by Peter Heller
Louie asked if I wanted to come.
“How do you film in there?” I asked. “I’ve heard that access to the cliffs around the cove is all blocked with razor wire, that they have armed patrols and they tarp off the inlet when they are killing dolphins.”
The men glanced at each other, smiled. Louie said, “We get in. We’ve been in twice now. We go in at night in all black. We have carpet to go over the wire. We have FLIR, military-grade forward-looking infrared cameras, to spot patrols. We have comm. George Lucas’s lab, Industrial Light & Magic, matched the rocks in the cove and made us floating waterproof rocks that hold hot-rodded cameras that can film for eleven hours. We plant them around the cove. We have remote-controlled cameras that look like birds’ nests. We rappel onto ledges way up on the cliffs with high-def cameras and when day breaks we change into full camo.” Louie smiled at me. “If you come, we’ll supply the face paint.”
OPS. Now I understood the name. “We’d like you to paddle in on a surfboard with the rest, wear a helmet cam and mike.” He crossed his strong arms over his chest. “Of course, you might get arrested. Do you have time to see some footage?”
Kim and I sat on a small couch in front of a large flat-screen. The shades hummed down. The screen came alive and dolphins began to die.
Thirteen fishing boats traveled over the water in a wide arc. From each, from the starboard side, extended a long pole into the water. Whalers banged on the poles, forming an acoustic net. Ahead of the boats, swimming fast, in panic, ran a pod of dolphins, twenty-five or thirty. Sleek, blowing rapidly, distressed. The boats herded them into the coast, into the funnel of a rock cove that quickly narrowed. Behind them, open boats ran two net lines across the mouth. The cove had two fingers. The panicked dolphins hit the net blocking off the one finger—“That’s a public beach, believe it or not,” Louie said—and turned. They were herded to the head of the second finger. There, divers in full black wetsuits and archaic round scuba masks and snorkels waited for them. They stood chest-deep in the water and grasped the exhausted, terrified animals in embraces that looked almost loving. They hugged and dragged them to the beach. Others, in wading boots, set the nooses around their flapping flukes and brought them tight. The nooses were attached to a taut line that ran across the waterline of the small beach. Still other men, in slickers and rubber boots, approached the dolphins, who struggled, half exposed, on the gravel. They carried T-handled spikes. They set them behind the blowholes and shoved down with all their weight. The dolphins screamed and writhed. Blood gushed in a fountain. The dolphins tipped over and thrashed. They began to drown, unable to right themselves to breathe, drowning in their own blood. A spiker would step over to the next animal and spike it, too. On down the line. The cove began to fill with blood. In a few minutes the entire inlet was crimson. Babies, hearing their mothers crying out, thrashed around in the blood. Then a boat motored through the rest of the pod. A whaler in the bow began to spear dolphins haphazardly from the bow. They leapt, crashed, bled. Tipped over, drowning. Pairs of living dolphins tried desperately to hold the wounded out of the water with their snouts, trying to let them breathe. They were speared, too. The animals writhing on the beach took twenty minutes to thrash and die. Some, still alive, were dragged across the gravel with hooks through their eye sockets.
The screen went dark. The light came on. I couldn’t speak for the longest time and when I did, I said that I’d come.
The slaughter continued every year from September to March. In this cove, dolphins, porpoises, pilot whales, false killer whales, and other small cetaceans were slashed to death almost every day during the season, over twenty-three hundred in Taiji alone. Up and down the coasts of Japan, twenty-three thousand small cetaceans were killed annually.
A single man had been coming here to document the slaughter every year, trying to get the word out. So far, nobody much had listened. His name was Ric O’Barry, and he had been Flipper’s trainer. He felt partly responsible for what was going on.
He told me that his popular TV show had engendered a worldwide love affair with dolphins. He said that dolphinariums, dolphin shows, and swim-with-dolphin programs had cropped up all over the world. He said it was a cruel industry that was driving the killing in places like Taiji.
“How?”
