The
Question
Copyright 2005 Renee Prince
All
rights reserved.
For the
most important questions,
the
truth lies somewhere beyond the answer…
The
Question
The beach is a place between worlds,
where the tide draws the boundary line between the known and the
unknown. Today, in the long hours of morning, the sea is a mirror
of the sky and every surface is polished with light. As I walk
north along the beach, to my right is the familiar world of terra
firma, where human beings have written all the rules, printed all
the currency, and jacked up all the prices. To my left stretches a
deep blue wilderness that man cannot put into order.
I welcome that change of view, and a
chance to see past the surface sense of what is and what might be.
It still feels like a breath held too long and then, at last,
finally released whenever I look out over the blue distance and see
the signs and signals of an ancient world where clocks don't make
sense and human beings have never been able to stay long enough to
settle, reproduce, and then come up with a reason to start killing
each other. Out here, just a street's width away from my footsteps,
glimpses of that non-human world sometimes shimmer through, and the
question reappears, as always, whenever I catch sight of the enigma
that drew me here in the beginning.
As I walk on in this brilliant morning,
my eyes are usually on the glittering expanse of ocean, scanning it
methodically from surf line to horizon and back again. I am looking
for dolphins, a habit begun so long ago I cannot tell it from
instinct, now. The dolphins are part of the view, part of my
thoughts out here, part of the questions I have carried around with
me ever since I found that what I wanted most in my life was to
study dolphins and understand them. The dolphins are part of the
question that takes me up and down the shoreline over and over
again. I ask the same questions knowing I am wishing for one
answer, at least, that will never come.
Somehow, when I was fifteen, I realized
this feeling about dolphins, and knew I could not change its
importance within me. Once I came to know it, I could not forget
it. As the psychologist I’ve become, I have thought long and hard
on the causes of my particular obsession. With the dolphins came
agape, or a love that needs no requital, no sexual desire, to
flourish, expand, and uplift one’s spirit. Sometimes it seems as
though events conspired to shape me toward this calling for
dolphins, but at other times, the reason I should feel so
irrevocably drawn to these creature is as mysterious as they are.
If I were to look at this love
clinically, I would see it this way: maybe it began at the age of
eight, when I spent the day at Marineland, a sea-life park perched
on the end of a long, cliff-edged point above the Pacific in
Southern California. I have often wondered if that experience
triggered some mutant form of imprinting, with a delayed onset and
no clue during the intervening time period that one day the organism
(me) would wake up to find that all the normal, established
psychological priorities had changed, and life would now follow a
new prime directive. Perhaps that is why certain images from that
long day’s visit to a new world persist in memory with a weird kind
of Technicolor significance.
I remember the bright turquoise of the
dolphin “petting tank”, and the touch of the warm, yet cool, smooth
and wet skin of someone who looked back at me, not once, but many
times, with an intensity new to me. I saw brief rainbows floating
in the strange, head-released breath of the dolphins, and traveled
long, dark corridors spaced with windows that glowed blue from the
light of a submarine cavern where huge black and white whales glided
slowly through the gloom. Divers knelt on sparkling sand in a
sunken stone arena feeding neon whirlwinds of fish by hand, and you
could buy pink pearls, each hidden inside a shell, at a stand which
overlooked the misty blue of the Pacific Ocean far below us. When I
looked at the horizon, there were islands out there, unknown places
dark and jungle-green, barely visible under vast castle towers of
white clouds. My throat ached with the beauty of it all.
I remember so much mystery, and it
arrived with these creatures I had never seen before or even thought
to imagine. Some of those creatures had gazed into my eyes with
their very different ones, all dark iris, no whites showing,
flattened and on the sides of their head. I had wondered, could
they see as well as I could?
My grandmother had taken me to the park
that day as a special outing for just the two of us. Without the
normal crowd of three impish younger sisters and our watchful
mother, I was feeling very much more adult, especially after Grandma
ordered lunch for us at a restaurant in the park that seemed to me
the most glamorous place I'd ever been. I carefully sipped my tea
with only a modicum of sugar (so she wouldn’t see me as a
candy-loving child), and we carried on a genteel adult conversation
about the family. The only part of that talk I remember was when
she leaned in to tell me gravely, "The eyes are the windows to the
soul."
