Leviathan or The Whale

a dog. Instead, he focused his camera to record the pattern of callosities, which appear at the same points where hair grows on the human face–brow, chin, upper lips–and which give each animal its identity, a rough physiognomy queasily underlined by the fact that they are infested with pale whale lice, the minute scorpions that crawl around their host’s head, eating its dead skin. As Eric Joranson, one of the mates on the whale watch boats told me, the lice will also colonize a human given half the chance, and are difficult to dislodge once they do. When a whale lies dying on the beach, they leave it like rats off a sinking ship. None the less, these parasites may also assist the whale: since they eat the same copepods, it is possible that they lead it to its food, acting as minute sensors.
    As the whale passed us, it was as if it were paying court to its champion, nodding its head serenely towards Stormy as it passed. It then swung around the boat, and next to me. Looking down into the water, I could see its great white jaw swinging open like some massive hinged door, wide enough to garage a car–the largest mouth of any living creature. Now I could see the entirety of the animal, hanging below, an iceberg suspended in its element. It was also deceptively fast, creating a wave in front of its snout with the weight of its fifty tons. Silently gaping as it passed by, both aware and unaware of us, it was like watching a dinosaur, an animal whose physical presence was belied by its air of fatality. It also smelled, a deep insupportable smell, somewhere between a cow’s fart and a fishy wharf, a pungent reminder of its function as a processing plant for plankton.
    Then it was gone to join the others, apparitions that, for all their size, were quite dreamlike. It was hard to look on these huge creatures and think of a time when they might not be there. Barely a mile away, shipping was moving in and out of Cape Cod Canal and under the distinctive hump of the Sagamore Bridge. It was a lesson in the nature of survival. Paying scant attention to anything other than their food and themselves, they would not know, could not see, the tanker or the container ship steaming towards them. Later that day, the
Shearwater
alerted shipping to their presence in the bay. What was a day trip for me may have saved a whale’s life.
    As we turned to leave, a black shape broke the horizon. A whale was breaching, lazily launching itself into the air before landing with a distant crash. Then it began to slap down on the surface with its tail, the sound ricocheting off our boat as a cannonade. As it held its flukes emblematically against the sky, infused with its own life and power, we turned our backs on the whales and left them to their lunch.
    Ham
. Do you see yonder cloud, that’s almost in shape of
a camel?
Pol
. By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Ham
. Methinks, it is like a weasel.
Pol
. It is backed like a weasel.
Ham
. Or, like a whale?
Pol
. Very like a whale.
    Hamlet
, Act Three, Scene II

    Hamlet was right, for all his teasing. Whales are like clouds. They change shape, forming and re-forming as they pass through the great expanse of the sea and over its drowned mountains and valleys, just as the clouds drifted over the snowy peak that Melville watched from his window in a Massachusetts meadow. In whale bone carvings, the Inuit represent the whale’s breath as a feather. Cartoon whales spout their own personal weather, their own head of steam. To its prey, the white belly of a humpback, too, appears as a cloud, albeit one that might consume it.
    And as clouds create atlases in the air, so whales are countries in their own right, planetary communities of barnacles and sea-lice wandering on their own continental drift. International ambassadors of nature’s undiscerning power, they are stateless nations, invested with something beyond their mere presence. ‘By art is created that great Leviathan,’ wrote Hobbes, ‘called a Commonwealth or State.’ As plundered colonies, they remain under attack, invincible yet vulnerable, defenceless for all their size. It is the whale’s fate to share man’s air, and so risk its life in the process of sustaining it, caught in a bind as much as any philosopher perplexed by the human condition.
    The whale lives between worlds; that is its miracle, and its folly. What did it do to deserve such a fate? Spurned by Noah (it could hardly fit in the ark), it pays the price for its