Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  After a while I became cold and returned to the boat. Most of the other passengers were already on deck, eating pineapple slices and comparing dolphin stories. “I feel like they raised my frequency, you know?” a red-haired woman with ambitious tattoos told an older woman wearing a sunhat tied under her chin. Next to them, a boy who looked to be about ten years old sat sullenly, ripping into a jumbo bag of chips. He wore cubic zirconia studs in both ears and a bracelet that said I LOVE BOOTY.

  Ocean climbed back on board, and peeled off her fins. “Did you see those two spotted dolphins?” she asked. Even when she was excited, Ocean’s voice was soft and low-pitched, just slightly raspy. When she said the word “dolphin,” she drew the syllables out for an extra beat—“dahhhlllfin”—as though she especially loved the sound of them in her mouth. I told her I had definitely seen the bigger dolphins, and that they had given me the once-over at close range. The effect, I added, was somewhat unnerving. “Oh, yeah,” Ocean agreed. “The spotteds are cheekier. They’ll even treat people in the water as a challenge. They’ll swim right up to you and clap their jaws. And the spinners would never do that. They’re always kind. We call the spotteds ‘the Bikers.’ ” Dusty, standing beside us, nodded. “The spinners are like, ‘Heyyyy, what’s going on?’ ” he said, “and the spotteds are like, ‘HEY WHAT’S GOING ON!!!’ ”

  Suddenly, off the bow, a spinner shot out of the water, torpedoing into the air and whirling at least 900 degrees. Another dolphin followed seconds later, executing a full aerial somersault. Everyone cheered and clapped. “That right there was a blessing!” the woman from Texas yelled. Ocean smiled, towel-drying her hair. “Why do they spin?” I asked. “Is it about dominance or mating or—”

  “Fun,” Ocean said. “It’s more like fun. They seem to do a lot of things for fun.” But it also had to do with signaling to one another and removing remoras, she added, the suckerfish that attach themselves to dolphins’ skin and then hitchhike along feeding on castoff bits of fish or plankton or anything else that came their way. “I had a remora on my leg once,” she told me. “It was the cutest little thing. But it hurt!” I wondered how long you had to swim around before remoras showed up and attempted to paste themselves to your body; the short answer was a very long time. “Do you ever feel as though you could just stay down there?” I asked. “Find a pod and just keep going?”

  Ocean laughed, and nodded: “All the time.”

  The road to Ocean’s home, Sky Island Ranch, starts out as a busy coastline highway then narrows to a local thoroughfare before it veers up a hillside, dwindling to a single lane cut through jungly cloud forest until it widens to reveal a gray wooden house with a grooved red-metal roof. It’s a place built to endure rain, sheets and torrents and lashings of rain, surrounded by a riot of vegetation. Everywhere you look there are flowers and ferns and trees and vines and bushes bursting out of the ground, as though intent on seizing control the moment anyone steps away. “We never expected to buy property,” Ocean said, as she drove past the gate and up the driveway. “We wanted to live like dolphins and not own anything. But then a friend who was a real estate agent said, ‘You’ve got to see this house. I think it’s perfect for you.’ And—boom!”

  Ocean lives here with three miniature horses, two donkeys, a trio of cats, and her longtime friend and collaborator, Jean-Luc Bozzoli. Bozzoli is an artist who paints intricate, ethereal dreamscapes, hallucinogenic scenes from far-off planets and other dimensions, many of which feature dolphins. He and Ocean met in the seventies and bonded over their shared New Age convictions, beliefs that ranged from the reasonably mainstream (dolphins are highly evolved, intelligent creatures) to the far fringes (dolphins’ sonar vibrations activate dormant human DNA so we can receive encoded messages from other planets).

