Jim Nollman has been called “a harmless crank” by the Washington Post. But Nollman is prepared to play the jester if it makes us reflect on our relationship to nature.
Nollman is founder of Interspecies Communication, an organization dedicated to promoting dialogue between humans and wild animals. In recent years, IC has made several expeditions to the Arctic to seek out beluga whales.
Admittedly, the idea of serenading whales with guitars and drums seems the province of a bizarre eco-mysticism. Yet Nollman is no mystic, but a shrewd and impassioned individual indignant over our plunder of the earth. He argues that a man strumming a bass chord at the edge of a breathing hole may prove sufficient not only to summon whales, but to fire the public’s imagination.
In Spritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature, Nollman recalls the invocation the opened Iroquois tribal meetings: “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Today, of course, we give little heed to subsequent generations; they are an abstraction. Nollman aims to make them real again. He takes to the ocean with his music in the hope of forging new metaphors that will alter our relationship to the natural world. In Nollman’s words, “Our culture’s relationship to nature will improve dramatically on the day that Senate subcommittees about land use start consulting with Native American shamans, poets, and deep ecologists as a matter of course. Improvement will come when we elevate our poets, musicians, shamans, and philosophers to the critical position currently occupied by our scientists and politicians: that of defining and explaining nature for the rest of us.” In the end, perhaps it is the cranks who will save us.
— T.L. Toma
In October 1988, I was invited by Greenpeace to join an effort to rescue three gray whales stuck in an ice hole a few miles outside of Barrow, Alaska. Because my consulting firm, Interspecies Communication (IC), has developed a sound system that permits humans to transmit sound and music directly to whales underwater, it was hoped that I would be able to develop some acoustic method to coax the whales out of their hole and toward the open sea again. It still took three phone calls from the Greenpeace representative in Barrow to coax me away from the balmy fall weather of the Pacific Northwest, and up to this Eskimo village where the pre-Halloween thermometer was already hovering around fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Simply put, I was not convinced that the whales ought to be saved.
There was a precedent. Two years earlier, when the Russell Glacier in southern Alaska slid down a mountainside to close off the mouth of a fiord, trapping seals, porpoises, and who knows what other manner of unfortunate beast behind an ice barrier, I had waffled interminably before deciding not to put the resources and experience of IC to work. For one thing, nobody in command seemed to know if the animals were actually in any danger. In more general terms, when efforts to save this or that species come down to saving one of this or two of that, the best of motivations too easily degenerate into a case of human beings tampering with the natural order to fulfill their own human agenda. Yet despite my hollow advice to let the glacier do its thing, the rescuers decided to fly north anyway, believing as they must that sheer altruism overwhelms any inference of tampering.
Am I callow or just plain stupid to ask what it is about human morality that insists we rally behind any activity that hints of an altruistic outcome? In the Russell Glacier case, the incipient saviors seemed to savor their role of good guys possessed of good human know-how utilized in the good cause of aiding the helpless marine mammals. Inevitably, the rescue team also exhibited too much yearning for power and glory, a desire to control and even turn aside a natural process of nature by exerting maximum human ingenuity and minimal wisdom. But why not? Weren’t we humans guilty of massacring marine mammals to the point of extinction? By God, didn’t we owe it to those icebound porpoises?
The Russell Glacier mission became a media event of the first magnitude. Journalists from every major newspaper and TV network in the U.S. and a half-dozen other countries descended on the area like vultures around a poached rhino on the African veldt.
In a typically wry insight, Barbara Tuchman has argued that there could be no history unless there were also historians around to write it. If so, then one must also agree that the task of ordering and reordering history is an act of creation, and that historians dream up history as much as they report it. Intriguingly, I find that most journalists — who are our historians of the present moment — disagree violently with this assertion; in fact interpret it as an assault upon their virtue as objective observers. Yet no matter what they, themselves, believe about their own participation in the events they choose to cover, most of the rest of us cannot help but notice that the media creates the news every bit as much as it reports it.
