Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank M Sheldon

CHAPTER 4

  Matthew leaned back against the seat as his old pickup bumped along the gravel road toward Bell’s legendary stronghold. A billowing cloud of dust floated up behind as if erasing his only way back.

  He had planned to stop off along the way to buy some wine, and then remembered the Bells’ reputations as gourmets. Anything he would pick would probably be a joke. Instead, he packed some salmon that a friend up north had smoked. Copper River, the best, so it should pass.

  A rare roll of thunder sounded in the distance reminding him that this had been the driest spring since record keeping began. Anomalies like this were becoming more common and if nothing changed—or changed soon enough—the day would come when Nature would snap everything to a balance as she had long before, and all would be swept away like the drift and trash from the beach.

  A rabbit suddenly ran into his path. He hit the brakes, and the small pickup skidded into a slide on the loose gravel. The truck was going into the ditch and heading straight toward a large cedar, when he let off the brake pedal, and swerved back onto the road. A half second longer, it would have been too late.

  Stupid! Why did he always do that?

  Heart pounding, he drove slowly, trying to calm down. A glint of water was now visible through the trees. Off to the west, the storm clouds still lingered as if waiting their chance. He reached a clearing and came to a stop. The dust that had been trailing along behind caught up and passed by him before slowly settling back to earth. He sat for a while and caught up with himself, gazing out across the Strait, where ocean waters dissolved into a dark sky.

  An ancient but shiny green pickup truck and Bell’s vintage Jaguar sedan were parked under a shed roof. Although it was not necessary, he pulled on the emergency brake. The report Bell had given him to read lay on the floor, and he gathered the pages back into the folder before getting out.

  The sound of his truck door slamming reverberated off the cliff face above and echoed across the water. Above, Doctor Bell’s sanctuary was perched on a bluff that rose almost vertically out of the sea and served as a fitting prelude to the soaring Olympics further south. The house had that rare quality of belonging where it was, enhancing the land and seascape rather than detracting from it. The path up followed a natural fault line in the cliff face. Bell was already coming down to meet him.

  “Welcome, Matthew. Come, I want to show you something before we go inside.”

  Bell led the way along a side path to a stone terrace built at the edge of the cliff. He grasped the railing of galvanized iron that ran around the edge in a semicircle, and leaned out into the soft updrafts. The view was a spectacular. Across the sea to the north, Canada seemed close enough to touch. The thunderheads looked as if they would pass them by this time.

  “Thirty years ago, when Margaret and I first found this land,” Bell said, “this terrace was our first piece of work. We lived out here in a collection of tents and trailers for close to three years, staying in town during the worst of the winter. The kids loved it.”

  They stood in silence, their gaze irresistibly drawn to the horizon.

  “None of them live anywhere near here, now. Agnes is somewhere off the coast of Madagascar, Colin’s in Prague. We just heard that Jonathan will be in Nepal for at least another year. Scattered over the shrinking earth. However Pen, our youngest, has come for a visit.”

  A voice was calling. Margaret Bell stood on the verandah, waving to her husband.

  “We’re coming!” Bell answered in an almost musical yell. He turned to Matthew as they walked along. “Never keep a woman waiting when the food is hot.”

  The walked to the house in silence, arrived at the front door. “Welcome to our home,” Bell said.

  Some might have called it a mansion, but it had a sprawling breeziness that gave no sense of pretense, only a comfortable graciousness. The smooth but unfinished woods that made up the trim and doors had been left to age and mellow into subtle shades of amber and gray. The walls were hand plastered, but not excessively rustic.

  Matthew was looking up at the hand-chamfered ceiling beams when Margaret Bell swept in. She was tall, with long flowing silver hair and the kind of beauty that never completely fades. She moved like a dancer, though Matthew guessed she was in her sixties.

  She came to rest in front of him as still as a windless night and took his hands. “Ah, Matthew, how good of you to come all the way out here to see us. I’ve heard so much of you over the last year from Martin that I feel I know you already. Do come along. Everything is on the table and waiting.”

