They tumbled acrobatically in the air over the sand, one crying, the other, bait in mouth, leading. One of them today had something in its beak. Unruly black feathers spiked back from their otherwise graceful white heads. Small as they were, they were as constant a presence as the waves. They weaved among themselves ahead of him as he walked, and when they tired of that, or feared him, they took to their swallow wings and glided around behind. Their little legs scurried so fast he could hardly see them, just the round white feather balls. He watched the sanderlings skitter beside him where the waves ran into the sand. Whales weren’t exactly clockwise.Īfter scanning for whales, he took a midday walk. But that didn’t make a sighting any less likely. After a day of that, he backed off the clock and just made himself sit in a chair in the sand and scan the sea frequently. He didn’t set a timer he just wore a watch, and because there was no timer to remind him, he checked his wrist every couple of minutes and found himself obsessed by time. He disliked having a schedule, but he disliked the thought of missing whales more. Every 15 minutes for three hours in the morning, and again for an hour toward sunset. But as a way to improve his chances of seeing a whale again, the next morning he tried setting himself a schedule to scan the waves with binoculars. He was a lawyer, a shark for developers who were transforming his sleepy little mountain town into a green Mecca for moneyed pilgrims. One thing he enjoyed about vacation was not watching the clock.
Whale watcher full#
Birds swam in air, fish flew in water, and early on, until full light, he was the only one to see. Early in the morning he alone was their witness. He felt he’d discovered where east and west actually met.
The surf sounded like wind in his ears, and wind sounded like waves. It was another thing he appreciated about the view of the ocean, the way sky transitioned into sea such that sometimes, in certain weather, he could not tell exactly where one left off and the other started. It’s not that he minded them, but he liked to have the shore to himself for an hour or so as night turned to day. He rose early, wanting to see dawn and to experience the place before the beachcombers and fishermen arrived. He peeled them and fried them in butter and garlic and dusted them afterwards with sea salt and smoked paprika. The shrimp were as near to krill, the food of whales, as he could think. That evening he drove to the seafood store and bought a whole pound of shrimp as a treat for himself. Many times he thought he saw one, but it was only a rolling wave. The rest of the day he scanned the water for another. So when he saw the whale and her calf he felt he’d seen Eden itself. If his gaze was right, and the sun, the spray made a rainbow. What hadn’t changed was the play of the surface, the ripple of wind on water, the rolling waves and crests, hurling white caps over themselves like a bathing woman flipping her long wet hair over her head and showering the air. It was the water, the unending expanse of it, that drew his attention. Where else could you see that? That’s what thrilled him. But if he looked out at the sea, at the water itself, especially in the early morning, when there were no boats, or swimmers, or fisherman in the sand, he saw what the original people, the first humans, must have seen. And the shorelines, and all the beach combers. The fish were probably nothing like they’d been. There were marinas, of course, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the cottages that rimmed the shore like flotsam. There were no trails in water, no parking lots. The national parks pretended to be wild, but their trails and shelters and camping grounds turned them into suburbs. Wildness was, in fact, what he came clear across the state to see. Every year he walked the beach at dusk and dawn, but he’d never managed to see one. He knew people who had watched turtles lay their eggs. He’d have loved to see one scramble up the beach. Earlier that week he’d seen a nesting turtle’s tracks in the sand.
He thought it was a leatherback because of its extraordinary size and because it was that time of year. The turtle was swimming in dark, swampy tidal water. He once saw a turtle while kayaking in the estuary behind the island. He longed for the sight of any wild creature. He’d seen plenty of porpoises, small pods of four and five patrolling for fish or playing in the water.
But a line of pelicans had been cruising past just above the water like they do, and he was watching them with binoculars when he saw the dark curve of the whale’s back, and then, a moment later, the smaller curve of the smaller whale. Finalist : 10th Annual Contest in Fiction On the morning of the second day, Bob saw a whale and her calf about a mile off shore.
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