by David Kirby
The two-story, cedar-shake house doubled as the Center for Whale Research. Out in the yard were trucks, boats, a barbecue area, and vintage navigational flags from around the world. Inside, the rooms were filled with whale-watching paraphernalia: binoculars, spotting scopes, telephoto cameras, and speakers hooked up to hydrophones to announce the arrival of an orca pod. Occupying a sizable chunk of the living room was a massive killer whale skull, a souvenir from Japan that Ken had acquired in the seventies while working as a navy acoustics analyst.
When Jeff walked into the place, he felt as though he’d somehow come home. Astrid greeted him with a huge smile and warm hug. She introduced him to the legendary Kenneth Balcomb, the cetologist with the bushy Kriss Kringle gray beard, about fifty-five years of age. The place was bustling with young people who’d signed up through the Earthwatch Institute—a nonprofit group that engaged volunteers in field research and educational projects pertaining to environmental sustainability. Some were busy developing black-and-white photographs of dorsal fins and saddle patches, while others compared the images with databases of the entire Southern Resident community, about eighty-five whales from J, K, and L pods.
Ken gave Jeff a firm handshake and led the newcomer out onto the wide wooden balcony that overlooked a calm green cove tangled with long strands of bull kelp, a favorite hangout for Southern Residents. In the summer, the entire western shore of San Juan Island is patrolled almost daily by J, K, and L pods, who travel up and down the coast, sometimes quite close to the cliffs, in what locals refer to as the Westside Shuffle.
Jeff was staggered by the view. Beyond the cove was Haro Strait, churning like a river with strings of frothy rip currents as the tidewaters raced toward the Pacific. Ten miles west across the channel, the green hills of Vancouver Island rose above the tidy homes of Victoria. To the south, across Juan de Fuca Strait, the towering stone peaks of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula glinted in the June sun, their highest summits still dusted in winter white.
He was going to love it here, Jeff thought.
Ken’s younger half brother, Howard Garrett, came out to join them. Howie was tall, lanky, affable, and as passionate about orcas as Ken. Both men loved killer whales and intensely disliked SeaWorld. “Shamu is an acronym for ‘shame on you,’” Ken joked with a wicked grin. Jeff took to the half brothers right away. He and Howie quickly became close friends.
Ken regaled Jeff with story after story of wild whales. He explained how gregarious the Southern community was—more prone to greeting ceremonies and giant leaps from the water than their Northern cousins in Johnstone Strait. He talked about individual whales and the personalities that he knew so well after twenty years of tracking them. Ken and the orcas were so well acquainted that the older whales recognized the sound of his boat’s motor and would often come pay a visit, especially proud mothers with their newborns.
“When they have a new calf, they actually bring it over to my boat,” Ken said. “I think they’re teaching their offspring that we are okay, they have nothing to fear from us. But I also think they’re showing off the youngsters.” Sometimes, the mothers would turn their children over, allowing Ken and his team to sex the calf at an early age (males and females have different black-and-white patterns around their genital slits, and females have mammary slits). “I don’t know if they do it on purpose,” Ken said with a sly grin, “but it sure is a big help.”
The men stood in silence for a while. Jeff took in the water, sky, and mountains, and the bald eagles circling nearby. He could feel the majesty of the place as much as he could see it. After a few moments of quiet, Ken pointed to the bull kelp rocking gently in the cove, about twenty yards offshore.
“When I first moved here in the seventies, the whales used to stop by that kelp almost every afternoon in the summer,” he said with melancholy nostalgia. “They would come into the cove, maybe a dozen at a time, and just loll around in that seaweed there for as long as they wanted. They’d be out there rubbing against each other and rolling in the water. It was just one big orgy. Nonstop sex.”
“So what happened?” Jeff asked. “Don’t they do that anymore?”
Howie answered, “Not as much. They don’t have time for that kind of thing these days. They’re too busy looking for salmon.”
Howie and Ken explained how the strait once choked with migrating chinook in the summertime. But overfishing, pollution (especially PCBs from the Seattle area), and dams that impeded the adult salmon’s return to spawn upriver were pushing the numbers down.
