Killing Keiko

by Mark A. Simmons

  “No, but I’m pretty sure they want us onboard. The issue is going to be how they hire us. From my conversations with Charles on the phone, they don’t want our company; they want us to work for Ocean Futures directly.”

  “Does anyone on-site know that we’re here representing our company?”

  “I think Jeff does and Peter might, but only because I know Jeff received the proposal. I don’t know if Peter or anyone else knows. In fact, I don’t think the rest of the staff has any idea why we’re here.”

  After Dr. Cornell had specifically contacted Robin about the project and following his first tour and evaluation, we had sent a formal proposal on our company letterhead. The proposal created an awkward conundrum between us and OFS leads. Lanny had intended to hire a person, not a company. To them, it must have seemed we were trying to take over the project and their jobs.

  I was wearing a denim long-sleeve shirt with our company logo over the left breast pocket. “What about this?” indicating my shirt, “should I cover it up? You think it’ll confuse matters?”

  “No, it’s fine. Jeff knows why we’re here, and I haven’t tried to hide it with any of the staff.”

  We had noticed the ferry heading into the channel as we talked. It was now passing right between us and our line of sight to the bay pen. This was no small ferry; it seemed more of a full-on ship to me. Again I wondered about the noise. Not wanting to get off track, I checked the thought, convinced that I’d remember to ask about it later.

  “I haven’t really worked Keiko, just observed, and that’s all I’ve really told the staff … that I’m here to observe the operation and help where I can,” Robin said.

  “So in the time you’ve been here and working Keiko, they haven’t asked who you are or what you’re doing here?” I pressed, completely dumbfounded.

  As Robin explained, I learned that no one in upper management had communicated to those in Heimaey who we were or why we were brought to Iceland. For weeks we had been toiling with the makeup of our proposal, Dave and I in Florida, and Robin dissecting operations in Iceland. As a result, here I was now in Iceland and expecting my arrival and purpose were common knowledge. I didn’t understand why the whole of it seemed so secretive. To me, it was simple. As the wave of realization came over me, I felt suddenly awkward. At best, I was an unknown and unwelcome visitor nosing in on their territory, and they had no idea why.

  “So what do you want me to do until Tuesday?”

  “You need to focus on Keiko. I want you to get a good read on him before we meet Charles. We’ll go out to the bay pen with the opening crew tomorrow. We’ll both spend the day on the pen and watch sessions. I’ve got some additional ideas to add to the proposal before Charles gets here. You’re not going to believe it, it’s pretty amazing, but the way they treat Keiko … it’s like he’s a big pet.” The analogy was not the first of its kind I had heard, but used in this context to describe the release of a long-term captive whale, it was as chilling as the cutting wind.

  So as not to be gone too long, Robin wanted to get back to the hostel, the living quarters for the frontline staff. Besides, we were both starting to force our words through clenched and chattering teeth. “Let’s head back and put your stuff in the hostel, then I’ll introduce you to Jeff and Jen.”

  The Hostel

  The hostel was far from the bare-bones travel stops I had heard existed throughout Europe. This hostel was amazing. They had somehow leased a dormitory-like building from the local fire department. It had an entry foyer with a couch and a couple well-worn but welcoming chairs, a full kitchen, men’s and women’s bathrooms with multiple showers in each, several dorm-style bedrooms, and an enormous common area reminiscent of a small gymnasium with a pool table in the center. Near the far end and close to the kitchen was a dinner table fit for twelve with a white dry-erase board mounted on the wall right behind it.

  There was a Partridge Family-meets-NASA feel about the place, warm in some ways, technical and clinical in others. Camera and recording equipment dominated another large table, and the entire front wall of the common area was covered by winter gear from parkas to fleece undergarments and even the occasional dry suit for diving in frigid waters. Most of the space against the wall was packed with Mustang survival suits—bright orange full-body survival suits that made the inhabitant look like the Pillsbury Doughboy no matter how thin the person wearing it. The suits were not much smaller hanging on the rack.

