by Abby Geni
The gray whales were in an obliging mood. There were ten or twelve of them in the group, and they seemed to be playing. I captured a flash of baleen slats, glistening inside a wide mouth. I caught an image of several tails cresting together, flinging a tsunami of droplets upward. The animals lived up to their name, deep gray, patched with white like a cloudy sky. For the first time, I was able to get what I wanted from the whales on film. The size of them. Their breath climbing in columns of steam. Their enormous flippers. Their elegance. Their mystery.
Mick and Forest were standing by the water’s edge. From what I could tell, they were arguing. Mick had the daily log in his hands. Forest had been deputized as his assistant and note-taker. This was the way of things on the islands. No one ever had time off. All the biologists had seasons in which they could focus on their areas of expertise (when their animals ruled the roost) and seasons when they were required to help the others (when their animals were absent). During the summer, Forest, the shark specialist, had been in command. He and Galen had given orders, and everyone else had jumped to obey. But autumn had brought the whales, and winter would give way to Seal Season, which would be followed by Bird Season. Each biologist had a moment in the sun. This was Mick’s time to shine.
Just then, one of the gray whales decided to “spy-hop.” It was a behavior Mick had described to me, but one I hadn’t expected to see in person. The creature poked his monstrous head out of the water. He rose vertically, perhaps ten feet in the air. Then he began to rotate. He pivoted on the spot like a barber pole. Camera in hand, I clicked gleefully away. I knew what he was doing—scouting the surrounding area—but there was such beauty and strangeness in the action that for a moment I felt that he was dancing for me. He was performing for the camera.
I heard a shout. Mick was waving in my direction. Forest appeared to be injured; he was bent double, holding his calf and grimacing.
“What happened?” I cried.
“He lost his balance,” Mick said. “He wasn’t listening to me.”
“Don’t start,” Forest said.
I hurried over, my camera bouncing on my chest. Forest’s pant leg was stained crimson. He had left smudges on the rocks, marking his path in blood.
Mick and I organized ourselves into makeshift crutches, one on either side of him. With my arm around Forest’s waist, I could feel his thinness. He was a surfboard of a man. His ropy musculature flexed beneath my fingers. His ribs were iron bars. He limped and winced, and we steadied him all the way home.
Back at the cabin, Mick stitched him up. First a shot of anesthetic, then the needle and thread. I knew the drill now. It had been the same for me. Forest sat at the table, reading a book, leg extended, as Mick worked away with reading glasses perched on his nose. Forest turned a page. Mick sewed in silence. I could not tell if Forest was genuinely uninterested in the progress of his injury—so accustomed to wounds, to stitches and scars, that he could not be bothered to attend—or whether he was keeping his mind occupied out of a dislike of syringes and blood.
I myself felt oddly detached. The sight of that pulpy gash, the trickle of red—I found these things engaging, rather than upsetting. I was glad to see Forest injured. Hurt, not killed. Already beginning to heal. He’d been dinged—Mick’s phrase. The islands were dangerous, but they did not have to be deadly.
At last Mick leaned forward and severed the thread with his teeth.
“Done.”
“Thanks,” Forest said.
He glanced down at his wound. He flexed his ankle, teeth bared in discomfort.
This is how we know we’re alive, I guess: we continue to feel pain.
16
YOUR DEATH MADE me into a nature photographer.
I was always going to be an artist. There was never any question about that. I need to take pictures of the world around me the way a whale needs to come up for air. For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by beauty. I am talented; I don’t mind saying it. Photography was a given. Nature was the wild card.
If I were a different sort of person, I could have made my bones on babies and anniversaries. I could have been a wedding photographer or a portraitist. I would have been happy enough. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all. The camera is nothing more than an eye that records what it sees. I could have found beauty in an ordinary life. I could have settled down. I could have had stillness and permanence. I could have mined art out of the raw ore of the visible realm.
But you died. That changed everything. Your death sent me skimming over the planet like a rock across a pond. A nomad. A lost soul.