  Surprising. Matthew had no idea that he occupied that much of Bell’s attention. If true, the relative ease with which he got his appointment today now made more sense.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing her the smoked salmon. “A friend prepares it himself, sends me some now and then. Copper River.”

  “Oh, thank you! As we’re having salmon tonight, I hope you don’t mind if I save it for another time?”

  “No. I mean, sure, it’ll keep. Sorry, I should have asked.”

  “Not at all. We absolutely adore smoked salmon.” She gazed at him with her pale blue eyes as if he was her favorite son, and it was hard to resist her graciousness. She led the way, gliding as if on wings.

  As he entered the dining room, a voice chimed from behind, “Looks like this glass of wine is just the right fit for your hand. Your lucky day.”

  Matthew turned to face a woman in her late twenties, who had come from nowhere or, more likely after he looked around, the alcove off the dining room. Her fierce yet friendly look temporarily stunned him.

  “Sure. Yes. I’m sorry, I was…I’m Matthew Amati. I’m studying marine science out at the Point.”

  “I know,” she finally said, after a long look and a glance down at the extra glass in her hand. “Do you want this? Or is wine too light for you?”

  “Ah,” Margaret said as she passed. “I see you’ve met our daughter, Penny. Please sit down. Dinner’s still hot, but won’t be much longer.”

  “Oh,” Matthew said. “Your father called you ‘Pen,’ so I just assumed you were…”

  “Male. Pen. Short for Penny, short for Penelope. All sorted out now?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t know what else to say and now could only stand before her unblinking gaze as if immobilized. To break the spell, he finally muttered, “I’m in a program at the Point with your father.”

  “I know. If you don’t drink…”

  “What?”

  Her eyes flickered down again toward the extra glass she was still holding.

  “Oh, the wine. Yes, of course.”

  “Then here,” she said, letting go almost before his hand could closed around the slender stem.

  He took his place at the table and just listened in silence to the table talk for a while as his embarrassment began to subside. The wine slid down effortlessly and that helped. The salmon, marinated in champagne and cherries from the Bells’ own trees and slices of key lime, was delicious. At first, he resisted looking at Penny, who was sitting at his side. When he did turn, he found her broad smile waiting. She looked relaxed, yet there was a hardness behind her green eyes that matched her lean body. Her straight hair was scorched the color of straw, which along with a freckled face and the random nicks on her hands and forearms, painted the picture of someone who spent much of their time outdoors.

  “To strange bedfellows,” Bell said, making a toast. “Odd, isn’t it? Here we have the fruit of the vine and the fruit of the sea. How did it work out that they would go together so well and form this perfect marriage now before us? God seems to have good—taste.”

  “You know,” Penny said to Matthew, “last week, I tried a varietal from eastern Washington that was as good as any, and this one may even be better.” She took a long sip and gave him an expectant look. “Yes?”

  “Well, I grew up more in the Kerouac tradition of wine appreciation,” Matthew said, “but this does go down easy. Are you in the marine science
s or—”

  “Yes, I can imagine it. ‘Hints of ethanol with a bold PVC finish.’ At least you still seem to have your eyesight.”

  “Ah…”

  “Ethology,” she answered. “Animal behavior. I like to watch.”

  She swirled the wine in the glass, her eyes steady yet obviously suppressing a laugh as she added, “Just a dumb joke that we hear too often. But endlessly amusing, our fellow animal travelers, aren’t they? Are you out in the field or stuck in the lab?”

  “I’m happiest when I’m out there.”

  “Here’s to ‘out there,’ then. No wonder Dad likes you.” She raised her glass and turned to her mother. “This salmon is amazing!”

  “I was happiest with the one you caught for your fifteenth birthday.”

  “Oh yes, the same day you caught me with Billy Canaan.”