  On this spectrum I fell somewhere in the middle, filled with questions about the nature of reality and inner space, intrigued by the likelihood that human existence was more expansive than our minds typically grasped, curious enough to have flown down to Brazil once to visit a spiritual healer. But if you asked me what I really believed, which convictions I held firmest and strongest and would stand behind no matter what, I could only offer something terrifically vague: that I believed life was more magical than we usually allowed for. That I believed there was a God, though I had no idea what that God looked like, other than he or she or it must exist in the grand architecture of the universe down to the finest details of nature, a nature that humans are not separate from but beautifully and inexorably part of. That miraculous, spellbinding, challenging things happen continually, beyond what our minds and senses can process, governed by an intelligence that we can’t see and don’t understand, and that somehow all of this is just fine. Quantum physics, of course, has unveiled the extreme weirdness of absolutely everything, but the scope of the theory’s implications—parallel universes and subjective realities and the ability of a particle to exist everywhere at once—are a lot for us to grok. Even the great religions, with their millennia of wisdom, are more like gateways to unknown journeys than roadmaps of the entire terrain.

  Were dolphins, as Ocean claimed, “multidimensional beings”? Were they communicating to us using “holographic images”? Did they “possess consciousness on an entirely different level than humans”? Who knew? A large part of me wanted scientific proof before accepting any such claims. I realized this was a limited way of measuring truth, but it was still the only one that we had. Ocean herself was aware that some of her ideas sounded outlandish; she had a wry sense of humor about this and never imposed her beliefs, or judged anyone else for theirs. Even her son and two daughters (in their forties and fifties now) hadn’t entirely signed on, Ocean said: “There’s a bit of ‘Oh, Mom. Mom does far out things. I wish she’d just be a normal mom.’ ”

  Ocean and I had picked up lunch at a health food store, and I followed her into her kitchen, a homey room lined with knotty pine that opened onto an outdoor deck. The house smelled of woodstove and saltwater, with a dash of cat. It was ideal for Ocean’s purposes—she hosts half a dozen workshops each year, and many of the participants stay on the premises. Upstairs there is space for dozens of people to lounge in the living room; downstairs is given over to a spacious meditation room along with multiple bedrooms and communal bathrooms. Two weeks from now, forty-four people were scheduled to arrive for a seminar titled “From Here to Infinity.”

  As we sat down to eat, Bozzoli walked in. He was a smallish man with a gentle presence. His hair was either brownish gray or grayish brown and it flopped over his face slightly, giving him a rumpled, professorial look. Like Ocean, he had pushed the odometer a bit, but also like her, he could easily be taken for someone much younger. Bozzoli is French, and his accent welled up like music when he spoke. These days, he spent much of his time finishing up a lushly animated 3-D film about the mystical properties of water. “Water has a deep meaning,” he said, pulling back a chair and joining us at the table. “And the whales and the dolphins have a lot to teach us about that. Water is like the biggest computer of the universe. It holds the memory of everything, of all that is and that ever was.” He fixed me with an intense look. “Water is everywhere. It’s in our bodies. You drink it, you pee it—”

  “It never goes away,” Ocean added. “It’s just recycled.”

  I nodded, eating my soup, unable to add substantively to the conversation. I’d gotten a bit of a sun overdose that morning, and my snorkeling mask had been sucked onto my face so tight that it had given me a whomping headache. I was still processing four hours of swimming with the spinners, and wasn’t ready quite yet to discuss the mechanics of the universe. Still, I was interested in what Bozzoli was talking about. Water has secrets. It is the element we fathom the least, and we love it and fear it and take it for granted all in equal measure. “It will take you into altered states, to understand water,” Bozzoli said, nodding for emphasis.

  These Star Trekian views about dolphins acting as teachers and visionarie
s and envoys from other dimensions—these were the convictions that had brought Ocean and Bozzoli to Hawaii, and that drew other seekers here too. Just down the hill from Ocean’s property, in homes clustered near the water, the residents of Dolphinville were exchanging cell phone calls about their morning swims and reporting on the whereabouts of the dolphins, just as they did on every other day. Earlier, Ocean had told me that she received letters addressed simply to “Dolphinville,” the way kids send mail to “Santa Claus, North Pole.” She’d also marveled at how, even over the decades, no one who belonged to Dolphinville had died: “Not one person. And anyone who had been sick has gotten well.” The implication was that the dolphins had healed them.

