My Natural History (11 page)

There were two endlessly thrilling things to deal with. The first was this dramatic revelation, this epiphany, which had informed me that the wild world is available to us all, even the likes of me; that impossible creatures were there for the seeing, that I didn’t have to be a different person to do that seeing. All I had to do was look, and to be forever looking, and I would always be able to see. The wild was within my scope: within my reach: within my grasp.

The second was that nearly extinct is not the same as extinct: that imminent disaster is not the same as disaster. It was unquestionably true that marsh harriers had become fantastically rare in this country: but that was not the end of the matter. Things had changed. Things had, it seemed,
improved. Things had actually got better: how about that for a thought? I didn’t know then that DDT had been the problem, that it is a residual poison, that it builds up in all creatures in the food chain: that it builds up in the
insect-eaters
, and therefore the build-up builds up
catastrophically
in those that eat the insect-eaters. I didn’t know that DDT causes eggshell-thinning in birds of prey, and so the eggs broke and bird after bird failed to breed. I didn’t know that the poison was now illegal in this country, and that since it was banned, birds of prey had begun a
recovery
, aided by conservation organisations like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The RSPB looks after many acres of reedbed, which is the prime habitat of marsh harriers.

What I did understand was that I had a legitimate cause for optimism. I could rightly feel optimistic about the world and optimistic about the possibilities it had. I felt that life was only now beginning in earnest: that the 30-odd years I had lived were nothing more than a
preparation
for the real thing that was now upon me. It was not a new start. It was the start. That’s what honeymoon, that’s what marriage means. A new optimism was sustained in the air: it had a
low
,
quartering
flight with
occasional
wing-beats and long wavering glides. Hope had taken to the air above me, holding its wings in a shallow vee.

13. Grey whale

Eschrichtius robustus

A
few years after my return to England, the wedding, the honeymoon and the marsh harrier, I was, if I might be so immodest, a success. At least, modest aims had been immodestly realised. I was a sports columnist for
The Times
, I travelled to far places to write stories, I had won a journalistic award, I had published a couple of books. What more could anyone want?

Cind and I were now living in a Victorian terraced house built on the roof of a railway tunnel at the extreme northern tip of London – clinging onto town by a whisker – and she was working as an actress when the work came in. Things were going well, and there was plenty more still to be done, more than enough to give savour to life.

It was January and I had a trip before me. Its main
purpose was to cover the Super Bowl, the final game of the American football season. It was to take place in San Diego, and I had been told a fine thing about that town, something that lit up the prospect of the entire trip. I was also to go on from San Diego to Los Angeles to spend a few days at the racetrack doing some horsey stories; but before that I had to go to Atlantic City to cover some
boxing
. Mike Tyson was to fight Larry Holmes for the
heavyweight
championship of the world.

I can only assume that the reason for my presence in Atlantic City was economy, for this was a drastic measure. Certainly, the boxing correspondent was far from pleased, but he showed no signs of blaming me for stealing his trip. He knew I hated boxing. I had covered a fight in Las Vegas, in the belief that every sportswriter must do so at least once, and I had loathed every inch of the place and every nuance of the event. I had also written fairly unapologetically in favour of the abolition of boxing. I was in no mood to start enjoying myself, then.

Atlantic City was vile, without any of the surrealism that – sometimes for minutes at a time – redeems Vegas from itself. Atlantic City was Las Vegas without the charm and sophistication; Las Vegas with all the subtlety and intellectual challenge removed; Las Vegas without the chance of escape. I walked endlessly along the winter boardwalk to get away from the claustrophobia of the gambling halls, past the same grey Atlantic that rolls past
England, squadrons of ring-billed and herring gulls
wheeling
and squabbling around my head, marching through the short days before twilight forced me to return to the hotel, the way to my room taking me not-at-all
beguilingly
past serried ranks of slot machines and gaming tables, back in the land where there is no night and no day.

I can’t say I handled myself well in Atlantic City. I drank copiously with kind and generous colleagues in the bar known as the Irish bar, a place blessedly without
gambling
to distract you from the task of drinking, but that was not the problem. I began to feel increasingly peculiar. Before long it became clear that I was entering the arena of the unwell. I grew increasingly disconnected. When I spoke I could hear my own voice in my head, as if I was listening to myself on headphones. I remember
disconcerting
an American sportswriter who, out of sheer good manners, asked me my views on the coming Super Bowl and whether I favoured the Redskins or the Broncos. I told him that my real ambition was the whales. I hadn’t
intended
to broach the subject, but sometimes you just say what you’re thinking, particularly when disconnected.

