by Lee Welles
Miho rolled onto another hot, wet tongue! Thousands of gallons of water rolled in with her and for a moment she was trapped in a spinning, swirling whirlpool. But as before, the enormous tongue began to lift and press forward. Miho, understanding what was happening, grasped tightly to the baleen and waited for the water to get pushed out.
She dropped back onto the tongue. She sensed the immensity of the creature and a feeling like, “Welcome.” She had no idea if this great being would understand her or not, but, in her heart and mind, she bowed in respect and said, “Ohayo, most honorable whale.”
With her greeting, Miho felt the snout tip up and the quick rise to the surface pressed her down into the fleshy tongue. She felt the huge body bend and roll and all around her the great “PPPPPOOOOOOOSSHHHH-WHAAAAAAAAAAHHHH” signaled the whale’s arrival on the surface. The lips parted and Miho was first pushed back by the incoming water, but then swept out into the warm, turquoise sea. Gaia was waiting for her.
41
Crushing Cold
Miho’s heart was beating triple time! She wasn’t completely sure what had just happened. She looked around and found that she was still in open water, no land in sight. She was still next to a great humpback whale, one whose laughing eye was inches from her own and Gaia was there too, laughing. “You did it! I knew you could!” Her round, sea otter face was alive with joy.
“Gaia, what happened? And how can you be here? You were there! I think it was a long ways back. It felt like a long way.” Miho paused to catch her breath. “What happened?”
“Grab on and I will explain,” Gaia said, and paddled over close to the whale. As the first whale had, the great, grey creature rolled on its side and lifted its long pectoral fin from the ocean. Miho grabbed on and was hoisted onto the broad belly of the humpback. This whale too, caught the breeze with its fin. Miho leaned back and told her heart to slow down. Gaia began to walk and talk in her weird otter way.
“You, my dear, just rode a wave halfway across the big sea, I believe you call it Pa-ci-fic. Yes?”
“Hai,Yes. It’s called the Pacific, but that was no wave! What was that? Where are we? How are you here too?” Miho couldn’t help it. The questions were piled up so thick that some spilled out. She needed to know.
“I am here because I am the whole of the earth. I am everywhere because I am everything. But enough about me. You, my friend, just rode a whale’s call. A sound is a wave as much as a wave on a beach is a wave. You surfed this one marvelously!”
“I…” Miho wanted to ask another question; but now the questions faded, all dried up on her tongue. She was sitting on yet another whale, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, maybe a thousand miles from Goza, talking to an otter. There probably were not enough answers to explain all this. Miho decided a practical question was best. “Where am I going next? And, am I going on a whale’s ping?”
“Smart girl! Yes. Your next stop is quite cold. I don’t want you to be frightened by that. You will be fine.”
“Will you be there?”
“No. I must go on ahead. There is something I must attend to in New York. I will see you there. This is your first mission. Do not worry; you have friends to help you get there.”
“But Gaia! How…” Miho’s question didn’t have a chance to come out because the humpback whale rolled and dumped them both into the water. When Miho came up for air, Gaia was again…gone.
Miho gritted her back teeth together. This was all very confusing, and she had no idea what was really happening. It was like…well, it was like Shodo. No one could really tell you how to do it. You just had to do it. She waited for the whale to dive, presumably to find the ‘talking lines,’ as Gaia called them. She treaded water and watched as a large albatross flapped in its big, lazy way across the horizon.
She wondered how far away New York was and how many whales it would take to get there. She had never been to New York, but knew that not a heck of a lot of it bordered the ocean. She wondered if she would end up at the Statue of Liberty or maybe out on Long Island somewhere. She tried not to think about the thousand and one reasons Gaia might want her in New York.
When the great humpback resurfaced and parted its lips, Miho didn’t hesitate; she swam in past the baleen and turned to face forward. The bright day closed down as the whale closed its mouth. She clung to the hard bristles as the water around her rushed out and then felt her stomach flip as the steep dive began.
