I can’t hold my breath any longer. I desperately need air, but can’t move. A ringing begins, becoming louder and louder until the sound fills my ears. A low rumble adds to the noise, and as the pressure builds, the rumble seems to grow, and grow, and grow until the sound itself is pressing down on me, squeezing what little air is left out of my protected space.
I try to push myself up and out of the water to reach the fresh air. All around me the whales continue to hruump, hruump, and now they too, are desperate for air. But none of us can rise to the surface. Something huge and dark is holding us down. The ringing won’t stop. Something invisible and strong is holding us down … under the water … under the surface. I hear crying all around me. I’m crying too—if we don’t surface soon, we’ll all drown!
I bolt upright in my bed, terrified. My chest is heaving. The phone won’t stop ringing. I lie back, forcing myself to breathe in and out, trying to calm my racing heart. The hands on my bedside clock say 6:00 AM.
In a cold sweat, I stumble through the dark hallway, into the kitchen. Dad is just hanging up the phone. My dream is quickly fading, but it’s shaken me. The rumble … that wide, black shadow—I can still see it hovering over me and the pod, its shape vaguely familiar somehow.…
“That was Tal,” Dad says. “Sunday morning and there’s a line for boats already.”
I nod dully, my mind still in my dream. The whales were in trouble, deep trouble, but they weren’t alone. Whatever was above them was keeping them from rising up to breathe.…
Climbing onto the stool, I hug my knees to my chest, pulling my nightgown down over my legs.
“I sure could use your help today,” Dad sighs. He sits down next to me, and rubs at his eyes. “Honestly, I don’t know how much longer we can keep this up.”
I don’t think Dad means the whales, but he might as well.
––––
The drive to Mud Bay is painfully slow. I fidget in my seat and Dad keeps glancing my way. As we cross the Warren Avenue Bridge, I crane my neck toward the inlet. Every possible kind of craft is visible on the water—the big whale watchers, yachts, rowboats, kayaks, powerboats, Jet Skis—all of them jockeying for a good viewing spot. If the whales are out there, there’s no way to know.
Mud Bay is a madhouse. At least fifty people are lined up and waiting for Dad to open so for the next hour, I help as much as I can. Together we get people signed up and outfitted with gear, but I’m distracted and keep making mistakes.
By one o’clock, we’re done—there’s nothing left to rent.
I pace, up and down the dock. I tidy equipment and clean out the life jacket bins. But I can’t seem to shake the emotion from this morning’s dream—the scenes keep running through my head. I need to see the whales, make sure they’re okay.
“Dad?”
He’s sitting and resting outside, on one of the waiting area benches.
“Hmm?”
“There’s not a lot to do until the boats start coming back.”
He laughs, sprinkling a sugar packet into his hot tea. “Is that a problem?”
“I was just wondering … do you think maybe I could leave for a little bit?” I sit down beside him. “I won’t be long, I promise. I just want to see if everything’s okay.”
Dad is quiet a second, then suddenly he stands up. “Okay … let’s go.” He flips over the “Closed” sign hanging from a hook above the door, then pulls the door shut and locks it.
I stare at him. “What are you doing?”
“Well, like you said, everything’s all rented. No sense staying here. Let’s both check on the whales.” He turns around and smiles. “That’s what you really meant, right?”
I swallow. Do parents always know what you’re thinking?
“But what if somebody wants to tie up early?” This isn’t like Dad to do something spontaneous and against the posted rules.
“They can wait.” He sees the shock in my face and laughs. “Don’t look at me like that! No one will be back until at least four o’clock. C’mon.” He reaches out to pull me up from the dock. “This was your idea, remember?”
––––
The bridge is crowded. We’re almost halfway across when we hear it—the shrill call of a long, low siren carrying over the inlet. I quickly roll down the window.
“Is that Kevin?” Dad asks, trying to drive and look at the same time.
“I don’t know!” I shout over the noise of traffic. It’s impossible to get a clear view from the bridge deck, but the warning being broadcast across the inlet is unmistakable. I think I see a flash of a yellow flag but we’re driving east. My view of the inlet is pretty much blocked.