  “I would rather have truth than mysticism,” Ken Norris wrote in a letter dated November 30, 1977, lamenting the emotional ways his study animals affected people. Even back then, it seems, no one wanted dolphins to be ordinary. It was more fun to think of them as extraterrestrials than as the playful fish-hogs of the sea. Ironically, the person Norris was writing to, a neuroscientist named John Cunningham Lilly—who also happened to be Ocean’s mentor—was the man most responsible for the trippy, groovy image of dolphins. Lilly was inventive, he was enthusiastic, he had been rocked back on his heels by his studies of the dolphin brain, and he was very insistent about wanting to know: What if truth and mysticism overlapped?

  One morning in 1949, a very desirable brain became available in the coastal town of Biddeford, Maine. The brain belonged to a twenty-eight-foot pilot whale that had stranded on the beach during a ferocious Atlantic storm; the animal, which had just expired, lay on its right side half buried in sand, left eye gazing skyward, black body big as a boxcar. Reading news of the whale’s demise, Dr. John Lilly, thirty-four, who happened to be in nearby Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at the time, called two of his neuroscience colleagues. “We discussed the possibilities of obtaining the brain of this particular whale, because we wanted to find out whether these animals had very large brains—much larger than ours,” Lilly wrote later. Giving the idea a unanimous thumbs-up, the trio gathered hacksaws, axes, and thirty gallons of formaldehyde, and quickly set out on the five-hour drive to southern Maine.

  For brain aficionados, this was a bonanza. To date, no one had managed to examine a whale brain in good condition—all of the studies had been done on animals that had been dead too long, their bodies wrecked by decay. Now, suddenly, here was the rare chance to obtain a relatively fresh specimen of what was rumored to be the most compelling brain around.

  Upon arrival the scientists scrambled across the beach, and they saw the whale immediately. Actually, the smell preceded the view: “There was a powerful clinging odor,” Lilly recalled, “a sort of cross between rotten beef and extremely rancid butter.” Soldiering on—“We held our noses frequently”—the three men sawed through blubber and muscle and bone, eventually revealing the huge brain. “We noted that it was very much larger than a human’s, more spherical in shape than ours, and looked like two huge boxing gloves,” Lilly said. He was struck, too, by the architecture of the brain, its labyrinthine folds and crenellations. By comparison, the cat and monkey brains he’d been studying in his lab seemed puny and dull.

  In the end, the brain more or less disintegrated on the beach, having moldered in the hot sun, and Lilly did not get the specimen he’d hoped for. But he left with something more valuable: a lifelong obsession. “I felt awed and diminished,” he wrote. “I wondered how such a small hill of flesh lived, what it thought, if it talked to its companions. We were all silenced by the awesome mystery of the whale.”

  At the time, Lilly’s scientific career was under way, filled with promise and breadth. He was a trim man with a hawkish face who had earned a physics degree from Caltech and a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania; he had researched high altitude aviation for the military, using himself as a crash-test dummy to test the effects of explosive decompression. He was versed in biophysics, chemistry, psychoanalysis, computer science, and neuroanatomy, a commissioned surgeon about to take a prestigious position at the National Institute of Mental Health. It was the brain that fascinated him most, the numinous computer of the mind. To Lilly, the brain was the ultimate black box, an inner space as unknown as the cosmos. It was the doorway to wonder—if we could just get past the threshold. The only way to parse its secrets was to probe the most sophisticated gray matter available, but tinkering with humans was out of the question. The appearance of the pilot whale, with its behemoth brain, raised new possibilities.

  A marine biologist friend suggested that Lilly consider bottlenose dolphins—they had similarly high-powered brains, but dolphins were a much handier size to work with. Also, they were available: In 1955, Forrest J. Wood, the director of Marine Studios, a marine park and research lab in Florida, agreed to let Lilly and seven other scientists visit the premises to conduct brain experiments on five bottlenoses.

  Every so often, life serves up a fateful cocktail of right person, right time, on the rocks, shaken—with history changed as a result. Dr. John Lilly, with dolphins, in the Cold War fifties and psychedelic sixties, is one such potent recipe. But first—on Lilly’s steep, bumpy learning curve—a dozen or so bottlenoses had to die.