In the case of the Russell Glacier rescue, large-scale media attention meant that the saviors could not easily pack up their bags and go home when they started to suspect that their efforts were hopeless. Not only was the sheer immensity of a cold, wet Alaskan fiord dampening their enthusiasm, the porpoises themselves were stubbornly resisting every opportunity to be corralled. But celebrity engenders its own validity. The applied force of reading one’s own words in half a hundred newspapers and seeing one’s own image up there on the tube can induce euphoria. And the impression that the whole world is offering encouragement tends to overwhelm any hunch that it may be time to throw in the towel. At the Russell Glacier, news reporters and news makers ended up working together like a well-oiled team, artificially stimulating what might just as easily have been a natural event bounded by the just laws of entropy.
Unfortunately, the machinery of the news business sometimes clogs when events choose not to develop at the media’s own speed. So the rescuers were coerced into providing more and more news morsels, known in the trade as sound-bites, until even the project’s most ardent supporters noted that the effort had deflated into a parody of a rescue. It was a bad moment that turned into a bad media event. And vice versa.
The glacier acted very glacierlike: it receded, rescuing sea mammals, rescuers, and journalists in one fell swoop. Ironically, none of the entrapped seals or porpoises seemed very interested in taking advantage of what the humans interpreted as a positive swing of the pendulum. To this day, marine mammals cavort intemperately through the waters of the Russell fiord, seemingly oblivious to the dangers that humans insist swirl about them. Paradoxically, there is little point in faulting the rescuers for their sincere act of trying. They caused no lasting harm. One does not leave footprints on a glacier. The rescuers disturbed nothing besides that inscrutable perception of place I choose to call spiritual ecology.
I have described the Russell Glacier event in some detail, because I did decide to take my underwater sound system to join the effort off Barrow. The difference between the two events was primarily one of scale: at Barrow there were exactly three whales trapped inside a twenty-by-twenty-foot breathing hole that was about five miles from the open ocean. Somehow, chopping a skinny channel through the fourteen-inch sea ice seemed infinitely more plausible and less manic than trying to stop the advance of the Russell Glacier, which approached the size of Rhode Island. Furthermore, the effort in Barrow was akin to trying to solve a puzzle — what ingenious measures might Sherlock Holmes have taken in order to extricate the whales? — as opposed to the Russell Glacier gesture of dressing up like Don Quixote to go off and joust against nature. All these factors combined to make me believe that, in this particular circumstance, saving three creatures might even bring out the best in the human species.
Everybody in Barrow agreed that, without assistance, the three gray whales would be dead within another week. Significantly, we all regarded them as active participants in their rescue, not passive creatures to whom deliverance would be given. Perhaps most critical to my own personal participation, I realized that IC held an important piece of the solution. If a channel could be chopped through the ice (and why couldn’t it?), then my transmitted sounds would almost certainly attract the whales to the channel, or at least lure them from their death hole.
The ambience in Barrow was typically altruistic and sincere, coupled with local Eskimo puzzlement over how such a common occurrence as marine mammals getting stuck in the local sea ice could have mushroomed into such an extravaganza. One broadcaster commented that the rescue had been snatched up as the ultimate goodnews foil to the superficial mudslinging of the current presidential campaign. Somehow, all is not lost in an America that permits three stuck whales to preempt national politics for nearly two weeks.
The location was incredibly majestic. All of us — scientist, soldier, environmentalist, journalist, and Eskimo alike — seemed to pause every few minutes to gaze upon a very distant sun illuminating the ice. Just as our various jobs tended to keep us separated, so, more often, the environment bound us together into a single organism sharing a profound unanimity of perception. Carlos Castaneda has written volumes about the larger-than-life visioning of a Don Juan who perceives human beings as eggs of light. After a few hours spent outside in this abominable cold, every one of us bundled up in the prevailing beige or white parka started to look like eggs. And at the center of each of these human eggs burned an astonishing flame called body heat. Why had none of us ever detected such an internal flame before?
