Leviathan or The Whale

the clamour diminishes like a dying chord, to be replaced by the rise and fall of the sea.

    It wasn’t until the day before I was due to leave Provincetown that I went on my first whale watch. I remember how cold it was as the boat left the bay the land’s warmth giving way to a chill sea breeze. As we sailed out of the harbour, our naturalist described the geography of Stellwagen Bank as it passed beneath us. He explained how fishermen had dredged up mastodon bones from the sea floor; how these were some of the most fertile waters on the planet; how they were crossed by the Atlantic’s busiest shipping routes. On a chart behind him, he pointed out the animals we might see. I looked at their unlikely shapes on the pamphlet he had handed out. They seemed as unreal as the dinosaurs I’d memorized from my library books as a boy.
    Then someone shouted,
    Whale!

    and in the mid-distance, a massive grey-black shape slid up out of the water and back down below. Before I knew it, there they were, off our bows, whales blowing noisily from their nostrils, rolling with the waves. Barely yards away a young humpback threw itself out of the water, showing off its white underbelly ridged like some giant, rubbery shell. It was a jump-cut close-up of something impossible: a whale in flight.
    Forgetting the children around me, I blurted out an inadvertent ‘fuck!’. Other whales were throwing their tails in the air, slapping their flippers as though signalling to each other, or to us. As I watched, more and more animals appeared, as if summoned by some unseen circus master. I was amazed by the exuberant mastery of their own bodies, and the element in which they moved so elegantly. I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free.
    Every summer, humpbacks come to the Gulf of Maine. For six months they have fasted, and mated, in the warm but sterile waters of the Caribbean, suckling their calves with milk so rich it resembles cottage cheese, until it is time to make the annual pilgrimage north. It is the greatest migration undertaken by any mammal. Following routes of colonization first undertaken by their ancestors millions of years ago, navigating up to eight thousand miles of ocean via age-old and invisible signs, they arrive off the north-eastern seaboard, where the warm Gulf Stream meets the chill Labrador currents and stirs up nutrients from the ocean floor in a process called upwelling.
    Here, in the grey-green waters, a vast food chain is set in motion. The whales fatten themselves on sand lances and herring, growing fat with the seasonal glut. And here, less than two hours’ sail from one of America’s great cities, these gigantic animals–‘the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales’–besport themselves, ‘making more gay foam and white water generally than any other’. Even their hunters acknowledged this playfulness in their nickname for the humpback, the merry whale, although its scientific name is hardly less glamorous:
Megaptera novæangliæ
, big-winged New Englander, barnacled angel.
    Launching fifty tons of blubber, flesh and bone into the air, the leviathan leaves its domain, its fifteen-foot flippers like gnarled wings, the tips of its tail, three times as wide as a man is long, barely in contact with the water.
    Seen in the slow motion of recall–the after-image it leaves in your head–a breaching whale seems to be trying to escape its environment, the element that, even as it breaks the surface, is pulling it back down. No one really knows why whales leap. Almost every species does it–from the smallest dolphin to the greatest blue whale–in their own style: backward breaches, belly-flops, half-hearted lunges or full-blown somersaults. It may be that the animals are trying to dislodge parasites–the force is enough for breaching whales to slough off skin, convenient samples to be gathered for genetic tests. There is no knowing when they will breach, although when they do, they may do so repeatedly, often when the wind picks up, as if, like some cetacean Mary Poppins, a change in the weather summons their magical appearance. One scientist reasons that the gymnasts may find it ‘more pleasurable or satisfying, or less painful, to slam the body on rough, rather than smooth, water’.
    It seems likely that their aerobatics are an energetic means of communication–advertisements of physical power and presence, telling other whales, ‘Here I am,’ and