwater? No wonder they turned and fled the other way!
“So they are getting stressed.…” I say, imagining what that must be like trying to protect your calves from all the noise and chaos coming from a whole slew of obnoxious motorboats.
––––
That night in bed, I can’t relax. I pull out a book but keep having to reread the same paragraphs over and over until finally I give up. My mind is racing and I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with Naomi. It makes me so sad. L Pod came to visit and we’re behaving so badly. How can they possibly trust us not to hurt them?
And even though nobody is saying it outright, I’m convinced Kevin and Naomi are hiding the real truth—that each day the whales stay in the inlet, they’re in more danger.
I turn off the light, still wide-awake. The motorboat noise is a clue, I’m sure of it, and I make a mental note to ask Kevin about it tomorrow. There must be a way to keep the boats away from the whales, give them a better chance to escape.
One thought keeps nagging at me, keeping my mind churning. Why didn’t the pod leave back when the inlet was quiet, before all the boats came? Or at night when there’s hardly any boat traffic? Does that mean there’s another reason keeping them here, something more than chasing salmon or motorboat noise?
I’m tired of worrying over all these questions. I need to find some answers.
CHAPTER 14
Orca Day 13
On Monday when I arrive at Lions Field, the VW bus door is locked and Harris is outside waiting. He hasn’t missed one chance to help with the whales ever since the canoe incident. Ten minutes later, Kevin finally slides the van door open and waves a silent hello, a phone to his ear. We climb in.
“Um-hmm. Yes, of course.” As he talks, Kevin begins to sort photographs on a small makeshift wooden shelf rigged up against a wall of the van. “Absolutely, we’ll be monitoring it closely.” He motions for us to sit down. “Great. Okay, thanks for letting me know. Much appreciated.”
“Well, that was interesting.” He lays down the phone and turns toward us, looking like he could use a hot shower and a good night’s sleep in a real bed. “State and tribal managers just agreed to cancel commercial fishing in the inlet starting tomorrow.”
“Wow! That’s good, right?” I ask, excited.
“Well, it’s certainly unusual, but it does show some concern for the orcas,” Kevin says. “What’s not good is they’ve slashed their estimate of this year’s chum run from 380,000 to 100,000. That’s the smallest it’s been in fifteen years.” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for commercial fishing and our hungry visitors.”
“Couldn’t they close the inlet to all marine traffic?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Harris agrees. “That’s a good idea! Why not?”
But Kevin is shaking his head. “Coast Guard rules make that almost impossible. It’s considered ‘an egregious breach of navigation rights.’”
Egregious. I’ll have to look that one up to use on Tal, but I can already tell it can’t be anything good.
“And we’d still have no guarantee that the whales would leave.”
He reaches up to the top shelf and hits “Play” on the cassette tape player. More opera. This time the singer is Spanish or maybe Italian?
“We might be able to carve out a restricted area, to all but essential boat traffic, but that would be a last resort.”
“But … isn’t there a law to protect whales and other marine animals?” I ask, not ready to give up quite yet. “I remember my mom telling me about it. Wouldn’t that make sense for what’s happening here?”
“You’re absolutely correct, Marisa, there is. It’s the Marine Mammal Protection Act,” Kevin nods. “But the act protects all marine animals, including whales, from being hunted or collected without a permit. What’s happening here with boat harassment wouldn’t apply.”
Harris and I exchange a look. Every day now, we’ve signed on to help with anything Kevin and Naomi need done, but it still doesn’t feel like we’re doing enough. The rules make no sense to me, but Kevin has already moved on, so I drop it.
“Okay, I need y’all to sort these,” he says, handing us each a big stack of photos. “I’ve marked the ID number of each on the back along with the date I snapped it. If you can organize them chronologically and by family, that would be awesome.”
“What’re these for?” Harris asks as we start to sift through the photos.
Most show dorsal fins or the upper surface of a whale, their blowholes, and a bit of their heads. Kevin plucks one back and lays it down on the shelf with the others, then flips it over. “L81” is scrawled in black marker on the back.