Miho sat on the hot cushion of the whale’s tongue and thought about where her next stop might be. Gaia said it would be cold. She thought about the map of the world in her Social Studies book.
If she were going to New York, she would have to get around South America to reach other side of North America! She must be heading south, into Antarctic waters. Miho hadn’t been there, but her parents had. Many whales—blues and seis, right whales and bowheads, fin whales and even the smaller minkes—went there to feed on huge swarms of krill. She pressed her body closer to the warm tongue and tried not to think about what her mother had called, “crushing cold.”
She felt the humpback whale level off and began to sense the same buildup as before. She took a deep breath and waited for the ping. The big sound began to swirl around her. She saw the waving blue lines and grabbed on. As soon as she did, the whale parted its lips and she shot off into the blue!
She gripped the sound wave close to her heart and squeezed her eyes shut. Not that it made much difference at this depth. Gaia was right: the world of water was mostly black. No wonder listening was so important! Again, the ride was so fast that she could barely scan what was around her.
She began to send a constant scan to the ocean floor. It was amazing to “see” all the hills and valleys, just like on land. Some of the chasms she flew over would put the Grand Canyon to shame. The mountains too, were mind-boggling in their scale.
Miho got hints of the life thriving in this hidden world. As she raced through the sea at the speed of sound, she got glimpses of clusters of living things. Sometimes they were bunched around what seemed to be plumes of smoke. Miho hoped someday Gaia would take her that deep.
Once, she passed over the shape of a fallen whale—mostly bones, but still teeming with life. Miho stopped scanning and thought back to when Gaia said that every day some things live and some things die. The day that whale died, a thousand other things found a source of life.
Miho gripped her blue ping wave tighter and let herself think about her mother and father. They were dead. But, because they were, she had gone to Japan, to Goza. She had met Gaia. Maybe because of all this, more beings would live.
She imagined that if she could use what Gaia had given her to tell everyone the real world of dolphins, no one would want to hurt them. She imagined if Ojisan could make people want to buy air freshener, maybe he would know how to tell them about the huge eyes and heart and love that whales possess.
Miho tightened her grip as she felt the ping hit a seamount and begin to rise up. She opened her eyes—the black was becoming a lesser black. She smiled, as best she could in the crazy speed of the ping, thinking of her Shodo ink washing down the drain. The lesser black turned to gray and the gray turned to a thinner gray and then she hit a whale!
This whale didn’t open its mouth to let Miho roll onto its soft tongue. She banged up against the whiskered face so hard it felt like the time she had fallen from the crow’s nest on Mr. Hernandez’s research boat. Miho had been horsing around and lost her footing. Landing on the deck had driven all the air from her body and made her see stars. All the grownups agreed it was a miracle that none of her bones had been broken.
Miho lost her breath this time too. But after her massive exhale, she inhaled a thousand knives! The intensely cold water hit her lungs and seemed to steal all sense from her. The whale, mercifully, opened its mouth and let her roll in with the frigid seawater.
Miho gagged and gasped as the whale tongue pushed the water out through the baleen. This wasn’t the same kind of m
outh as the humpbacks. This mouth was much longer and narrower. Miho thought it could be a fin whale…maybe even a rare blue whale!
Part of her wished she could be outside to see. The more sensible part was grateful to be in the hot, mammalian mouth instead of out there in the icy waters. She continued to cough, ejecting the last of the salt water from her lungs. She felt the whale begin to rise.
She lay flat on its tongue, knowing the whale would have to breathe before sending her onward. Northward? She patted the tongue a few times, wondering if this massive creature could feel this gesture. She rolled onto her back and called up toward the hairy, baleen-fringed roof of the mouth, “Domo arigato. Thank you.”
Miho waited. And waited. She began to feel sleepy. It had been a very long and crazy day. She had just begun to nod off when her whole body lifted off the cozy, warm tongue. The huge whale began its deep descent. Miho was quickly alert and prepared herself for yet another ‘ping ride.’