She had meant it within the context of
human beings, I now know, but as I heard the sentence for the first
time, it seemed like such a strange thing to say that I thought of
its possible meaning in every context, trying it out for the truth
of it; testing its definitions. I remembered the phrase all that
afternoon, thinking about windows and then about souls. I had
looked into many windows that day, but windows into what?
When the dolphins locked eyes with me at
the petting pool, was I looking into souls, or something less?
Something more? Something different from anything in my own or my
Grandmother’s world? Many years later, I still wonder about that
day spent in an artificial marine world on cliffs high above the
real ocean.
When high school began, with its
required hard science courses like chemistry and biology, the
mathematics they entailed petrified me. Through all of elementary
school and junior high, I had never been able to do math without
suffering the agonies of the damned---I had no faith in my answers
and would recheck and change them constantly. I seldom finished all
the questions on any test because I had gone back to earlier
problems so many times, looked deep into my soul for the knowledge I
thought I had and found nothing but a blank abyss. From the
times-tables on, mathematics had been hell.
Thus, feeling wretched and doomed, I
began chemistry in my sophomore year. To my utter surprise, the
entire world opened up like a flower that had been invisible until
its blossoming. I saw how things worked, what air was made of, and
water. The molecular structure of my own desk was revealed along
with the very components of life. Now, as the courses progressed, I
understood the lessons, including the math, because it all made
sense, and I became fascinated with discovering the truth of things.
I realized my older questions, long
abandoned out of difficulty---questions about religions, dogma,
philosophy, mind versus matter---even questions concerning windows
and souls---all came back to one burning meta-question: “What is
the truth?” With the clear example of chemistry and its value in
revealing the true structure of things, I learned that I was
fascinated with that meta-question. I loved science, because it
concerned itself solely with the discovery of the truth.
As to the truth of my wonderful and terrible
bond with dolphins, I might also speculate that it may not have
happened through some unrecognized form of imprinting. Instead,
perhaps it had happened gradually over the course of a few years,
and perhaps the longing to communicate with dolphins had everything
to do with the television, which was on from the moment my sisters
and I came home until long after we went to bed.
In those important formative years, the
Viet Nam war was broadcast into our house every day from five to six
o'clock. It ran on every channel of the four we got before the time
of cable and satellite television, so it was inescapable, and in
colors of blood and burned flesh, it graphically displayed the
hideous stupidity of which human beings were capable. The war would
only go away when six o'clock arrived, the news would be over, and I
could leave my tiny human world behind for the vast reaches of outer
space via Star Trek.
Every weekday I counted the minutes to
lift-off, when I could escape from my own war-torn planet. The
perspective from light years beyond earth pointed to the pettiness
of all human differences and suggested to me the wonder of all the
exotic, unexpected, burgeoning diversity the universe might have to
offer.
Mr. Spock became my role model.
Although possibly he was inappropriate in some ways (he was
half-alien, and possessed superhuman strength and intelligence),
what most impressed me was the job he had. He was the "Science
Officer", and as such, he was actually paid to do what I dreamed
of---discover new things and meet new creatures in a spirit of
friendship. What a great way to make a living.
I watched Spock perform the Vulcan
mind-meld and wished that it were so in this life, to know another
alien being and to rejoice in our differences and learn about one
another. It was sometimes a sad feeling to have adopted the general
philosophy of a group of human beings who did not exist outside of
the starship Enterprise, somewhere in the distant, imagined
future. I felt estranged from my own species as it existed in the
undeniably primitive, savage present.
However, alienation is the birthright of
every teenager, so I felt the better for it. That is, better than
the adults around me, who were incredibly ignorant of the
possibilities that life had to offer, myopically running through the
job and social mazes, and never looking out at the vastness of space
and the unknown truths of the world around them. Who cared about
house payments and having meat every day for dinner? Who could be
bothered with dress codes or the limits of seemly career choices for
nice young women? Not I, most certainly not.
I clung to the comfort, however
hypothetical, that somewhere there were others who thought like me.
I wanted to believe there was another place, where I would fit in, a
place where my values would be worth something, but unfortunately,
it was out in the distant reaches of the universe, far into the
future.