Dad and I exchange a worried look. Without a word, he presses down on the gas pedal and our car accelerates. Ten minutes later, I’m racing down to the SoundKeeper tables at Lions Field.
I spot Naomi and Lena near the dock launch and struggle through the crowd toward them. “What’s going on?” I mouth wordlessly to Lena but she just shakes her head. Naomi is on her radio, talking and pacing. The crowd swirls around us.
Waiting, I take my first good look out across the inlet. A gray cloud of pollution from the boats’ exhausts hangs over everything. So many vessels are packed together, I can’t even see the water in some places.
“Guys, this is a real problem,” Naomi says, turning to us. She blows her bangs out of her eyes with a puff of air. “I need your help. One of you come with me; the other stay here.” She shoves a walkie-talkie at Lena. “I’ve got Kevin on an open line. Make sure you don’t lose him. This button will connect to my pager. Call immediately if Kevin needs me.”
She shows Lena how to switch channels, grabs a granola bar from the table, and rushes toward the dock. “Marisa, follow me!” she calls back.
Lena looks terrified. She’s holding Naomi’s walkie-talkie as if she’d just been handed a baby with a poopy diaper. I offer up a smile, then hurry off after Naomi, wondering what’s in store for me.
––––
“They’re grouped up over by Chico Bay,” Naomi explains when I catch up. “From what Kevin says, it sounds like they’ve abandoned their normal feeding behavior.” She chucks her gear in the eighteen-foot inflatable, and reaches out to help me climb in.
“That’s bad, isn’t it?”
She nods. “Whales won’t cluster in a tight defensive group like that unless they’re pretty stressed. Big surprise.…” she scoffs, starting up the raft’s engine. “Look around!”
We motor out and see clearly now that the entire inlet is jammed with boats. They’re everywhere, stretching across the full width of the inlet and as far north and south as the eye can see. In some places, you could literally walk across the water by stepping from boat to boat.
“How many do you think there are?” I ask, stunned.
“We’ve counted close to five hundred.”
I think I must have heard her wrong. “Five hundred boats? Here? In the inlet?”
She nods and slows the engine to maneuver the raft around a clump of kayakers. Five hundred is such a huge number that it loses all meaning to me. I try to imagine being one of the whales now, fighting for space in a 100-foot-deep inlet, but the image it conjures up is too terrible.
“But, isn’t there some rule? Some kind of limit on how many boats can get in?”
Naomi snorts. “Right. Try restricting the right of navigation and see what happens,” she says, echoing Kevin’s answer that day when I asked about closing the inlet to boat traffic. “It’s like asking people to give up their guns.”
We continue a slow tour of the inlet, following a wide, flattened circle pattern from south to north. The air stinks with the smell of half-burned fuel. In some places, I see the rainbow shine of oil gleaming on the water. My head is spinning.
“What can we do?”
“We need to get them to back off, scatter them as much as we can.…” To our left a speeding motorboat cuts us off, “and get ’em to SLOW DOWN!” Naomi shou
ts as their passing wake rocks us. She picks up the bullhorn lying on the bottom of the raft.
“WATCH YOUR WAKE!” she calls out.
The offending boaters turn at the sound of the warning. One waves sheepishly but the boat doesn’t slow down.
Naomi sighs. “We have no legal authority. There’s no state or federal law controlling the speed of boats in the Narrows or Dyes Inlet. Nobody’s even been given one ticket.” She reaches into her bag for a clipboard and tosses it across to me. “From now on, keep track.”
Her pager beeps. She checks it, then punches some buttons on her walkie-talkie. Kevin’s voice comes over the line, scratchy but urgent.
“Where?” Naomi shouts. “Okay, got it.” She clicks off the radio. Her face has lost all color. “Hang on,” she says, pushing the raft’s measly engine as hard as it will go. We speed off toward the western shore, near Chico Bay, moving through relatively open water now. I don’t understand where everyone went, until up ahead I see a huge cluster of boats jammed together, with more speeding toward them from all directions. Naomi slows the engine.
“Marisa, can you drive this?”