For most of my life, I have been interested in the journey, rather than any particular destination. I never cared where I ended up as long as it was somewhere new. I like feeling rootless. I like airplanes and buses. I like waking up without being certain where I am. I like owning next to nothing. Six cameras (now five). A light meter. A tripod. A changing bag. A couple pairs of jeans. Nothing more.
I have enjoyed what travel does to my mind, too. My mental baggage is as spare and well-organized as my suitcase. I don’t have romantic relationships, only brief, incandescent trysts. I don’t have friends, only coworkers. Every new connection has come with a built-in expiration date. This is fine with me.
After all, I have you. You know me better than anyone else ever could. While you were alive, I loved you as passionately as a daughter can love a mother. Ever since your death, I have written to you ceaselessly. I have told you everything. I have left nothing out. I have had no desire to bond with the people around me—braving those awkward getting-to-know you sessions, figuring out the equilibrium of the relationship, calibrating the level of intelligence and compassion on both sides, stumbling toward shared experiences, whispering secrets, getting attached. I have never had to bother with all that. Not when I could write to you instead.
Your death taught me what happens after love. I have no interest in reencountering that depth of loss.
So I have moved and moved again. I have moved here.
I FOUND MYSELF considering this matter today during a conversation with Mick.
I had planned to lounge around the cabin, reading and napping at intervals. Sleep and I are renewing our relationship with open arms. Any horizontal surface seems to whisper to me, enticing me to lie down and rest for a minute, or maybe an hour. Time is still fluid for me, hard to keep track of, but it is getting better, clearer.
Mick, however, had plans. I was stretched out on the couch, book in lap, when he approached. I was feeling a bit nauseous, probably due to the food. As usual, we had been noshing on snacks of dubious origin and date. The previous night’s dinner had been canned chickpeas and Spam, with canned mushrooms thrown in for good measure. The radiators were clanking, warming my toes. Dust motes twirled on the air. Somewhere nearby a mouse was gnawing and scratching inside the wall. Mick asked me to accompany him with all the chivalry of a swain requesting a place on his lady love’s dance card. I sat up, brushing the hair out of my eyes.
“Yes, please,” I said.
He kicked at the carpet. “If I don’t get out of this cabin, I’m going to go stark raving mad. Everyone is working. There’s a hole in the rowboat. A catastrophe. Galen and Forest are out there fixing it. They’ve got Charlene with them. And Lucy—she’s busy. You’ve got to come with me. It’s got to be you.”
I held up a hand.
“Stop trying to convince me,” I said. “You’ve already made the sale.”
An hour later, I was shivering beneath my coat. The Janus trolled over waves the size and shape of desert dunes. The roll and plunge, the tug of the current, seemed to be doing some damage to my equilibrium. I gripped the bulwark so I would not fall over. Mick was oblivious. A little distance from the cabin had worked like a tonic on his mood. We were heading toward Asia, leaving the archipelago in our wake. The line of islets had become tiny once more. It was disconcerting. For the past few months, those shorelines had encompassed what felt like the w
hole world, the borders of the knowable universe. From this vantage point, however, the islands looked scrawny, insubstantial, like a row of rubber ducks in a bathtub.
“Sit by me,” Mick shouted. He was settled at the rudder, steering with a practiced hand. I staggered over and collapsed on the bench. I wished I had thought to bring a hat. A warm stocking cap would have helped ward off the chill.
“I don’t see any whales,” I said.
“They’ll be by,” he said serenely. Then he did a double-take, his eyes narrowing. He looked me over, head to toe.
“What?” I said.
“Mel,” he said slowly. “You didn’t bring your camera.”
I groped for the strap that I habitually wore around my neck like a favorite locket. I had transported six cameras to the Farallon Islands in all. One had perished, of course. Dead and gone and buried. During any given week, I would rotate through the five that remained, depending on my mood, depending on the circumstances. Jewel, for instance, was a large-format camera. To use it, I had to first lug massive, heavy equipment over the rocks—my tripod, my light-tight film boxes, my changing bag, my light meter. Each shot required preparation. I would duck under the dark cloak. The rest of the world would fall away, sounds muffled, erased by the cloth. I would breathe in the musty air. For a moment, only the image and I would exist—a glimmering rectangle, the horizon flipped upside down, a meditation on vision and light. I would never have brought Jewel onto one of the boats. Normally I would have taken one of my digital SLR cameras along—Gremlin or Fish Face. But none of these precious instruments was with me now.
