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When my daughter Fiona was three, we went out for a paddle on the west side of San Juan Island, where we were camping. My brother’s wife, Trish, was in the front of our long two-person kayak, which features a center hatch containing a child seat, complete with a nicely retentive spray skirt. That’s where Fiona was seated when we came upon the killer whales.
We really weren’t expecting to see any orcas that afternoon. Sightings had been scarce the previous few days, and then a pod of about twelve whales came by the park where we camped that morning. Most of us had watched from shore as they swam past, headed north. The grownups’ low expectations notwithstanding, Fiona was still hopeful we would see the whales. The night before, as she had snuggled into her sleeping bag, I had read her a book by a local children’s author, Paul Owen Lewis, titled Davy’s Dream, about a boy with a sailboat who befriends the local orcas by, among other things, singing to them. So when we got in the kayak, despite my warnings not to be disappointed, she felt certain we would see them ourselves that day.
The water was glassy and calm, the day windless, and the currents, which, in the San Juan Islands, can become powerfully riverlike, were mild and easy. About three quarters of a mile south of camp, we rounded a corner from which the park was no longer visible, and almost simultaneously, we came upon the orcas. Actually, they were still quite a ways off, but we knew they were there because the daily flotilla of whale-watching boats that accompany the resident pods from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day in the summer was forming at the southern end of our view, near the Lime Kiln Point lighthouse. And then we heard them. And then we saw them: tall black fins, heading more or less in our direction.
We were already close to the rock-cliff shoreline, and I tucked the big kayak in a little closer, although I knew it made little difference in whether the whales decided to pay a visit or just trucked on past at cruising speed, as they so often do. That kooosh sound, wafting over the half-mile distance between us, announced their presence as well as the fact that we were now in their territory and we were at their mercy. They went where they wanted, at whatever speed suited them. They were large and in charge.
I barely needed to point them out to Fiona; she heard the blows, saw the big fins at the same time as both Trish and I. Still, I talked to her: “Here they come, honey! See them?”
Oh yeah, she saw them, and she began singing to them.
Her favorite movie at the time was the Disney musical version of The Little Mermaid (yes, she loved and still loves all things oceanic), which at one point (during key transformation scenes) features a lilting three-note choral melody, and this was what she chose to sing to the approaching orcas. She was relentless, too.
“Ah ah ah . . . Ah ah ah . . . Ah ah ah . . . ”
The whales appeared to be in rapid-transit mode as they approached, but now they were slowing down and milling, as if they were hunting the Chinook salmon that are their dietary staple. It took ten minutes or so for them to pass in front of us, but Fiona sang that theme for the entire time. And it was a close pass.
A large male, with one of those six-foot dorsal fins, burst with a kooosh out of the water about twenty yards away from us, swimming in a line perpendicular to the boat. We could hear the deep inhale that usually followed. And then he went down and swam away.
“See, Daddy?” Fiona cried. “It worked!”
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