illustration by La Voliera

I have long loved whales. I once wanted to be a marine biologist to study whales. My father always had a sailboat, so I was quite used to weekends of dolphin pods surfing our wake, and humpbacks breaching off our windward side. I swear I’d recognize individual whales as I watched them migrate each season, and I would imagine they recognized me, too, and watched me growing up. Scientists identify whales by the unique patterns on the undersides of their tails. These patterns always reminded me of Rorschach’s ink blots, and I still believe I feel the same way each time I see the same tail. I’ve even had two in-the-water whale encounters. One whale saved me, but more recently one tried to rape me.

—

My father had proposed an idea to take my sister and me on individual father-daughter and father-son trips of our own design. My sister, I love her, planned an elaborate stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York, with dinner at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, and center orchestra tickets to a Broadway performance of, something spectacular. Keeping in mind that we lived in Miami at the time, my plan involved simply driving down to the Florida Keys to swim with the dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center. That was, for me, a way to ease back into the water. It had been a few years since my other whale encounter, and I felt ready. I wanted to be ready. The research center was a controlled environment with relatively small whales, which dolphins are. What could go wrong?

We didn’t sign up for a private encounter, but there were only two other people that showed up. It was the February of my fifteenth birthday, and the water temperature, we would learn, was near record lows. The other two guests were dressed in full-body wetsuits. My father and I were in nothing but basic swim trunks. At the end of the pier there was a giant round thermometer, along with several other mismatched signs of various notices, hanging on a makeshift wall of reclaimed wood planks. Its once-bright yellow paint was peeling, and the whole wall was covered in years of chalky white seagull guano. You couldn’t miss it. The dial pointed at 58 degrees, at least from the angle at which I was able to observe it.

A beautiful young woman walked up and introduced herself as Rebecca. She was wearing a uniform of matching khaki Bermuda shorts and a short sleeve button down shirt. It was creased like new, and one-half size too large for her small body. An oversized embroidered Dolphin Research Center logo, that was perhaps a touch too low anyway, pulled some of her surplus fabric down and against her left breast. She was maybe only a few years older than me, I thought. I never understood short sleeve dress shirts. Just roll up your sleeves, please, but she looked good in this one.

“Do you guys want wetsuits? The water’s cold.” She asked my father. There was some genuine concern in her voice, but it was also evident she didn’t want to delay the schedule at all. I think she looked directly past me.

I remember my father saying, “No. I think we’re okay, but what is the water temperature?”

She bent down and pulled up a thermometer that was attached to the ladder with a string. She looked up before speaking. So polite. “It’s 70 on the dolphin’s nose.” I thought that was a cute thing for her to say at the time.

My father said, “70? Oh, we’re good. That’s warmer than we are now, right?” And he chuckled. He knew very well that 70 degree water would feel quite cold. He was an avid diver, and an experienced seaman.

I had not formed my own opinion yet. I stood conflicted somewhere between Rebecca’s concern and my father’s nonchalance. So I referred back to the wall of notices to collect any relevant data, and there I read, from the National Center for Cold Water Safety, that 70 degrees should be treated with caution, and they recommended wearing thermal protection. But, I said nothing.

So Rebecca said, “Okay,” and stepped up onto a bit of a riser and started to brief us on the dos and don’ts, which I don’t think anyone else paid any attention to, but basically it included to stay in position at the center of the lagoon, watch her for the instructions, and don’t touch the dolphin’s belly, because that is where the male is “sensitive sexually”. I took this all very seriously, as I do all instructions, but she spoke in a rhythm that reminded me of a funny movie, so I found myself swallowing a giggle with a bit of a grimace and a tiny snort. I prayed Rebecca didn’t notice, but I was sure she did. The movie was Back to the Future. The scene where Marty is up on the stage and says, “All right, guys, listen. This is a blues riff in B. Watch me for the changes, and try to keep up, okay?”

