In the mid fifties, high clouds, no rain… yet. The Alder trees are leafing out, Cherry Blossoms are starting to fall, Dot has learned to lay down on her side and crawl out under the steps and out of her enclosure, so she can run around and show us how clever she is. We were all sitting outside last night in the sunshine eating our dinner and Dot came over and peed on both of Jan’s shoes, which greatly annoyed Jan. I scolded Dot and put her in another area where she barked like a crazy person. Now it’s Jan’s turn to be mad at Dot, so things are a little frosty between the two of them this morning. I’m just trying to figure out what kind of message Dot was trying to send with the shoe peeing. There are a lot of weird interpretation of things on the internet. I’m just going to keep siding with Jan. This is the smart plan for me. I think I have to show a lot more affection towards Jan in Dot’s presence. But I’m drawing the line at family counseling. I will do, family treats for everybody… but family therapy with the puppy included. Sorry.

Years ago when Finn was little we read Moby Dick aloud. It took us more than a year to do it. I read the book at night before sleep. I have to admit that there were times I was the last person standing… or awake. But it was a wonderful experience. Jan loved it due to all the whale details, and Finn enjoyed all the goofy voices I did and all the adventures on the water. He was a little boy who, after all had had quite a few adventures on the ocean around whales. Soon enough he would learn to shoot a dart gun and take blubber samples from whales along side his mom. He always had to fight off drowsiness going out in a boat for he found being in a boat the most restful place on earth.

Whales are seen as “charismatic megafauna’ by the United States Park Service and other management agencies. Which means essentially, people go nuts to see them. Which is true. This is basically the theme of Moby Dick, and why not? They are massive. The blue whale is larger than any dinosaur, so to be close to any of the really big whales, to hear them breath and to”be able to look them in the eyeball is a chest expanding experience that even the best monstertron movie theaters have not been able to replicate… yet. I have not been close to a great ape or a herd of elephants but so far being close to a male Sperm Whale when it is feeding is THE MOST humbling experience I have ever felt as a human being. The next weirdest experience with an animal was being with a US military dolphin in it’s tiny pool. They were stationed near Sitka and the Navy had asked Jan to come advise them about the possibility of transient killerwhales being in the area before they deployed their million dollar dolphins to detect underwater ordinance during an exercise. (Transient Killer whales eat dolphins.) Anyway, I was petting this dolphin, and it was looking at me and pinging on me with it’s sonar and I was certain it could read my mind and could possibly transmit my thoughts back to the Pentagon. Super Creepy animal experience.

Here again, these animals, the sea mammals are due a lot of my respect. Smart in a way we don’t even understand yet. We can teach them the rudimentary elements of English, train them to understand words, yet we know almost next to nothing about their communication structures. Sperm whales are the loudest creatures on earth. Think of that for a moment. They also have the biggest brain. Of course bigness doesn’t necessarily mean intelligence, but they pretty remarkable problem solving abilities. Being able to feed themselves when they have huge caloric requirements and they live in a huge dark ocean and they have these tiny eyes that can’t even see their tiny little mouth. What the hell? No digits, no tools, no traps, come on! Give us a pair of fins on our feet and tie our arms to our side. Turn off the lights in the pool the size of Texas and put in a few hundred million protein and fat packets that swim around that evolved to AVOID US for God’s Sake! Give me a break!

No wonder Herman Melville resorted to religious allegory to describe the experience of the search for such creatures! What I like most about Melville is that he never really tips his hand as to what it all means. The Whale is EVERYTHING, dangerous, and marvelous, life-giving, light-giving, dreaded, and desirous. It might be God, it might be the devil. It might be the primordial force which animates paganism, or it might be the Christian God of the crusades. It might just be bigger than anything a human can conceive. It is the thing worth giving your soul for that is for certain. We wait on the calm sea for it to rise, and when it does, we are startled and amazed, both by it’s kinship and by it’s strangeness.

Me. I love whales. It’s a good thing too because I married into it’s family.

Here is a poem I wrote a while back, after rereading M.D. The Rachel is the ship that AHAB refused to help in her search for her lost children. There are many papers written about the biblical significance of that. I didn’t write a paper, I just wrote the poem.

The Rachel

Out of the gray where rain swallows rain

and waves consume the horizon

The Rachel lunges heavy and fat,

her lines worn soft, rigging lose

her planking shuddering into the trough

in search of her lost children.

Men cinch and fasten, clamber like chimps up and down the sticks

yelling to the heathen gods, wallowing

beneath the surface, Neptune with his Trident and the Christian God’s,

beard whipping great waves

across the decks, skidding men on their backs

to grab hold of the gunwales, and pray aloud.

Then in an hour, the storm has backed,

the lookout calls out flotsam three degrees off the port bow:

for a man clinging to something in the swell.

The sea is as immense as the sky, and a whale like a planet

passes beneath then turns on its side watching the refuse.

Perhaps an elephant seal, with flippers outstretched,

the great snub nosed beast pauses and clicks to detect it, but the

report is wrong, something hollow, full of air, something hard

and alone. Not food, Not meat. Not worth stopping for

so the great beast glides on, easing under The Rachel

searching for her lost children.

I am that man. Not meat, not food, and without a ship.

Not a lost tribesman, but a modern man alone. Homeless.

I would rather have been taken up into the belly of that Whale,

For God still hears a man’s pleas

in the deepest gut of a leviathan, even the lost Jonah was delivered, and it’s true

that God directed a worm to eat the roots of his only shade tree,

still Jonah endured, as will I, as will you afloat on our shipmates coffins, while

our Captain has abandoned us

all of us,

to madness. J. Straley

Blossoms on water

floating in the sea, where whales

feed on herring eggs.

Here is a recording I made reading from Cold Water Burning, where I wrecked Jan’s boat again and bumped into some sperm whales and some sneakers floating in the ocean. I hope you like it.