“Well, the fishermen who kill the dolphins are very poor. They sell the meat, but demand has been dropping and prices are low. But when they capture a pod, they cull out the prime females. They can get ten thousand dollars from a broker for a single dolphin. The broker in turn can get a hundred and fifty thousand from a dolphinarium.”
“You mean like SeaWorld.”
“Technically, since the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972, nobody is allowed to import wild dolphins into the U.S. They say all their animals are bred in captivity. But they know that that’s a shrinking gene pool. They work around it. A dolphin from Taiji will go to the Dominican Republic, and from there will be sold to SeaWorld as a nonwild dolphin. If it wasn’t for this thriving captive industry, the drive hunt—what’s happening in Taiji—would have died a long time ago.”
O’Barry, now seventy, is not afraid of a fight. He had been a diver in the U.S. Navy’s elite antisubmarine hunter-killer group. He had blown off a finger with a shotgun doing stunt work for the Bond movie Never Say Never Again. Despite harassment and threats from local police, from the Yakuza, the Japanese mob, from the whalers in Taiji, from just about everyone, he kept going back. He stood by the cove year after year and wept. He started an organization called SaveJapanDolphins.org and tried to tell everyone. He was so well known in Taiji that he often had to drive through town in a wig and a dress.
He told me, “This is murder. These are emotional, highly socialized, self-aware animals. I knew dolphins were self-aware thirty years before any of the studies confirmed it. In the show there was a dock. At one end of the dock was a house where the family lived and at the other end of the dock was Flipper. Well, the family didn’t really live in the house, but I did. Every Friday night I’d drag a long extension cord and a TV out to the end of the dock and Flipper would watch Flipper. She loved it.”
He said that aside from the killing, there was another issue. The meat, sold to school lunch programs, given to children, was extremely high in mercury. Independent tests by a Japanese lab had found concentrations three to thirty-five hundred times the levels deemed safe by the Japanese government. He said Japan had the potential for another Minamata scandal on its hands, referring to the disaster in the late fifties and sixties when thousands of people died from mercury poisoning, tens of thousands were sickened, and hundreds of babies were born with terrible defects.
I flew into Osaka. At a downtown business hotel I met up with the international group of activists and surfers led by Dave Rastovich, the charismatic Australian free surfer. One cold, rainy night with the OPS team, we drove the four hours to Taiji and infiltrated the inlet and set up cameras high on the cliffs overlooking the killing cove. All night, three of us huddled on a ledge while the rain swept in and a light on some far-off headland blinked its warning in lonely silence. Then, when morning broke, I stripped off all the camo and put on a wetsuit and paddled out on a surfboard with about thirty others to perform the surfers’ circle, the ceremony normally held for a departed surfer, but now enacted to memorialize all the dolphins and small whales that had died there. No dolphins had been netted in for killing that morning. I was so relieved. And despite the somber feel of the place, it felt good to be back on a surfboard again, just paddling around. Except that now, instead of looking over our shoulders for a good set wave, we were keeping eyes out for fishermen and police. The ceremony was moving, it went without a hitch, and everybody drove back to Osaka feeling pretty good.
The next afternoon Ric O’Barry called from Taiji where he keeps watch on the cove and said a pod of thirty pilot whales had been driven into the inlet and netted in, and would be killed the next morning. I guess the whalers thought the inte
rnational attention had come and gone.
Six of us went back. We drove most of the night in a crowded van. Just out of Taiji, in the first faint light, we pulled over and got into wetsuits. Now there would be blood. The fishermen would have spears and knives and they were known to get worked up and violent.
The OPS teams had set up earlier in the night—avoiding patrols, going over razor wire with rolls of black carpet—and they had rigged a battery of cameras. Taiji is all about whaling—they have a whale museum with an aqua park behind, where dolphins captured from the cove perform tricks and tourists eat dolphin sandwiches. They have smiling dolphin statues and pictures everywhere. Just at dawn we parked behind a life-sized bronze of a humpback with calf and waited for one of the hidden cameramen, who called five minutes later: “They’re killing! Go!” We sped to the public beach where we had been two mornings before. The six of us grabbed our boards from the van and splashed into the water, and we began to paddle as hard as we could toward the mouth of the killing cove. The plan was to perform another surfers’ circle before we were stopped by the fishermen or the police. O’Barry wanted the footage to air around the world.