Imagine the humbling pause each of us felt to behold the faces of three naked and bruised whales just a few inches away from our own. For two solid weeks the global village never lost eye contact with these three neighborly ambassadors representing the mysterious tribe of great whales. If there is a mind in the waters after all, then here was our best chance yet to scrutinize its drift.
When I first considered the whales’ ability to survive, their metabolic virtuosity seemed nothing more than an ocean mammal’s version of the body heat just described in my fellow humans. But after a single hour spent in the company of these three grays, what at first seemed a difference in degree was obviously a fundamental difference in kind as well. Hadn’t one whale scientist commented that, should these whales be freed from their ice hole, they would not eat any food whatsoever as they spent the next three or four months swimming six thousand miles nonstop to the warm Mexican lagoons? Several of us concluded that the leviathan was a master alchemist who had somehow learned to stoke some significant part of the golden flame directly out of the brutally leaden atmosphere. How did they do it?
Or perhaps a better question: were the assembled journalists forfeiting a monumental opportunity by focusing all of their reportage on the mere mechanics and human emotions of a rescue operation, completely oblivious to the whale’s own remarkable breathing patterns?
In this case, the potential for recording a myth in the making encountered two major hurdles. First, the mass media’s coverage of the meeting between human and whale never attained the dimension of the mythical because it never sought to record anything but the externalized form of the interspecies coalition. Second, the rest of the people in the world who read and watched those reports, and who diligently construct their perception of contemporary history from the cumulative flow of all such secondhand reports, never heard any reporter so much as whisper about the alchemical power of the whales themselves.
I wondered what if some enterprising TV network had simply turned their cameras on the hole, and then left them there for the week? No cogent commentary, no sound-bites, no talking heads. Just whales breathing in your very own living room, for an entire week.
Instead, something crucial felt out of sync. On the one hand, most of the journalists seemed rapt and articulate students of the mythical images swirling about them. On the other hand, the strictures imposed by their media proved glaringly incompetent to liberate these images. I started to wonder if the reporters failed in their reporting because, witnessing the struggle of the whales, they became an integral part of this struggle. In a word, they were inside the myth. Their activities as journalists turned them into protagonists who were as central to the unfolding myth as the whales themselves. Unfortunately, their own skewed sense of objectivity demanded that one’s own transformed perceptions not become the leading character of one’s own story. The reporters became publicly struck dumb by a format suited only to deal with externalized, objective events.
To generalize this predicament: our own cultural quasi myth, that which we call history, ends up possessing very little of the psychic interconnectedness implicit within traditional myth. When the media fails to include the contextual whispers of contemporary ritual and myth in their reportage, they also fail to include the much fainter whispers of the seventh generation. After all, those whispers are right inside us — nowhere else.
A Yupik Eskimo from Nome once described to me a situation in which a hundred beluga whales shared one small breathing hole for the duration of an entire winter. The belugas simply took turns breathing. That also meant, of course, that the whales developed complex beats to their synchronized breathing: not unlike the polyrhythms of an existential big-band concert stretched out to four months’ duration. He said, “We go out on the ice to watch the whales breathe — and we learn how to get along with each other through a long winter.”
Such anecdotes inevitably prompted nonstop restaurant talk between journalists and rescuers concerning the big picture about life and death on an ice floe (none of which ever made it into the newspapers). One reporter, for example, listened to my rantings about the missing mythical element, only to answer that, yes, it was all true, “Except that it just ain’t the news.” He then proceeded to ask how I might expect the human race to alter its course. Should we all be forced to share a single breathing hole? “Well,” I laughed, “it would probably transform a much smaller human population into a virtuoso rhythm section.”
Now I stand out on the ice, keeping time with my heavily mittened thumb and index finger, trying to determine if these grays exhibit any humanly discernible rhythm in their breathing patterns. They have been lying at the surface for a full two minutes, breathing easily with cavernous two-second-long exhalations. Then a great big three-second breath signifies a change. They dive beneath the ice, disappearing so completely out of sight and sound, and for such a long period of time, that we rescuers might easily forget what on earth has impelled us onto this formless Arctic ice sheet in the first place.
