In the Eye of the Beholder

by

Turk Pipkin

(Originally appeared in Texas Monthly)

The possibility of actually touching a 40-ton gray whale in its natural environment at first seems like a self-indulgent exercise in toying with Mother Nature. It is not until I am kneeling in a small boat in Mexico’s remote Magdalena Bay, with a mother whale directly beneath my down-stretched hand that I realize how much I want to make that physical contact; to feel mama’s barnacled skin, to gently stroke her baby, and to be touched myself by true greatness.

Ever so slowly the mother floats closer to the surface untill she is just inches from my hand. Taking this as an invitation, I extend my arm further, only to watch as she slips away into the depth. Moments later, mother and child reappear. Gliding slowly beneath the boat, they offer our group a breathtaking look at their size and grace; the baby lovely and enormous, the mother like some unfathomable leviathan. Over and over the pair tease us with their presence: either our boatman paddling slowly to mom and baby, or the inquisitive infant leading its mother to us. Both of the whales seem to delight in bumping or rubbing on the bottom of the boat, a gentle reminder of how easily they could crush us with the mere flip of a tail.

After disappearing for several minutes — an adult gray can stay submerged for 20 minutes before surfacing for air — mom comes back for yet another close encounter of the human kind. Once again she rests beneath us, rolled on her side with one of her huge, dark eyes peering straight up at me. Our gazes lock together as if we are both trying to discover some mystery hidden on the other side of the ocean’s looking glass. This time I keep my hand out of the water, and ever so slowly she rises, breaking the surface and rubbing her head on the edge of the boat until, at last, we touch.

Her skin is cool and wonderful, like silky wet leather, while the small, round barnacles that live on her have the texture of rough velvet. Sensitive to the stroke of my hand, she quickly shies away, and the baby takes her place, rolling slowly on my side of the boat and slapping my hand with her dorsal fin. When Mom returns, she announces her arrival with a spray of gloriously bad breath, exhaling from her blowhole directly into my smiling face. This exhilarating bath charges over my body in a rush of goose bumps and adrenaline, baptizing me in some mysterious secret of the deep.

Seated back in my proper spot in the boat, camera in hand but not even remembering to take photos, I watch numbly as my companions scramble for their own turn with the two friendly whales. The sun bursts through the low clouds for a moment and reflects from the bright and gleaming eyes of our motley crew of whale watchers. They all seem younger and more alive than when I met them just a few hours before, and I wonder if they too have seen some unexplained wonder in the eye of the whale.

A company called Baja Expeditions has organized my visit to this mangrove-lined lagoon on the Pacific side of the Baja Peninsula. Relieved of the normal Mexico travel worries about hotels, meals, and expensive car rentals, all I have to do is get myself to the colonial city of La Paz, best accomplished via Tucson on Aero Mexico. The first evening I am on my own to check out the bars and restaurants along the scenic La Paz waterfront, and early the next morning, our group piles into two vans for the five hour drive to Bajia Magdalena. The cost of $995 per person includes guides, transportation, meals, drinks and three nights of live-aboard accommodations on a wooden-hulled ship called the Don José. Sleeping accommodations are somewhat cramped and I’m sharing a cabin with two others, but the cooking is excellent, the beverages cold, and the whales, well the whales are everywhere.

Weighing as much as 45 tons, gray whales are the only whales adapted to coastal waters, and the only whales to exhibit the friendly behavior and voluntary human contact which I experienced first-hand. For reasons unknown, grays whales began making close contact with humans in Magdalena and two other Mexican bays in the 1970s. Since whaling of the grays was outlawed in 1937, and since a gray may live to be fifty years old, it is possible that the whales began human contact only after there were few or no remaining whales with memories of man’s destruction.

