by Pam Houston
Charlie had a sweet face with eyes that smiled even when he didn’t. “You are interested in the beads?” he said.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “I was curious about them.”
“Well,” he said, “they were made in Venice, and traded in Africa. I think they are pretty old. They became popular over here with the people because, you know, they look like bear claws. But I believe the artist intended them to be flowers. You’re the first person to ask about them,” he said. “They have been in this case a very long time.”
We eyed each other. He couldn’t decide if I was a little bit interesting, and I couldn’t tell if he was pulling my leg.
“They’re the most beautiful thing in the store,” I said.
“Were you interested in the whole string?” he said, picking up the fifty or sixty beads and running them through his fingers. “Because that would cost a lot of money.”
“Maybe you don’t want to sell them,” I said. “Maybe you like having them here.”
This made him smile. “You know,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind if a few of them went”—he held the string up to the sunlight—“traveling.”
“I’m a traveler,” I said. “Maybe the beads are in luck.”
“Yes,” he said, “I think it would be okay if a few of them left with you.”
I grinned back at him. “What if I chose three?” I said.
“That’s a good number,” he said.
He cut the string and I took a lot of time choosing my three beads. He wrapped them in brown paper for me, and I paid him sixty dollars. It crossed my mind that wearing the beads might somehow help William. Convenient as it was, I went ahead and let that thought be. I walked out of the store to the sight of a large sailboat pulling into the tiny town dock and my plane-mates making their way down the gangway.
The captain’s name was Neil. He had a crooked smile and wore a dirty old fisherman’s sweater that seemed to have grown to his body like a pelt. He was also sick as a dog. His eyes were red and his nose was running, and it was easy to recognize his squint as the side effect of a sinus infection.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m Pam.”
“The writer!” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “I thought we were all supposed to be writers.”
“Well, in the most literal sense, I suppose.” He gave me his crooked smile.
“Hey listen,” I said, and told him about William’s condition. “Is there some way after the surgery my boyfriend could call your office and maybe get a message to you?”
“Of course,” he said, “or easier than that, you can just use the radio phone anytime you want.” He picked it up off his navigation table and put it back down. “I keep it right here. You can use it whenever. Just be sure to put it back.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “I mean, I know some people would say it’s only a dog.”
He squinted his already squinted-up face at me. “Well, who would ever say that?” And that’s when I knew I was going to be okay.
We weren’t under way thirty minutes when all traces of civilization, including power lines and cell reception, dropped completely away. The afternoon sun splashed brightly across the surface of the water, and we sat on the deck like satiated children, taking in waterfalls that tumbled down the granite walls of the surrounding islands, staring up into deep green forests that climbed the surrounding mountains as far as the eye could see.
We traveled alongside humpbacks every day. We walked up estuaries thick with dying salmon and encountered grizzlies on two occasions. We went up on deck and howled into the starry night, and most nights wolves howled back to us. One day a Gitga’at elder named Marvin led us up a small river to wait for a spirit bear, and we sat for hours, unmoving and silent on the bank, hoping one would walk by.
A spirit bear—also known as a Kermode bear—is a black bear with a double recessive gene for whiteness. It is not an albino—it is truly white; sometimes a white sow will give birth to two black cubs. The First Nation tribes in coastal British Columbia, the Tsimshian and the Gitga’ata, kept the white bear a secret for centuries, protecting it from settlers and trappers, but more recently they have come to believe raising awareness about the bear might help protect their hunting and fishing grounds from the tar sands project as well as the Enbridge pipeline.
Four hours after we arrived, when we had lost all feeling in our fingers, toes and butts, a white bear appeared a hundred yards upriver, taking her time picking through the rocks, chewing on an occasional half-dead salmon. Eventually she walked only a few feet from our breathless forms, close enough for us to see her eyelashes, the rose-colored tint of her skin through her thick white coat, the black underside of her considerable paws, which looked for all the world like the soles of well-worn bedroom slippers.
When she was out of sight, we gasped and squealed and hugged one another, broke out lunch and then resumed our positions. After a few more hours, she headed back upriver, ambling right past us again.
As it turned out, there were only two other writers on the trip—John Vaillant, who wrote, among other things, a luminous book called The Golden Spruce, and an important environmental blogger named Brendan DeMelle—but that didn’t really matter because there were filmmakers, mediators and professional fund-raisers: twelve good people who were all doing their part for the earth. The philanthropist and I never got chummy, but it didn’t make much difference. I admire her passion and commitment to the Great Bear a lot, and I’m nothing but grateful to her for giving me a week in that unspoiled place. From the very first moment, I knew I had a friend in Captain Neil.
Each night, after the philanthropist had gone to bed, Neil would crook his finger for me to come up on deck and hand me the radio phone, and each night I would point it up to the southern sky and call Greg. Sometimes, while I was waiting for a satellite, a wolf would howl, and my heart would tear, imagining my boy on the operating table, in the recovery room, wondering where I was. Sometimes the call would fail, once, twice, three times, and there would be nothing to do but surrender to the reflection of the starlight on water, to whatever would be back home. On the nights I did get through the news was never conclusive. The surgeon at Vista had eventually decided it was too risky to operate, so after $2,500 and two days worth of not much of anything, Greg took William to UC Davis, where he could have gone in the first place if his case had originally been deemed an emergency. The Davis team planned to use a supersonic blaster to try to break up the trapped stone and hopefully get it to pass. After that, they would operate to remove the other nine stones X-rays had revealed in his bladder. No one would tell Greg exactly when that would happen.