“It’s like you’re missing an arm,” Mick said.
“I feel naked,” I cried.
He snickered. “Plus, you might get in trouble. I assume somebody’s paying you to be here. They’ll be mad that you missed the whales.”
He pivoted the wheel, and we swung to the left, my stomach lurching. Then he frowned, his brow knotted. I watched what seemed to be a ponderous internal conversation going on in his brain.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“You’ve never asked me that before,” I said. “Nobody has, actually. Except Galen.”
“I’m asking you now,” Mick said.
His tone was aggressive, almost suspicious. I looked at him in surprise.
“Fine,” I said. “The way it usually works is that I get an assignment. I’ll be sent to a specific place to get specific images. I’ve traveled all over—the mountains, the arctic, the desert. But this time it was my choice. I wanted to come here. Nobody asked me to. I made it happen myself.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
“I applied for a grant to do a personal project,” I said. “The islands aren’t that expensive. One of the cheapest places I’ve ever stayed. I’ll have to coast on my savings for some of it. There’s a gallery in D.C. where I’ll be able to show my photos when I’m done. I’ll make the circuit of the usual arts-and-crafts fairs, too. I might even be able to get a book together. I was lucky. I rarely get to stay anywhere this long.”
“Bird lice. No hot water. Spam. Lucky mouse girl!”
“This is the beat I wanted,” I said, staring at the waves.
Mick nodded. I fell silent. There was more I wanted to say, but I found that I could not quite explain.
Over a year ago, I had first glimpsed an image of the archipelago. On a lazy afternoon, I had stumbled onto a snapshot—and that was all it took. Saddle Rock, silhouetted against the sea. White spray breaking on the cliffs. Islets of bare stone, like the skeleton of some massive sea creature, long extinct. I had gazed at that image, stunned and enthralled. It might have been a photograph of loneliness. The Islands of the Dead—they had taken my breath away.
For the first time, I had been pulled to somewhere. In the past, I had craved motion for its own sake. To go from. To go elsewhere, anywhere, away. But the call of the islands had been unmistakable. It was magnetic. It was gravitational.
I could not say these things to Mick. In truth, I did not understand it myself. I had to come here. It was that simple. It never felt like a desire or a wish; it was a requirement, a command. I’d begun to do research, and everything I had learned only made me want it more. Mist without end. Blood in the water. Tetchy biologists. A hundred thousand mice. Sea lions birthing their pups on the granite. Storms like the judgment of a vengeful deity. Shark Season. Boats that had to be lowered into the sea by crane. Mysterious deaths. A lighthouse beacon crying out to an empty ocean. I wanted it all. I was a woman possessed. I was falling in love.
The archipelago was the answer to a question I had not realized I was asking. It was the home I had not known I was looking for, all along.
Now I sighed, remembering how hard I had fought to come here. I had written dozens of letters detailing my love of nature, my résumé, my awareness of how to conduct myself in a marine sanctuary. The biologists who lived on the Farallon Islands had their room and board provided for, as well as their equipment. Nothing more. They took their payment in life experiences and earned no salary. But even their meager government stipend, which kept the cabin’s electricity on and paid Captain Joe’s fare, did not extend to me. As a photographer, I was not eligible to take part. The powers that be—which I now knew to be Galen—had looked askance at my desire to live among these scientists, interfering with their righteous labor.
So I had pleaded. I had cajoled. Into each envelope, I had stuffed dozens of my photographs—rainforest trees, rare animals, polar ice caps, anything that might help my case. I had explained that I was hoping to document, to observe—not to touch or interfere. Photography, like biology, was fundamentally passive. I had filled out so many forms that I could have papered the walls of my father’s house with them. I had done everything but fall to my knees and beg.