“Chinook are energy bars,” Howie explained. “Back when the whales had good, full bellies and lots of fat reserves, and they didn’t need to store any more up, they moved on to do other things that they naturally prefer to do. When they got a chance, they’d stop and socialize and engage in a lot of sex play. It’s just their normal attitude toward life, it seems.”
Ken nodded his head. “If they could do that all the time, they would. But of course, they’ve got to make a living. And it’s become a lot harder for them to do that, which leaves a lot less time for playing around in the kelp.” The population was more or less stable, for now, he said. The Southern Residents were finding food somewhere. But it kept people up at night worrying about what would happen if the salmon population collapsed entirely.
“There’s an old saying among the Salish people,” Ken said. “No fish, no blackfish.”
Both Ken and Howard had long and storied histories. They grew up with a third brother, Rick, just north of Sacramento, raised by a single mother who worked night and day, leaving the boys to their own devices. Ken spent most of his time out in the fields of central California, bringing home frogs, snakes, birds, and even abandoned lambs to take care of.
Ken went on to get his bachelor’s degree in marine biology from UC Davis and worked at the last whaling station in the United States, in nearby Richmond, which did not close down until the early 1970s. Howie, after graduating from college, was drafted to fight in Vietnam. The left-leaning hippie-type passed a petition around at his draft physical in Oakland saying, “We, the undersigned, are against the war in Vietnam and object to being forced to fight in it.” Howie got about a dozen signatures before they ejected him from the building “and straight to Canada,” as he put it. After Canada he traveled through Europe and South Asia. When President Nixon offered conditional amnesty to draft evaders in 1972, Howie returned to the States, moved to New Mexico (where he was born), got married, and had a baby. The marriage did not last.
Howie moved to San Juan Island in December of 1980 to help Ken smooth over a tumultuous transition at the whale museum that Ken had founded in Friday Harbor. Howie spent the next two years assisting with field research and writing about new findings in cetology, especially the orca studies he was participating in. After a three-month research expedition to study humpbacks in the Caribbean, Howie ended up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, working for about a decade as a freelance naturalist and wildlife guide for whale-watching tours in New England. In June of 1993, he agreed to move back to Washington State to help Ken on the Orca Survey. Driving on the road west, just twenty miles outside Gloucester, Howie came across a movie theater that was screening Free Willy. He decided to stop to see the movie, as a form of inspiration before the long drive out West to see the real whales. (The movie’s shots of wild orcas swimming in the ocean were filmed in the San Juan Islands.)
When Howie got to Friday Harbor, he discovered that Ken was already deeply involved with the plan to free Keiko. That’s when Howie became an orca activist.
Two years later Howard started his own nonprofit called the Tokitae Foundation. Tokitae, which means “nice day” in the Coast Salish language, was the original name given to Lolita, the female killer whale locked in a small pool at the Miami Seaquarium in Florida. Tokitae was a member of the L25 matriline of L pod. Her mother was thought to be L25, Ocean Sun, who was now over eighty years of age and still going strong, still running her family. Tokitae emitted calls used
only by the L25 subpod.
Tokitae was taken on August 8, 1970, during the infamous Penn Cove roundup led by partners Ted Griffin and Don Goldsberry. More than eighty members of the Southern community—possibly the entire population—had been captured, and seven of the youngest whales were sold to marine parks.1 Tokitae was sent to Miami as a playmate for a young male named Hugo, who was taken from Puget Sound in 1968. Hugo was an anguished cetacean. He would often send high-pitched shrieks echoing across the park grounds and repeatedly banged his head on the tank wall. One time he actually broke a viewing window and sliced off the tip of his rostrum on a glass shard. The piece of flesh had to be stitched back on by a veterinarian.
Once in Miami, Tokitae’s Salish name was switched for something a bit more Latin sounding for South Florida: Lolita. She and Hugo were probably closely related, though no one realized that at the time. The two Southern Residents lived and performed together in their cramped pool for ten years, until March 1980, when Hugo slammed his head into the wall for the last time. He was about fifteen. The Seaquarium listed the cause of death as a brain aneurysm. After he died, Lolita kept performing the show all alone.
