Grayson

by Lynne Cox

  Carl tipped his white sailor’s cap and turned his boat toward me. His face was red and deeply etched from years of being on the water. He wore dark sunglasses to protect his light blue eyes.

  Carl loved to stop and talk. His wife had passed away long ago and he still missed her company. But while he liked people, he enjoyed fishing alone; that way he didn’t have to wait for anyone or be on anyone else’s schedule. Sometimes he brought an older friend—he was kind of a grouch—but Carl did it because he said his friend’s wife had passed away too and he was lonely. I thought it was nice of Carl to do that, since I’d much rather be alone than be with someone cranky. Carl and I didn’t see each other very often. It usually took him some time to get himself going in the morning; he was usually starting to fish when I was finishing up my workout.

  But I loved to see him. He always had some news or information that I could think about when I swam. Just as good, Carl usually caught an extra halibut or two, and he always gave me some to bring home for dinner. It was always a little strange kicking ashore while holding a five-to ten-pound dead halibut above my head with fish juices sliding down my arms.

  No fish ever tasted as fresh or as sweet as the ones Carl gave me. I liked the fish even more because they were from Carl and I could tell he was as excited about giving me the fish as I was receiving them from him.

  Carl was perplexed. He saw me floating on my back: He had never seen me do that; usually I was swimming on pace. He thought something was wrong, and when I told him about the lost baby whale, he smiled as if he had just been given an answer to another of life’s mysteries. He hadn’t had a nibble on his line all morning and it hadn’t made sense. The fishing conditions seemed perfect, and usually he caught at least two or three fish.

  The baby whale must have scared the fish away. Carl thought the baby was still somewhere nearby. He told me he would cruise the shore and radio Steve if he saw anything at all. Sometimes, he said, the important things take time, sometimes they don’t happen all at once, sometimes answers come out of time and struggle, and learning. Sometimes you just have to try again in a different way.

  He knew so much more than I did, and I always liked talking with him. He turned his boat, glanced back over his shoulder, tipped his hat, and motored along the shore.

  Try again one more time. Try diving into deeper water. If you can’t find the baby whale this time, then it’s time to try something else.

  Diving below the water, I pulled as fast and as hard as I could to get down as deep as I could go. From moment to moment the world changed. I swam through a brilliant melting kaleidoscope of green, yellow, indigo, violet, and soft blue. As I pulled deeper, the pressure tightened around my head and body like an invisible shrinking knot.

  My ears popped, and I pulled deeper. The increased arm movement was using oxygen more quickly, so I had to keep enough air in my lungs so I could make it to the surface without passing out. I was grateful for those training sessions my coach had given me where I had swum one lap of the pool breathing every five, then seven, nine, and eleven strokes. Still, I wasn’t used to swimming with the weight of the water on me and I knew I couldn’t stay down too long.

  There he was floating right below me, inches above the soft light brown silt-covered bottom. He looked right at me with his large brown eyes. He was so peaceful. I laughed and I wanted to swim over and hug him. He had been there all along, just watching me.

  He lifted his fluke, did a little nod downward with his head, and glided toward me underwater through beams of white and green sunlight. The liquid light dappled and waved along his skin.

  He swam in a small circle and I laughed out of relief and delight. And tried not to get a noseful of water. He wanted to play with me, but I was out of air.

  Following my bubble stream, I raced to the surface. My lungs were down to zero.

  Floating on my back, I gasped for air, caught my breath, and then dove again.

  He had the most incredible set of lungs. He was able, it seemed, to stay down forever. He did one giant dolphin kick and slipped through honey-colored sunbeams, and they changed with his movement through the water, becoming squiggles of lime green light.

  He grunted softly, squeaked, paused, then grunted softly again. He paused longer this time, as if he was waiting for me to respond. Then he clicked and chirped. He made a small symphony of underwater sounds: high and low tones, soft and loud; all were new and different.

  For the first time in my life, I heard a baby whale speak. I heard the voice of the whale. I was thrilled. The baby whale had spoken to me.

  More than anything, I wanted to talk to him and I wished I could understand what he was saying. It was like going to a foreign country and not being able to speak the language. It was frustrating, wanting to somehow make a connection but not being able to understand anything.

  He looked at me with his big chestnut brown eyes and I wanted to reach out and touch him. I wanted to be able to do something that he would understand.

  Instead, I just watched him, trying to think of a way I could help. Watching for any gesture he might make, anything I could comprehend.

  He tried a few more sounds, louder in volume, higher in tone. And he waited as if he was expecting me to say something.

  When I didn’t say anything, he turned on his side and looked at me. He opened his mouth. He had a large pink tongue. I think he was clicking it against the roof and base of his mouth, like a human child. He continued talking or vocalizing.

  And I listened to the sounds with real awe. Years later, I realized that if I had found the baby whale on my first dive, I might never have heard him speak underwater, I might never have seen the graceful bat rays or the swimming sea turtles, and I never would have known how far I could go down into the ocean depths on a single breath.

  six

  There was no sign of the whale’s mother by the jetty, underwater, or anywhere else so I started swimming back toward the pier, hoping the baby whale would follow. He didn’t.