At last, after nearly six months, a letter had come in the mail, as lovely as a summer air. It was decorated with Galen’s signature. Your application for residency is approved. I look forward to meeting you in person.
“There’s a market for this kind of work right now,” I said. “Endangered species. Vanishing places.”
“Poof,” Mick said, waving a hand at the islands.
“Global warming,” I said. “Climate change. If the ocean rises by about half an inch, they’ll be gone.”
He nodded. “If it’s too late to save them, we might as well get a few photos of them. You’re a witness to the end of days.”
I leaned back against the railing.
“I showed you mine,” I said. “Now show me yours. Why did you come here?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. His expression was a closed door.
There was a pause, the boat rising and dipping on the waves. Mick stroked his nose thoughtfully. I found myself admiring anew his thatch of bristling hair, the curved brow, the strong bones of his jaw. He was, without question, a fine specimen of humanity. I could see this now without feeling the smallest inkling of desire for him. The timeline of my life was divided into two distinct periods: Before Andrew and After Andrew. Before Andrew, I had nursed a crush on Mick. After Andrew, everything was different.
Without warning, Mick punched me in the shoulder.
“Ho!” he cried.
Rubbing my arm, I pivoted in my seat.
At first I thought it was not a whale at all. It was gray and slimy, the size of a dinghy. It was floating on the surface. We were far enough away that it did not seem to pose an immediate threat. Its hide was disfigured by scars and bulges, warty lumps of barnacles. For a minute or two, I thought it was dead—a dead elephant, drifting over from Asia on some strange current—but then it reared. The tail came out of the sea, a cleft fly swatter. A wash of droplets fell like rain. The beast exhaled. An orifice in its back opened, coughing steam. The wind carried the cloud toward us. I can honestly say that I have never smelled anything so foul. A row of Porta-Potties standing in the hot sun wou
ld not have come close. I clapped a hand over my nose.
Mick chuckled. “What did Queen Victoria say? ‘We are not amused’?”
And then the sea was filled with them. In every direction, gray bodies appeared, thrusting upward, burst after burst of spray. The entire pod seemed to come up for breath at the same time. They penetrated the surface any old way, upside down, sideways. Massive fins swiveled. Tails poked upward and sank into the ocean again. For an instant, I wondered if I was dreaming. I had been here before, lost at sea, surrounded by animals the size of houses. Their bellies were scored with deep grooves, ridged like the roof of a mouth. Unlike sharks, they had no dorsal fins, which made it hard to tell which end was up. Their faces were oddly expressionless. No nostrils. No ears. Tiny eyes. Some of the whales were an acceptable size—they might have been the juveniles—while others appeared too huge to be real.
As they rose and sank, they disarranged the organized flow of waves. The humpbacks rolled in the surf, and the boat sloshed back and forth. Everywhere I looked, there was a nose, a blowhole, a rim of tail. The animals had skin that was topographical—scarred, seamed, patched with rocky barnacles. The overall impression was one of a new archipelago in the process of forming.
Mick began to lecture me. This was not unexpected. Over the past months, I had been lectured by everyone; they couldn’t help themselves. Diet. Mating habits. Anatomy. Mick was nicer about it than Lucy usually was. He did not make me feel ignorant. I was ignorant, of course. But Mick had a way of explaining things as though he was just thinking out loud.
He told me that the humpbacks had the most complex and beautiful songs of all cetaceans. He told me that they named their children, addressing each calf with a specific chord progression. I was scarcely able to listen. So much was happening. A whale yawned—our entire boat could have fit inside that maw—and I saw the bony struts of baleen. It coughed a wet spume, which climbed against the sky. Ten feet high. Twelve feet. Mick told me that the pod navigated hundreds of miles of open sea. Yet the whales did not use sonar, and they did not use the position of the sun—not exclusively, anyway. The earth’s magnetic field might have had something to do with it. No one knew exactly how they managed to find their way without landmarks, without any visible oceanic bottom, just the wide, blank blue.
