When you pull up to find out what all the fuss is about, you see the strangest combination of citizens. The hard nosed real estate salesman is holding hands with the Nyungar elder. Night nurses yawn and rub their care worn paws against the Health minister's brand new Chanel suited back. A couple of teenage girls actually smile at their mothers and the mothers actually smile in return, before looking back out to sea.
Alright, I'm making most of that last bit up. But I'm quite sure this scene has happened once or twice on the wild shores of the South West.
Whales do these things to people.
When whales appear, rolling off their barnacles on the white sands of Middleton Beach and parading their babies, people who would normally stride past each other, avoiding eye contact on their power walks, actually begin to commune. They lend each other binoculars and stand close enough to feel the warmth coming off each other's bodies. Everybody and each individual within a few hundred metres knows in their water that the whales are here to visit us.
Old Salt came back from a cruise out into the Sound, all misty eyed and converted. "It was just great," he told me. "They swam straight under the tinny and all around us. We could have touched them." This old whaler said it was the closest he'd ever been to a whale, "in Peacetime."
Native American tradition says that whales are the record keepers of the earth. I like this idea. Those pelagic archivists, closer to us in structure than their fellow fish, are said to have witnessed times when the earth went through catastrophic change - more catastrophic than Bush and Howard both being elected a second time. This was really bad. The oceans of the world rose and their Motherland - Mu - sank beneath the waters.
I think when we see them, we intuit them as our record keepers. They remember where we came from.
With a memory like that, no wonder the locals are aghast, in love, blown away and humbled by these leviathans gracing us with their presence. It was only thirty years ago (this week) that the last whale was harpooned in Albany waters.
Photograph courtesy Dr. Louis M. Herman/NOAA
When I read you, you make me cry. Thank you.
ReplyDeletedarling,
ReplyDeletethis gives me goose bumps.
xx ck
I hope it's good crying foxy and not my lack of hyphens. Nice of you to drop by. Thanks ck x
ReplyDeleteCute tatooed feet! Hey, I want you to be named the official Albany story-keeper, or something like that. You are sooooo..into the local scene and history - steeped in it - and write so interestingly about it....we gotta do something with this.
ReplyDeleteYou know in 1986 I had the experience of placing my arm - by mistake - inside the toothed jaw of a false killer whale whilst its underside was being ripped by the reef beneath it. It did not bite down. It could have snapped my arm. In Augusta in the winter of 1986 we whale rescuers swam many metres offshore amid bloodied waters with bleeding screaming false killer whales. Black fins were everywhere but no one was harmed by either the false killers or the sharp toothed killers that no one saw. And you know, where we spent hours, that turned into days holding them before their release, the very space where we all stood - whales and we cold folk together this space had once been a place of whaling. The red bricks that formed the ballast of the boats that brought them sat strewn near the shore. Twas a strange business that winter in 1986. Biggest and most successful whale rescue of its kind. Yep Sarah, the whale peoples of the southcoast are the friendliest whales in the world. They don't want to bite you and getting close, they only want to eye you, seem to want to study you, with eyes of wonder, like we do them. Thanks for your yarns Sarah - please don't stop - ever!!
ReplyDeleteAgreed!
ReplyDeletei started to comment however it morphed into a post
ReplyDeleteset adrift on a wine dark sea again