I found myself split in a way that was deeply familiar—half of me so worried about William I could barely function, the other half drunk with joy at getting to be exactly where I was. I wanted to be large enough to contain the totality of both feelings. Did their coexistence automatically make me some kind of a monster? I reached for the life lesson that was hovering close in the starry night, waiting for me to snatch it.
I was in a place both radically pristine and radically threatened, by Big Timber, by tar sands, by liquefied natural gas. The Enbridge people wanted to run multiple 400-meter tankers a day through these virgin passages, around some of the tightest turns in the shipping industry, in some of the most ferocious winter weather on earth. A 125-meter ferry, the MV Queen of the North, had sunk in 2006, a few miles across the water from where the spirit bears lived, because of the captain’s failure to execute a simple course change. One moment of inattention, one bad decision, one corner taken too close, one jagged rock, and two million barrels of oil could poison this slice of heaven forever.
There had to be a way to know all that and still be here with my heart wide open. Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Maybe it was simply what being a grown-up meant.
On the second to last day of the trip we stopped at a plac
e called CetaceaLab—a cantilevered shack a woman named Janie Wray got permission from the local Gitga’at nation to put there so she, her then husband and several volunteers could study resident and transient whales in the whales’ preferred location. We rounded Whale Point at 6:00 p.m. on what had been a grey day, but now the clouds were washed pink, red and blue in an extended sunset.
We had seen the spouts from a long way off, backlit, and shooting into the air in the three-pointed shape of a scepter’s crown. The humpbacks were tight in the harbor and feeding, and there were a lot of them. Neil pulled the boat in among them, and just as we dropped anchor, two whales full-breached off our starboard bow simultaneously, once, twice and then a third time—kids doing cannonballs—giving the boat and all of its passengers a serious soaking. More whales came by the boat to check us out, rolling their big eyes toward us, letting their baleened smiles come to the surface and stay there. Other whales bubble-fed in groups of three and four off the bow. A young whale practiced fin and tail slaps off the stern, in front of what was left of the sunset. No wonder Janie Wray chose this place to build CetaceaLab.
We were all so high on the show we almost didn’t hear Darcy, the CetaceaLab volunteer we would be transporting back to Bella Bella, when she told us everyone at the lab was concerned because the whales were especially skinny this year.
“Do you think the warmer water is affecting their food supply?” Neil asked. The warmer water was affecting a lot of things in the Pacific. The California sea lions were dying by the thousands and the exoskeletons of the purple sea stars, found on all the coasts of British Columbia, were turning into mush.
“It’s hard to know for sure,” Darcy said, “but whales are staying in the area longer this year than ever before, maybe trying to bulk up a bit before their trip to Hawai‘i. The difference from a year ago is really dramatic. Something is definitely wrong.”
Worse for me than thinking about my own death, or even William’s, was trying to reckon with this kind of information. The closer one got to the North and South poles, the more dramatic and obvious the effects of climate change. I didn’t want to live in a world without polar bears. I wasn’t sure an ocean without whales in it was any kind of ocean at all. My entire life I had watched, heartbroken, as individual pieces of wilderness that mattered to me got destroyed or developed, but I had believed, for reasons I am not clear on now (propaganda? denial? naïveté?), that the earth contained vast tracts of land humans had not pushed into. Now, I understood this thing we called technology had advanced to a point where no place on the planet was safe from our penchant for destruction. I found myself glad we had never colonized the moon.
It had gotten fully dark while we talked, and a young whale had come alongside the boat and started to sing. The massage therapist from Vancouver had pulled his harmonica out of his pocket and now they were playing a duet. I fingered the trade beads around my neck and closed my eyes to better hear the dissonant harmony. I reminded myself to be here now. Whatever calamity was around the corner, there was no denying it had been an afternoon of marvels.
Not even five months later, on February 1, 2016, an agreement would be reached between the provincial government, the First Nations, and the logging industry to protect 85 percent of the trees in the Great Bear. On October 16 of that same year a tugboat driver would fall asleep at the helm, running his ship and the barge he was towing hard aground just north of Bella Bella, releasing more than 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the pristine waters of Seaforth Channel.
But that night, surrounded by the squeak and blow of humpbacks, when I pointed the radio phone toward the southern horizon, I found out that a different sort of advanced technology had successfully exploded the stone in William’s urethra, allowing him to pee normally. And after that, some relatively old-fashioned laser surgery had successfully removed nine rather large cystine stones from his bladder.
In early March 2011, Greg and I went to the Sea of Cortés, hoping to see blue whales. When we arrived, we were told the blues usually left in February and we would have to be content with fin whales and humpbacks. Because any day of seeing a whale is better than any day of not seeing a whale, I was more than content—I was ecstatic.