  “Him!” Bell said. “A career rascal, if ever there was one. Came to a bad end, I’m sure. But taking up my former topic, from years ago as a young man, I still recall the astonishment I felt about the origin of wine. The selfsame yeast molds that convert the sugars of the grape to alcohol live on its skin. How convenient, how elegant.”

  “Also the yeasts that can turn it to vinegar,” Penny said. “Billy runs a winery now, Dad. Married with six kids and two mortgages. Saw him three summers ago in Mendocino.”

  “California,” Margaret Bell said without looking up. “Too easy. I’m looking into starting a vineyard here, by the way. No, it is possible with the right vines. Six kids? If he could get his grape yield on the sunny hills down there to match his own, he could pay off at least one mortgage, I should think.”

  The meal was by far Matthew’s best in years. He was not surprised, as Margaret Bell had long held a reputation as a master cook. Penny, however, was a surprise. In spite of her attitude—or maybe because of it—she had hit him where it really hurts.

  “More pie, Matthew?” Margaret Bell already had it heading toward his plate, so he acquiesced.

  “And some coffee to go with it, of course,” she added. “My after-dinner blend.”

  He looked out the window at the fading sunset and tried to remember the last time he had felt the warmth of a real home.

  Penny, her piercing gaze directly on Matthew, suddenly spoke. “Dad tells me you’ve seen a purple whale, Mr. Amati. That must have been a treat.”

  He glanced at her father who just said, “I fancied it might be good to have someone in on this who could provide us with an outside perspective and took the liberty of giving Penny a brief rundown. A fresh eye, yes? I hope you don’t mind, Matthew.”

  Bell got up. His wife began to clear the table and Matthew started to help.

  “Please, go ahead,” Margaret Bell said. “No arguments. I can take care of this in fifteen minutes, as most of the cooking pans are already washed.” She looked at Matthew. “You shouldn’t be on the road going home too late.”

  She left no possibility of a rebuttal. Matthew put down his dinner plate and trailed after the father and daughter through open double doors. Penny must have inherited her height and lankiness from her mother, as she was inches taller than her father.

  The room they entered was entirely paneled in knotty pine that had been left to age into a pale amber grayness while still retaining some of the warmth of the living wood. The room was an elongated octagon capped by a cathedral ceiling that peaked almost five meters above the floor. Bay windows looked along the coast on one end and into the woods behind the house on the other. The remaining walls had shelves carrying a multitude of books, photographs, and paraphernalia from Bell’s journeys across the seven seas. A sliding ladder gave access to the higher regions. It seemed no one had made an effort to achieve a look, but the room had the glow of a painting rich in detail and textures.

  “I’ve seen bears from this window,” Bell said, walking over to the bay on the forested side. “They rarely come down this far anymore, however, since the state put in the highway extension near Qiffe. The benefits of progress.”

  Bell had already moved to a comfortable wing chair, upholstered in faded green velvet. It faced a wide and equally comfortable, matching sofa. An old sea chest between them was strewn with scientific journals.

  “Please be seated,” he said. He glanced at the folder in Matthew’s hand. “Pen has already heard your story, in brief, from me, and she’s seen Harold’s report. What did you make of it?”

  Matthew thumbed through the folder again as if to glean some answer out of it by touch. “It doesn’t make sense, Doctor Bell. From the coordinates and time, the whale you mentioned today—Lefty—would certainly seem to have been in the grouping we saw from the Eva Shay. Our sighting did occur at the same time that Harold reported the garbled readings. But I don’t see how your tagged whale could have gone north that fast. That leaves instrument error of some kind as the most likely explanation, either the transceiver, the satellite, or the reception station at the Point. Most likely, the transceiver.”

  Matthew had been speaking directly to Bell and belatedly turned to Penny to keep her included in the conversation. She was already there, however, centered in the flow of words like a falcon in an updraft. The playful banter of just moments before had fallen away.

  “I’d like to hear more about just what you saw when they disappeared,” she said.

  “Your impressions,” Bell said. “Yes, please, just as you had them. Do not edit anything. No grade on this.”

