Leviathan or The Whale

clutch of baleen plates, fringed and brown and brittle, the colour and texture of horses’ hooves.
    Five years after I first boarded this boat, I have a different role. Now I’m part of the whale watch, rather than a mere observer. Through my field glasses, I loosen my eyes, letting them ride over the horizon. It is ever a nervous quest. I look for anything to indicate the presence of whales: subtle, hypnotic changes in the sea’s surface which mark the meeting of currents; a flurry of gulls in search of a free meal; any little anomaly to break the monotonous view.
    The boat ploughs ahead. Greater shearwaters, no bird ever so aptly named, tip their wings until they almost touch the waves, playing daredevil with the ocean; like Wilson’s storm petrels, they are pelagic birds, spending all their lives at sea. Dennis quotes Aldo Leopold on how animals imply a landscape. Our captain swears loudly about the lack of fucking whales. Then, with eyesight sharper than my borrowed binoculars, he sees a distant blow. And with that, everything changes.
    To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows.
    The First Lowering,
Moby-Dick

    There are strict regulations governing the approach of whales. From two miles away, speed must be reduced to thirteen, then ten, then seven knots; six hundred feet from the animal is the statutory stand-by zone. Even aircraft must maintain a minimum altitude of one thousand feet; John Waters quips that the whales are more demanding than Hollywood stars in their requirements for respectful distance.
    In the wheelhouse, activity accelerates as the boat shudders to a halt. We bundle up cameras and clipboards to climb the ladder to the roof, where the captain takes control. As we glide towards the blow, the passengers let out their own gasps of excitement. Cameras click in a digital fusillade, but their lenses reveal only second-hand images of what their owners’ eyes witness: creatures out of all scale with our world; animals so strange that sometimes it seems as if we hadn’t seen them at all.
    BE (Boston Entry) Buoy, 42°.14.88 N, 70°.17.45 W

    The arrival of the leviathan is all the more surprising for its unassuming manner. As it rises, rivulets run off its graphite-black back like threads of quicksilver; huge pectoral fins glow below the surface, turned luminous green by suspended plankton. Slyly, it even shapes the sea in which it swims. The whale’s mountainous body creates its own valley as it bobs in the ocean; while the pull of its tail leaves a slick of flat water as still as a pond even in rough seas. This flukeprint, the spoor by which its route can be traced, was believed by whalers to be oil or ‘glip’ washed off the whale as it dived; they would not cross it for fear of gallying their prey. The Inuit, too, decline to break its spell; but they do so out of respect, seeing this
qaala
–‘the path of the unseen Whale’–as the animal’s mirror into our world, and our mirror into its own.

    As massive as it may be, a whale may be identified by its misty blow: the tall columnar geyser of a finback; the brief, staccato snort of a minke; the bushy blow of a humpback, the steam-engine of the sea sometimes turned into an indignant-sounding elephant trumpet; and the distinctive v-shaped spout of a right whale–for many whale watchers, the nearest they will ever get to seeing such rare animals. These are iridescent, airy signifiers of something so huge. They are also–as I discover only after I have been serially sprayed–capable of conducting ‘flu-like infection.
    Little wonder that Tom, our videographer, turns his face away as the whale exhales again.
    Other, more physical clues to the species are as subtle. The finback, for instance, is the only cetacean–indeed, the only mammal–with asymmetrical markings: one half dove grey, the other albatross white, an elegant division that extends even to its baleen, and which seems somehow to camouflage it in the ever changing light and shade of the sea. Its flukes, angular and sharply defined, are seen only when the animal lunge-feeds, moving on its side through a food source as it uses the white of its jaw to flash the fish into submission. Although their muscular backs are emblazoned with subtle