By 1987, Lolita was the only survivor out of an estimated fifty-eight killer whales taken captive from Puget Sound or killed during captures. The same year, while attending the biennial conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, in Miami, Ken Balcomb approached the Seaquarium with a scientific proposal: Let Lolita listen to audio recordings from her pod, “just to see, and record, what might happen,” he said. When the facility refused, Ken offered to lease the whale for the experiment, but received a similar rejection.
In 1992, after Hurricane Andrew flooded the Seaquarium, electrocuting six of its sea lions, Ken offered to buy Lolita outright. He had picked out a clover-shaped cove on the west side of San Juan Island, Kanaka Bay, used in 1976 to hold two orcas for two months prior to release as stipulated by a court order. It still had metal hooks in the rocks where nets were stretched to corral the orcas. It was the perfect location for a retirement pen, Ken told Seaquarium officials. When they once again refused to consider the offer, Ken’s half brother Howie started his Tokitae Foundation.
Because of Lolita, and so many other whales now dead, Ken and Howie never forgave Griffin and Goldsberry for the havoc they wreaked upon the Southern community. J, K, and L pods were still trying to recover their numbers after so many family members had been taken from the Salish Sea.
Ken had been hired by NMFS back in 1976 to conduct the first-ever complete census of the Southern Resident community. Part of his assignment was to assess the impact that culling by SeaWorld and other facilities had on the stability and sustainability of that population.
But the following year, the government moved to quash his operations.
“It was insane,” Ken told Jeff one day. “In 1976 the feds hired me to study whales, and in 1977 they tried to put me in the slammer for doing the same thing.” Don Goldsberry himself had tipped Ken off that trouble was brewing. By then, Goldsberry was wealthy and he worked for SeaWorld. He also had a home on San Juan Island, and Ken would run into him in Friday Harbor.
“I was at the hamburger stand in town, and Don was there,” Ken told Jeff. “And he said, ‘Watch out, Ken, they’re going to arrest you.’ And I was like, what the hell? I mean, he’s such a blowhard, this guy. He likes to tell tall tales. So I kind of wrote him off.”
Ken went home and began planning his orca survey for that summer. His study permit was still awaiting final authorization at NMFS, but Ken was ready to start preliminary observations. The next morning, he got in his boat and went out to look at the whales.
“They were everywhere that day, hanging just offshore and going around in circles like pollywogs,” Ken recalled. He was out on his Boston Whaler along with a forty-foot sailboat called Bakers Dozen, with eight volunteers on board, ready to do a follow-up study to the previous year’s. Their motors were off and the sails were down. “We were off the front of the house and the whales were heading right for us, coming from the south,” Ken said. “And then I see a helicopter coming round the point.”
The chopper flew in low circles as officials with telephoto lenses photographed Ken and his little operation. It then came in even lower, driving the whales right next to Ken’s boat. More photos were snapped.
“Then, after they got all the whales around us, they dropped a note on the sailboat with a piece of wood tied to a paper that said, ‘People, you are in violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Call this number in Seattle,’” Ken said. “And I’m just sitting there, blown away that all of this was happening. But the beauty of it was I had a tape recorder running on the hydrophone. Our engines weren’t operating at all; you could hear the helicopter.”
The feds threatened Ken with $20,000 in penalties and a year in prison. But he wasn’t going down without a fight. “I shot a sixteen-millimeter movie of the whole thing,” he told Jeff with a big laugh. “I got him herding whales around my boat. I got it all.”
Ken had a friend in Seattle, Rick, who ran an adult-movie theater and knew where to process the film overnight. He gave Rick the negative. “And then I called up the enforcement guy. And he said, ‘We’d like to set up a meeting at ten tomorrow morning to discuss this harassment incident.’” Ken said he would try to make it. He then told the officer he had filmed the whole raid. “I said, ‘I’m not guilty of anything. I didn’t have any engines running. We weren’t doing anything wrong and there was no harassment. You’ll see. Can I show you the movie?’”