Whales are believed to have been on earth for 50 million years. Early whales once had legs, but unlike man and most other mammals, the whales returned to the sea where they have long sparked the imaginations and daring of man. As our ability to master the oceans grew, one by one the whale populations of the world were decimated in short order: the right whales, so called because they were easy to kill and had much blubber; the humpbacks, almost completely annihilated before we discovered their beautiful melodic song; the bowheads, the sperm and numerous others, all hunted to near extinction by hard and determined men with hand-thrown harpoons.

More difficult to pursue were the blue, fin and minke whales, who fared well until the invention of the exploding grenade harpoon in 1868. Instead of sinking when killed, the faster and larger whales could then be harpooned from the bow-mounted cannon of a steam-driven ship, and their bodies pumped full of air through tubes to keep them afloat for the harvest. By the beginning of this century, hundred-foot whales were being hauled on deck and cooked in giant, sealed cauldrons into fertilizer and whale oil for uses that would eventually include margarine, pharmaceuticals, automatic transmission fluids, and nitroglycerin explosives.

The discovery of the gray whales "nursery" in Bajia Magdalena by whaler Charles Melville Scammon in 1856 attracted fleets of whalers to the lagoons of Baja. Although the grays fought back, earning the name devilfish for their habit of defending themselves and their young by breaching completely out of the water and landing on the whalers skiffs, grays whales were believed to be commercially if not biologically extinct by the end of the Nineteenth Century. The hunting of the few remaining gray whales continued until the 1937 signing of the International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling, which allowed the killing of grays only by aboriginals for their own consumption. Russia and Japan did not sign this agreement, and a Western Pacific population of grays whales is now extinct. By 1960 the California gray whale population had rebounded to 4,000, and today there are an estimated 25,000, all of them making what is the longest migration by any mammal—10,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico and back.

In preparation for this annual journey, the grays partake of a massive carbo-loading in Arctic waters. Feeding around the clock for months, they scoop tiny shrimp-like amphipods from the sea-bottom and filter out the mud and sand with their baleen plates, a row of long tooth-like keratin that was once harvested for use as corset stays. In October, when Arctic waters begin to freeze, the whales head south, fasting most of the six months until their return to the Arctic. During this period, a 40-ton whale may lose 10 tons of its body weight as it lives off fat stores of blubber that are not needed in the warmer waters farther south. The calves are born during the journey south, usually off the coast of southern California, coming into the world at a healthy 12 feet in length and at a birthweight of 2,000 pounds.

"No one has ever seen the birth of a gray whale," says our Baja Expeditions tour guide Alan Cortash during a lunch break in the ship’s dining room. Cortash also describes for us the incredible act of a baby whale nursing without taking in saltwater, a feat accomplished by the baby curling its six foot long tongue into a tube around mom’s nipple and drinking as if through a gigantic straw. "The babies continue to nurse all winter in the lagoons," says Cortash, "swimming constantly with their mothers, almost always against the tide, presumably to build their strength for the journey north."

As our time aboard the Don José passes in the company of whales, my appreciation for our early contact with the friendly mother-baby pair grows by the hour. We do not find any more whales displaying such curiosity—and indeed, in an unusually wet and chilly winter in Bajia Magdalena, ours is one of the only groups to experience such intimate contact. But there is never a shortage of whales. One afternoon near the tidal entrance to the bay, we can see 50 or 60 whales in the area around us, many of them "spyhopping"— emerging from the water head first, spinning gracefully until their dorsal fins clear the surface, then quickly sinking out of sight. Just beyond the breakers, the horizon is filled with the fifteen-foot high spouts of hundreds of whales. We gasp and cheer in unison each time we see a whale breach, bringing perhaps 75 percent of its body entirely out of the water, then crashing back into the ocean with a gigantic splash.

Some of the best whale-watching is of mating activity, which generally involves multiple males but only one female. Experts believe that gray whales thrive on body contact.

