Stephanie introduced me to a man in beard, blazer, and bifocals. He was rebuking an elderly woman for the silver-fox boa dangling from her neck. “Disgusting,” he snarled, working himself into a froth. “Savage and vestigial. What do you think we’ve developed synthetics for?” His hair was like the hair of Kennedys, boyish, massed over his brow, every strand shouting for attention; his eyes were cold and messianic. He rattled off a list of endangered species, from snail darter to three-toed sloth, his voice sucking mournfully at each syllable as if he were a rabbi uttering the secret names of God. Then he started on whales.
I cleared my throat and held out my hand. “Call me Roger,” I said.
He didn’t even crack a smile. Just widened his sphere of influence to include Stephanie and me. “The blue whale,” he was saying, flicking the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray he held supine in his palm, ‘is a prime example. One hundred feet long, better than a quarter of a million pounds. By far and away the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth. His tongue alone weighs three tons, and his penis, nine and a half feet long, would dwarf a Kodiak bear. And how do we reward this exemplar of evolutionary impetus?” He paused and looked at me like a quiz-show host. Stephanie, who had handed her lynx maxicoat to the hostess when we arrived, bowed twice, muttered something unintelligible, and wandered off with a man in dreadlocks. The old woman was asleep. I shrugged my shoulders.
“We hunt him to the brink of extinction, that’s how. We boil him down and convert him into margarine, pet food, shoe polish, lipstick. ”
This was Harry Macey. He was a marine biologist connected with NYU and, as I thought at the time, something of an ass. But he did have a point. Never mind his bad breath and egomania; his message struck a chord. As he talked on, lecturing now, his voice modulating between anger, conviction, and a sort of evangelical fervor, I began to develop a powerful, visceral sympathy with him. Whales, I thought, sipping at my champagne. Magnificent, irreplaceable creatures, symbols of the wild and all that, brains the size of ottomans, courting, making love, chirping to one another in the fathomless dark — just as they’d been doing for sixty million years. And all this was threatened by the greed of the Japanese and the cynicism of the Russians. Here was something you could throw yourself into, an issue that required no soul-searching, good guys and bad as clearly delineated as rabbits and hyenas.
Macey’s voice lit the deeps, illuminated the ages, fired my enthusiasm. He talked of the subtle intelligence of these peaceful, lumbering mammals, of their courage and loyalty to one another in the face of adversity, of their courtship and foreplay and the monumental suboceanic sex act itself. I drained my glass, shut my eyes, and watched an underwater pas de deux: great shifting bulks pressed to one another like trains in collision, awesome, staggering, drums and bass pounding through the speakers until all I could feel through every cell of my body was that fearful, seismic humping in the depths.
Two weeks later I found myself bobbing about in a rubber raft somewhere off the coast of British Columbia. It was raining. The water temperature was thirty-four degrees. A man unlucky enough to find himself immersed in such water would be dead of exposure inside of five minutes. Or so I was told.
I was given this morsel of information by either Nick, Gary, or Ernie, my companions in the raft. All three were in their mid-twenties, wild-eyed and bearded, dressed in Norwegian sweaters, rain slickers, and knit skullcaps. They were aficionados of rock and roll, drugs, airplanes, and speedboats. They were also dangerous lunatics dedicated to thrusting themselves between the warheads of six-foot, quadri-barbed, explosive harpoons and the colossal rushing backs of panic-stricken whales.
At the moment, however, there were no whales to be seen. Living whales, at any rate. The carcasses of three sei whales trailed behind the rictus of a Russian factory ship, awaiting processing. A low cloud cover, purple-gray, raveled out from horizon to horizon like entrails on a butcher’s block, while the Russian ship loomed above us, its endless rust-streaked bows high as the Jersey palisades, the stony Slavic faces of the Russian seamen ranged along the rail like a string of peas. There were swells eight feet high. All around us the sea was pink with the blood of whales and sliced by the great black dorsal fins of what I at first took to be sharks. A moment later I watched a big grinning killer whale rush up out of the depths and tear a chunk of meat the size of a Holstein from one of the carcasses.
Nick was lighting his pipe. “Uh,” I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back to the ship?”
If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. He was muttering under his breath and jerking angrily at his knuckles. He took a long, slow hit from a tarnished flask, then glared up at the stoic Russian faces and collectively gave them the finger. “Murderers!” he shouted. “Cossack faggots!”
I was on assignment for one of the news magazines, and I’d managed to come up with some expense money from Audubon as well. The news magazine wanted action shots of the confrontation between the whalers and Nick, Gary, and Ernie; Audubon wanted some wide-angles of spouting whales for an article by some cetologist studying the lung capacity of the minke. I’d talked them into the assignment. Like a fool. For the past few years I’d been doing pretty well on the fashion circuit (I’d done some Junior Miss things for J. C. Penney and Bloomingdale’s and freelanced for some of the women’s magazines), but had begun to feel that I was missing something. Call it malaise, call it boredom. I was making a living, but what was I doing for the generations of mankind? Saving the whales — or at least doing my part in it — seemed a notch or two higher on the ethical scale than inflaming the lust of pubescent girls for snakeskin boots and fur collars. And what’s more, I was well equipped to do it, having begun my career as a naturalist.
That’s right: I too had my youthful illusions. I was just six months out of college when I did my study of the bearded tit for the National Geographic, and I was flushed with success and enthusiasm. The following year Wildlife sent me up the Xingu to record the intimate life of the capybara. I waded through swamps, wet to my waist, crouched behind blinds for days on end, my skin black with mosquitoes though I didn’t dare slap them for fear of spooking my quarry. I was bitten by three different species of arachnids. I contracted bilharziasis. It was then that I decided to trade in my telephoto lens and devote myself to photographing beautiful women with haunted eyes in clean, airy studios.
Nick was on his feet now, fighting for balance as the waves tossed our raft. “Up Brezhnev!” he shrieked, the cords in his neck tight as hawsers.
Suddenly one of the Russians reared back and threw something at us, something round and small. I watched its trajectory as it shot out over the high bow of the ship and arced gracefully for us. It landed with a rush of air and a violent elastic hiss like a dozen rubber bands snapping simultaneously. The missile turned out to be a grapefruit, frozen hard as a brick. It tore a hole through the floor of the raft.
After the rescue, I spent a few days in a hospital in Vancouver, then flew back to New York. Gary — or was it Ernie? — lost two toes. I took a nasty crack over the eyebrow that required nineteen stitches and made me look either rakish or depraved, depending on your point of view. The photos, for which I’d been given an advance, were still in the camera — about thirty fathoms down. Still, things wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the headaches. Headaches that began with a quick stab at something beneath the surface of the eye and then built with a steadily mounting pressure until the entire left side of my head felt like a helium balloon and I began to understand that I was no longer passionate on the subject of whales. After all, the only whales I’d managed to catch sight of were either dead, dying, or sprinting for their lives in a rush of foam. Where was the worth and beauty in that? And where, I wondered, was the affirmation these diluvian and mystical beasts were supposed to inject into my own depleted life?