What was it Kevin said? People miss the big picture. Everything is connected.
“Maybe they’re out there, waiting to answer,” Harris whispers. “Maybe they’ll really come.”
I catch his eye and we both smile. Listening, I can almost convince myself that the whales really do understand the song. It is meant for them after all, isn’t it? Maybe they feel the connections, too.
Yes, please come and let us bless you. Come and let us help you find your way home, even if we can’t get rid of all the speedboats, and cars, and people—
“Look, they’re circling!” Lena announces.
As the first canoes approach the marina they peel off, the paddlers circling one to the left, the next to the right, until they form two semicircles, opening up a direct line for half a dozen of the larger canoes to dock. It looks so cooperative, just like the synchronized swimming of the whales.
Some paddlers are wearing the traditional conical cedar bark woven hat of the Coast Salish. Some have woolen blankets, pitch-black with swirling red spiral and oval shapes, covering their shoulders. A handful wear their own versions of ceremonial clothing, some making due with just a red shirt and a headband of woven rattan. One woman’s hair is decorated with white yarn braided with red beads. One paddler simply covered his ears with a woolen headband—the kind you’d wear when you’re skiing.
The smaller canoes rest in a holding pattern now, facing the dock. We watch as paddlers from many of the Coast Salish tribes—Suquamish, Swinomish, Samish and Lummi, S’Kallam, Tsartlip, Chehalis, Quinault, and Puyallup—pull their canoes side by side, traveling together for the blessing ceremony.
The drumming stops and words in Lushootseed, the language of the Southern Salish, echo over the water. I think about what they must mean. I know a few words in Lushootseed—Sáq’ad is “Dyes Inlet” and qál‘qaləx̌ič means “killer whale.” I think I’m hearing both of those words repeated now, but I can’t be sure.
I’ve gone to a few programs that the Suquamish Tribe offered. One year I even pulled in a canoe on a special paddle journey up near Lummi Island. I know how important traditions and values are to their culture. Some Coast Salish tribes even consider the orcas to be their ancestors. They see a connection, too, between all living things on the planet. I’m not sure I really understood what that all meant until right now.
As their words wash over me, suddenly everything becomes crystal clear.
The Suquamish are right. Kevin is right. Everything is connected, from the fish to the forests to the oceans. From Harris and Jesse and their dad, to me and Mom and Muncher and all the visiting orcas. I keep trying to make sense of everything that’s been happening, but I’ve been going about it the wrong way—looking at all the pieces of the puzzle separately. The clues are here, but I’ve been chasing them at the surface, like the orcas do sometimes when they fish. Instead, I should be following the whales’ example when they dive deep. I need to look closer, look deeper, below what I see on the surface.
We watch quietly for close to an hour, until the ceremony ends. As the tribal canoes start to separate, I take our rowboat out past the dock, adding my own prayer for the whales, sending them the wisdom and strength to find their way home. Mom always says there are no coincidences. I know the Suquamish Nation held their blessing ceremony to help the orcas find their way home, but maybe being here has helped me find my way, too.
I pull hard against the water, moving us forward against the incoming tide, repeating my prayer for the whales and hoping it’s powerful enough to bring Mom home, too.
CHAPTER 18
Orca Day 20
On Monday morning, I bike over to the post office so early I have to wait for Charlie to arrive and open up. It seems to take forever by the time he unlocks all the doors, turns on the lights, and checks whatever else needs checking. Finally, he gives me a little nod and I scoot in.
It’s been over a week since I’ve stopped by and there’s a lot to sort through. Quickly, I spread everything out on the counter, separating the junk mail from the bills and magazines, looking for a simple white envelope with blue handwriting.
Nothing. How can that be? She said she’d write, even when we talked on the phone that day, but nothing has come since that one letter that I stupidly tossed weeks ago.
I start over, going through every piece in all the piles again, and by the time I’m done a sick, sinking feeling has worked its way up through my body. Mom knew I wasn’t reading her letters. What if she decided to give up? There’d be only one person to blame. Me.
“Oh, and there’s this too,” Charlie says. “Probably missed the forwarding period.”
He hands me a blue greeting card envelope, hand addressed to “Abigail Gage” at our old East Sixteenth Street address. Stamped across the front in black ink are the words “Undeliverable.” There’s no return address, but the original postmark reads REDLANDS, CA.
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All day, the letter to Mom rests in my backpack. I should just give it to Dad, but what I really want to do is open it. That would be wrong, I know. It’s Mom’s letter, not mine, but the idea keeps tick-tocking back and forth inside my head. I can’t stop thinking about it and I sit, restless, through my classes. Whoever sent Mom this letter is with her now, somewhere in California, I’m sure of it. It’s the “important person” she needed to meet.
And inside is the reason why she left.
By the end of the day, I’ve convinced myself that opening and reading the letter is okay. It’s been in the post office so long already, whatever it says inside is probably old by now, not important, but … maybe I should just check to be sure … right?
Right.
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Tonight, before the emergency meeting at the Sons of Norway, while Dad’s getting ready, I quietly close the door to my room and sit cross-legged on my bed, holding the little envelope. I turn it over in my hands, squeeze it, hold it up to the light.