We each got into the water to interact with the dolphins one at a time. First, each of the other two went in, then my father, and by the time it was my turn I pretty much knew exactly what to expect.

I slipped into the water. Wow, was it cold. I was only like an uninsulated 100 pounds. I swam out about 30 feet to the center of the lagoon. Rebecca blew her whistle. From sea level, accounting for the curvature of the Earth, the range of your vision is technically 2.9 miles. In practice, I determined that even with just a light chop in the water, you can’t see very far at all, but a dolphin fin definitely appeared in the distance. “Up and down, good. Side-to-side, bad.” I lipped to myself trying to stay calm. You can distinguish a dolphin from a shark by their kinematics. A shark, which is a fish, swims side-to-side.

The dolphin arrived very quickly, and it was much larger up close than I thought it would be. I had remembered feeling so close to dolphins off the bow of our boat that I could reach out and touch one, but this was different. It was much larger. And its presence was much more powerful. I was once told that a cubic foot of water weighs 63 pounds. I could feel the thrust of his tail forcing many gallons onto my body. I was pushed out of position, and Rebecca called out for me to get back in the center. I didn’t like being caught breaking the rules. I wondered how everyone else seemed to stay in the center with ease. I did a few quick breast strokes towards the dolphin, and then we both came to rest. I took a deep breath.

It was time to pose for my pictures. Rebecca motioned to me, but I had already started lifting my hand to the right side of my face. The dolphin swam into his position and rested his rostrum onto my hand so I could guide it to my cheek. A kiss. My father captured a photo. I thought this was very silly. We’re just posing. I wasn’t having a moment with the dolphin. I wanted to get to know the dolphin, and for him to get to know me. But Rebecca blew her whistle, and we moved into pose number two. She blew the whistle again, and we moved again. Eventually we found ourselves ready for the final pose. The dancing pose.

While treading, I reached both of my arms out of the water and directly in front of me. The dolphin, also anticipating Rebecca’s whistle seconds before it sounded, swam up and started treading water of his own. He was able to lift his 400 pound body out of the water with nothing more than a flutter kick. I became conscious of just how small and weak I was. This made me more nervous. I was shaking, perhaps also from the prolonged exposure to the cold water, but my instinct drove me to tread harder. We were so close. I kept feeling my feet touching him. I heard Rebecca yelling again, so I looked around and focused more on staying in position. His skin felt slick, and the water around him was much warmer than the rest of the cold lagoon. I kept touching him, or he kept touching me. I figured it was his swinging tail, but a dolphin can be nine feet long. As we got even closer, face to face, the simple math was inescapable. My feet were not that deep. Rebecca yelled out again, and I heard her more clearly this time. “Don’t touch his belly!” She had been warning all along.

“I can’t help it!” I whimpered defensively, as the dolphin pushed up against me and I had no choice other than to fall out of position. The stress! I turned to face the ladder and started crawling rapidly towards it. Rebecca waved me in like I was about to round third, whistling over and over again. That 30 feet felt like a mile. The dolphin was, well, there’s no delicate way to put this. He was humping me. I felt waves of water crashing over my head, and every few feet of progress I made, the thrashing dolphin pushed me under a few feet, so I would have to wiggle my way back up to the surface. Finally, about 10 feet from the platform, the dolphin heeded Rebecca’s command, and swam out of the lagoon. I started to climb the ladder and got tangled up in that damn thermometer string. On full display at the last rung I reached down to pull up my swimsuit which was one-half size too big for my small body, and weighed down with water and an oversized embroidered Ralph Lauren logo which was perhaps a touch too low anyway. I felt so much more than ridiculous. Sweet Rebecca placed a finger under my chin. I hadn’t yet realized my head was hung. She asked if I was okay, and after a quick breath or two which cleared my nose, I nodded yes. Before pulling away she looked at me and said, “I think all of us here at the Dolphin Research Center agree that you are simply irresistible.” I thought that was a cute thing for her to say at the time. And the silence broke into laughter.

