Leviathan or The Whale

‘Aren’t I splendid?’ But when you see a whale leap out of the water like a giant penguin, your first thought is that it looks
fun
. The fact that calves and young whales are more prone to breach reinforces this idea. The whales may be merely playing, like the boys who dive off Provincetown’s Macmillan Wharf, placing implicit trust in their immortality as they hurl themselves from one medium to the other. Or perhaps they pity us for our enslavement to gravity, allowing us a glimpse of their true nature by rising out of the ocean to reveal their majesty.
    Seeing whales in the wild seemed to turn me back into a boy. I remembered what it was that fascinated me about these outlandish animals: their sheer variety, their wildly differing shapes and sizes; a satisfying set to be collected like bubble-gum cards, a catalogue of complexity and colour: from the tiny harbour porpoise to the great rorquals–from the Scandinavian for reed or furrowed whale, a reference to their ridged bellies–and the mysterious sperm whale, a tiny model of which I found in my sister’s toy box, still perched on its own plastic wave. It was as if the watery world I feared was restocked with friendly creatures, an international tribe of global roamers; as discrete and wide-ranging as birds, yet all of a type. This was what appealed to me: their completeness, as opposed to our separateness, for all that we are mammals together. They are a tidy whole; we are in disarray.
    Cetaceans–from the Greek
ketos
for sea monster–fall neatly into two suborders. The toothed odontocetes–seventy-one species of porpoises, river and ocean dolphins, beaked whales, orcas and sperm whales–feed on fish and squid. The mysticetes or moustached whales–of which there are at least fourteen species–filter their diet of plankton and smaller fish through their baleen.
    The bizarre nature of baleen seems to underline the otherness of the whale–one that begins in the womb. Although mysticete fœtuses have teeth buds, these are resorbed into their jaws before being born, to be replaced by sprouts of fibrous protein called keratin, the same material that furnishes humans with their fingernails. These long flat slats form pliable plates which line their gums in a great horseshoe shape, smooth edges outwards. They are continually growing, and are teased into fringes at their extremities by the constant play of the animal’s tongue. Swallowing swimming pools of water–so greedily that they actually disarticulate their jaws to maximize their intake–baleen whales expand the ventral pleats in their bellies, then contract them to expel the surplus water and thereby catch their food in the bristles.
    Toothed whales pursue their quarry through the ocean, fish by fish. Baleen whales are grazers and gulp mouthfuls at a time, from herring and sand eels to the tiny zooplankton which drift through the seas like animated dust. Here in the fertile waters of Cape Cod, it is the mysticetes that reign: from the elusive, relatively diminutive minke and the performing humpback, to the rotund right whale and the sleek fin whale–the second largest animal in the world, known as the greyhound of the sea, able to reach twenty knots or more.
    After the blue whale, the finback,
Balænoptera physalus
, is also the loudest of any animal; and since sound travels further and faster through water, an American fin whale (if it cared about such things as nationalities) could be heard by its European counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic. Its mating call registers below the lowest level of human hearing; when it was first detected by scientists, they thought it was the noise of the ocean floor creaking. And in a few seconds, this immense creature–larger than any dinosaur–will pass beneath me. Lowering its broad, flattened snout, the whale dips below the keel in one imperceptible motion, as if powered by an invisible, silent motor.
    There you stand…while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.
    The Mast-Head,
Moby Dick

    In that one motion, my entire presence is undermined. I feel, rather than see, this eighty-foot animal swimming below. Knowing it is there tugs at my gut, and something inside makes me want to plunge in and dive with it to some unfathomable depth where no one would ever find us.
    The finback completes its manœuvre, emerging on the