Magical whale-watch, the closest I've come to a living whale. As some of you may know, I once wrote a novel, The Geometry of God, about a young girl who finds the fossil of Pakicetus, a hoofed whale that lived about 55 million years ago in what is now Pakistan. The actual fossil was discovered by an American man in the Salt Range mountains, about three hours from Lahore, where I lived at the time. I had fun fictionalizing the find, crediting a Pakistani girl for her smarts, drawing pictures of Pakicetus and other walking and amphibious prehistoric whales to include in the story. I'd always wanted to draw weird and beautiful things for a book of my own ever since reading Saint-Exupery's heartbreaking The Little Prince.
Before then, in 1995, I'd seen a humpback breach in Maui, next to an astonished kayaker who began kayaking a little frantically, as the whale kept breaching.
Next sighting was in 2008, also in Maui, on a whale-watching trip where we saw a pod of humpbacks blowing and breaching, but it was pretty far and folks were more interested in a cocktail-and-sunset Hawaii, making me mostly want to get off the boat (but for the fleeting visitors on the water).
Then, last Sunday, on April 14 2019, off Plymouth, MA, this humpback romped around our boat for half an hour, blowing us a perfect concentric kiss, floating on its back, reversing the gaze. We also saw a pod of five humpbacks; a solitary right whale (critically endangered so we did not linger; it's called the right whale as it is slow and feeds on the surface, making it the right one to kill); a solitary finback (the second largest whale after blue whales, and the fastest); a pod of minkes. Tons of white-sided Atlantic and common dolphins, harbor porpoises, and gray and harbor seals, feasting alongside.
A beautiful gift of a day, the sort that, like whales, happens only once.
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