I got through the fight all right. Better than Holmes, anyway. Got my copy written. It was a brutal business. In 1980, when Holmes had fought the fading Muhammad Ali, he had shown compassion, and refused to destroy the man before him. Tyson had no such instincts.
Au contraire
. He
pummelled the beaten Holmes with sadistic relish over four bloody rounds. The crowd roared: it was clearly worth paying good money for such a spectacle. Afterwards, I did the press conference duties, my head spinning like a top. And all the time, very high, very faint, very distant, I could hear music. I wasn’t humming to myself: the music was outside of me, or certainly seemed so: apparently wholly external in origin. I could recognise it, though: a tiny fragment from Paul Simon’s then hugely popular album,
Graceland
. It played on and on, on an endless loop: “I don’t want no part… I don’t
want
no part… I don’t
want
no part…”

I went back to my room – reeled, rather – and soaked the sheets with my sweat, abandoning them towards dawn, cold and clinging, for prickly but dry blankets. Then, after a weekend in New York, mostly spent sweating and
starving
and drinking water, I took myself, recovered and again cheerful, free from both flu and the sulks, across the
continent
to San Diego, there to immerse myself in the madness of the Super Bowl, to take part in the massed press
conferences
and the press breakfasts for 2,000, to climb the cholesterol mountain of scrambled eggs, to pile into the media scrimmages at those times when all the players were
available
and the linebackers and the nose tackles and the free safeties all politely told us what sort of tree they would be. Super Bowl week is so absurd it makes cynicism
redundant
. No one believed in it as a serious occasion: everyone
went along with it. There was absolutely no danger
whatsoever
of confusing this with reality. It all made great copy, of a not uncrazy kind, and I was content throughout, if not entirely sober of an evening.

But all along, it was Saturday I was looking forward to. The game, I should point out, was Sunday.

I had walked up and down the waterfront at San Diego every day, for sunlight in winter is a rare and precious thing for an English soul. And there I found what I was looking for, and so I paid my money – five bucks? Ten bucks? Maybe even 20? No matter, it was a wonderful investment. Saturday morning came, and I made my way out for the treat with all the other tourists, as if we were making a journey to the lighthouse rather than a
pilgrimage
towards ultimate truth. Most of my fellow-passengers, my fellow-Ishmaels, were people in town for the big game, some wearing grotesque colours to show their scarlet or orange affiliations, others wearing the curious clothes Americans wear for lee-zhurr, most with children, because we all know that the wild world is a thing for children, rather than grown-ups. There were even a
couple
of my colleagues: I had obtained tickets for them at their request, for they showed unexpected enthusiasm when I mentioned my plan, and I was, even then, not
without
an evangelical streak. One of them, Simon Kelner, went on to edit the
Independent
, and under his leadership, the paper became notable for the prominence given to
stories on wildlife and the environment.

But on with the trip. A slow trudge out to sea, cheerful yammering of families on a day out, endlessly taking
pictures
of the boat and each other, other vessels around us, boats that were following us to steal our captain’s
knowledge
and expertise and gain a free look at the treasures we were tracking.

And we found them. We found them all right. A pod of three grey whales: I simply couldn’t believe it. I mean that quite literally: this was not a thing that made for easy
credibility
. It was, unlike the Super Bowl press conferences, quite evidently real, but something in the mind rejected the evidence of the senses. This couldn’t be, could it? These things, so uncompromisingly, so bewilderingly huge: they couldn’t exist just like that, could they? It didn’t make any sense to our human, our land-locked, our
city-locked
gaze. I stared at the three plumes of spume, each one holding a distinct shape for a couple of seconds before being whipped away in the sprightly breezes of the ocean. A back, breaking the surface, then rolling, siphoning past us, also like an endless loop, on and on, more and more and more of it, yard after yard after yard. Then a pause and then again the breaking, the echoing sigh of the triple breaths: the grey whales southing their way towards the breeding lagoons of Baja California.