The Mexican government strictly regulates all whale-watching in Bajia Magdalena, both for the protection of the whales and for the safety of the watchers. Our boatmen, Felix and Luis, have years of experience guiding whale tours here and are always careful to keep the pangas away from the mating whales, a wise precaution considering that a few years ago, two researchers working in this area got too close to a mating pair and one of the whales crushed and killed both people. Hearing this, I quickly calculate that a adult gray whale has the same ratio to my weight as I do to a grasshopper weighing just one ounce.

When no whales are exhibiting "friendly" behavior, we content ourselves to motor slowly along in the path of one or more whales, hoping for a good photo opportunity—perhaps a 10-foot wide tail vertical in the air just before a dive. Like land animals, whales leave an indiaction of the path they have taken. When the whale submerges, the upstroke of its tail makes a large flat circle on the surface, and because the water keeps flowing up to the surface from below, the circle remains for quite some time after the whale has moved on. These "tailprints" are not marred even by the wake of our motorized skiff, and so a series of them can be easily followed.

The more whales we see, the more I begin to realize that each has its own distinctive appearance. All gray whales have a low hump, ten to twelve knobs along the dorsal ridge, and an upper jaw that overhangs the lower, giving it the appearance of a gigantic parrot’s beak. Unlike the babies, which are uniformly gray at birth, the adults have a lighter, mottled-color that is the result of barnacles, whale lice, and scarred patches, the patterns and shades of which are unique to each whale. It is also possible to identify the older whales by bite marks torn from their fins and tails by orcas, or killer whales. Toothed whales (like Shamu) eat everything from fish and seals to both baby and adult grays. Hunting in packs much like wolves or coyotes, the orcas gang up on a much larger gray and drown it by latching onto its tail to slow it down, pushing it below the surface, and blocking the gray’s blowhole with the orca’s own bodies. The gray’s only defense is its powerful tail, the outcome depending on the number of attacking orcas.

Unlike the orcas, gray whales are no longer in danger of being captured by man. The only large whale ever maintained in captivity was a baby gray netted in 1971 by an expedition from San Diego’s Sea World. Eighteen feet long and weighing 4,000 pounds, Gigi was placed in a large tank both for scientific study and public viewing. Eight months later she was eating a ton of squid per day and growing too fast for any tank to hold her. A year after her capture she was released into the Pacific during the migrating season and has subsequently been seen in the wild.

Late on our final afternoon, as the pangas return my companions to the Don José for a farewell margarita celebration, I ask our boatman to drop me off for a walk on nearby Magdalena Island, a seventy-mile long finger of sand that separates the bay from the ocean. As I climb from the mangrove brakes into the dunes, the ship and all civilization disappear behind me. As far as I can see, the shifting sand ripples in endless patterns of wind and wave, millions of parallel lines stretching up and down the dunes like tracings by the hands of a thousand-fingered god. After a two mile hike—much of the way following the tracks of two coyotes who in turn follow the tracks of a fleeing rabbit—I finally top the last row of dunes for a view of the roaring ocean.

My jacket zipped tight against the cold, I sit on the beach surrounded by the treasures I have found nearby—a marvelous tiny sea horse, the giant shell of a green sea tortoise, and a massive bleached-white whale bone. Staring out at several whale spouts beyond the surf, I begin to ponder the vastness of the natural world, whose mysteries continue to defy our full understanding. In places such as this, in the songs of the shore birds that chase away the chill of the ocean from which we came, and in the knowing eyes of earth’s oldest and greatest creatures, the majesty of life, on rare occasions, reaches out and touches us.

Some months have passed since I visited the whales in Bajia Magdalena. I would like to report that my experience there made me somehow wiser or more appreciative of the world around me, but I am sorry to say that rush hour traffic still winds up my gears, and the current state of American politics really pops my gourd. But in my sleep, there is often a peacefulness that returned with me from the nursery of the whales. Lost in my dreams, I look into the unfathomable deep of time immemorial, and in the dark and shining eye of the gentle leviathan, I see my own reflection, bright and smiling. And in that dream, the mother whale whispers to me, gently like the waves lapping at a boat at rest, one word only, repeated softly again and again. The word is: "remember."