We scraped over one net line and then it was forty yards of open water to the cove mouth. No boat appeared. We paddled past the rock corner and looked into the inlet. It was all blood. Thick and red, like paint. The dark bodies of two pilot whales floated in it, washed into the beach. And then I saw them: twelve or fifteen of the little whales pressed in panic against a far net.
They huddled tighter as we got closer. They circled in terror, blowing hard. We stopped, circled, and held hands. The blowing of the whales slowed. I watched the large dolphins, twenty yards beyond us, slow and mill. They spy-hopped, lifting their heads out to look. Small babies nosed out of the water to peer at us. They calmed down. Half of their group had just been butchered in this water, many crying for a long time before they died. These whales were in shock. But they seemed to sense that we meant them no harm. Rastovich wanted badly to cut the nets, but we could see another net stretched across the cove eighty yards out, and another beyond that. All of these whales would be spiked within the hour.
We watched the remainder of this pod of pilot whales begin to flow against the net, their backs silvering in the long sun. We could hear them blowing. I sat on my board and felt tears stream down my cold face.
A boat cruised around an outer point of rock, a long, open motorboat. The fisherman throttled when he saw us. He skimmed over the lines of nets and wheeled dangerously close, standing, yelling. He motioned for us to go. I looked around our circle. Everyone seemed calm. The whaler revved his motor and tried to frighten us with the propeller. He came so close to Hayden’s leg where she sat on her board that she had to pull it out of the way. Furious, he circled once more and headed to the beach.
We paddled out, not in. Closer to the whales. It was a bold move, as the local cops must be scrambling. In Japan you can be held for twenty-eight days without being charged, and no one was looking forward to a free cell in Taiji. We were yards away from the pilot whales now. The little pod huddled against the net and we could hear them breathe fast, hollow blows over the slick water. We floated in the blood of their family. Hayden began to cry quietly. Then Isabel. Then Rastovich’s wife Hannah.
Soon the boat sped out to us again, and this time there were four whalers aboard. They feinted with the prop. One yelled wildly, picked up a long forked pole, and jabbed it at the closest boards. He hit Hannah in the thigh, then shoved Hayden’s board. Both women stayed calm, keeping their balance and holding the circle. Behind them I noticed the pilot whales going crazy, thrashing against the net. Enough, Rastovich said. “Let’s paddle in. Stay against the rocks.”
We ran from the water, threw the boards in the back of the van, ducked to the floor, and sped away. Forty-five seconds later sirens wailed and police cars flew past us, heading toward the cove.
Back in Osaka, we all changed flights and left the country before the authorities decided to make someone pay.
At home, I was amazed at the press the protest was getting. People, CNN, AP, MSNBC, Ellen. Hayden was everywhere, a real-life hero. Ric O’Barry, who stood by the cove heartbroken and alone for so many years, was thrilled.
When I tried to sleep the image returned: Those twelve pilot whales swimming against the nets, watching us. I watched them back. There is a lot I want to communicate. A baby lifts its head. They are wondering why we are there, but they don’t feel threatened. A boat approaches. I hear the motor like a snarl. The whales circle tighter, faster. I lie beside my sleeping wife and weep.
I continued to be shaken by a grief whose power I can’t explain. Perhaps it is that the little group of whales spoke, to me at least, for the whole ocean. The dying waters. At home I began to see the surf trip as more about loving the ocean than anything else. It was a way to know her better. It certainly wasn’t Endless Summer. One couldn’t do that anymore, the sheer lark, not in 2008. The joy and the rush were still all there, surfing was still surfing, but one couldn’t do it without a simultaneous commitment to taking some responsibility.