As the time of college applications and
the plotting of career jump-off points drew nigh, my theoretical
Marineland delayed mutant imprinting countdown was about to hit the
big zero, although I didn't know it. I had high grades enough to go
to college, but I couldn't see spending the time and effort of such
an education on a subject as narrow in scope as business or
commercial art, which were my only “practical options” according to
the high school career counselors who seemed to be only concerned
with my future financial stability.
What I really wanted to learn was
science and the intricacies of the scientific method. However, this
was no more than a vague, unmapped cloud of desire, until one
afternoon in the Montrose, California public library when I was
looking through the "Books on Nature" section for a senior project.
As usual, I was dreaming about ways to
hurry the space race along, because if I had my whole life
ahead of me, I wanted to get off this rock and exchange thoughts
with alien minds, and I did not see manned space travel out of our
own solar system marked off on any calendar day within my lifetime.
The titles of various volumes faded out of sight as I tried to make
the impossible work in my personal plans. Then one title leapt into
focus. It was called The Mind of the Dolphin: A
Non-Human Intelligence. I had come across a book by
neurophysiologist Dr. John C. Lilly.
As I read it, my practical universe
suddenly expanded to include my dreams. The huge gulf of outer
space or the far-too-distant future no longer separated me from the
search for alien minds different from humans. This scientist
proposed that dolphins might be very intelligent, but because they
lived in the ocean, and had no hands or technology, we humans had
never caught on to this. He talked about not only intelligence, but
also "consciousness". In one second, my world changed forever, and
I knew I had found my quest. I wanted to find "consciousness” in
some other creature besides humans, and I wanted to understand it.
Once I came to this conclusion, I could
not forget it or change it. It was a fact of my being, no less than
my favorite color or food. This was what I wanted to do with my
life---search for a non-human consciousness and study it. But what
was "consciousness"? And how would I prove it if I ever found it?
I began to wonder about consciousness
and the limits of its definition. Specifically, I wanted to know if
“conscious” beings other than human had evolved on our planet.
Lilly claimed that according to biological correlates such as brain
size and structure, the most likely candidates for consciousness
were dolphins and whales. If I could somehow get close to a
dolphin, become familiar with it, I might eventually find out if it
possessed anything I could define as consciousness.
I needed to do everything possible to
ensure the accuracy of my own perceptions of any dolphin I might
interact with or study, so I would approach this task with great
caution and skepticism. Did dolphins in fact possess consciousness
and intelligence equal to humans? If I leapt to the conclusion of
answering those questions with a “yes” and was mistaken, I could
waste a lifetime trying to prove the existence of something that was
not there. My longing for the truth mattered more to me than my
longing for alien contact.
I applied to the University of
California at San Diego, which had an excellent reputation for the
sciences, and was the sister institution of Scripps’ Institute of
Oceanography, where I hoped to do my graduate work. I was accepted,
and immediately visited Scripps' a few days before classes started,
hopeful of working with dolphins as a volunteer during my
undergraduate studies.
To my disappointment, I learned from the
scientists there that all dolphin research had been indefinitely
suspended after the initiation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Except for two or three seals, the famous tanks at the highly
regarded institute were empty. Furthermore, as an undergraduate at
UCSD I would be ineligible for admission as a graduate student at
Scripps.
I began my first quarter at UCSD as a
dutiful student, but agonized over the wrong turn I had seemingly
made in my search to find and work with dolphins. Then, a few weeks
into classes, a friend from my dorm house mentioned that he'd seen
three dolphins in the back of Scripps’ when he'd scaled a wall to
check the place out after a day of surfing. The dolphins were
"weird-looking", he said, "not like Flipper, you know?" Somebody
who worked there saw him on top of the wall and told him the
dolphins had been caught just recently, and were staying in their
tank at Scripps’ for a while.
Early the next morning I took the short
bus ride down the hill to the institute, a compact group of tan
buildings on the shores of La Jolla beach, eased through the boarded
up gate that said “Absolutely No Admittance” and inflicted myself on
the men I found next to the dolphins' tank.
When I said I would work for free taking
care of the dolphins, the men responded that these were big,
dangerous animals, and I was a young girl. They were newly captured
and untrained. Wasn't I afraid of these wild creatures? After I
offered to climb into the tank with the creatures then and there,
the curator of the aquarium gave me a volunteer position as
caretaker for the three wild dolphins.