“Remember, I’m the fin-guy,” Kevin says, crouching down and wiggling his fingers above his head again, just like the first time, and we have to laugh. “This one is Raina, male, about seven years old if memory serves me. I took this a couple of days ago. See the nick here in his dorsal fin? That tells us Raina had a run-in with a boat propeller. So all these photos are valuable, they give us clues: who the whales are, their health, all sorts of things.”
He scans the shelf cluttered with photos. Watching him searching, I realize that the photos are laid out in the same configuration as my pod genealogy chart at home.
He points to an area in the upper left-hand corner. “Ah, here we go,” he says, holding up a picture of a huge whale. “Almost all of Raina’s family is in the inlet. His grandmother Baba, L26, is one of the oldest ladies of the group. She has three offspring. Rascal, Raina’s mom who’s in her twenties and Ballena, just a baby, maybe three or four.” He taps his finger on another stack of photos. “Then there’s Hugo, Rascal’s brother, big guy, almost full-grown. He’s gonna be our next sprouter,” he tells us, sounding like a proud father. “By next season, his fin will be twice the size it is now.”
Kevin shuffles through Rascal’s pile of photos. “Now here’s another photo, taken right after the group entered the inlet. See her blowholes … here?” He holds both pictures up side by side. “Not much difference, right?” He crouches down under one of the seats of the van, pulls out a drawer, and shuffles through its contents until he finds what he wants. “But … take a look at this.” He shoves a worn looking photo into our hands.
Harris and I squint in the dim light of the van. The photo is a close-up shot, showing the upper surface of a whale, but the blowhole looks different from the others—shrunken and shriveled, not taut and smooth like Rascal’s. And the skin color—more gray than black, and mottled in places.
“Kinda creepy,” Harris says under his breath.
“A couple of years ago, in ’94, a bunch of whales got trapped in Barnes Lake up in Alaska,” Kevin tells us. “Some never made it out; we had about three fatalities. What ya’ll are looking at is a photo of one of the whales that died.”
“See the difference here, the dull gray skin and the depression around the blowhole?” Kevin leans over and traces around an area with his finger. On the cassette tape a whole chorus of voices are singing together so furiously now it feels like the space of the van is almost too small to contain the sound. “On a whale, that condition is called ‘peanut head’ and it’s the first sign of emaciation. Basically, those whales in Alaska starved to death. That’s why we’re taking all these photos of L Pod in the inlet, so we can catch the first signs of distress.”
I study the pictures of Rascal, H
ugo, and little Ballena.
“Ours are doing okay though, right?” I ask, turning to face Kevin.
“For now,” he reassures me. “But animals that size … if they start to fail, it’s hard to play catch-up. And we know the salmon won’t last forever.” He looks out the van window toward the inlet. “All the other plans we have in our back pocket to lead them out of the inlet are gonna be a whole lot more complicated … and controversial.” He sighs. “So let’s hope they take advantage of this week’s good tide coming up.”
I decide now is the time to ask Kevin the question that’s been bothering me ever since Halloween.
“Are people blaming the whales for hurting the salmon run?”
Kevin quickly shakes his head.
“Low salmon runs are a bigger problem than Dyes Inlet. Still, 80 percent of the chum on this side of the peninsula run through Chico Creek. It’s probably why the whales came in the first place. Slim pickin’s elsewhere.”
“What about seals?” I ask, remembering Grace’s father’s remark. “Would the whales eat seals instead?”
Kevin shakes his head. “Not on their menu. Transients will; those are the ones out in the open straits and the ocean … totally different animal. You wouldn’t want to get anywhere near a transient in a kayak, not like you can with our sweet guys. I’ll show y’all how to tell them apart sometime. Okay.…” he slaps his thighs. “Lesson over. Start sorting.”
––––
Now the only thing I want more than getting the whales home safely is to make sure Harris and Jesse get a chance to see them up close before they go. When I ask Harris if there’s any way he and Jesse could meet me at the marina one day this week, early, before classes, he agrees in a heartbeat. The more time I spend with Harris, the more I’ve learned he can make things happen when he wants to.
We head out later that week, at seven o’clock, just as the sky is lightening. Sightings have been scarce these last few days—the whales seem to be pretty much going where they want to go, with no pattern—but I know from talking to Naomi where the most likely spots might be. I figure we have a window of an hour and a half to find them.
Chasing at the Surface Page 9