We wharfies spend ourselves on sandwiches slick with mayo and chips as tough as baleen, a scrap of which hangs over the bow? stern? of the craft. Craft is what you call a whale boat like this, according to the captain, accustomed to explaining to landlubbers whale accoutrement like baleen, which actually looks more like a tough frozen feather. We wharfies, however, know at least what knot to tie to keep our own crafts within reach, and that all boats are crafts, but not all crafts are boats. This one is just the right size for exploiting tourists, which we are not. We thirty wharfies comprise a school of people who actually live on water on craft without stern or bow, fixed to a dock beside two of these large crafts that set out each morning, noon, and sunset to trap cetaceans on camera in the wild because the whales are not us. Once a year, the whale boat company invites us on a cruise to ameliorate their intrusion upon our dock quiet, especially the washing of the decks at six a.m. Now cameras—black barnacles—teeter on the whaleboat railing, hoping to “catch” the whales, the one in today’s case, slaiChainsaw, whose serrated, shark-chewed fin is soon seen in a close-up lens, while to us standing camera-less, the fin’s barely a dark wave among so many.
Waving a plasticized chart of possible marine sightings, the onboard burly biologist announces through his bull horn that Chainsaw is not one of the Southern dying whales. Southerners won’t eat anything other than the very best salmon—which are scarce—he announces, and they refuse to breed with Northerners. They’d rather swim aloof and starve. Racists, the biologist admits, but not through the bull horn. Chainsaw, whose fin now glides far in front of the boat, is one of the happy, well-adjusted whales, except for the cut of his fin.
After such an insight, we are allowed to down the contents of bottles given us out of the hold toward the development of our own happiness, and stand drinking spread-legged to account for the swaying of the sunsetting water, the wind helping the motion quite a bit, and gossiping because what else can you do with neighbors you know mostly only by sight on the wharf and their occasional verbal surfacing—my pipes broke or help me with my ropes? Line, not rope. The owner of the B&B, floating of course, sits close to her date who’s known to live elsewhere but is now taking advantage of the wharfies’ free tickets to watch the whales, thank you very much, and not to watch her. The bison-looking, young, bearded man with a prominent cellphone is not watching her either, perhaps he has the stock market in mind and in hand. The assiduous writer has forgotten her pen and thus is forced to realize that the brass fittings in front of her wouldn’t match anything in her kitchen, then swivels to imagine sex amongst the three bulky-jacketed crew at the sterner end of the boat, so indeterminately gendered surely any act would have to be conducted by spraying, similar to fish mating or the bobbing anemone. A discussion between her and the threesome lasts only a few minutes before drifting to the extinction of the Salish White Wooly Dog, and the huge number of its bones found buried together on a nearby island, so many it suggests the slaughter of the buffalo a latitude lower. He believes the Salish deed was done to discourage the cultural integrity of the weavers who spun the dog’s wool into blankets for warmth. The biologist interrupts him, saying that the basking shark is the newest candidate for extinction, the basking variety not being aggressive enough to counter the attractiveness of its basking, just-in-reach flesh. Defenseless, the sharks are hard to campaign for versus the cute whales. Whole mounds of bleeding sharks, he says, used to pile up the end at the pier we’ve just left behind, overfished and unsuitable for anything but bait. Then he goes quiet, scanning the waves for the living, possibly frisky whales, starving or not, to justify his salary.
Everyone fixes on the same horizon.
What about elsewhere, asks the writer after a fruitless while, Gaza’s extinction, where we’re good Germans after the Holocaust? Extinction is extinction.
No one pays her the least attention. Too simplistic an analysis? Or already said, old news? Too political? The writer cleans up the appetizers and takes out a book. That the Leviathans should be so concerned as to warn us about the end of the world with their bubbles and flipper wagging! she says over pages that suggest just that. It’s not like we ask the whales to parade for us and throw themselves into the air.
Why exactly do they? queries a dashiki-clad woman.
They want our attention, says a child-sized woman before the biologist can open his mouth. And they have something to say if only we could understand them.
People always think they’re warning us, argues a grandmotherly man in a rainbow t-shirt. But couldn’t it be instead Get a life? Stop hanging around, waiting for us to jump out of the water? What are these stinking voyeurs doing out here anyway?
The whales don’t want anything, says the writer.
No one on board wants for anything either, says the baby-holding dad, so much so it’s hard to imagine extinction. Besides, watching the sea absorbs every want, he says, like being in or on the water, floating—
His baby is stirring but he can’t stop staring at the sea. Can he will a whale into his view? The biologist chirps a lullaby he says is a whale’s, of a species that was saved only a decade earlier and is now in apparently good stead, indeed from the sound of the song, happy. Is he luring it? He chirps as if his job depended on it.
The writer says she awoke in the night a year ago to a series of strange squeaks seemingly emitted from the water under her hold. Her craft is moored not a twenty-minute walk from the center of the city, and the harbor is big, but not that big, she says to all of the other craft owners, and they agree, nodding over the noise of the boat’s accelerating motor. It could’ve been a baby wailing after being fed and changed, sunk in the mystery of emoting, she says, looking at the glassy-eyed, wide-awake baby.
It was no baby, she adds.
Fin!
Everyone piles onto the railing again, weighing the boat to one side, but it’s only Chainsaw taking a bow. Nonetheless, photos are taken, backup Chainsaws, the cameras held and held, hoping to capture the whole mammal doing the whole thing, flailing itself high in the air. As if to avoid a chainsaw? asks the dashiki-clad.
The sailor perched at the wheel above them, plows the boat forward, like a farmer sowing bubbles into the sea. Dusky birds race beside the boat, identified as auklets by the biologist, Auk! Auk! screeches someone not at all sober. The great auk! Those too died off, killed for feathers, meat, fat and oil, says the biologist. Oblivious to their missed greatness, the birds cross in front of the bow in threes, looking as if they like doing it.
But do they? wonders the writer out loud, disembarking a few minutes later amongst wondering others who have to wait, like herself, another year before the next free ride and sandwiches offered to allay the whaleboats’ inconveniences, next year’s noise and the moneyed, obnoxious crowds who come to stare at them. Do the whales hate it, too?
We wharfies banter long and hard about the difficulties of having tourists swarm the docks in such huge numbers, trying to peer past our doors and peeing off our decks. We pass the coffee shop tucked in dockside that we ourselves often frequent, now so closed and dark, wending our way between solid waves of those late window-peering tourists to throw open the doors of our floating bedrooms, still a little drunk on whatever came out of the hold, and happy.
