Summer of the Whales

I scan the horizon, looking for them. It’s chilly and foggy; the hour early, the beach ghostly.  A thick grey marine layer hugs the water just offshore.  It will burn off by mid-morning, if my experience is any guide.  I have been here many mornings.  I am beginning to trust my experience.

I don’t have long to wait.  Suddenly one bumps the surface, tentatively, and plunges again.  Another breaks through, visible for a moment, then submerges.  A third, emboldened by his brothers, rises in a joyful breach—a soaring glorious body; tons of blue-grey mass. 

This summer, I have made the journey west over the mountains and onto the wild coast many, many times.  I roam beach after beach, from Montara to Miramar to Martin’s; Redondo to San Gregorio to Bean Hollow.  Once, all the way down to Waddell Creek.  I drive and I walk--sandy beaches, rocky shores, crumbling cliffs—my body soaking in the negative ions; my eyes restlessly seeking.  If I am patient, I am rewarded. They are always there. 

It is the summer of the whales.

Why are they here --- every day, in great numbers, just offshore?  They’re not supposed to be.  It’s summer—not the right time. There’s some kind of scientific explanation for it.  Something about temperatures and currents and krill and other food sources veering closer to shore.  El Nino; maybe.  Climate change. I think those are somewhere in the scientific explanation.  

But I take no notice of those things.  I have another explanation, this summer of the whales.  You sent them to me.

You died June 9.  Once the arrangements were made and the people went home and the river of casseroles

slowed to a trickle, I was left alone to figure out what kind of life could possibly lie ahead.  When the feelings threatened to drown me; when I couldn’t figure out what else to do, I would find myself in my car, heading west.

From the first visit, the whales were there.  Humpbacks, grays, blues, killers, minkes?  Not sure what kind. But there they were, in astonishing numbers.  Whole pods of them, churning up the water, sailing into the air, playing and singing and feeding and putting on a show. 

One day, it took a very long time for them to arrive. I think I was at Martin’s Beach, and the sunlight was very bright that day, bouncing off the surface of the water in hard diamond shards.  I looked out over this lovely cove, drinking in the vastness of the sea and sky.

As I stood there, taking it all in, the air suddenly started to shimmer.  Like the squiggly lines in Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a pulsing energy surrounded me.  The ocean and the sky were alive with things unseen.  Just below the surface of the waves, sea creatures sailed the depths, a watery world teeming with life. The sky was bursting with atoms and organisms and energy, like something important was about to happen. 

Mural by Wyatt Hersey, Point Reyes Station

It was all there. The fact that I couldn’t see it was beside the point.

Just when I was settling into the idea that I would not actually see the whales that day, they appeared. One, two, five, ten.  A pod.  A family.  A tribe. A world. Churning up the water of the cove, making their presence known.  Delivering on a promise.

You know what they call this, Cars? Faith. A belief in things unseen. And I know, as surely as I know anything, that you sent it. A message from the realm where you are now; a place my tiny human brain can’t fully understand yet.  Your wave from beyond; your letter of love. Your reminder that I am not alone, even when I feel like it.

Eventually, their message delivered, the whales withdrew. The water settled. The cove became quiet. The sun sank west, inexorably, toward the completion of its cycle.  It was time to go. I trudged back to the car, got in and drove east, back over the mountains. 

I still go to the beach a lot. And I always search.  But the summer of the whales would never recur. At least never again with the drama or in the numbers that happened that year. 

But there was something that summer gave me. A nugget of knowing—tiny to the point of invisibility at first. A realization that arrived in the wake of your shattering departure. 

Life is hard.  But that doesn’t make it any less of a miracle.

And even now, though you are there, and I am here, it is not all over between us.