  I don’t know what I expected, but this was not it. In the small world of fieldwork, one does not naturally assume that a project is well funded or that everything needed to do the job is actually provided. On the contrary, minimum creature comforts, the sharing of gear and a constancy of fighting for equipment and funding are the norm. Here, this was not the case. I had never been involved in animal-related fieldwork as well-equipped as the Keiko Release Project.

  Congregating in the front foyer, Robin introduced me to the first handful of rotational staff at the time. Jeff, in his mid-forties, was laid-back and right away disarming. In fact, he was similar to Robin in that capacity. Hair boyishly long enough to cover his ears, Jeff had a ruddy face that spent most of its time smiling, a smile that could easily turn into a shit-eating grin. He reminded me of that kid on the block that always finds trouble, the same one I couldn’t resist hanging out with.

  After getting to know Jeff over the course of the project, I would refer to him as a “whaleboy,” the marine version of a Wild West cowboy. While effective in a multitude of ways, Jeff was a wrangler, the kind of person that shoots from the hip, nontechnical and nonanalytical but extremely competent just the same. He was gifted with an uncommon sense that allowed him to advance in his profession; yet, if asked to explain how he accomplished things he was often at a loss to adequately describe his actions or teach his skill to an heir apparent. In my experience, this was a common trait among those that do versus those that talk. Yep, “whaleboy” fit Jeff nicely.

  Jen and her younger brother Greg were equally as disarming. Greg, the outdoor type, seemed adequately competent. His posture and enthusiasm revealed an eager-to-please youthfulness. He was young enough (early twenties) to be taken at face value with no ulterior motives or hidden agendas. A good-looking sort, Greg seemed to model the same boyish style as Jeff, sandy-brown hair over the ears but not quite below the neck. Greg’s role in the project focused primarily on marine operations, making sure the bay pen was stable, piloting various watercraft and maintaining support equipment. I liked him right away. Jen and Greg were so well established in working together, it was almost impossible to tell they were brother and sister had it not been for the nights of heavier wine drinking when the childhood name-calling came out along with other gregarious banter.

  Jen and I would eventually, simultaneously, become both adversaries and advocates. In as much as she was Jeff’s right hand, I was Robin’s, and we would soon be conspiring to keep operations between the two smooth. Jen looked to be about late twenties or thirty-two at most. Attractive and with shoulder-length light hair, she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve turtleneck that complimented her figure. Suitably thin, it always surprised me that Jen was not “granola” and did not allocate any of her time to working out. She was naturally fit, while her overall studious demeanor was juxtaposed by the occasional cigarette she would partake of while sipping coffee or wine, but never in front of Greg. Throughout my experience working with Jen, she was singularly focused on promoting and protecting the collection of data for any and all types of research that could be extracted from the project. I also found Jen to be genuinely concerned for Keiko’s well-being.

  There were others, but they had not yet returned from their duties on the bay pen. To my surprise and with no effort, I immediately felt comfortable with everyone I had met thus far. In retrospect, I suppose my expectation was to find something akin to the Berkeley radicals of the era. I had no reason to think this way; I had not heard anything negative about the staff on-site. I
n fact, I really hadn’t heard much at all about them (certainly not from Robin, who didn’t invest much time in character descriptions). My perception of the organizations leading the project had colored my expectations of those in the field. Once realizing that the people actually tending to Keiko were “animal-oriented people” I was able to let my guard down and felt more at home among professional peers.

  The first night in the hostel, we all exchanged the usual small-talk introductions, drank red wine (a nightly practice on the project) and finally, turned in for the evening. The majority of our exchange had been fueled by my curiosity about the project and the people. For that night and many weeks yet to come I was in information gathering mode. But after a full day of travel and stimulation overload, sleep was a welcome reprieve. I had been on my feet for more than nineteen hours.

  Keiko’s Bay Pen

  By five a.m. we were ready to go, clad in long johns, fleece outerwear and bright orange Mustang survival suits. The first stop after leaving the hostel would be the fish house, located in an old warehouse adjacent to the harbor. This is where Keiko’s food was stored and prepared each day. In contrast to the enormous freezer warehouse in which it was located, the actual fish preparation room was not much larger than a walk-in closet. Every morning, the opening crew (typically two people) would bucket the fish that had been put in cool water the night before to thaw, weigh out Keiko’s base (his total food allotment for the day), place it in steel buckets and cover it in ice for the trip out to the bay pen.