We stayed at a funky little tent camp run by an Italian named Antonio, who was disparaging of Americans, mostly because, he said, they didn’t understand food, wine or coffee. We assured him things had gotten better in all three categories in the last decade or two, but he didn’t believe us. He hadn’t been across the border to the States in thirty-seven years, and he had no intention of crossing any time soon.
Antonio told big stories of his days on the sea, but when it came time to actually go boating he turned us over to his friend Pablo, who owned an open-topped blue and white fiberglass 20-footer with an outboard. We saw hundreds of whales during the week we were there, humpbacks that breached and slapped their flukes, and big pods of eighty-foot fin whales, moving nearly silent and torpedolike through the water.
On the sixth day, we went out with a small group of other tourists, including a Japanese couple named Hito and Mikiko. They were staying at Antonio’s tent camp too, and we had gotten friendly, in spite of their limited English and our nonexistent Japanese.
Earlier that morning we had heard the news of the earthquake off the coast of Tohoku, Japan, and the disabled and leaking nuclear reactor. Hito and Mikiko were from the south, they said, hundreds of miles away, and had no relatives or friends close to the quake. Without the English words to express his grief, Hito kept it simple. “We are just happy to be with the whales,” he said. “This is our dream.”
We had seen the usual assortment of whales that morning and were currently pacing a baby hammerhead shark who’d been swimming alongside our boat for nearly five minutes, when off in the distance the captain sighted a humpback. As we raced toward it we could see the whale was slapping one flipper, over and over, loud, hard, in an exhausted but persistent rhythm. When we got close, we saw blood on the flipper it slapped. When we got even closer, we could see there was plastic fishing net wrapped around its lower body.
“Can we help it?” I asked Pablo, but he shook his head. “Too strong,” he said, in Spanish. “It would kill me.” He seemed sad about it. The whale continued to slap, almost mechanically. Who was she calling for? her mate? her friend? her mother? us?
I remembered a children’s book I’d read on a whale watch in Provincetown, where some fishermen help a tangled whale, and not only does the whale let them help her, she comes back and circles the rescuer’s boat three times before departing, then drenches them with a joyful fluke-created wave. I had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.
In a combination of English and Spanish, Pablo let me know some local fishermen tried to help the whale a few days ago, but she dove, nearly killing one of the helpers in the process. “They wait for her to get more tired,” he said, “and maybe they try again.”
Mikiko and I exchanged desperate glances. I took several photos of the whale knowing that later, I would wish I didn’t have them in my camera. Pablo shrugged and turned the boat toward the harbor. My mind raced in panicked circles, wishing plastic gill nets were illegal, wishing for a local chapter of Marine Mammal Rescue, wishing for my own boat, a life preserver and a reasonably sharp Swiss army knife.
It was only with my back to the whale, hearing that plaintive slap . . . slap . . . slap continuing as we pulled away, that a wall of grief so huge hit me it felt, honestly, unprecedented in my lifetime. I was doubled over by it, literally taken to my knees, and once I started crying, I thought I might never stop. And once I accepted the fact I might not ever stop crying, I then started to have to work very hard to keep mysel
f from keening, or shrieking, or making some other sound that neither Greg, nor Pablo, nor Hito and Mikiko, nor anyone else on that boat wanted me to make. This was the kind of grief Cheryl Strayed was talking about, I realize now, when she talked about losing her mother.
Mikiko touched my shoulder. In her country, just hours before, more than ten thousand people had been killed, with thousands more missing or fatally contaminated by radiation. Even as that whale was slapping her flipper behind us, thousands of gallons of radioactive fluid were pouring into the sea, killing who would ever know how many whales and dolphins and fish and reefs. Maybe I was crying for the people and the animals and the sea creatures of Japan. Maybe I was crying for the havoc we wreak upon the planet every day. Maybe some part of me was crying for my mother.
But it felt like was I was grieving for that very whale, with the net around her flukes and blood on her flipper, and I knew as we sped away that some part of me would always be grieving for that whale, that she would live in me forever, and somehow, illogically, she might be the biggest grief of all. Of everything I have written in this book, including the death scene of my beloved Fenton, this scene was the hardest to write.
I cried longer and harder and more hopelessly for that whale than I did for my parents, for the three dearest friends I’ve lost to cancer, for my dogs or any of the other animals who have graced and left my life. Maybe I cry harder over animals because my love for them is so uncomplicated, or maybe it is because I trust an animal to always be itself. Maybe I cried hardest over that whale because I’d had no chance to brace myself for the sight of her. She was the last thing I expected to see on that glorious day of sparkling sea and sunshine and shark after whale after whale. And there she was, starving, dying and asking for help, and neither I, nor anyone else in the Sea of Cortés, could help her.
Last February, after a brief teaching stint at an arts high school in West Palm Beach, I tacked on three days to go down to the Keys. I love Florida, and am not afraid to say so, though it horrifies my staunch environmental friends when I do. I stayed in a marginally decent hotel on Islamorada because it had a paddleboard rental office in its parking lot. I went paddling every morning for four hours, came back and ordered room service, and wrote until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