I actually bumped into Rebecca many years later on an airplane. It was a nearly empty flight, so I invited her to join me in my row. It turns out she had thought my father and I were a couple. “Ew, Rebecca! My father? And I was 15!” There was a gay pride parade in the area that weekend. Because we didn’t have wetsuits in February she assumed we had really come for the parade, and had only decided to swim with dolphins on a whim.

Rebecca and I spent the next 48 hours together, but not in the way that sounds. She had a connecting puddle-jumper scheduled to take her back to the Keys. I drove her instead, and stayed with her for the rest of the weekend. She had recently completed her doctorate, and we couldn’t stop sharing our whale knowledge with each other. If you ever meet Rebecca, you have to ask her about the island where her father raised her, but I was fascinated by everything she had to say. It was an absolute dream. She took me behind the scenes of the Dolphin Research Center. I did not get back in the water, but she did allow me some time alone with a dolphin.

—

Okay, you want to know about my first whale encounter. The truth is, I don’t remember. But I’ve pieced together much of it over the years from stories I’ve been told by people who were there. Most accounts began with, “If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t believe it”. I was barely a teen, and my family and another boat of family friends were sailing back to Florida from the Bahamas. That’s not a quick thing to do by sailboat. About twelve hours. We were navigating by night. It was nearly a new moon, so the only light was from a clear sky of stars. The stars are magnificent at night this far from land. Land hadn’t been visible for hours, and it wouldn’t be visible again for hours more. It looked, and felt, like the middle of the ocean. It was actually nowhere near the middle. During a long sail, you get a sense of just how massive the ocean is. Even of everything it rests on. Looking at a map, the distance between Florida and the Bahamas is barely the width of my pinky finger, while the distance across the Atlantic is more like both of my hands sprawled out.

It was a quiet sail. Some slept, so we didn’t have music on or make much conversation. Just a rhythmic sloshing against the boat’s side where the water would otherwise be silent. Then an alarm went off. The depth sounder. The instrument that measures the depth of the water. For the last few hours, it had displayed nothing but dashes across the screen indicating the depth was greater than its maximum range of 400 feet. (I knew that the true depth of the water there was somewhere over five thousand feet.) It was difficult to read, but I could just make out under the aging incandescent bulb of the display that it was changing. Now I saw numbers! And the alarm, which only went off when the depth went below 5 feet! It’s a warning so you don’t run aground. I got a little closer and started shouting out the depth, as I had been trained to do while charting shallow waters. “3.2… 3.8…” – then louder, “2.8… 2.2”! None of these numbers made any sense. Our boat wouldn’t clear any less than four feet. My father looked first at the compass then quickly at his watch as if he were computing in his head if we could possibly be that far off course. I was on the starboard side deck when a faint shadow became visible at the edge of my vision. I stood a bit and hunched over the railing to see what it was. Like I said, I don’t remember, but I could only have yelled something like, “I think I know why the alarm is going off!”

I’m told the whale must have grazed the keel while passing below us. It was a humpback that would have been migrating along the same path it follows every year. Averaging 50 feet and 36 tons, our 34-foot sailboat weighing a measly 6 tons was no match. Everyone was awake and on deck at this point from the alarm. The impact flung me over the railing and into the water. Everyone rushed to starboard, and watched as I sank into the shadow. My father had been quick to rush to my aid, and began a running leap off the boat to save me. But before he could launch himself, the whale surfaced, calmly, with me flat and face up on its back. As if this kind of thing happened all the time, everyone seemed to know exactly what to do to bring me back onboard. I was in shock for a minute or so. Then I’m told I went back to acting as if nothing had happened, without much memory of anything past the alarm sounding.

I had been studying whales at the time, and on that trip we had seen a few. It was migrating season. One thing I had shared with the group was how scientists recognize whales by the patterns under their tail. They told me I had turned my head just in time to see the whale’s tail slip back into the sea as if to wave goodbye, and I said, “I think I recognize that whale.”