  I thought that if I could communicate with him he would come with me, like a dog responding to a familiar whistle. I thought that maybe if I could try to speak in his language he would understand. I tried to repeat his chirp. It was pathetic. It didn’t sound anything like him. I tried to grunt, a really big grunt, but all I got was a noseful of saltwater and tears in my goggles from the salty sting. I returned to the surface to clear the water out of my nose.

  And it finally occurred to me: No matter what I sounded like, I didn’t know what his sounds meant, and even if I could imitate them, I wasn’t going to be anything more to him than his echo.

  Unable to figure out a different approach, I resumed my swim back to the pier.

  Sometimes it makes sense to try something again and keep it simple. A moment later, the baby whale took the lead.

  When we reached the pier, Steve was waiting there along with a group of fishermen and a handful of locals and tourists. Steve said that one of the fishermen on an offshore boat thought he had sighted the mother whale near one of the oil rigs.

  The oil rig was about a mile and a half offshore and it was almost in a direct line with the pier. I had swum out there only once before, during an open-water race, but at that time, I had had a paddler with me on a long paddleboard. He had helped me stay on course, and he had watched for danger.

  But the baby whale had already turned and started to head offshore. He looked over at me as if to say, Please come swim with me.

  I knew it made no sense to follow him. I could think of many reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t, but I didn’t want him to go off alone.

  Sometimes things just don’t make sense, sometimes there’s no reason to explain how or why I wanted to do them; I only knew that I had to, I had to try. Without trying I would never know what could happen. It was like reading a great mystery and never knowing how it finished, always wondering who did it. Sometimes the things that make the least sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense
to me.

  Maybe I knew this, too, because I didn’t always fit in. I was shy and large, and I believed that I had to work hard and study hard to do well. I had different friends—from computer wizards to the guys on the water polo team and the girls on the swim team to friends in drama and music—but I didn’t fit into any one group. I had things I knew I wanted to do and didn’t play the teenage boy and girl games. I was more interested in studying people who had been leaders, made discoveries, or explored, men and women who were always going against established thought. It was always difficult to swim against the tide, doing something new or different, because the ideas that could result might cause something to change. Many people are happy with things as they are. They are comfortable with what they already know. But if I didn’t move outside my comfort level, how would I ever experience anything new, how would I ever learn, or see or explore? I believe that each of us has a purpose for being here, that we have certain gifts and certain challenges we need to learn from and fulfill for our lives to have meaning and richness.

  “I’m going to swim with him,” I shouted to Steve.

  “I don’t like the idea of you being out there alone,” he said.

  I was afraid. But I knew I had to. Sometimes I just did things because I thought I could and because if I didn’t an opportunity to learn something, grow, and reach farther would be lost. There wasn’t time for a long discussion. The baby whale was turning out toward the open sea, and I was afraid that if he left now without me, we would never know if he found his mother or what happened to him. Maybe my presence could even make a difference.

  So I quickly told Steve I’d be fine and asked him to let his friends on the fishing boats know that we were out there. They’d let other boaters in the area know. He still didn’t entirely like the idea. He was an adult and pretty conservative, and he warned me that the closest fishing boats would be a quarter mile away.

  “I’ll be careful. Besides, I’ll be swimming with the gray’s son. I’ll be swimming with Grayson,” I said, and smiled with more confidence than I really felt.

  Steve smiled. “Grayson, that fits. He’s grace in the water and he’s the gray’s son.”

  But then Steve’s tone grew suddenly serious, and he advised me: “Lift your head up often and look all the way around you. If a boat approaches, you move out of the way. Don’t count on them seeing you.”

  I swam with Grayson one hundred yards off the pier, two hundred yards, three hundred, four hundred, and on a breath, I looked back over my right shoulder. The pier and the people on it were becoming smaller and smaller. We continued swimming near each other. Grayson led the way. He swam directly toward the oil rig and I followed in his wake. A couple of times he slowed down and stopped dead in the water. He seemed restless and sort of agitated. He probably hadn’t eaten for at least a few hours. His energy level had to be dropping.

  “Come on, Grayson. Let’s swim out there and see if we can find your mother,” I said, encouraging him, knowing he couldn’t understand a single word, but hoping he would somehow understand the thought.

  Words are sometimes too small, too confining, to convey the depth of thought and strength of emotions. How does a whale communicate love, hope, fear, or joy?

  He looked so small in the enormous sea and I wanted to protect him somehow.

  Maybe you communicate with your heart. That is what connects you to every living thing on earth. Use your heart. It is love that surpasses all borders and barriers. It is as constant and endless as the sea. Speak to him with your heart and he will hear you. No matter how close or far away she is, she loves him. And from that he will have strength. He will.

  Let him know that he is also in your heart.

  The sky was changing: Thin clouds were masking the sun and the water was becoming a dull opaque blue. The water temperature was dropping too. It must have been about fifty-three degrees.

  There were a few fishing boats on the horizon. But as I followed Grayson’s “footprints” in the water—the indentations he made with his fluke in the ocean’s surface as he swam—I grew increasingly uncomfortable.