My eyes wander over the theater of this improbable rescue operation. To the south unfolds a scene out of a war movie: great chopping helicopters unloading whale soldiers, half of whom have long spindly projections that at this distance look like rifles, but are actually camera tripods. In another direction, to the east, a three-foot-high escarpment of solid ice runs along the shoreline all the way to the horizon. It is as if the last wave of a long-past summer had frozen as it curled in upon itself. To the west, a white plain of sea ice charges unbroken all the way to . . . where? Soviet Siberia? Finland? I blink once, twice, unable to locate even the hint of a landmark.
I clap my bulky gloves together just to make sure my hands are still inside, and turn my body another ninety degrees. To the north, twenty eggs stand clutching chain saws along a series of newly dug channels. Yesterday, one observer informed me that the jolly Inupiat Eskimos sat by and giggled as all the imported white boys — marine biologists, oil company laborers, national guard personnel — took hours and hours to cut out slabs of sea ice and then lift the two-hundred-pound sections up onto the adjacent ice surface. After a full day of activity they had cut a second and then finally a third small breathing hole. Finally, early this morning the Inupiat staged a quiet coup against what they must have considered to be the incompetent although well-meaning authority of the U.S. government scientists and army officers. Just seven hours into this day, after the Inupiat workers push the ice blocks under the main body of the ice, their freshly cut channel stretches an impressive half-mile from the whales’ own breathing hole.
Closer to where I stand, ten more eggs hover over one of yesterday’s holes that has been kept unfrozen overnight through the electrically powered bubbling of one of three donated de-icers. These eggs are bent over the hole as if praying to the god of whales, “Please! You’ve got to teach these animals that they must, absolutely must, learn to surface at one of the new holes.”
There is the rub. This cetacean act of discovery must occur within the next two hours, because if the whales do not discover the channel before the workers leave the scene at dusk, then the entire half-mile channel will surely freeze overnight. A day’s work will have been in vain. But if the whales do discover the channel, then the entire interspecies brigade of whales and chain-sawers can continue their dance tomorrow, eventually cutting a channel all the way out to the open lead, five miles offshore. The optimistic Inupiats have already started to cut out a much larger breathing hole at the end of their new channel, with the understanding that all three of the de-icing machines will keep only that single hole open overnight.
Pssssshhhhooooofwaaaww! The smallest of the three whales surfaces to startle me out of my reverie. The second whale surfaces, then the third. All the nearby rescuers emit a parenthetic groan: “Come on whales! Why won’t you try out some other hole?” The ocean around the whales’ own tiny breathing hole is barely thirty feet deep, no deeper than the body length of the largest of the grays. More conjecture erupts between media and rescuers: you would think they’d feel cramped. You would think they would have an ounce of curiosity to explore all the noise made by the chain saws.
One of the more metaphysically oriented of the rescuers pops a truly wonderful question: where do the whales go during their three minutes underwater? One of the scientists starts to laugh. “Go? What is that supposed to mean? Where do you think they go?” I stare at the questioner and realize that humans have been tying their minds up in knots for centuries over the anthropocentric issue of whether or not a tree that falls in the deep forest has actually made a noise if there is no human there to hear it.