NEW BODY
After Baja, the first nights at home in Denver were weird. I tried to sleep but could not hear surf coming in tatters on a shifting wind. I couldn’t smell the salt. When I listened for the ocean’s mood, the ceaseless wash against the shore, all I could hear were the furnace clicking on, the hiss of the gas jets, the old fridge. Kit-ten, the little black and white calico, purring. Not the same at all.
I lay in the big bed with Kim, our cat, and a surfing-toned body that felt strange and new. It was strong in a way it had been only a few times in my life. It hummed with muscular power, with the music of the sea, and it wondered why there was no answer. I woke up at six every morning, wide awake, ready to pick up a board and feel cold gravel underfoot. I woke disappointed.
We ended up staying in the States for two months as I finished other projects. I went to Japan, then needed another chunk of cash, so I took a quick magazine assignment, a profile of an Olympic whitewater kayaker who would soon go to Beijing, and as I stood in the freezing wind on the banks of a swift channel of the Potomac outside of D.C., watching him glide with power through his aquatic element, my new body ached for water. Not the chlorinated, imprisoned lanes of the pool I tried to swim in a few times a week, but the wild, surging, unpredictable body of the sea. She was struggling and dying and I was heartbroken and my body ached for her body.
DUNE
The world had changed when we finally returned to Baja. It was freezing. The taxi driver picked us up in a winter parka and ski hat. After checking into Los Arcos, we finally looked up an old acquaintance of mine named Tim Means who runs Baja Expeditions. He’s a hulking man, bulky in the shoulders, with a salty gray drooping mustache and unkempt gray hair blowing around his neck. He is one of the most effective environmentalists I’ve ever known. He knows that the Sea of Cortez is one of the richest marine environments in the world, as well as one of its greatest opportunities for preservation. Jacques Cousteau called it the Aquarium of the World. Over twenty species of whales and dolphins are seasonal residents, and two hundred bird species and over five hundred species of fish call the gulf their home. On some islands, like Espiritu Santo, there are plants that exist nowhere else. Look at a map: a narrow, seven-hundred-mile-long experiment in what happens when a rich body of ocean and a teeming human population come together. The wildness of the west, the Baja side, is made up of vast stretches of coastline, island-studded, mostly unpopulated, abundant with coves and points, cliffs, rock islets, inlets softened by mangroves; the mainland side to the east strung with port cities, fishing fleets. Unfortunately, the experiment had been failing until fairly recently. The Mexican shrimp fleets engaged in a kind of bottom trawling that ravages the seabed and that scientists describe as one of the most destructive fishing methods on earth; the trawling had depleted shrimp stocks until they were no longer commercially viable. Resort development was t
earing out the last critical mangroves and filling in estuaries. Beach houses and resorts threatened bird habitat and endangered sea turtle nesting grounds.
Tim’s dream was to turn the whole sea into one vast marine park and wildlife refuge. An entire sea protected, with commercial fishing allowed but strictly regulated to keep the fish populations healthy and sustainable. He was already working to establish protected marine zones, and areas with strong protections for mangroves and other critical coastal habitat. If there was anyplace in the world this could be done, it was here; it is hard to monitor the Pacific Ocean, but possible to monitor the Sea of Cortez. Though boundless in its beauty, the Sea was a place you get your mind around. All that was needed was the full cooperation and commitment of the Mexican people and their government.
Given that that wasn’t going to happen all at once, Tim was taking one patient, furious step at a time.
We called him and he met us at Rancho Viejo Restaurant, a taco joint a block up the hill from the harbor. He sat at a table on the sidewalk next to the hissing grill. A waiter slapped down a dish full of grilled whole guero chilies. Tim hulked over the rough wood and the plates in a faded Hawaiian shirt. He seemed bigger and shaggier than I’d remembered. He had the same undisciplined gray mustache and hair. The same laconic preference for long silences. Until he started speaking about the Mogote sand spit in the middle of the La Paz harbor. A developer from Colorado was building a resort out there, high-rise hotel, condos, golf course. Tearing up some of the last remaining mangroves in the harbor. The developer was putting the golf course on sand, too, where there should never be a golf course. Tim said the bigger buildings were already sinking because they were built on sand. I asked the name of the developer.