The officer asked where the film stock was. Ken gave him the name of the company that was processing it that night. “And God, as soon as I said that, I thought, ‘Oh, shit! What the hell did I do that for?’” he told Jeff. “So I got ahold of Rick and told him to have them make two prints and put the original in the vault and take the other one back to his theater. And sure enough, at one o’clock that morning, federal agents showed up with a subpoena and seized the theater print. They didn’t know we had a copy.”
Ken showed up at the meeting as planned. The agents calmly informed him he would be charged with harassing marine mammals, whether he had a permit or not. “And I said to these guys, ‘Well, I filmed the whole thing. And I happen to know that you people have the film.’”
Jeff was loving this story. “So what happened then?”
“Well, they just said, ‘We have the film, but it didn’t turn out. There was nothing on it. And I told them, ‘Well, gee, gentlemen, that’s really too bad. But I happen to have a copy myself. Let’s watch mine!’”
The charges were dropped.
Years later, Ken ran into Don Goldsberry in the Bahamas. Over a bottle of Crown Royal, Ken asked him, “What the hell happened back in 1977? How did you know, Don, about the raid before it even took place?” Don said he had attended a meeting with the head of the NMFS permit office in Washington, DC, where the entire operation had been planned, he told Ken. He claimed to be at a second meeting with the local enforcement officers who were going to do the actual bust. They had planned to intentionally drive the whales toward Ken’s boat. It was all a setup, designed to stop his survey project.
Ken was appalled. “What was a SeaWorld representative doing at a planning meeting in DC to arrest me for studying whales? My deep suspicion was that SeaWorld had a hand in the whole raid.”
“So SeaWorld didn’t want the study to go through,” Jeff said. “I can believe that.”
“They absolutely did not want me out there counting whales. They did not want any data on longevity or anything from the wild, because obviously it would make them look bad. And they sure didn’t want data on what their culling of the population had done to the Southern Residents. Besides, these are vengeful people. If you cross them, they’ll come after you.”
“What do you mean?” Jeff asked.
“Well, we had organized up here to get them kicked out of Washington State because they’d caught too many whales. And I had pe
rsonally collected the evidence to prove it. But they didn’t want my evidence out there, showing they had permanently affected this population. To this day they don’t want to believe it. But they can’t deny it anymore, even though it’s certainly not part of their education program.”
It hadn’t been Ken’s only interaction with SeaWorld. In 1993 several company executives—including Thad Lacinak, Chuck Tompkins, and Orlando park president Bill Davis—went to San Juan Island to film a promotional video with British actress Jane Seymour. They came to gather footage of wild killer whales swimming in Haro Strait. Ken invited them over to the center for a little tour.
“We were all a little embarrassed for these people,” he told Jeff. “I mean, they didn’t know the first thing about wild whales.” Astrid had tried in vain to explain the photo-ID science to them, “and she said they were totally dense about the whole thing. They just didn’t believe you could track whales the way we do over such long periods of time.”
One day, when a matriline from J pod was milling around in the cove, Thad Lacinak jumped in a kayak and paddled out to commune with the wild beasts. But he got too close: Much to Ken’s amusement, the whales nearly whacked the SeaWorld executive into the icy water with their flukes.
Jeff laughed at the story. “I heard about that trip when I was still at SeaWorld!” he said. “I thought it was wrong that top officials would come here and see what wild orcas are really like while keeping the rest of us at SeaWorld in the dark. It seemed a bit like book-burning, you know? You will learn only what you need to learn.”
Astrid gave Jeff a brief orientation on what the regular summer duties entailed. He was going to participate as a team member—with all the dishwashing and food-prep duties that came with membership. The survey volunteers would get up “super early,” she warned, and hit the ocean on the High Spirits to seek, photograph, and identify Southern Residents. The High Spirits was an ideal stable platform for taking photographs, especially using long lenses. It being the beginning of the season, everyone was anxious to document newly arrived infants and recently departed adults.