The smallest of the three whales lies on the surface, its snout battered to the very bone, its face skewed sideways to get a good look at the human beings who also turn their heads sideways to gaze upon the meaning of life as expressed by that scanning eye. A reporter from the Australian broadcast news steps gingerly up to the hole, composes himself as his camera crew records the setting, and then proceeds to describe the drama of the multimillion-dollar rescue mission that has bogged down because of the whales unmitigated lack of curiosity. While the camera eye fixes on him from one direction, the baby whale examines the strange human sounds, shapes, and colors from another. As the reporter continues to speak, a crew from the BBC queues up behind the Australian crew, and too improbably, a crew from NBC queues up behind the British crew. The Australian reporter searches to find entirely too much pathetic irony in the fact that “the local Eskimos, who usually kill [pause] and eat [pause] whales, should be working so hard to save these three individuals.” But why is he saying this? I am quite certain that the reporter has already been briefed on the fact that local Eskimos never did hunt the grays. So ten thousand years of Eskimo culture is capsulized for ten million Australian viewers in the slander of a single erroneous statement. To make matters worse, the reporter expresses discontent over his own phrasing, and so asks to repeat these same lines two, three, four more times. For my own part, I smack my mittens together and feel embarrassment watching four Inupiat whaling captains listen to this false exposé. Meanwhile, one of the larger whales has chosen to exhale a mighty breath, spraying shards of ice crystals around the commentator’s head. The Aussie finally concludes his perfidious report and steps aside, making room for the British reporter to take his turn.
This commentator unzips his hood, takes off his knit cap, and then displays the top six inches of a blue necktie before focusing upon another favorite side issue of the rescue effort. “Can they justify the expense of more than a million dollars, and one hundred volunteers, to save three gray whales, while they permit children in the Sudan to die of starvation?” I stare at the man in outright astonishment. In a land where a person’s body heat is far more valuable to him than his money, the man’s opened parka seems to be squandering the equivalent budget of this entire rescue operation.
We are the species that seeks control over each other as well as over nature. So the reporter’s impossible question reprimands the ruling class of the human species, those abstract individuals he chooses to call they, for losing control by losing their cumulative heads over three foolhardy animals. This question also assumes, of course, that it is more moral — in traditional, human-centered terms — to devote the lion’s share of our attention to saving the disadvantaged human underclass. In other words, how could they have gone so far as to permit a mere interspecies affair to acquire a life out of all proportion to its monetary value — a life that aspires to the mythical?
According to Joseph Campbell, myth awakens the human psyche to the mystical dimension of the universe. It accomplishes this by converting what is an inscrutable mystery into a grounded order through the creation of icons and heroes.
A rescue operation mounted in the far north of the planet permits us to tackle the task of grounding the inscrutable forces of the universe in the icon of three stranded gray whales. The representative from the BBC asks the question why they, actually meaning he and you and I, are not directing our energy to save the starving children of the Sudan. This question will later be answered by a statement on the editorial page of the Hartford Courant:
The creatures’ plight stirred global sympathy. . . . The caring doesn’t compensate for any human shortcomings, but it generates hope that this element of human nature will be seen more often.
Just as the media worked so diligently (if not inadvertently) to invent the myth of the gray whale rescue, so that myth now encourages the media to focus some of its archetypal juice upon other sympathetic issues; for example, starving children.
Last night at “the world’s most northernmost Mexican restaurant,” it was revealed that marine mammals get stuck in the ice around Barrow every winter. In fact, even as we rescue gray whales at one hole, there is yet another hole just a few miles farther out that contains an iced-in bowhead whale. But the Eskimos do eat bowheads, and so no one is interested in covering that situation.
Ironically, if there were no predictable Arctic larder of frozen critters, the threatened polar bears would have a very difficult time making it through the winter. Did that mean, I asked, that we end up killing polar bears when we save gray whales? Everyone at the table reacted with that mixture of sighs and laughter that means no one has the answer.
An hour later, the conversation inevitably drifted to the relationship between the news media and the rescue effort. A dinner companion explained in some detail how the rescue operation was born after a local reporter had written up the story in the local paper because the whale hole was located so close to town and everyone wanted to witness it firsthand. This led to a story in the Anchorage paper, leading to a syndicated story by UPI, leading to the networks, so on, and so forth around the world. As syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick finally described it, “The story had taken on the kind of irresistible momentum that defies objective analysis.”