  Unconsciously, I turned and looked at my feet. The tiny footprints they made when I kicked dissolved instantly. I shuddered.

  There weren’t any breakwaters or jetties to buffer the strength of the current. Using the oil rig as a reference point, I could tell that we were drifting to the north at about a knot, a little faster than one mile, per hour. The oil rig that had been directly in front of us was sliding to our left. And the ocean’s surface was cracking with a northwest breeze. The sea was rising into waves a foot high.

  Grayson was swimming hard against the resistance of the waves. He was breathing more rapidly, his poofing sounds were more frequent. He seemed to be very stressed.

  And he was changing course abruptly. He was swimming north toward the oil islands off Long Beach, and then he turned in a half circle, and swam south toward Surfside Beach. It seemed as if he couldn’t decide what to do. Then he came to a complete halt.

  He hung on the water’s surface. His eyes opened wider than before.

  “What is it, Grayson?”

  He turned toward me, and he tilted his head and looked at me with one eye.

  He seemed to be waiting for me to follow him.

  I really didn’t like being so far from shore. But I swam toward Grayson anyway, with my head up.

  There was something in the distance, floating on the water’s surface.

  We moved closer. It looked like white lily pads were floating on the water.

  We swam nearer and the lily pads grew larger. They were ovals three to four feet in diameter with scallop-shaped tails. The ovals were different colors—gray, olive, black—and they fluttered.

  They were giant fish, giant ocean sunfish called Mola mola, basking on the ocean’s surface, absorbing the sun’s warmth through their skin. They shimmered silver, and as the light shifted they became luminous and ivory like the moon on a clear black night. They had small dark eyes and light pink oval mouths attached to a snout. They were the heaviest bony fish in the world, weighing up to five thousand pounds.

  One sunfish was swimming. He was waving his top fin and bottom fin, using his pectoral fins as stabilizers and his tail fin as a rudder. And he was spitting water out of his mouth to help steer.

  He dove deeper and deeper and deeper into a cold current to cool off, and when he resurfaced, he rolled over to let the sun warm the other side of his body.

  Grayson maneuvered between the shimmering sunfish; they seemed oblivious to our intrusion. And we continued heading toward the oil rig. I felt very exposed; my legs were dangling like worms in the water.

  Four hundred yards from the oil rig’s base, we entered a sea garden. It was filled with long ribbons of golden brown kelp, which had short ruffles and a mermaid’s necklace of pearl-shaped air bladders attached to the main stem that enabled the kelp to float and dance on the water, signaling the speed and direction of the water currents.

  On the seaward side of the oil rig, a large cluster of kelp smoothed the waves and we were able to swim to within two hundred yards of the rig.

  The oil rig rose above our heads like a mini–Eiffel Tower with metal cranes and drilling equipment that towered twenty feet or more above our heads. These were connected to a large metal platform and the platform was attached to multiple metal stilts that had been drilled deep into the ocean floor.

  The oil rig was an amazing and yet ominous structure. As the rig pumped oil out of the ocean floor, I could feel its energy emanating through the water. It felt very different from the natural energy of radiant sunshine or the quiet energy of the earth.

  It felt like being in New York City. Being among the city’s skyscrapers was like standing between power transformers with the energy flowing all around all at once. All of this energy bounced off the surfaces of the buildings and was amplified by the wind blowing through the open spaces. The energy from the oil rig was like that, but it was more
diffuse, a softer force that was transmitted in waves through the water.

  The energy from the oil rig was a constant hum—a sort of ooommm. And there were loud metallic noises, creaking, groaning, clanging, and hammering.

  Men who worked on the oil rigs had told me that they noticed the energy attracted fish into the area and lulled them to a state of inactivity. There was a deep-water-fish metropolis around the oil island.

  As I breaststroked closer to it, I noticed schools of sunfish clustered together near the base of the rig, floating peacefully on the water’s surface, their bodies conforming to the shape of the waves rolling under them.

  Grayson swam past the sunfish, and he didn’t even notice the green sea turtles paddling by, like a green turtle swim team. They all pushed off near the oil rig and swam together as if they were setting off on a series of sprints.

  Slowly, a school of sea bass swam past, moving like a shimmering curtain of silver blue.

  Grayson took a big breath and dove five feet down, past a cluster of clear moon jellies. They were beautifully transparent except for white circles on top of their domes. Grayson swam by purple jellyfish that were larger, like large Jell-O salad molds, and they were beautiful, graceful swimmers. They moved by contracting and expanding their domes, like opening and closing umbrellas.

  Their long, flowing tentacles stretched up to six feet beneath them. I hoped they would stay below me. The moon jellyfish didn’t sting, but the purple ones did. The purple ones had tentacles that had tiny little barbs attached to them. The barbs were trigger-loaded with stinging cells called nematocysts. When a swimmer brushed up against a tentacle, the barbs snapped off or stuck to the swimmer and that movement fired the stinging cells. I had been stung before and it hurt. The intensity of the sting depended on the type of jellyfish. The sting of the Pacific jellyfish wasn’t as bad as a bee sting, but a swimmer could be stung multiple times at the same time. It felt like running through a field of nettles naked.