Finally, I shut my eyes and rip it open quick, like pulling a Band-Aid off a nasty cut. From inside, I extract what feels like one thin sheet of paper.
Slowly, I unfold it, lift it to my face, and open my eyes.
Dear Mrs. Gage,
After mailing you my first letter, I panicked. I’m guessing you’ve received it by now and are probably still in shock that the son you gave up for adoption years ago has contacted you. With all my heart, I hope that you decide to contact me at the phone number I provided. But if you cannot or do not want to ever meet me in person, there are a few things I don’t want to leave unsaid.
Because telling you my name and phone number isn’t the same as sharing with you a little of what my life has been like.
So here goes …
The words get blurry because my eyes are filled with tears. There’s more, a lot more, but I stop reading and fold the letter up clumsily, shoving it back into the envelope. I don’t even bother to look at the bottom to see the name of the writer. It doesn’t matter. What flashes through my mind are Mom’s words to Harris about taking care of Jesse. Don’t give him up or you’ll always regret it.
I lean back on my bed and stay that way for a long time, as the room darkens and night comes to the inlet, until finally Dad calls my name and it’s time to go.
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The Sons of Norway Lodge is packed. Just about anybody who has some kind of business on the water is here. Dad and I slip into two of the last open chairs in the back, just as the meeting is getting under way. There are familiar faces everywhere. I spot Kevin and Naomi up at the front, talking to a man wearing an official-looking uniform.
Dad notices me looking. “He’s with the Coast Guard,” he whispers, leaning over.
The lights in the room dim. The projector clicks through image after image showing Saturday’s herding. The pictures are grainy and blurred but what they show is unmistakable. Two rows ahead, Harris turns and points to the flashing pictures. I shake my head, not understanding. When he grins and taps his
chest, I realize he’s telling me those are his pictures.
Kevin steps up to the microphone and the room quiets.
“Folks,” he addresses the crowd, unsmiling, “what we witnessed this weekend was Penn Cove without the net.”
Chairs scrape and people cough nervously. I scan the room to see if I’m the only one who doesn’t understand. “Whatever strategy y’all had completely fell apart,” Kevin says, turning to the officials from the National Marine Fisheries Service. “You allowed the whales to be harassed, corralled, and captured with 500 vessels. SoundKeeper will not allow this to continue.”
He talks for twenty minutes, challenging the different agencies to come up with a plan to manage the number of boats in Dyes Inlet. When he’s finished, he asks if anyone has questions or comments, and dozens of hands shoot into the air.
Everyone wants to have their say. Some get so agitated they just shout out without waiting to be recognized.
“Just ticket ’em!” one man yells. “What kind of enforcement have you got if you ain’t gonna ticket?”
When I turn to look, I’m shocked to see that the speaker is Grace’s father.
“Close the inlet!” others call. Harris turns to me, grinning.
Listening, I lose track of what everyone wants and why they think they should get it. Finally, a Port Washington official takes the microphone and tries to settle everyone down. There’s a final call for questions and Dad surprises me by raising his hand.
“Not a question,” he says, standing up, “an announcement. Mud Bay Kayak is cancelling all commercial kayak outings on weekends and holidays, starting tomorrow—” a few people clap encouragement, “as long as the whales remain in the inlet.”
A reporter from the Inlet News is busy scribbling in his notepad. This is huge.
“And what’s more,” Dad raises his voice, “I challenge all commercial whale watching operators to do the same.” He sits down to a loud round of applause.
“Can you do that?” I lean over and whisper, scared but excited and proud at the same time.
“I just did,” he whispers back, “and with Tal’s blessing, too.”
He reaches over and squeezes my hand and I squeeze back.
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After the meeting, we regroup for pizza at Garlic Jim’s, and the first thing I ask Kevin is what he meant by “Penn Cove without the net.” But Bette answers instead.
“It was terrible, just terrible,” she says, shutting her eyes against the memory. “Anyone who was there and witnessed it will tell you that.”
“It was in 1970. August, I believe,” Tal says. “Not too far from here, up at Penn Cove on Whidbey Island.” He glances at Bette. “We spent summers there at the time, so we were around a lot, exploring.”
I shake my head, still not understanding.
“The whales make a long trek at the end of summer,” Kevin explains. “They meet up with other communities north of here at Possession Sound. We know now that they do this annually, but years ago there wasn’t a whole lot of understanding of how whale societies were structured.” He slides three pizza slices onto his plate. “All folks knew was that sometime in late summer, there was a good chance of finding large groups of traveling whales, sometimes numbering over a hundred.”
“That’s all they needed to know,” Tal says.
“How’s the pizza?” Lena asks, arriving with Grace. No one answers.
“They sent out speedboats to set off small explosives,” Tal continues. “It disoriented the whole pod pretty quickly. Then they used backup boats and small aircraft to herd them into Penn Cove. It’s a small inlet, easy enough to section off a corral with nets going down on all four sides.”
“Those whales move fast!” Harris exclaims. “How’d they manage it?”
