LITMIR.BIZ

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She could hear-see in the depths, heat-seeking sand eels and surfing with humpbacks; she could bond with her pod, using her signature whistle and those of her friends to call them. She could echo-locate her peers, sensing their emotional states, knowing how they felt, almost telepathically. She had a culture and expressed her self in a state of collective individualism and, as we now know, exhibited an emotional maturity possibly in excess of our own. But her life of apparent ease has been brought to an end on this urban shore. Passersby ask, ‘What kind of fish is that?’ Waiters sit on restaurant steps smoking cigarettes before the start of their next shift. In another age, their counterparts might have served it to their customers. In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s Sea View diner had humpback on the menu.

      Dennis saws at the jaw, hacking out the four teeth required for analysis by the organisation for whom he is acting. The serrated blade grates against bone, the worst hour in the dentist’s chair you could imagine. The gums part and, two by two, the teeth are extracted. Blood trickles into the sand. The outrage is complete. Our samples bagged and the animal’s flanks duly marked with the organisation’s acronym, we drive off, leaving her alone on the beach, ready to roll in the next tide, as though its comforting waves might wash her back to life.

      Dead or alive, we all strike the same pose; the same way my mother sat in a sepia photograph of her as a young woman in the garden of her suburban family home, resting her weight on one hand on the chair as she half turns to the camera like the movie stars she’d seen; the same way she’d sit in the last photograph I took sixty years later of her in our garden barely a mile away, adopting the same position; the same pose that, I realise, I too take up as I sit and turn to a camera which is not there.

      Out in the bay, the moored boats act as weather vanes, swivelling and turning with the direction of the wind. I look out from my deck to the horizon. It’s my barometer. If it’s straight, there’ll be whalewatching today; if it’s wavy and irregular, perhaps not. Today it is level. So we go to sea.

      There’s nothing so exciting as that rising feeling as the boat readies to leave the harbour, potent with the prospect of the day ahead. Even as it stands tethered to the wharf, Dolphin VIII is a vessel invested with its own momentum, as though it would leave whether or not anybody was on board; a great grinding mass of steel plates and engines whirring deep down below, a powerful industrial connection with the resisting churning water. As I board with its crew – the fisherman turned captain, the taciturn first mate, the poet naturalist, the East European galley staff with professional futures back home – I feel a perennial outsider, for all that I’ve been sailing on these same boats, watching the same whales, for fifteen years. No one is ever sure of their place here, no one quite secure: the crew only work if the weather is good and the punters are paying their wages. Weather, work, people, whales: it is all an uneasy alliance, a nervous contract drawn up on an inconstant sea, agreed by a common pursuit. At least, for those few hours.

      After a long bitter winter, the Cape has come to life. As I peer down into the green water, the reason is clear: fields of silvery sand eels, roused in their millions from the sea floor by the sun and now pooling in wriggling tangles, turning this way and that as one mass, just below the surface. These slender fish supply an entire food chain; their arrival could equally herald the crowds that will soon teem through the town’s streets.

      Only half an hour out from the land, a frenzy is in progress. Northern gannets are plunging into the bait like white-and-yellow torpedoes. A raft of loons, with stiletto-sharp bills and freckled oil-green wings, are working the same source. Harbour porpoises roll through the waves; grey seals bob like bottles.

      Suddenly, something much larger appears in the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-deep water that runs right up to Race Point: the falcate dorsal of a fin whale. For all its size, its black back too big to belong to a mere animal, it too is feeding on fish barely bigger than my finger. A pair of minkes, more modest rorquals, bearing the same strangely pleated bellies, join in. Then, as the boat pushes out over Stellwagen Bank’s great drowned plateau under the wide Atlantic sky, the ocean begins to erupt anew with the blows of dozens of humpbacks, back from their winter stay in the Caribbean.

      Then we are upon them, along with a thousand white-sided dolphin, weaving in and out as the great whales trap the sand eels in their bubble nets, rising through the corralled fish with mouths open wide, throats like rubbery concertinas, pleats clattering with barnacles like castanets. Gulls perch on the whales’ snouts to pick out titbits. And just when it seems the scene can sustain no more predators, a dozen more fin whales arrive, lunging on their sides, displaying the bristly baleen in their jaws.

      In this moment of witness, nothing else matters. Passengers delete images to make room for new ones on their cameras. My friend Jessica sees a couple frantically pressing the trash button as one says, ‘Dump the wedding ones.’

      Up on the bright white fly bridge, we watch the performance. A pair of adult fin whales aim straight for us. Each of them sixty feet long, at least.

      Hands tight to the wheel, our captain, Todd Motta, shouts, ‘Whoa!’ as the nearest whale sheers off our bow, surfing on its side to display its great white belly like some enormous salmon.

      ‘I thought it was going to hit us,’ says Todd.

      As experienced as he is, he’s momentarily shaken. The second largest animal on earth, normally betraying barely a tenth of its mass as it moves through the sea, has flashed its entire physical self at us, using our boat as a fish stop. We are an instrument as much as an engine of observation.

      All around us, the humpbacks continue to feed. One of the whales called Springboard rolls over to swim for a while on her back, displaying her genital mound, a region so gathered about with barnacles that it must make life uncomfortable for her suitors.

      ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ says Dennis.

      Or maybe he has; it’s so difficult to tell. Are these the same whales we just saw? The boat rocks and I stagger as I hold on to the clipboard and the rubber-encased GPS, regaining my footing to read off the coordinates for the pink photocopied sheets.

       70 degrees north 18 degrees west. Mn: 1/2.

      A calf holds its tail out of the waves, its body perpendicular in the water column. It trembles with its own life, the way a young boy’s body trembles in adolescence, quivering with hormones. Then it starts to smash up and down on the water.

      ‘Are these new animals?’ Dennis asks.

      I’ve no idea. The boat has turned round on itself, leaving a green swirling trail in its wake. The animals rise again, mouths as open as birds’ beaks. The passengers look over the railings, ecstatically, loudly excited or overcome with lassitude and boredom, in the way of all ordinary miracles. None of this is of any consequence, because it happens day after day. Only in the actual moment am I transported. Only then does it leave me, this sense that I am not really here at all. We shiver with life, and its alternative. Waiting to come out the other side.

      A few days later, we sail out of the harbour on another sunny morning. In the wheelhouse, I lean over the broad counter covered in what looks like wood-effect Formica from a seventies kitchen, peering at the chrome-ringed dials, updated with computer displays of the underwater terrain and a green radar screen silently scanning a black sea. We have left the land and its safety. An adhesive label announces the instructions for Marine Distress Communications to be relayed on the Submersible Plus VHF radio. Stuffed behind the sticky cup-holders is the Weekly Payroll Sheet.

      Everyone on the bridge is in a good mood, looking forward to the day. But as the depth gauge draws 206 feet, the outlook changes as abruptly as the ocean floor falls away beneath us. The land to our starboard – such as it is – has been submerged under a sea fret. It’s as if the view had reached the edge of an old projected film, fading into fuzzy nothingness.

      The boat sails straight into the mist and everything around us disappears. The land and sky vanish into one vast cloud; all we are left with are the few yards of water immediately around the boat. We’re entirely isolated, wrapped up in damp cotton wool. One minute, holiday sun; the next, murky obscurity.

      ‘How do you look for whales

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