My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  WHEN WOULD KEIKO BE READY to take the next step toward freedom? Criteria had been set up, benchmarks had been established: Was he eating live fish? Could he swim great distances? Could he hold his breath underwater for a long time? But still, right-minded people could disagree. In fact, right-minded people could even litigate, as the Oregon Coast Aquarium did in 1997, to prevent the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation from moving the whale to Iceland, where he would be decanted into the actual ocean, into an open-water pen in Heimaey Harbor. The aquarium’s position was that Keiko was not ready to leave; the foundation’s position was that 1) Keiko was indeed ready to leave, and 2) he belonged to the foundation, not the aquarium. Relations grew ugly, then hideous. In early October 1997, the board members of the aquarium requested an independent evaluation of Keiko’s health. A few days later, the Oregon Veterinary Medical Examining Board announced that it would investigate Keiko’s care and the legality of his custody arrangements. There was talk in the Free Willy camp of moving Keiko to a pen in Oregon’s Depoe Bay. Finally, a blue-ribbon panel of experts was formed to analyze Keiko’s well-being and determine his fitness for release. To the dismay of the Oregon Coast Aquarium, the run of million-visitor years would soon be over: The panel announced that Keiko was ready and able to go.

  Even then, there were skeptics who believed that the effort to free Keiko was doomed. Some of those skeptics also happened to be employed by Sea World, which had been picketed to free their own orcas in the wake of Free Willy: They warned that the poor whale would get frostbite if he was exiled to dark, cold, miserable Iceland—this in spite of the fact that Keiko was born in Iceland and that killer whales teemed in the waters offshore. But even among whale people—free-whale people, that is—there was doubt. Keiko, they argued, was already ruined. It was too late to teach him what a wild whale needs to know, and he repeatedly demonstrated an alarming preference for frozen fish over fresh, suggesting that his tastes had become completely corrupted by two decades in a fishbowl. What’s more, there was a conspiracy theory circulating in the most radical anticaptivity ranks that Sea World might actually be behind the free-Keiko efforts, knowing that they would fail, thus inoculating amusement parks around the world from an upwelling of liberationist sentiment.

  Skepticism was not the only impediment to moving Keiko to his ancestral home. Consider this: Icelandic fishermen view whales as annoying and gluttonous—blubbery fish grinders that consume commercial product by the ton. The government has asked the International Whaling Commission to allow regulated whaling again, and Iceland recently accepted the first shipment of Norwegian whale meat in fourteen years. Now imagine that you are David Phillips of Earth Island Institute, and you represent a telecommunications billionaire, the Humane Society, and Ocean Futures, an environmental group founded by Jean-Michel Cousteau, and you are approaching various Icelandic ministries for permits to construct a million-dollar pen in the harbor; organize a fleet of boats, helicopters, and airplanes; and muster a crew of scientists, veterinarians, and animal trainers for the nurture and eventual discharge of one Keiko, aka Willy, a whale. Furthermore, the affront of having a whale so coddled in Icelandic waters would not even be offset by the comfort of cold cash, since Keiko would not be on display. There would be no Icelandair travel packages to visit Keiko—he would be living in a pen in the harbor, accessible only by boat, and he would be slowly weaned from human contact to ready him for life among his brethren. “The opposition from the Ministry of Fisheries was fierce,” Phillips said. “This was antithetical to everything they do. There is very little by way of whale conservation awareness in Iceland and a lot of hostility toward anything coming from the United States. So we started looking at other locations, in Ireland and in England, too. But Iceland was Keiko’s home waters and really the best place for him, and after a long series of complexities, we finally got it approved.”

  So now there was another flight to pay for (three hundred and seventy thousand dollars), another pen to build (a million dollars), a staff to recruit and equip and pay. The annual costs of the project in Iceland were estimated at three million dollars; if Keiko never learned to live on his own, the foundation could conceivably be looking after him for thirty more years, at a cost of ninety million dollars. “Along the way, this had become a different kind of project,” Bob Ratliffe, of the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation, explained. “It was involving planes and helicopters and big boats and major expenses.” But, Ratliffe said, a commitment had been made to the creature, and there was a desire to do something people said couldn’t be done. The flight on an Air Force C-17 was booked, the gallons of diaper rash ointment to moisturize Keiko during the long flight procured, Familian Industrial Plastics contracted to build the new pen, the staff of fifteen lined up.