Our raft? I hesitate a second, then nod. “I think so.”
“Forward to speed up, straight up for neutral, backward for reverse. Got it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. We change positions and I take hold of the controls. Naomi moves to the edge of the raft and switches on the megaphone.
“BOATERS, TURN OFF YOUR ENGINES. ALLOW THE WHALES ROOM TO MOVE. REPEAT, PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR ENGINES.”
With all the motors running, you can hardly hear her even with the megaphone. She repeats the message. Once. Twice. A third time. I try my best to keep the raft moving steadily forward. Easy enough. Hands on the throttle and shifter. No problem. I’ve done this before.
Still, I’m sweating in the cold inlet. The current feels more muscular than I thought it would. I concentrate so hard my head starts to hurt.
The tangle of boats seems to grow with every 100 yards I navigate. As we reach the crush of boats, I have to jockey for space with whizzing racers and 2,000 horsepower yachts. We’re almost near the center of the vortex now. Sometimes, a space will open up and I see the flash of black and white or a plume of mist rising up from the water’s surface.
There are way too many vessels for us to corral them. Whenever we manage to scatter a few, others come up and take their place. The whales are close by but this is all wrong—terribly wrong. The boats have the pod encircled with nowhere for them to go.
It’s last night’s dream. Come alive, right in front of my eyes.
“Turn off your engine and back off!” Naomi screams at two guys in a racer no more than six feet away.
“Will you just shut up and let us experience this?” one of them yells back, making a rude gesture. Unfazed, Naomi repeats the warning. They ignore her and make a sharp about-face in their boat, sending a plume of exhaust fumes directly in our faces.
“NEVER, in two years with SoundKeeper, have I had to bullhorn boats to back off and have NOBODY pay any attention. Damn it!” she explodes. “They’re pushing the whales up against the shore!”
She’s furious and I have no clue how to help. Frightened, I grip the controls even tighter. I can clearly see the backs of the whales humped and clustered at the surface—there’s no way they would dive under, not with all those hulls underneath the water. My mind is racing, imagining various outcomes to this mess—all of them bad. Then, off in the distance, two spots of yellow catch my eye. SoundKeeper vessels! Like beacons of hope, they flicker in the murky smog-filled air over the tops of the boat hulls.
“Naomi, look!” I point awkwardly with my chin in their direction, reluctant to release my death grip on the raft’s controls. Naomi grabs for her radio. When I hear the familiar crackle of Kevin’s voice, I allow myself a tiny glimmer of relief, listening to them coordinate a plan.
“Marisa, drive us forward,” Naomi instructs, clicking off the radio. “We’re going to give this one last shot.” She gives me a weak grin. “Let’s hope they don’t know we’re bluffing.”
I drive our inflatable directly at the wall of boats, half a dozen times. Naomi orders all engines off, and threatens citations for noncompliance. Kevin’s raft, approaching from the north, does the same, even though we have no authority to follow through. Tal handles the southeast edge, and in the SoundKeeper vessel beside him—video camera running—is Harris.
After fifteen wild minutes of maneuvering, we’ve managed to punch out a good-sized opening. Once some of the engine noise is cut, I hear the whales again.
Hruump. Hruump. Hruuuuuump.
In a rush of water and fins, they regroup, diving to escape north toward Silverdale, one or two boats still racing after them. As they swim off, I count ten animals. A couple yards out, they start up their rhythmic breathing: twenty seconds down, blow; twenty seconds down, another blow. After three or four cycles, they hump their backs together and dive deep.
Pfoosh—Pfoosh
“They’ll stay down now for about seven minutes, then probably surface again farther away,” Naomi says, as we stare at the empty surface of the water. She gives a short laugh. “Amazing they don’t just cut and run as fast as they can.”
But they’re not all gone. A small whale breaks the pattern, surfacing nearby.
“That’s gotta be a kid,” Naomi says. “You gotta love the little ones who can’t hold their breath too long.”
The little orca pops up once, twice, enjoying his private little water spot to frolic and play. When he arches his back and dives, I spot his saddle patch. It is Muncher. Now I’m positive.