  Matthew tried to smile, gave up and faced Penny again.

  “Well, as I told your father, we were pulling up on the whales to get a closer look. Suddenly, they all went under at the same time. I’ve seen something like this happen before, but never so quick and coordinated. It’s difficult to describe. I could swear that just for an instant, the water stopped moving. And then there was this peculiar turbulence like water suddenly rushing. It was enough to make the boat sway, but the movement wasn’t quite right…there may have been a flash, or I may have just…”

  Matthew looked up at the space between the ceiling rafters. He finally added, “It happened so fast.”

  Penny looked into his eyes, waiting.

  “There was something else.” The image from his long moment on the Eva Shay that now seemed so brief came back to him.

  “Just before they went under, I felt I was being watched…by the whale. She looked straight at me, her eye seemed to—”

  “You could you tell its sex?” Penny asked.

  “The female grays are substantially larger than the males. This one looked even bigger than usual to me.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was upset. It was almost like, you know, getting caught when you were kid. Red-handed.”

  “Getting caught at what?”

  “I don’t know, something you weren’t supposed to do. Or see. I only bring it up because you asked. It was just an instant, but it was so intense, yet somehow I couldn’t remember very well later. I still can’t.”

  The feeling had been clear last night, but he had lost it again. He shook his head and looked out the window into the darkness. If he were outside, he could probably still see in the late twilight, but now he could only see the moths on the other side of the glass attracted to the light of a false moon. Melancholy seeped into his chest like the last embers of a winter fire.

  “What about what you first saw?” Penny said, almost whispering. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, sorry. We were securing our gear. I looked out and saw this whale swimming near the front of the grays. These guys see whales all the time, you know, so they hardly look. But this whale was purple. Not all over. Piebald with splotches of a cold bright purple mixed in with the usual dark gray. Some highlights of magenta and pink. Ridiculous, I know, but that’s the way it was.”

  “You do see a slight pinkish color in ordinary dolphins sometimes,” Bell said. “It’s really blood vessels showing through white skin, especially on the underside. There was an albino dolphin in a lake in Louisiana once—c
ame in from an estuary—that was remarkably pink for the same reason. Extremely rare. I don’t know how it survived so long with poor eyesight, not to mention having no protection from the sun.”

  “This was much darker than that. At first I thought it was blood,” Matthew said. “A terrible accident of some kind.”

  “Not at all subtle, then,” Bell said.

  “More like a sore thumb, forty tons’ worth.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t blood?” Penny asked.

  “No, I’m not sure, but she showed no signs of distress and was covered head to flukes.”

  “A pigment mutation that extreme seems unlikely,” Penny said, “but I’m wondering if it could have been a partial albino with perhaps a fungus or algae adding the color.”

  “The Romans extracted a purple dye from a secretion of a certain mollusk,” Bell said. “Not that I see any way to connect that here.”

  Penny smiled. “Dad thinks out loud sometimes.”

  “True enough, and I’m known to meander far afield, but that’s how my best work always seems to get done.”

  “Well,” she said, “this may not be so far afield, but what about a nutritional disorder of some kind? Flamingoes are only pink because of what they pick up from the shells of the shrimp they eat, right?”

  “Yes,” Bell said, “the same as the pink dolphin.”

  “The one in the lake?”

  “No, these are the pink river dolphins found in Brazil. Where the Orinoco and the Amazon converge during the rainy season, the rivers overrun their banks and form an inland sea. It was eerie watching one swim through the flooded forests as if, after millions of years, she had decided to pay a visit to her former life on land.”

  Bell looked pensive. “They are pale pink, however. The shade is at best delicate. This doesn’t fit Matthew’s description of purple and magenta. Pen?”

  “There’s nothing in any files I could locate about a gray whale this color. We have a multitude of records of whale sightings over the last three hundred years. Many of the captains in the old whaling days kept detailed logs and would note anything unusual.”

  “Scammon noted an albino or two,” Bell said.