This time, as she shot off into the black, the shock of the cold almost made her let go of the sound wave. She squeezed the wave tighter and squeezed her eyes closed against the tremendous speed. This time, she didn’t try to scan; she simply rode.
Minutes passed as she streaked northward. Miho could feel the water become noticeably warmer. How many more whales would it take to get her to New York? And then what? Was she supposed to swim to shore and ask for Gaia? She clenched her jaw, still frustrated with the lingering questions of this mission.
The ping wave bounced a bit against the layers of warm and cold, but Miho now expected that and didn’t worry too much about the bumps and jolts. The wave hit the rise of yet another seamount, and she began to anticipate hitting yet another whale snout.
But as the ping-wave crested the seamount, she encountered something other than a whale.
42
Gaia Chica
As the sound wave crested the ridge of the seamount, it began to lose its structure! The water was in turmoil and there was no greeting whale. Instead, the water was full of debris: bits of coral, bits of fish, bits of the seamount’s very earth! It all spun and churned and filled the water with a great confusion.
The ping-wave that Miho had been clinging to disintegrated into whorls of muck-filled water. Her ears filled up with dreadful clanging, dragging sounds! She tried to send out a scanning sonar, but couldn’t overcome the hideous scraping that filled the sea with both the sounds and sights of utter destruction.
Miho was adrift, spinning free at a depth that would be unsafe to free dive to. She let loose a few bubbles of air to know which way was up. Looking skyward, she saw a pinprick of light blue. There waited her life-giving air. Her panicked heartbeat thrummed the question, Can I get there? She began to kick. I may have enough, I could have enough air...but...Oh! The, what are they called? The bends!
Anyone who ever donned a mask, snorkel, or scuba tank had to know about the bends. When one rose too fast, the life-giving air bubbles in the bloodstream would expand—just as a bubble blown underwater did. But the air bubbles that traveled veins and arteries could get too big, too fast. The bends could twist you into knots of agony—the bends could kill you!
Miho didn’t have a choice. She had no scuba tank and therefore couldn’t pause in her ascent. If she had a scuba tank, she could stop and wait for her body to adjust to the releasing of pressure from the deep. But she had to breathe—just like a dolphin, just like a whale.
Miho kicked hard for the surface. Gaia had gifted her the ability to scan with sonar, talk to dolphins and ride the ping-waves. She hoped against hope that another gift from Gaia would now allow her to surface without being twisted into a thousand painful knots.
The circle of light above her grew and the water around her began to dance with spinning strands of sunlight. She released the last of her air and burst to the surface. Miho turned her face to the hazy sky above, treading water, and waiting for the twisting pains of the dreaded bends. But the bends didn’t come. Miho laughed a laugh that came from the deepest place in her body—the place the bends would have pretzeled and crushed had Gaia not given her yet another power to take into the water!
Still smiling, she looked around. Chugging away from her was some kind of fishing vessel, surrounded by a cloud of screeching gulls. Miho hoped they couldn’t see her. Then hoped they could. Then hoped they couldn’t.
She twirled her arms and legs in the green-gray sea. The surface was choppy and the sun pounded down. Miho was glad she was in the water, because the heat of the day was intense. Not knowing what else to do, she kicked back and lay prone, ears underwater and eyes to the sky.
Did Gaia know that the last ping-wave would be disrupted by whatever created that man-made mayhem? Did Gaia know that she was adrift in what was surely the open water of the Atlantic Ocean?
“At-lan-tic,” Miho whispered, imagining how Gaia might say it. The Atlantic, after all, was part of Gaia and that word, Atlantic, was just the human way of describing the place. “At-lan-tic,” Miho whispered again.
She closed her eyes against the bright sun. She could hear her own blood squooshing through her ears with a rhythmic, “shooosh, shooosh, shooosh.” She focused on that sound, her circulation, the fluid movement that was her life force.
The oceans and the rivers and the rain were like Gaia’s blood. Miho listened to the rhythm of her own blood in her ears and imagined that each “shooosh” she heard was her brush making one stroke of the kanji for satoru satori—understanding.