In Barrow, what had started out as a common life-and-death drama enacted between living beings and the elements grew, acquired an identity of its own, grew more, and finally became an event that prompted Ronald Reagan to call and offer the U.S. Army to help save the whales. The mystery tale of three whales fighting for their lives along the lip of the Arctic Ocean was quickly transformed into an accessible news flash about human volunteers making incredible donations of time and money, about ingenious equipment whose only function was to keep an ice hole open, and how an international media event was altering the October ambience of downtown Barrow. We would hear over and over again about these icons and heroes, all of whom represented the oil companies, the U.S. Army, the environmental movement, and the Inupiat whaling captains — all joined together in common cause. Yet if this was the high ground of an unfolding myth, it also was bound to acquire its dark side, as represented by this statement from the Seattle Times:
Standard Oil of Alaska couldn’t buy this kind of front page network news positive publicity for four times the [$500,000] amount. Oil companies have battled a land-raper image since the first oil pipeline was proposed. . . . What is warmer or fuzzier for Big Oil than saving three whales?
And of course, what about the more compelling issue of saving all the whales? As I sat at the restaurant enjoying a plate of enchiladas, the Japanese were out on the high seas killing endangered whales under a dubious loophole known as “scientific whaling.” In a nutshell, scientific whaling means that the Japanese totally disregard the international moratorium against killing whales, and then justify their affront by asserting they need to study a thousand or more whale organs. Back in the early 1970s, the U.S. Congress passed a farsighted law called the Pelly Amendment that demanded, among other provisos, that the government impose trade sanctions against any country that disregards international whaling accords.
It now seems the height of irony, although not untypical, that the same president who sent the army into Barrow refused to uphold the Pelly Amendment. When I arrived in Barrow, I found myself politicizing the answer to the reporters’ stock question about why I had joined the rescue: “I hope that the focus accorded these three whales brings attention to the whaling policy of the current administration in Washington.”
But that was when I arrived. Now that I have passed through my initiation by spending time out on the ice, the urgency of the Pelly Amendment seems like a faraway memory from my early childhood. Out on the ice, you enter another world. All I can think about is moving whales. All I can feel is body heat.
The two o’clock helicopter back to Barrow has carried away almost all of the news reporters. The stories about today’s activities have to be written and sent off via modem or satellite to make it into tonight’s newspapers or telecast. Viewed from a media perspective, anything that occurs out on the ice after two p.m. will never have happened for millions. Although this fact prompted no more than a chuckle when it was explained to me at Pepe’s last night, now that I am out on the ice about to commence my own job, I feel strangely liberated.
Actually, there remains a single reporter with a tape recorder who has just spent fifteen minutes interviewing me in some depth. Furthermore, he plans to stay out here until dark, “just to see how the music turns out.” He says that he represents the Voice of America, and that this interview will be broadcast tomorrow morning throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I stare north, trying one more time to sense some (or all) of the Soviet people who are going to hear that interview. All I can see is the well-coordinated team of Inupiat whaling captains, who continue to slice hole after hole through the ice, neither concerned about nor deterred by the momentary hiatus in noncommunist coverage. Now I turn in a circle just to see this panorama one more time. Off to the southwest, bright rainbows of ice, called sundogs, have precipitated on either side of the sun. All of my wry beliefs about media events seem to slide off my heavy shoulders and sink into oblivion. It is time to go to work.
The engineer who built IC’s electronic underwater sound system recommended that I keep it above zero degrees Fahrenheit if at all possible. So the scientists have set up a heated, three-by-eight-foot shed on runners at the fourth ice hole to the north, located about one hundred yards from the whales’ own. This particular hole should be an easy underwater jaunt for even the most battered of whales. Most important, this particular hole is the gateway to the half-mile channel. If the whales decide to join me, then they will also inevitably discover the channel. Everyone involved in this task hopes that the discovery will prompt the whales to zoom down the channel’s entire length searching for an outlet to the ocean. At the end of the channel they will find, instead of the ocean, a very large hole kept ice-free by all three of the de-icing machines. Then, the entire day’s worth of channel can be allowed to freeze overnight.