  I was no stranger to “food prep” and immediately pitched in helping to scrub down the fish room and carry the four approximately thirty-five-pound fish buckets out to the truck. The two-story warehouse was a catacomb of freezers and was almost always deserted with little indication of human activity from one week to the next, although there was ample evidence of seemingly ghostly activity nonetheless. During daily ventures into the freezer building, we were often welcomed by creepy sheep heads, the decapitated remains of a healthy appetite for lamb in Iceland. Not far behind in ranking was puffin meat. Mounds of frozen and yet to be processed puffins would often greet us within the subzero structure. At night, when we would reverse the process of breaking out Keiko’s food to thaw, the darkened warehouse full with carcasses proved to be the ideal setting for pranks.

  Keiko’s diet was identical to the whales’ diet at SeaWorld. He was provided high-quality herring and capelin: 30 percent of the former and 70 percent of the latter, totaling approximately 120 pounds of fish per day. The only contrasting difference being that male killer whales I knew would typically eat between 200 and 280 pounds of fish per day. Killer whales require fewer calories in colder waters. Klettsvik Bay temperatures hovered around thirty-six degree Fahrenheit during winter months. Frigid water and Keiko’s reduced activity level meant he didn’t require near the bulk of food I was accustomed to feeding a whale of his size. Even so, we always took a little more than Keiko’s set base amount out to the bay pen, in the event some of the food was dropped or lost in the wind, or if Keiko showed an unusually strong hunger drive.

  With our survival suits pulled down to our waists and the arms tied-off behind our backs, we crammed into the back of the truck along with the fish buckets and a random collection of greasy marine gear and engine parts. Our next stop: the staff transport boat, Sili (sea-lee). It was a two-minute ride from the fish house, literally just a few hundred feet around the other side of the workingman’s harbor.

  The Sili was small, something you would expect to see on a calm lake in Florida, not the vessel of choice in transporting equipment and crew in the North Atlantic. She had an aluminum hull, about twelve to fourteen feet in length with a single outboard motor. Not much to write home about and overly crowded with even three occupants, but the Sili got the job done. On harsh weather days, the Heppin would take its place, a much stouter all-weather rescue boat designed expressly to thrive in Icelandic waters. On this particular morning, my first, all was calm and welcoming, and the Sili fulfilled her role without incident.

  Rounding out of the harbor and into the channel, we were greeted by an ever-changing and inspiring scene. Jagged rock islands, just outside the mouth of the harbor, frame a distant glacier on the mainland. Defiantly emerging from the ocean’s surface, the islands look tough, as if they are the last soldiers standing after a centuries-old battle with the elements. Like the bay, their walls are straight sheer cliffs that rise up well over 200 feet on all sides, making the island appear as an impenetrable fortress. Each one is topped with the characteristic Icelandic grass, tall enough to fall over in mounds, which from the distance appear more like an irregularly shaped surface covered in a thickening wet moss.

  On the milder days, birds dominate the sky above Klettsvik and speckle the mossy grass, like salt sprinkled on green parchment. The sky was filled with birds of all types, sizes and shapes, and thousands of them, from the largest gulls I’d ever seen to the distinctive puffin and impressively large (albeit dull-looking) skua, a predatory seabird that commands its own air space wherever it patrols. All of this airborne activity gives Klettsvik Bay its own distinctive sound that, often paired with milder weather, quickly became a welcoming background ensemble.

  The glacier, Eyjafjallajökull (don’t even try to pronounce, unless able to vocalize on an inhale, this name like so many others in the Icelandic language is not within English vocal means), perched on the mainland over thirty miles in the distance, provided the backdrop and completed the most amazing commute to work I would ever enjoy. Every day the same islands framed the glacier, but somehow in the various lighting schemes experienced that far north, it always looked different. We never failed to be in awe of the glacier’s beauty.