  To put it mildly, 1955 was a rude time for brain research. Lilly’s work included vivisection—surgical experimentation on live cats, dogs, monkeys, pigs, sheep, and rats—and invasive doings with electrical wires. Part of his process involved hammering steel sleeves into the creatures’ skulls and then jabbing the exposed viscera to see which areas lit up with pain when stimulated, and which provoked pleasure or seizures or other reactions. Lilly’s notes from these experiments contained many sentences like “The animal jumped at every prick of the needle as I injected the fluid, under pressure, into the upper cranium,” and “Dr. Mountcastle thrust his arm all the way down through the mouth into the throat. He pulled the larynx out with one finger and inserted a small tube.” Using these and other techniques, Lilly and his fellow scientists allotted themselves two weeks at Marine Studios to map the dolphins’ cerebral cortex.

  In Florida, things did not go well. With dispatch the team killed all five bottlenoses. The first dolphin, injected with Nembutal, quickly lapsed into convulsions and heart failure. The second one did the same, though he was revived temporarily. “We put him back in the tank to see if he could swim or whether his brain had been damaged by a period of anoxemia,” Lilly wrote. When Dolphin #2 was placed in the water he listed heavily to starboard and made repetitive, piercing cries. As the scientists watched, the two other dolphins in the tank responded. They swam over and, working together, tilted the injured animal upright and pushed him to the surface. “Immediately a twittering, whistling exchange took place among the three animals,” Lilly observed. He was struck by the care the dolphins gave to their tankmate, and he had the impression that they understood the situation and were communicating about it. But Dolphin #2’s brain was too ruined to survive, and he was euthanized. The third, fourth, and fifth dolphins followed.

  “We were all shocked and saddened at the rate of death under anesthesia,” Lilly wrote. “Each death was a new experience to us all.” They lacked basic information, the scientists realized, like the fact that dolphins are voluntary breathers: when they lose consciousness, they die; that when they are taken out of the water and subjected to gravity their organs can be crushed under their own weight; that their skin is more sensitive than a human’s, abrading painfully or even sloughing off if not treated extra-gently. So the experiment’s conclusion was effectively this: not one of the eight celebrated scientists knew a damn thing about dolphins.

  It seems unthinkable now, but as recently as the sixties most people had never seen a dolphin. All of the ocean was a tabula rasa, in fact. Jacques Cousteau had just appeared on the scene with his book and documentary The Silent World, capturing everyone’s attention, but real knowledge was scarce. Dolphins were fish-shaped riddles, roaming the seas largely out of sight and
mind and imagination, chasing squid and playing games with jellyfish and strands of kelp, chattering and buzzing and clicking to one another, surfing waves and rubbing pectoral fins in aquatic obscurity.

  Lilly was about to change all that.

  The Stanford campus was lit up with autumn when I arrived on a crisp October morning, driving down from San Francisco among the Silicon Valley commuters. The leaves blazed russet and crimson and a zingy, extroverted ochre. Everything smelled like eucalyptus. Students whizzed by on beach cruiser bikes with an intensity more suited to sudden death playoffs than anything resembling cruising, and they sped among the tall shadows of the trees on their way to classes and pitch meetings. The place was stately, but it was hard not to notice that even the air seemed frazzled. I tossed back a double espresso in front of the Green Library and headed into the building.

  Inside, across the marble floor and through the Corinthian colonnade, beneath the cool, vaulted ceilings and tucked into the hushed Special Collections reading room, five file boxes awaited me. I had ordered them from an erratic catalog of file boxes that spanned 240 linear feet in total, all the existing “manuscripts, proposals, reports, notes, diagrams, photographs, charts, data, reprints, and extensive audio tape, video tape, and DVD/CD-R material relating to John Lilly’s research into dolphin intelligence.” Stanford had acquired the archive after Lilly’s death in 2001, and it remained mostly uninspected and un-indexed despite widespread curiosity about its contents. Lilly’s life was a large one, and he seemed to have hung on to every scrap of paper, every letter and conference brochure and scientific report, every memo and operating manual and flotsam and jetsam receipt, every bit of kaleidoscopic ephemera from his eighty-six years.