And of course, tomorrow the Eskimos will start the entire process again. By that time, all of us would like to believe that the whales will have gotten the general idea. If not, then I’ll play again.
I drop the underwater speaker and the hydrophone into the hole, tie them off to one of the sled runners, and step inside my thirty-five-degree nest, where I start connecting the electronic leads into a power amplifier and a tape recorder. I have chosen to commence this acoustic experiment on a positive note, trying to attract the whales away from their own certain deathtrap hole and to the source of the sound.
Yesterday, when I told the scientists in charge that I had spent part of the past fifteen years developing guitar techniques “for attracting or repelling the whales,” all the assembled men and women looked at one another as if I had said I was from the Pleiades. I explained that live sound has enjoyed a long history of attracting whales, because the ever-playful whales tend to play with the call-and-response medium of improvisational music. Live sounds, even electronically generated live sounds, may even lead to that paradigm-shifting phenomenon known as the interspecies dialogue. In this specific case, if the trapped whales feel that their own rhythmically based grunts have been answered, they may actually search out the source of that sound. One man asked if he could bring his flute along, which got a chuckle. Someone else asked if I had brought any recorded sounds. “Well, yes, now that you ask, my preferred choice for recorded sounds is a cassette of a South African a cappella group, Ladysmith Black Mombazo, because their music consists of whispering voices singing in harmony, without any sharp edges.”
My ever-diplomatic sponsor from Greenpeace recommended that I first transmit a recording of gray whales made in Baja California by a very senior scientist from the National Marine Fisheries Service. “Let’s try the gray whale tape first,” she said. “Maybe our grays will be tricked into believing that there are other whales just a few hundred yards away.” “Well, no,” I answered in my most expert tone. “Experience makes me believe that the whales will probably respond more to a live musician emulating gray whale sounds than to any dead cassette of grays, no matter who recorded it.”
Our difference of opinion offered no grounds for an argument because, in all honesty, everyone agreed that nothing else was working. Had I proclaimed that I would conjure up a 50,000-year-old cetacean ascended master to channel the whales up the channel, the rescue leaders would have felt obligated to try that as well. In fact, here was Greenpeace invoking a guitar-playing interspecies communicator, who had arrived in this nest of commando helicopters, a skycrane right out of The Empire Strikes Back, a 185-ton icebreaking barge, a seven-ton icebreaking needle, an eleven-ton Archimedes screw, wheeled, icebreaking pontoon vehicle, all of which cost a whole lot more and make a whole lot more noise than my little guitar. But, critically, none of those machines had worked at all. By contrast, this self-proclaimed nonexpert matter-of-factly proclaims that no, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get the whales out of the hole using South African choral music. So very quickly, we arrived at a strategy that pleased everyone: play what you like, after you try the gray whale sounds.
Out on the ice, I complete all the electronic connections to the sound system, don a set of headphones, hand a second set to my friend from Greenpeace, and tap on the power to give a listen to the under-ice environment. All is silent except the faraway sounds of the chain saws. In fact, the acoustic ambience under the ice attains a quiet I have never encountered in any other ocean. Next I pop the gray whale cassette into the tape recorder, flip the play button, and am greeted by the grating cacophony of very loud static. I turn off the tape recorder and announce that if there are any gray whale sounds on this tape, then no one, either whale or human, is going to hear them through such a dense wall of noise. Without another word, I plug my soprano guitar into the transmit connector, turn up the volume to achieve maximum clarity, and start to strum a D-modal drone. I do not know what it is about the key of D major, but in my experience, more species seem to utilize its harmony than any other scale. Jazz musician Paul Winter has discovered the very same thing while recording his albums with many different animals.