  On my inaugural trip out to the bay pen, we approached the facility from the east. The norm was to approach from the west. In either case, it depended entirely on the wind. We always approached the leeward side of the pen whether that was east, west or north.

  The wind owned Klettsvik Bay. Framed by sheer cliffs on three sides and so near the mouth of the channel, the bay acted as if a giant turbo scoop on the hood of a late model muscle car. If it was blowing at eighty knots offshore, Klettsvik Bay funneled the wind and amped that up to 120 knots sustained with gusts even higher. Not this day though. This day, my introduction to Klettsvik, it was deceivingly calm.

  As we tied off to the bay pen, I could tell it was roughly the size of Shamu Stadium’s main pool (a pool at SeaWorld Orlando of which I was vastly familiar, nearly 200 feet long and well over 100 feet wide), different shape, but about the same surface area for Keiko. My interest in the pen was short-lived. I would get plenty of time to analyze the structure later. Right then I was singularly focused on seeing Keiko. On the entire approach to the pen I had been scanning the surface for the familiar round black melon (or forehead) of a killer whale. The way the bay pen was constructed, much of the work area was two or more feet above the surface of the water and blocked the view. We reached the pen, tied up the boat and disembarked. At once I began walking across the middle bridge when finally I saw him.

  The last two years of my life had been school and work. Purposefully intertwined, the two undertakings had parlayed into the start of a new business. Of great purpose and without pause, I had buried myself in the pursuit of altruistic possibility, tempered by equal amounts uncertainty. In this no-man’s land, a by-product of the entrepreneurial endeavor, I had long felt a certain lack of security, as if my feet were not fully touching the ground. It was as if at times I couldn’t get the right balance or traction. Amidst this feeling, enter Iceland and the Keiko Release Project: yet more uncertainty and now the supplement of vastly foreign surroundings. In the earliest hours of the morning the feeling is altogether reminiscent of childhood, when perhaps one stays too long following a sleepover at a friend’s house. All is well, but in idle moments there is a longing for the security of familiar things.

  This is where I was when I first met him. This was the feeling
and state of my being that was so thoroughly vanquished at my first sight of Keiko. The all familiar black sheen; his movement so efficient and so smooth that barely a ripple escaped on the surface as he ascended; a recognizable breath that played like music to my ears; and then his gradual descent again leaving only the serpentine flow of his muscled back to follow. All this I knew. This I knew well. I immediately felt at home again.

  Lesser Things

  I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to get my hands on him, see what he was made of … get a feel for his particular brand of bull killer whale character … look at his eyes. What did we have to work with here? I considered the variety of killer whales in my recent past. Was he most like Kanduke, Kotar or Tilikum? Maybe Taku? Was he mischievous like Taima or a scary-smart Gudrun? Hopefully he wasn’t a Winnie—that would never fly for a release.

  I had heard so much about Keiko’s history, and studied every available morsel of information. But what cannot be read in a profile, history book or scientific paper is the kind of drive an animal has … whether or not the “lights are on.” To be overly anthropomorphic, was he an extrovert or introvert? Outgoing or antisocial? Inquisitive or indifferent? All of this and so much more had a critical influence on a project of this nature, and I wanted to know all of it in one divine moment of enlightenment. Of course this wasn’t possible, and my impatience would just have to be suffered. It would take time. Robin and the staff started me off with a tour of the bay pen. Damn, can’t you just leave me alone? I’m on the brink of a human to whale mind meld here!

  The pen was literally two donuts joined in the middle by a square rig that completed the necessary deck space for the research shack on one side and the dive equipment locker on the opposite. The “bones” of the bay pen and the outer rings were made of large, high density, foam-filled plastic tubes called HDPE, thirty inches in diameter. The black tubes were straight sections of various lengths and bolted together via enormous flanges on each end. These tubes provided the buoyancy and the structural integrity that kept the bay pen in one piece. However, flexible to a point, they also allowed movement. The bay pen would literally undulate and swell with each passing wake like a crowd at a football game doing the “wave,” a contorting ripple that warped the pen from end to end and side to side. This happened in weather, of course, but also in calmer waters with the passing of shipping traffic in or out of the channel, often a dozen or more times per day.