She floated, the sound of her heartbeat making Shodo in the sea. Maybe she slept. Maybe not. Her body felt light. “Shooosh, shooosh” went the sound of her blood. Perhaps she slept. Perhaps not.
“Hola, Gaia Chica!” A girl’s voice and bird-like twitter of laughter startled Miho. She sat up and started to tread water. Except, she was no longer in the water!
Miho’s arms and legs twirled like egg-beaters in a cold gray-white thickness that she didn’t understand. It was like the thickest fog she ever saw. But it wasn’t fog! “Where am I?” Miho called into the bleakness. “Gaia? No… You’re not Gaia! Who are you?”
Miho hoped her voice didn’t show the fear beginning to grip her belly. A dolphin would know, but that voice didn’t come from a dolphin. That voice had said, “Hola,” just like Mr. Hernandez!
As she waited for an answer, a deep boom echoed around her. It was almost like a whale’s call, except a wild, white light chased the sound through the gray.
“Relaje, Gaia Chica,” a girl’s voice said. The high-pitched chirping voice surrounded Miho.
“Wakarimasen,” Miho called into the gloom. And then she realized her linguistic mistake. Miho scrambled through her mind for the long-unused Spanish words she knew. She dug deep into her memory. She flipped through all the warm, happy days in Baja.
“Yo no entiendo,” Miho said, hoping her Spanish for “I don’t understand,” was as decent as her Japanese.
The girl’s voice swirled around her in tight, practiced English, “Gaia tell me, tell you—this my mission, take you to your mission!”
“Your mission is to take me to my mission?” Miho hoped her voice was able to penetrate the cold, thin grayness. She hoped her voice wasn’t shaking.
“Si,” the voice answered. Miho knew this was Spanish for ‘yes.’ “Sea valiente-Be brave, Gaia-chica.”
Miho’s quick mind had already made the translation of “Be brave, Gaia Girl.” She thought, I’ve lost my parents, been sent to Japan, been lost in the ocean, seen my friends skewered and hauled from the sea! I have kimo! Miho was grateful for the reminder.
The chirping, happy voice said, in English, “Rain falls down.” Whoever, or whatever, had held Miho up, let go! Miho began to fall! As the gray around her began to thin, she realized she was falling from the sky! Her arms wanted to pinwheel, to grab onto something, but she couldn’t feel her arms!
Streaking toward the green earth below was as exhilarating as zipping through the ocean, but it was more terrifying! Mih
o was completely powerless; gravity had all the control. She wanted to yell. But what could she yell? She wanted to close her eyes, but a morbid curiosity wanted to see where she would land and what it would look like when she did.
Because she was curious, she found the guts, kimo, to look around a moment. All around, fat raindrops fell with her. A flash streaked around her. The flash lit each and every drop with a hot white light. It was like a wave-wish magnified a thousand times!
I’m raining—I’m water and I’m raining down! When the next flash of lightning coursed around her, she wished, Please, let me land in one piece!
Miho looked down. A thin, brown squiggle could be seen, winding its way through puffs of green trees and squares of light and dark green fields. Miho knew from all her years of looking at maps that the squiggle must be a creek or river.
She wished desperately for the comfort of a whale-ping to hold onto! But there was no whale-ping to hold, to trust, just the memory of a high, bird-like voice telling her to, “Be brave.” The squiggly line of the creek grew bigger and bigger. The creek was rushing up to meet her! Miho squeezed her eyes shut.
43
Be Brave
SPLASH! The sound of her landing was so loud that it seemed to fill every pore of her being! The fresh water was a startling slap after so many days spent in the sea. When Miho surfaced, she realized she was moving at great speed.
She barely had time to look around at the mist-coated tall hills. This rich, green place was swollen with rain and alive in a way that almost sang. The leaves that dangled out over the creek winked at her from their rain droplets. Miho imagined that each droplet whispered, “Be brave. Be brave.”
