Kissing a Whale

Yes, I had the wonderful experience of kissing a whale! My lips, her forehead. I avoided the barnacles, and her smooth skin was surprisingly soft, for a 40 ton animal. It was both mutual and truly a moving experience...[click on the picture to view slide show]

These beautiful grey whales migrate 6000 miles south from the Bering Sea in winter to Baja California, where we visited them. Adults weigh up to 35 tons, and can be 45 feet long. Almost hunted to extinction by the 1970’s, they have made a remarkable comeback and now number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Several hundred show up to winter in San Ignacio Lagoon, on the West coast of the Baja peninsula to overwinter and to give birth to calves that weigh 1 ½ tons. After barely three months of nursing and hanging out in the lagoon, these amazing creatures head back north on one of the longest migrations of any mammal on earth.

The Mexicans called the grey whales “devilfish,” because they were fierce fighters, and therefore dangerous, when harpooned. Around the time of their near-extinction in the early 1970’s, a San Ignacio fisherman named Pachico Mayoral noticed a whale approaching his boat. Afraid, he tried to get away, but the whale followed, staying with the boat for an hour, rubbing up against the boat, and clearly initiating contact. Sensing no aggression, Mayoral relaxed, and soon the whales were touching, and being touched.

A small eco-tourism business has since sprung up around the whales in this protected lagoon; 40 years later, Pachico still takes people out to meet the whales.

We went out four times with a guide from Kujimá. Each time, we were approached multiple times by whales, including a mother seeming to show off her calf. They came right up alongside the boat… popping up an eight foot head out of the water to look at us, diving, flukes rising and gracefully going under water, spouting inches from our faces. Sometimes there would be several right next to the boat, passing underneath, or bringing their huge snouts out of the water right next to us. They seemed to enjoy being touched. I kissed one enormous whale; it seemed silly at first, but as I kissed her, and put my arms around her nose, I had a very strong experience of awe, joy, and love.

Given the human propensity to project ourselves onto the world, it is easy to anthropomorphize their behaviors. We could, for example, spin a story that these whales understood they needed to connect to humans in order to survive. Or, that they learned to forgive and are here to teach us something about living in harmony. Or that they are inviting us to interspecies communication, and thus accelerating our own evolution. Maybe.

Perhaps they simply enjoy a trans-species emotional connection, and, similar to us, are moved by the experience of interacting with an alien life form, and by the discovery of a surprising intimacy that transcends their own species. (“So, how was that for you?”)

Or, perhaps they are simply curious, like us, about another unknown creature that thrives in an adjacent and unknown world and seems to enjoy interaction.

For sure, the whales initiated the initial contact, and are still in charge of the interaction. And, for sure, evolution has always moved forward by experimentation; the creative impulse to reach out, to explore, to try new things. Whatever is going on in this relationship, it seems to benefit both the whales and the humans.

In one sense, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to try to guess what is going on, and why the whales reach out so. We can speculate, and we can form interpretations that are inspiring and that imbue the experience with meaning.

At the same time, efforts to superimpose our interpretation on a phenomenon only reduce it. Like identifying a beautiful bird, doing so provides some reassurance that we are in charge of our world. At the same time, our experience collapses somehow. From an experience of mystery and awe, from pure seeing and pure experiencing, the natural instinct to interpret makes it somehow smaller, more intellectualized, more known.

For me, the experience with the whales was so rich precisely because it is unknowable. This enormous and mysterious creature invited touch, connected somehow. Why, I can’t know. It simply WAS, and I am different as a result. More humble. More grateful. More astonished.