***
Rake, Shy, and Spot were Pacific
white-sided dolphins, but most dolphin handlers called them “lags”,
a necessary nickname---it’s short for the mouthful of their species
name, Lagenorhynchus obliquidens. These three lived in a
sunken below ground level, donut-shaped concrete tank with a tiny
round island lab at its center. All that was visible of the tank up
top was a low circular wall in one corner of a large asphalt yard.
No one spent any time in the yard.
Scientists occasionally walked through it on their way to somewhere
else, but most of them did not even know that there were dolphins in
the tank. The dolphins were human-sized creatures, sleek and
streamlined, boldly colored in long elliptical stripes of black and
white and gray. They moved together, three abreast, rising and
falling in synchrony as they breathed and then submerged, swimming
around their small circle of captured sea.
My job was to feed them and to keep
their tank clean by scrubbing algae off its walls every two weeks.
They were pelagic dolphins, who would have spent their lives in the
open sea, where the waters were deep and limitless. When I checked,
there was virtually no literature on lags and their care in
aquariums. I was told by the vet who had caught them that “lags
didn’t do well in captivity”, and he urged me to help them adjust to
their new living conditions in whatever ways I could. They were
between four and nine years old, making them late teenagers to very
young adults by dolphin standards.
Shortly before I began working with
them, the dolphins had finally eaten their first dead fish, an
important adjustment for animals that all their lives had caught and
killed live prey. This is a major turning point in a dolphin’s
captivity. With the acceptance of the fish, their prognosis was
much improved. More than a few dolphins never made that adjustment,
and died in their tanks, especially during the first two decades of
cetacean captures, when catching them was a booming business.
The water in the tank was usually less
than five feet deep. To get next to the dolphins at the waters’
edge I opened a trap door built into the floor of the yard and
climbed down an eight-foot wall using rungs set into the concrete.
Once at the bottom of the ladder, you were still just at water
level, in a six-foot square hangar. Directly across from it a twin
hangar cut into the curving side of the island lab. The outside
diameter of the doughnut was around fifty feet while the width of
the doughnut part of the tank was not more than fifteen feet. From
the bottom of the ladder, I slid into the dolphins’ shallow circular
world.
The first few days the dolphins stayed
on the far side of the tank, behind the cement curve of the circular
lab after I arrived. At the mere sight of my face looking down on
them they burst away like black and white bullets, racing so fast
that the plumes of water called “rooster tails” fanned upwards on
either side of them, spraying me with seawater even though I was
above the tank’s water level.
Repeatedly they would brake to a stop
just as they realized that their world was now circular and they
were once more within sight of my surely monstrous visage. I was
just one more of the same creatures that had taken them from their
home and their families. Creatures like me had imprisoned them in a
shallow place with walls that endlessly echoed every sonar pulse and
vocalization, reverberating through their normal sounds for
communication and perception and almost certainly reducing much of
their sonic world to chaos.
Each time they came to their sudden
halt, a small tidal wave swelled forth from their stopping point and
continued around the tank. When its weakened remainder washed over
them from behind, it frightened them into blurred movements of new
panic. I knew they were terrified. They were truly going in
circles, for the first time in their lives getting nowhere, no
matter how fast they swam.
Of course, I wasn't welcome---I was
another one of the monsters who had taken the dolphins from the
world they were born to know. But I wanted to know them, so I
patiently followed them, day after day, walking in the water around
the tank behind them, calling, singing, whistling, cajoling, and
always, always jiggling plenty of dead, thawed-out herring in what I
hoped was an enticing way. They calculated the exact distance
necessary to remain out of my sight, and effortlessly matched my
pace so that they were always just past the bend, hidden around what
I came to call "the disappearance curve."
I dropped fish every few seconds so that
the dolphins could feed on them, and these were always picked
up---somewhere out of my sight, around the disappearance curve. I
didn't actually see a dolphin eat a fish until a week into our
forced companionship. Then it was a swift thing, a flash and sliver
spray of water, a fin cutting the green surface and gone.
Nevertheless, I was encouraged by our small progress. Sometimes in
that thrashing, I could spot a dolphin eye, studying me.