  By September 1998, it was all ready. The goodbyes were again tearful. Keikomania had rolled on, unabated, since the day the whale arrived in Newport, and two more Willy movies had come out, further inciting whale devotion—Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, and Free Willy 3: The Rescue—although these used computer-enhanced footage of wild whales and animatronic models rather than a real Willy.

  “I went to his tank and told him goodbye and good luck,” Ken Lytwyn, the Oregon Coast Aquarium mammalogist, recalled recently. “I would love to see the release work, but, because of who Keiko is, the kind of individual he is, I don’t think it will. I was really sad when they said he was going, but it wasn’t my call.”

  Ah, the Westman Islands! So raw, so rugged, ripped so recently from the earth’s dermis—in fact, the youngest landmass on the planet may be the little rock pile called Surtsey, the southernmost Westman in the chain, tossed up above sea level only thirteen years before Keiko’s mother conceived him. And as recently as 1973, a volcano erupted right in the middle of Heimaey, increasing the island’s landmass by twenty percent. To make a living, people in the Westmans fish and they fish and they fish, and a few of them service the small but steady tourist economy. Slogans range from the somewhat inexplicable “Westman Islands, Capri of the North” to the more explicable “Ten Million Puffins Can’t Be Wrong.” Everywhere you look, you see dozens of these stout, clownish black-and-white birds: nesting in lava outcroppings, teetering on cliffs, plopping like stones into the sea. Every August, the baby puffins sail out of their nests to make their first trip on the ocean and instead crash-land in town, seduced by the lights of human civilization. This magical visitation and potential avian catastrophe is known as pysjunaetur—the Night of the Pufflings—and children and visitors await it every summer, armed with cardboard boxes for the rescue effort, and, in the morning, they release the babies at the water’s edge. When full grown, puffins are enjoyed in the Westmans roasted, smoked, or sliced thin, like carpaccio.

  The whale was not unwelcome here when he arrived, in September 1998, even though you couldn’t see him unless you drove up to the ledge across the harbor and looked through a telescope that the foundation had installed; and even though not many local people got jobs; and even though the Keiko merchandise—the shot glasses and aprons and tea cozies decorated with his distinctive black-and-white face—wasn’t flying off the shelves in the souvenir shops. He was met with what was becoming the standard greeting in Keiko’s life—several hundred accredited representatives of the media and scores of ebullient schoolchildren, many of whom had first seen Free Willy when an Icelandic hot dog company gave the video away for free with a six-pack of franks. Everyone, certainly, liked Keiko, admired him for his gentle giantness, for being the good egg who tolerated being crated and shipped hither and thither, for suffering with a sort of martyred calm the strange, fickle circumstances of his life. If anyone thought that the money being spent on his rehabilitation was an insane extravagance, they didn’t blame it on the whale: It wasn’t his fault that he was captured to begin with and stuck in a lousy tub in Mexico. It wasn’t his fault that he became a ten-thousand-pound symbol of promises kept (or not) and dreams achieved (or not) and integrity maintained (or not) and nature
respected (or not). It also wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know how to blow a bubble-net and trap herring, and it wasn’t his fault that he’d been torn from the bosom of his family at such a young age that now he was a little afraid of wild whales and that they viewed him as a bit of a freak.

  Moving the Keiko project to Iceland wasn’t easy. The storms were endless—wild, white, end-of-the-world storms, with screaming winds and waves so high and stiff that they looked set with pomade. A walloping squall hit Heimaey just two weeks after Keiko arrived. The pen net, held in place with what the staff called “the big-ass chain”—each link weighed five hundred pounds—broke apart and had to be rebuilt and reanchored. Keiko’s living quarters were splendid, but everything had to be done by boat, since the land that formed the bay around him was a sheer ridge of petrified lava. A crust of grass grew on the lava, and every summer local farmers ferried their sheep out to spend the season grazing on the ridge. The staff agreed to restrain Keiko when the sheep were floated back and forth, since no one could guarantee that a killer whale wouldn’t have a taste for mutton. And throughout the next three years the caretaking staff turned over again and again, because it was lonely and cold in Iceland, even if you were crazy in love with your whale.

