Tales of Whale Tails

A pair of whale tail earrings sent me on a stroll down memory lane this past week. After our nightly walk I noticed that my daughter was missing one of her earrings. They were cheap ones gotten as a souvenir from Alaska when we visited the state a few years back. Was it worth re-tracing the four miles at 9:30PM after a long and tiring day? My daughter's face told me yes. She believes that whenever she wore these plain whale-tails I tended to be (subconsciously) more expressive with my love for her and that made those earrings worth going back for. So armed with a flashlight and a phone light we retraced our steps and with pure luck and my eagle eyes we found the lost one to complete the pair! She paid me back with her joy and a fantastic poem about these whale-tails. It is true that the whale-tails are keepers of identity. Each whale-tail is unique in its marks and coloration that individuals are often identified by their tails. My daughter's earrings seem to have been imbued with these qualities - they were keepers of memories.

I am terrified of water. I believe that gravity always trumps buoyancy, but I love whales. I don't know anyone who doesn't. I am not a religious person by any means but the closest spiritual experience I have had was when I watched a mama blue whale with her calf off the coast of Los Angeles on a whale watching trip many years back. Back then I was still getting used to the concept of motherhood. Seeing the whale calf nuzzle alongside her mom while holding my daughter's hand tightly on a rocking boat I distinctly remember the feeling of kinship (however brief) that extended beyond my species. Like an iceberg, the size of the whale is beyond comprehension. What I saw on the surface did not do justice to these giants. How can anyone so huge have so much grace and gentleness? Words failed me as I struggled to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. The romantics had a word for such things - sublime. You know you are in the presence of something sublime when you are in complete awe but also can detect a tinge of fear as the scale and perspective of nature is mind boggling. Was my face covered in salty ocean spray or my own tears, I couldn't tell. But after that experience my then five year old never asked me why we did not go to Seaworld although it was practically in our backyard.

Maybe it was this experience that also made me viscerally upset when in Tokyo I realized whale meat was sold in many places both for human and pet consumption. I had a hard time reconciling the presence of so many Buddhist and Shinto shrines and the peace loving people of Japan with cruelty of whaling and eating cetaceans. But as Melville reminded me "A man's religion is one thing and this practical world quite another." Melville was trying to reconcile the peace loving Quakers who were "sworn foe to human bloodshed... (yet) spilled tuns and tuns of leviathan gore." I had avoided reading Moby Dick for the longest time because I didn't want to read about the butchery of these magnificent beings, but Philip Hoare's The Whale convinced me otherwise. Hoare's book traces his own fascination with whales and along the way he lays bare the difficult relationship our species has had with Cetaceans. 

Whaling stations and whalers fueled the world before the age of fossil fuels. Working on a whaling boat had to be one of the most dangerous professions of all time. For those who could not resist the call to adventure whaling offered a life on seas that took them to the remote corners of the world. When Shackleton was stranded in the Weddell Sea following his Endurance expedition his rescue plan was to reach the remote whaling station of South Georgia. Before there were Antarctic explorers there were whalers. However, while the owners of the whaling ships profited, the hands on the deck, as Melville found out for himself, sometimes came back owing more than they did before they left on a whaling voyage. If there was one benefit of our obsession with fossil fuels is that it saved the whales from being hunted to extinction although it has put the planet on the brink of catastrophe.

There is so much we still don't know about whales. What we know is already enough to blow our mind. Language, sisterhood, songs, teamwork - how can we not see culture in these creatures? How could we have boiled them down for oil! For a species that boasts a superior brain we don't seem to learn from our past. Although we are not hunting whales like we used to, we haven't stopped exploiting the oceans that they depend on. On the same trip that I saw my first Blue whale, a docent showed us what the whales feed on - krill. 

These minuscule organisms feed on even tinier marine algae. They remove carbon from the surface and take it with them deep into the ocean as they plunge into colder waters where they become food for whales and penguins. Climate change and human exploitation are the double whammy these creatures are facing. The Weddell Sea in the Antarctic is facing unprecedented changes and needs to be protected. One of my childhood heroes Jacques Cousteau summed it up beautifully when he said

"Man, at least so it seems, is incapable of leaving a place the way he finds it, whether it is outer space, the moon, or Antarctica. The mark of man's presence is often an absence - the disappearance of blue whales in familiar water....The hope is that man will somehow be able not only to define the problems, but also divine the solutions. Hope is an ephemeral thing. It can easily be shattered by the unscrupulous, the ignorant, the distrusting, the economically deprived. The very nations that found it profitable to exploit the polar regions are the countries that must be relied upon to protect the seas."

Will we rise up to these challenges or are we going to be Ahab on the Pequod? Melville often referred to the whale as a Leviathan, a sea-monster. That word brought to mind the other Leviathan - Hobbes' where he called for a new social contract between the ruler and the ruled. As we are slowly realizing that killing other species and contaminating the planet is just a sure-fire way of killing ourselves, perhaps it is time for a 21st century Leviathan to emerge forging a new social contract between Homo sapiens and all the other species.