I shiver, wishing I’d had time to bring along some gloves. Muncher spyhops again. This time he stares straight at me with his perfect round eye and a chill runs down my spine. He holds my gaze for a long minute, does one last dive, and is gone.
“Be careful,” I whisper. “Just hang on a little longer. We’re going to help you get home. I promise.”
As the water settles, Grace’s dad’s words come back to me about the times he would pitch rocks at the whales when he was a kid. Nothing’s changed, really. The whales are still at risk, except now we’re shooting them with cameras instead of guns.
CHAPTER 17
Orca Day 19
After the chaos of yesterday’s herding, everyone’s mood darkens. The Suquamish Tribe moves up the day for their blessing ceremony, and everyone is grateful. Right now, the whales can use all the help they can get.
A light rain is falling as Lena and I row north from Mud Bay toward Rocky Point. Everything is silvery gray, one of those Northwest days when it seems as if the whole world has no color. The ceremony is set for noon but things are still quiet. We secure our rowboat, an old aluminum one that Dad let me borrow, and wander the dock, waiting for Harris and Jesse to show up.
Pretty soon folks start arriving. Some paddlers tie up at the dock in canoes, rowboats, or kayaks. Others who’d been gathering up on the grass, near the picnic shelters, start moving nearer to the dock. All the jostling for a good viewing space reminds me of that day on the bridge deck when the boaters turned back the whales. Kevin said when people think they only have one chance to see a whale, they’ll act irrational—do anything to make sure they don’t miss out—even if it could mean hurting the very creature they’ve come to see.
“That’s missing the bigger picture,” he told us, frustrated. “People need to look at the consequences of their actions. Everything is connected.”
One chance. Mom and Bette both talked about getting a second chance. But a second chance to do what? It’s been so crazy I haven’t had time to check for any letters at the post office, but I resolve to ride by again first thing tomorrow.
“How are the new digs?” I hear Lena ask.
“Jesse loves it,” Harris says, ruffling Jesse’s hair. He’s wearing a new hooded sweatshirt and squeaky clean sneakers. “I’m not as used to … you know, always having people around.” He shrugs. “But it
’s not forever.”
“They officially counted 550 boats on the inlet yesterday,” Lena reports, reading from the newspaper she’s spread out on the grass. “Not including people watching from shore—”
“I overheard one lady say she came all the way from Florida!” Harris interrupts. He sits fiddling with his video camera, rewinding and viewing the footage he shot yesterday on the inlet.
“They’re calling an emergency meeting at the Sons of Norway Community Lodge,” Lena reads, “to see if they can bring charges against any of the boaters. Apparently, it’s a federal crime to harass marine mammals. Who knew that?” She looks up, and I wave my hand, smiling. “Oh, right, of course,” she says and we laugh.
“Well, I got it all here if they wanna see it,” Harris says, patting the camera. “It’s not pretty.”
“C’noos!” Jesse yells, jumping up and down. He pulls on Harris’s shirt, pointing toward the open inlet. “Harris, lots of c’noos!”
In the colorless light, I can just see a thin line of dugout canoes approaching the marina, their hulls each carved from a single cedar log. Some are painted black, others white, each with graceful curved half-spiral tops, and prows carved and painted with Coast Salish designs.
“There’s so many,” Lena says, climbing up onto one of the dock railings, trying to get a better view with her binoculars. “Looks like fifty or sixty canoes.”
“They can’t all be Suquamish,” I say. “They must be from other tribes.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Lena confirms. “The carvings are all different.” She lowers the binoculars. “Wow,” she says softly.
The line of canoes slowly emerges from the gray landscape, the paddlers pulling together. As more and more canoes become visible, they seem to fill the entire inlet spread out before us.
Then we hear it—drums and chanting voices. It begins softly at first, but rises in intensity. The sound wafts toward us in the thin air. I close my eyes, wishing I knew what the words mean, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Just like Kevin’s opera music, just like the whales’ songs, I feel the way I did when Naomi clicked on the recorded tapes. The voices of the paddlers are all moving together, breathing together, singing together, as if they’re one being.
Chasing at the Surface Page 12