“Oh, the orcas led them on a pretty wild chase, you can be sure of that,” Tal says. “The adults split up, trying to lure the hunters away from the calves. But the boats were relentless.”
“Who were these people?” Lena asks. She’s still standing, holding her plate of pizza.
“If you’re asking about the people who did the actual work,” Tal tells Lena, “I think they hired from the local community.”
“You see, back then, you could get a permit to capture whales,” Kevin explains. “But I don’t think we’ll ever really know where the big money came from to finance these operations. You have to remember … there was a huge demand from aquariums for whales back then.”
“It was the young ones they wanted especially,” Bette whispers.
Everyone’s food is sitting untouched, getting cold. I think about Bette and Tal’s lost daughter, Carol Ann. And I think about Mom, and the letter from her son, resting now in my jacket pocket, and I suddenly know, without any doubt, that all the questions I have must be only a fraction of the ones Bette and Mom have wondered and worried about all these years.
“Did it work?” I ask.
“Unfortunately it did, Marisa,” Tal sighs. “But not easily and maybe not in the way they intended. They managed to corral eighty whales in the pen that day.”
“Eighty?” Grace says, her voice thin.
“Man, I thought you were gonna say something like eight or ten!” Harris says. “But eighty?”
“They kept them in that pen for days and days,” Bette says. “You could hear their screams for miles. I remember walking by early one morning.…” She pauses and gives Tal a quick look. “With our daughter, Carol Ann. She was four or five at the time and she was terribly upset. She kept asking, Why are they crying, Mommy? Why are the whales crying? It just broke my heart.”
I feel a lump steadily rising in my throat. When I look over at Naomi, tears are streaming down her face.
“Bette reaches for Tal’s hand and holds it in her lap, stroking it. “From that moment on, we became ardent environmentalists, didn’t we, hon?”
“But … why didn’t people do something?” Grace asks. “Didn’t anybody try to stop them?”
I expect Tal or Kevin to answer, but it’s Dad.
“People thought about going out at night and trying to cut them free,” he says. “Some might’ve tried, I don’t know. You have to understand, they had men on boats with rifles out there guarding them day and night.”
Was he there? Was Mom? What would I have done if it’d been me? Would I have fought for the whales, taken a stand, or just stood by and waited for someone else to act? I feel my face redden, remembering that I have Lena to thank now for helping our whales.
“How did it end?” Lena asks.
“Not well,” Dad says. “They separated the adults from the calves, and of course the mothers were desperate to reach them.”
“Anybody tried to take Jesse, I’d do the same,” Harris says, looping his free arm around Jesse’s shoulder. His forehead is wrinkled up in a scowl. And it dawns on me how, just like with the whales, so many feelings, so many connections exist below and beyond what’s easy to see on the surface. You have to chase them to find out the truth. Unless you do, no one has the right to judge.
“One mother and four youngsters drowned trying to charge the nets,” Kevin says. “Of course, they tried to cover it up.…” Tal tells us. “They hired men to go out in the middle of the night and dispose of the whales that drowned.”
“It wasn’t pretty,” Bette answers.
“What did they do?” I have to ask.
“Slit them open and filled them with rocks, then put anchors on their tails to sink them,” Kevin says, his voice flat.
The tears start and I close my eyes against the horrible image Kevin’s words have put into our minds.
“There was a huge public outcry a couple of months later when the bodies washed up on shore. It made national headlines,” Dad says. He looks at me. “I’ve always thought it was part of why your mother moved up here from California … she got pretty involved with organizing local protests.”
That made perfect sense … why Mom loved the whales so much. But why
have I never heard this story before?
“Penn Cove was key to passing Washington State’s ban on orca captures,” Kevin says, glancing at me. “And a few years later to the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Probably the only good things that came out of it.”
“But people forget,” Tal says, answering the question I didn’t ask, “they harvested six youngsters in the end.” I cringe at his choice of words. “Yes, Marisa, that’s the word they used: harvest. Awful, isn’t it? Funny thing … once they got them and pulled up the net to release the others, they wouldn’t leave. They went right over to the beach and just milled around there … for the longest time.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, a call went out to aquariums around the world. A few stayed in the US but the rest were sent to other countries: Japan, France, Australia. None lived for very long really, except one: a six-year-old female that went to Miami.”
“She’s been there for twenty-seven years now,” Kevin says and I hear the anger in his voice. “A four-ton orca swimming around in a tank the size of a backyard pool.”
“I went there once to see her.…” Naomi says. “They gave her a new name … Lolita.” She swipes at her eyes with a tomato sauce–stained napkin. “She still makes the same calls that L Pod uses … after all those years.”
I close my eyes and see a blur of tangled images: baby whales, struggling mothers, armed men guarding the pen. I imagine Bette and Carol Ann walking by the cove in the dark night, listening to their cries. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose or leave your child—or give one up—for whatever reason, but I’ve learned a new truth. It happens all the time.
I shove my hands deep in my jacket pockets. My fingers close around the letter from my half brother. I understand now why he needed to write to the mother he’d lost. And why Mom needed to leave to find him again.
Chasing at the Surface Page 13