But after fifteen minutes spent in the key of D, and another fifteen spent in variations thereof, the whales still have not budged. I turn off the system, don all my layers of clothing, step outside, and walk over to the whales who are lollygagging on the surface. The two adults still look fairly healthy. However, the baby looks more beat-up and listless than ever. “Hey, you guys, please pay attention to what I’m trying to do, will you? You’ve got to move out of this hole within the next hour or the channel is going to freeze overnight. Try to understand. OK, listen: I’m going to go back and try it again.” The whales eyeball this babbling two-legged in their midst. I walk to the very edge of the hole, reach out a heavily mittened hand. One of the two grown whales reaches up to nudge my hand with a badly bruised snout.
Back at the shed again, I put Ladysmith Black Mombazo into the box and turn it up. Whispery male harmonies fill the icy Arctic water with a song about the struggle of living homeless under a warm South African sun. On and on they warble. But half an hour later, at five-thirty p.m., with just about one more hour of daylight left, the whales still have not budged. I shut down the system, pull in all the loose wires, dress, step outside into a cold wind, trudge a half-mile out to the end of the channel, walk all the way back again, trot laterally away from the rescue operation, watch the sundogs dancing across the sky, and then finally return to the shed, where I flag down the first snowmobile and ask if the Eskimo driver will drag my shed over to the hole where the whales live. This is quickly accomplished. Now, just as quickly, I drop the hydrophone and underwater speaker into the water and hook up all the wires again.
Several of the Inupiat chain-sawers gather around me as if waiting for an explanation about the wires and the guitar. When I tell them that I plan to play some a cappella South African choral music into the hole, they all laugh. I can only remind these good-natured men that at least three times during the past two days they have gone so far as to drape plastic tarps over the breathing hole in an aggressive attempt to force the whales to use an alternate hole. The whales continued to surface right into the plastic, and pushed the tarp upward until the wind took it away. And no, I cannot be sure that the sounds will redirect the whales to the channel. Actually, that is not my intent. Rather, I wonder if the whales might make the connection between the sounds I am about to play at this hole, and the sounds I will later play when I return to my original location. But enough talk. I step inside the shed, hand a pair of headphones to the Inupiat leader, and very quietly turn on Ladysmith Black Mombazo. The whales, for their part, immediately dive out of sight.
They resurface a minute later at the hole to which I have spent the last hour trying to attract them. Too much! All the rescuers who have assembled around my little shed start to jump up and down in sheer delight. Now I turn off the tape just to see what will happen. The whales evidently take some note of the silence as well. They dive again, only to resurface back at the original hole. “Turn the tape back on!” everyone yells. On it goes. As if on cue, the three whales dive again. But this time they vanish for at least three minutes. Where did they go? Finally a keen-eyed rescuer shouts, “Look!” pointing a good quarter-mile down the length of the channel. Yes, I see it too, we all see it — a blow, and then another blow. The whales have discovered the channel! Success! Hooray!!!
We all go waddling across the ice toward the last hole of the channel. By the time I arrive, the whales have already found their new home and have turned about, dashing vigorously back and forth along the entire length of the channel. They seem as delighted by their own liberation as we obviously are. So, in effect, there is nothing more for me to do but return to the shed, collect up the sound system, and lug it across the ice to the main command hut to wait for a ride back to Barrow.
But then, tragedy. Someone reports that the baby whale has not been sighted for the last ten minutes. Someone else suggests that it is already too dark, and the channel much too long, to be certain of anything so ephemeral as a whale spout. Yes, I had seen the baby return to their original breathing hole after the music had been shut off that first time. But look over there, you can see the two adults quite plainly. All eyes search the channel for a sign of a third whale. If it is true, and the baby is gone, then it must have happened when the whales dove for so long. Although the baby could have surfaced at any of several holes along its path, it may instead have tried to keep up with the two adults. Already listless, it could have quickly exhausted its very limited store of energy and so drowned.
I return home late the next day to newspaper headlines tolling the death knell of a baby whale. The reports also note that the two remaining whales have inexplicably left their deathtrap of a hole and are on their way to the open sea. There’s no mention whatsoever of Ladysmith Black Mombazo.
“When Nature Is Larger Than Life” is excerpted from Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature by Jim Nollman © 1990 Jim Nollman. Reprinted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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