That breathing is the most colossally intimate thing: the vast noise – grey whales are noted for the din of their blow
– the least subtle way possible of reminding us that whales are mammals, just like us, that they breathe, just like us, and for that matter, they drown, just like us. Some
scientists
have suggested that sometimes the whales that get beached are sick animals, returning to land in dread of death by drowning. To see a whale is to experience not differences but similarities: not what divides us but what we share.

After that, the sounding. A deeper sigh, a more
explosive
exhalation/inhalation, the body siphons past, perhaps a shade more quickly, and certainly there is more of it than before, for it takes longer to go past and then – oh, like a Roman candle bursting – the flukes break the surface and the great grey Y is silhouetted against the sky, dripping, wonderfully elegant in shape and conception, and then soundlessly it has vanished. Who could restrain a gasp, an oath, a tear? I wanted to drop to my knees, sing
hallelujahs
, fling myself into the ocean, kiss all the prettiest girls on the boat, the plain ones too, utter broken thanks to the skipper, be for ever a better, a humbler, a wiser person.

When the flukes break the surface – that’s when the
differences
come crashing home, the extraordinary fact that these creatures are so much bigger than us, for all their likeness so unlike us, for all the received wisdom of their near-human intelligence, so fundamentally at odds with any way of thinking that humans can grasp.
Fellow-mammals
: creatures as alien as any a science-fiction writer
ever came up with: these were the denizens of Mars, Krypton, Tralfamadore, yet they were equipped with flesh and blood and lungs and hearts like our own. It was the scientist and writer JBS Haldane who said: “My own
suspicion
is that the universe is not only queerer than we
suppose
, but queerer than we
can
suppose.” You don’t have to leave the atmosphere of the earth to know that he’s right.

Every time the flukes broke the surface was a profound revelation of this truth. We were face to face with the
vastness
of whales, the vastness of creation, the vastness of the principles that make our planet function. There was no song in my head save the sighing of the whale’s breath. I wanted to be a part of it – but then I was a part of it, after all, and had been all along. That was inescapable. The great Y in the sky said Yes, and Yes, and Yes again.

Eventually we left them: whales in the process of
making
the longest migration known to mammals: 10,000 miles from the Arctic to Baja and back again, 20,000 of them doing it every year. They used to make a similar journey in the Atlantic as well, but the whalers put paid to that: the grey whale went extinct in the Atlantic as early as the 17th century.

The game the following day was good, or at least it was a damn good story; Washington Redskins, the first team to make the Super Bowl with a black quarterback, beat the Denver Broncos 42-10. On Monday I caught the plane for the short hop north up the coast to LA. For some reason, I
had a window seat; I normally prefer an aisle, but perhaps I asked for a window for once. Perhaps I already had a plan to look at the ocean from a dizzy height. Certainly that’s what I did, sipping rather than gulping a cold beer that stung the palate agreeably, staring down at the wrinkled sea and wondering how many whales swam and rolled beneath its grey-blue surface. That’s the thing about whales: the conjuring trick: one minute there is just sea; and then, like a Brobdingnagian rabbit from a
horizon-filling
hat, comes the whale. That something so immense could appear from nowhere is gloriously unsettling, going against all kinds of preconceptions. It seems so utterly unnatural: and at the same time, the most natural thing in the world. That’s the stunningly obvious contradiction that gets to everyone who sees a great whale: that
combination
of complete astonishment and complete
inevitability
: of total disbelief and perfect confirmation.

The sea is only alive for us at the surface. All that lies beneath is invisible, inaudible, unimaginable: non-existent, until it forces itself on our attention. We have no
conception
of what life is like down there, in the aqueous depths; we can’t begin to comprehend how it feels to make a
5,000-
mile underwater trek between Arctic and Baja, to make that endless, endlessly repeated journey from A to B and back again. We just see something that breaks the surface: it appears, it materialises: we can’t really come to terms with the idea that it was there all along: and then it
is gone again, as baffling as before.

And with their immensity, their fragility. No group of creatures has come to represent the fragility of the earth as much as the whale. In a thousand campaigns across the 70s and 80s, the notion of Saving the Whale was a revelation of the lurking secret immensities of our world, and of the human genius for destruction, a thing still more immense. To view a whale in his might is to see the planet as a thing of perfect fragility.