Rake, Shy, and Spot acquired their names
rather arbitrarily; Spot had no spot, Rake had no rake scars, and
“Shy” could, of course, describe any one of them. They were to be
fed every day, twice a day, from a store of frozen smelt and herring
that I would take out of an adjoining building’s underground
freezer, load onto a stainless steel cart, and thaw a day ahead.
I set up shop in a little room with a
large steel sink that was up top next to the doughnut tank. The
nook had one window, which looked out at the tank, but since the
dolphins were actually swimming in water about eight feet below
ground level, nothing could be seen of them from the “fish room” as
I dubbed it. To see them, I had to stand at the three-foot high
tank wall and look down at the water’s surface inside the doughnut
tank, eight feet below my shoes.
The round island lab building in the
center of the dolphins’ doughnut tank connected to the “mainland” of
the courtyard via a small footbridge that arched above the circular
waterway of the tank. The lab itself was about the size of a
high-end city’s lifeguard tower. Inside, banks of experimental
monitoring equipment ran floor to ceiling and a four-foot high
stainless steel freezer occupied a six-foot section of the curved
wall. One day a researcher with lab access showed me around. He
called me over to the freezer with a conspiratorial gesture.
“Take a look at this,” he said, and
opened the lid. I leaned over, looked inside and saw three penguins
shuffling about. They looked up, quite surprised to see us suddenly
peering down at them---almost as surprised as I was. After my visit
with the strange, charming birds, I would think of them at odd
times, and muse on the quality of their penguin lives, spent inside
that little room of ice a few yards away from a warm, sunny
California beach.
One morning, I noticed Spot, who was one
of the two females and the smallest dolphin of the three, was not
breathing well. Instead of the normal short, explosive “chuff” when
she surfaced, she exhaled, paused, and then slowly inhaled. I
watched and worried at her sluggish movements and noticed she made
only tentative, ineffectual grabs at the dead fish. I called the
vet immediately, but he did not take my concerns seriously. He
assured me that because I was new and certainly anxious about doing
a good job, I had projected my own worries onto “the animal”. When
I had the curator look at Spot, he called the vet himself, but the
vet was busy with some very important “show animals” in the dolphin
lagoon over at Sea World, which was his primary employer.
By the time the vet showed up the next
afternoon to draw blood, Spot was listing to one side or the other,
and with every exhalation she wheezed, then took a long, drawn-out
inhalation that was whispery and uncertain. Even to an ignorant
land mammal like me, it was painful to hear. Her struggles to
simply move and breathe were exhausting her.
The curator, his assistant, the vet and
I got into the water and immediately Rake and Shy raced away. A
moment later they turned back, and tried to herd Spot away from us
by pushing her forward between the two of them. She was too weak to
get up any speed, and before she got very far the men started waving
their arms and shouting to scare Rake and Shy away again.
The two dolphins retreated, but watched
every move we made. I had never handled a dolphin in the water
before, so I hesitated to grab for her, but the vet easily got hold
of Spot’s dorsal fin and pulled her toward the hangar at water level
cut into the island lab.
The three men hauled her out and took
blood samples from her tail, because that area has the most blood
vessels near the surface of the skin. During the first part of her
capture Spot had resisted, writhing from side to side, until the men
had pulled her out of the water. Once on land, she stayed still
until the needle, which looked uncomfortably huge, pushed in. She
arched up and her eyes rolled, the whites showing. Almost
unconsciously, I noted the behavioral similarity to a frightened
horse as I patted her and tried to soothe her.
The men shoved her quickly back into the
water and she lurched away as fast as she could go to join Rake and
Shy. The other two dolphins matched her slow speed, now, and the
three dolphins moved around the disappearance curve and stayed
there.
After taking blood, the vet would
eventually diagnose Spot as having an advanced case of pneumonia.
Most captive dolphins die of this or complications arising from it.
Stress seems to be the most likely cause for respiratory illness in
dolphins, and so it is the greatest factor in their deaths in
captivity.
To a dolphin, no breath is automatic, or
given. Thought must precede each breath, to bring it to awareness,
to take action to surface, exhale, and then inhale. If a dolphin
loses consciousness, it does not have the awareness to breathe, and
it will die. Putting a dolphin or whale under a general anesthetic
is always fatal unless mechanical methods are employed to keep the
respiration going. To a dolphin or a whale, breath truly is life.
For dolphins its rhythm certainly underlies all action, and possibly
at some level, all thought.