  “White, yes. Purple, no,” she said. “There are also the native American hunters who have had contact with these mammals for centuries. I did a search of a few databases this afternoon on all this. I should have included porpoises and dolphins, I guess, but for whales ‘purple’ didn’t come up at all.”

  “I figured that would be the case,” Matthew said. “It’s so hard to remember. I find myself forgetting it again quickly. Like a dream.”

  “You sound like you have doubts,” Penny said.

  “Of course I have doubts, who wouldn’t? But the captain of my fishing boat said it wasn’t a whale, period. He’s been out there over fifty years. I’ve never heard him say anything he didn’t mean.”

  “What did he mean, then?”

  “I don’t know. He never spoke of it again. Almost like it didn’t happen.”

  He looked at the father and daughter, who both sat as still as monks, and tried to cover a growing frustration with having to defend something he could not even adequately describe.

  “Listen,” he finally said. “Did you ever feel the hair on the back of you neck stand up? Straight up? When that whale looked at me, I was terrified. It felt like she looked into me, saw me, saw everything about me. I’ve never had anything remotely like that happen before. It affected everyone else on the boat as well. I don’t know why they can’t remember, but forgetting seems to be part of it. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m sure it did happen.”

  Penny and her father looked at each other for a long time.

  “We do believe you, Matthew,” Bell said, “and like you, we don’t understand the experience you had yet. However, there are a few new pieces to the puzzle, since I spoke to you this morning. Harold had a call from the Air Force. He had notified them of the anomaly we experienced with our tracking.” Bell glanced at Harold’s report on the sea chest that served as a coffee table. “His premise was that the Air Force might have been doing some tests that threw our signals out of kilter. He got a call back much faster than in the past, and they had endless questions, but no answers. Furthermore, they wanted all the recorded data we had on the incident.”

  “Why?”

  “I called Harold’s Air Force liaison myself. To say their interest was acute wouldn’t be an exaggeration. I never got anything like a definite statement that our anomaly had anything to do with their testing something, just a slew of official-speak about security and ‘it would be premature at this stage,’ and so on. I didn’t tell them about your sighting, since they didn’t ask.” Bell smiled at this. “After all, you were not working for the Point at the time, were you? They said they would get back to us soon, and I feel they will.”

  The phone rang.

  “I’m expecting a call from Andrew Thorssen on the Valentina. They were on the way to find Lefty, to verify the location to see if she had really changed position so abruptly. Excuse me.”

  He picked up the phone. “Yes. Put him through.” There was a pause and then, “Martin here, Andrew. Well and good enough. I’m going to put you on the speaker. Yes. Matthew Amati who I told you about earlier. Pen is here as well. That’s right, hold on.”

  Bell searched for and finally pushed the right button.

  “Go on, we’re all listening now.”

  “Glad you made it home, Penny.” The voice was low and resonant even over the phone. Matthew had never met the Captain, but had seen and heard him many times on the old documentaries of the voyages of the Valentina.

  “Thanks,” Penny answered. “We’re all ears, Andrew.”

  “We made contact just before dark. Didn’t have much light to get any visual. It’s Lefty, though.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No doubt.”

  Matthew looked at Penny, who looked at Bell. Her father nodded slowly and said, “Anything else?”

  “We were able to confirm the identity of some of the other grays before dark. Decided not to use lights. Didn’t want to disturb them. Still following their usual route to their Arctic feeding grounds. Some unusual behavior.”

  “Really?” Bell said, an anticipatory smile already on his lips.

  “A currently unrecognized member seems to be leading them in an extremely tight formation. Never come across this before.”

  “What does this new member look like?” Bell asked.

  Matthew waited, not knowing what he wanted to hear.

  “Largest gray whale I’ve ever seen, maybe seventeen meters or more.”

  “That’s still within its growth potential,” Bell said. “At least in theory.”

  “What color is it?” Matthew asked, not being able to restrain himself any longer.