  Then the stock market deflated. This would not ordinarily be a matter of much concern to a whale, but Craig McCaw now wanted to pay more attention to his other undertakings—some land-based conservation efforts, some world peace initiatives with Nelson Mandela—and it just so happened that his company, Nextel, had seen its stock price fall from a high of more than eighty dollars a share to somewhere around ten. He wasn’t crying poorhouse, but the word went out at the end of 2001 that the three-million-dollar annual whale underwriting from the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation was finished.

  IT WAS SUCH AN IRONY, in a way—just as everything in Keiko’s life has been an irony—that the funding dried up just as the project was starting to accomplish what it had set out to do. In the summer of 2000, Keiko began taking supervised “walks” out of his pen into the ocean. At first, when he saw wild whales he did a spy hop to look at them and then swam back to the staff boat and followed it home. The next year, he dallied a little, and more than once he stayed with the wild whales when the staff boat sailed away. Meanwhile, the budget for the project was cut from more than three million dollars a year to six hundred thousand dollars, and the helicopter and pilot that McCaw had provided were furloughed, and the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation offices in Heimaey were consolidated into one drab waterfront space, a former grocery store (with, conveniently enough, a huge freezer for Keiko’s herring).

  Despite Keiko’s progress, though, there was no irrefutable evidence that he would ever leave his bay pen permanently. During the winter, when the wild whales were gone, he was back in his pen full-time, and he was the same tractable fellow as always, ready in a minute to put his big wet rubbery head in your lap. If he was getting an idea of what wildness was, he was still a bit of a baby, and certainly daintier than you might think a killer whale should be. Once, when the trainers instructed him to bring something up from the bottom of the bay, he presented them with a puffin feather when they were expecting something more like a boulder, and then he accidentally dropped it, dived back down, and brought up the same tiny feather. Another time, he came up with a little hermit crab that was blithely scurrying up and down the long row of his teeth, oblivious of the fact that it was inside the mouth of a killer whale. When seagulls stole his food, he got angry, but he usually just grabbed them, shook them a bit, and spat them out.

  Really, though, just how big a baby was he? There were plenty of people who wondered whether Keiko was being held back. “I worry about the trainers,” David Phillips said recently. “Just who is more dependent on whom?” It was a question not simply of Keiko’s providing jobs for people, but of the emotional attachment. One of his trainers carried pictures of Keiko rather than of her children in her wallet. And if Keiko didn’t leave—that is, if he didn’t join a whale pod, learn how to hunt, eschew the easy life of a kept man, a Hollywood retiree—he would have to be funded with new money from somewhere. Whoever contributed to the Keiko project now would have to do it knowing that he or she would probably be underwriting not a magnificent mammal’s colossal leap to freedom, but an ongoing day care program for an aging whale.

  Then, on July 7, he was gone like a shot. The trainers had led him out to the waters near Surtsey, where several pods of killer whales were rounding up a ration of herring, and Keiko headed over to them and didn’t turn back. Days went by, and he was still loitering with them. The project staff checked on him, noted that he was getting on nicely, and then slipped away without his noticing. More days went by. The summer was in full bloom. The sun hung in the sky until close to midnight; the ice creaked and melted; the sheep, now so heavy with wool that they looked like four-legged snowballs, clipped the grass down to the rock on the cliffs surrounding the empty bay pen. In late July, a huge storm muscled in on Heimaey, and for days it was too rough to send anyone out on the water. The satellite was still transmitting coordinates from Keiko’s radio tag, but there was no way to tell whether he was with other whales and eating or floundering around, lost.

