On the year of my 60th birthday, I hear that you have gone missing. By the summer of 2011, your death is official, the oldest male in the Southern Resident Community. A gray box in the Orca ID guide will mark your life and death. Your body has been laid to rest by the sea, a banquet for your neighbors.
Photo by Erick Pierson |
Photo by Jami Rouge |
Mostly, the limited views I had of you was like identifying
a human from the top of their head only.
But in rare moments, in the time span of one breath, I was given the
opportunity to try and really see you—to catch the momentary splendor of your
strength and beauty when you cartwheeled. I took in my breath as you surged and porpoised toward some
new location; I watched you rest and travel in the middle of your pod,
surrounded by the members of your clan.
Photo by: Monika Wieland |
Over the
years, I saw the stateliness of your movements become more labored. I could see you getting old. This observation
I hold tenderly, because it is the true privilege of time spent with a known
individual. You were a creature from another place, as alien as outer space,
but I could see that you were slowing down.
Source: Trickster Wine |
Source: Seattle Times |
I like to think of us walking on the sacred trails of the islands and
then to the top of the hills and mountains, where we would rest and look out
over vistas you have never seen. You would tell me you knew little of the lives
of the strange creatures who move through the water in such different ways,
sometimes nearly mowing whale families down in their haste to arrive, sometimes
moving alongside the clans for hours at a time, sometimes silently skimming the
water with a long structure you had observed for thousands of years. Perhaps
you would recite an old orca legend, about salmon that once filled the waters
and how, with the coming of humans, they catastrophically disappeared from your
world.
When we had
our fill of such stories, we would return to the water’s edge and slip beneath
its opaque cover of dark blue. You would show me a world of sound and
connection, for the water does not allow the concept of boundaries that my land
planet does. You would tell me how the cold tempestuous waves
swirl around your skin and how the only heat you had ever known was the warm
milk of your mother and the hot blood that ran in your veins. You would show me salmon and herring, upwelling
and tidal current and I would understand that all of it was you—for who can find
the line between the things that give rise to life and the life that develops? I
would recognize that the salt water I call ocean and Salish Sea is you. I would
see the nations of the ocean planet beside you and understand that they cannot
be separated from their home or from each other. I’d like to
think that this conversation, without words, would occur like bell tones in our
bodies.
An aside. I
would hesitate to tell my spirit kinsman the name we have given him. The
ruffled edge of his fin was his trademark but it never defined him. Calling Ruffles Ruffles seems a bit like calling Lincoln
Stretch or Benjamin Franklin Fluffy.
Or imagine perhaps Chief Seattle being dubbed Red. Nor would I describe
how we watched and marked his movements. Imagine trying to know—say, the poet
Billy Collins— in this way. Yes, his
literal bowel movements we could know, and the way he moved through space. “He
is walking, he is sitting, he is sleeping.” We would know much about his animal
life but this would not account for the deep wisdom of his soul and the way he lived his life.
No, I might just never mention it.
Photo by Jeff Lorton |
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