  “Hard to say. The sun was going down. The usual color.”

  Matthew slumped, not sure whether he felt relieved or let down.

  “Was already getting dark. We’ll have a better look tomorrow. Going to try infrared scanning tonight.”

  “That makes sense. We’ll talk in the morning, yes?”

  “Sure will. Good night, all.”

  There was silence as each sifted through the new information.

  “It brings in more questions than answers, doesn’t it?” Bell said. “Still, we have now a confirmed sighting of Lefty. If we compare another sighting we had of her two days before yours, Matthew, it fits the original tracking data perfectly. Somewhere between these two sightings, an unusual whale arrives on the scene and something like a family pod is formed, rather than the typical, random behavior of migrating grays. Then, it appears, they take just a minute to move north a distance that would usually take them a day or more, and go on with their migration.”

  “But the leader isn’t purple,” Matthew said.

  “Well?” Bell said as he leaned back and glanced at his daughter. He seemed as much at ease with all th
e ambiguity as he was half reclining on the couch.

  Penny turned her gaze inward for a moment, then said, “My take on it is, be careful not to discard what doesn’t fit the picture. I have a hunch that what Matthew saw and what Andrew reported about this lead whale still fits, despite the seeming color discrepancy. Maybe the color was a temporary thing. We need more time and a closer look. The Air Force’s acute interest in Harold’s inquiry seems odd.”

  “Did they in any way indicate that they thought Lefty might have moved?” Matthew asked. “The apparent displacement, I mean?”

  “Not from their questions,” Bell said. “I would say their concern revolved around what could throw off our tracking signals.”

  “Perhaps they’ve been having problems of their own,” Penny said.

  “Could be,” Bell said. “Or perhaps Harold was right, and they are testing something. Matthew’s right. I doubt if they have even considered the possibility that Lefty’s position really shifted. At the time, the only rational thing to conclude was instrument error, wasn’t it?”

  Bell got up and slowly circumnavigated the room. His broad smile reminded Matthew of Penny’s. He returned and stood behind his chair, his hands resting on its back.

  “I’d like very much for the two of you to go onboard the Valentina. I need to get your impressions. I know it’s not a small thing to ask, and I’d certainly like to go myself, but not at this time. I want to be here when we give the Air Force what we have to give them. I do not have a completely good feeling after that dolphin business a few years ago.”

  He looked at Matthew. “Don’t worry about your courses. They owe me a favor over there, and I think I can take care of it without any problem. Even get you your onboard credit early!”

  This would not really be making Matthew’s life easier, but he only hesitated an instant. Still, it shocked him to hear his own voice saying, “Yes, I can go.”

  Penny did not even need to say that she was coming.

  They spoke briefly of arrangements for the next morning. Bell called a man he knew who would come on short notice with a floatplane. The pilot agreed to fly them north to Charlotte Island, off British Columbia. There was a village called Abercrombie with a cove just large enough for the floatplane to set down. In the morning, Bell would call the Point and have them arrange for a local from the village to take Matthew and Penny from Abercrombie out to the Valentina in a small boat. If all went well, they would rendezvous about fifteen kilometers off the coast.

  “You had better be on your way home,” Bell said to Matthew. “Get some sleep.”

  As Matthew was getting his jacket on by the front door, Margaret Bell insisted he take home the rest of the pie. She handed it to him in a bag, already prepared.

  “Makes a lovely breakfast,” she said.

  This touched him unexpectedly, and he did not quite know what to say. Finally he managed, “I don’t usually have the opportunity for an evening with family. I’ll never forget the wonderful meal.”

  Margaret Bell smiled. “Come out again, won’t you? That is, if Martin ever gives you any time off.” She put her arm around her husband. “He’s relentless when he’s on to something.”

  Bell gazed at her as she spoke, obviously still in love.

  Penny began to walk away but glanced at Matthew over her shoulder. “Good night. See you in the morning.”

  “Yes. Good night.”

  But she was already gone.