  By the time I got to Heimaey, Keiko had been on his own for almost a month. I went down to the office the morning I arrived, during the three-hour window of the satellite feed. It is a large room across from the harbor, outfitted with a motley array of cast-off desks, boating magazines, foul-weather gear, and photographs of a loaf of bread that one of the staff members had baked in the still-warm crater of Heimaey’s volcano. A handful of people wandered in and out: Fernando Ugarte, a Mexican scientist with a master’s degree in the killer whales of Norway; John Valentine, an American whale-training consultant, in town from his home in Thailand; Colin Baird, a Canadian now running the Heimaey office; Michael Parks, a marine operations coordinator who is from Oklahoma but lives in Alaska; a Danish whale scientist; a sailor from Ireland; and three Icelandic staff members, one of whom was an awesomely musclebound former Mr. Iceland. Charles Vinick, the executive vice president of Ocean Futures, had flown in the day before from the group’s Paris office to organize the effort to figure out where Keiko had gone. Naomi Rose, a marine-mammal scientist with the Humane Society, had also just arrived on what had been planned as a trip to check Keiko’s physical fitness.

  “It looks like he’s spent all this time with wild whales,” Vinick said. “To me that’s, like, wow.”

  Michael Parks was plotting the satellite information on a marine chart. “He’s south today,” he said. “Jesus Christ, he’s here.” He was pointing to a spot southeast of Surtsey, several inches off the chart.

  “He’s making the decisions now. He’s in charge,” Vinick said. “He could be gone for good.” People drifted over to examine the chart. It looked as though Keiko were traveling sixty or seventy miles a day and was now too far away to reach by the project’s fast but open-deck workboat. It was decided that three people would take a sailboat in Keiko’s general direction. This would put them out of regular radio range, making it impossible to receive the updated satellite coordinates. But one of the staff people knew a company in Reykjavík that rented satellite telephones that would work at such distances and arranged to have one flown from Reykjavík to Heimaey—or conveyed by ferry, if fog, which rolled in regularly, kept the island airport closed. Then another group would carry the phone out to the sailboat on the little workboat. Vinick also wanted to hire a private plane to fly overhead, but none would be available for a couple of days. Once they sighted Keiko—if they sighted Keiko—they would either leave him alone, if he seemed to be eating and keeping company with other whales, or lure him back to the pen, if he seemed distressed or lonely or hungry. By the time all the arrangements were made, everyone seemed a little exhausted, as if they had laid out plans for an armed invasion.

  We took a boat out in the harbor to check on the pen. On the deck of the equipment shed was a dead
puffin, probably blown sideways by the storm. Inside the shed, someone had posted a list of possible new behaviors to teach Keiko that included “Pec slap and swim,” “Bubble-blow underwater,” and “Swallow Jim in one piece.” A crew of divers was scheduled to start cleaning the seaweed off the net in preparation for winter, although now it seemed like a bootless task, given that Keiko might never come back.

  But it was a good day, all things considered. The Humane Society had just revealed that it would take over managing and funding the project, and Craig McCaw’s ex-wife, Wendy, announced a grant of four hundred thousand dollars for Keiko. In the afternoon, the fog thinned, flights made their way to Heimaey, and the rented satellite phone arrived. As we loaded gear onto the workboat, a gray-faced local woman, bundled in a man’s overcoat and red galoshes, hollered from the dock, “How’s my Keiko? Is our star still out there?”

  CALL ME ONLY SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED. Who wouldn’t want to have seen the great black-and-white whale? Who wouldn’t want to scratch his tongue, look into that plum-size eye, take a turn around the bay pen on his back? All I saw of whales in Iceland were two humpbacks who dived a few feet from the workboat, flourishing their tails like ladies’ fans. Keiko was far away by then, headed for Norway, where he panhandled from picnicking families and romped in Skaalvik Fjord. What a choice! In the entire world, the only country that allows commercial whaling is Norway, and a member of Bergen’s Institute of Marine Research suggested that it was time to stop the madness and put Keiko to death. But the children who swam on his back and fed him fish reportedly found him delightful, as has everyone who has ever known Keiko. He played with them for a night and a day, the luckiest whale in the world, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.