Breathing with thought and awareness has
been an integral part of meditation and prayer in spiritual
disciplines across all human cultures, and science has recently
validated our ancient practices by demonstrating that such
meditation alters brain wave functions to produce those associated
with calm, clearness of perception, concentration and a sense of
connectedness and well-being.
Humans have been consciously breathing
with thought for over three thousand years. Dolphins and whales
have been breathing with thought for an estimated thirty million
years.
That afternoon was Spot's last one on
earth. Sometime during the night she gave up her breath for the
last time. No thought, no awareness, existed to initiate another.
I learned she had died when I glanced over the edge of the tank the
next morning, and stared into the face of an unexpected mystery.
Rake and Shy floated side by side, not
moving, their pectoral fins almost touching, as if they were
"holding hands." Supported on their fins between them was the cold,
stiffened body of Spot. Hours after her death, they were still
holding her up at the surface, where she could take her next
breath. I had heard that dolphins often held the bodies of their
sick or injured fellows up to the surface so they wouldn't drown,
but Spot was long past any help.
I tried to make sense of the strange,
somehow intimate configuration of their bodies. Didn't they know
that she was dead? Dolphins are skilled predators that kill every
day so they can eat. Death is no mystery to creatures so totally
immersed in a violent and hostile environment.
Or is it? Death is a mystery to most of
us humans, especially when it happens to our own. Perhaps they, like
us, wonder, and grieve, and fear death. I wondered if they intended
some meaning to their seemingly pointless vigil. Was I looking at
ritual, or instinct? Or was I seeing something else, something we
do not have words for?
I climbed down into the tank with three
other men to retrieve Spot's body. I was the only woman, and they
suggested I would be "safer" if I stayed up top, out of the water.
However, I felt I had made the beginning of a connection with the
dolphins, and I wanted to be in the water with them. I stayed near
Rake and Shy, and spoke softly to them while the men attempted to
wedge themselves between living dolphins and dead. Rake and Shy did
not fight or move; they offered an unconquerable passive resistance,
floating in the same position without visibly moving a muscle. The
living dolphins seemed made of stone.
The men regrouped by the alcove and
various plans were bandied about. At that moment, more than
anything else, I wanted to comfort the dolphins. I stepped between
Rake and Shy and tentatively, for the first time---put my hands on
them. They stayed. I felt them each quiver for an instant. And
then they pressed gently against my palms. This pressing seemed so
deliberate that I felt I should respond, and acknowledge it in some
way. I drew my hands across their skin in a short, brief caress.
They returned my caress with the same gentle, specific pressure
against my palms. Suddenly I realized they were responding to my
touch, acknowledging me as I had acknowledged them.
With my hands still on them, Rake and
Shy slowly moved apart, releasing Spot's body. They floated nearby,
but allowed the men to put a sling around the body and hoist it up
and over the tank wall. The dolphins raised their heads out of the
water and strained to see. Standing next to them, I saw the edge of
their world: a circular slice of pale green cement wall outlined
against an empty blue sky. Spot disappeared over the edge, gone
forever into the unknown.
That morning marked the turning point in
my relationship with Rake and Shy. When I climbed down into the
tank the next afternoon, they were both waiting for me at the bottom
of the ladder. As I slid into the water, they moved back only a
foot or so, and turning on their sides, they looked at me. For the
first time, we made eye contact.
I stared into their calm, steady,
penetrating gaze. I had an odd feeling of embarrassment, of being
exposed with every one of my weaknesses in plain view. All the day
before I had been trying to think of the right word to describe
their acceptance of my attempt to comfort them. Now it came to me.
Gracious. They had been gracious.
Rake and Shy then reoriented so that
their heads faced me and waggled their upper bodies slightly.
Suddenly I could feel them buzzing, the sound waves moving with such
force through the water that I could feel them as a tingling on my
skin. They were echolocating; that is, examining me in detail by
sending clicks through the water and then apprehending my body by
the difference in the return echoes bouncing off me.
This sense is akin to our manmade sonar,
but it is vastly more efficient and accurate. Dolphins can detect
the echo differences instantaneously and come up with a continuously
changing three-dimensional sonic perception of me, or a moving fish
or a rocky sea floor. They can “see” through solid objects with
different densities or hollow areas---objects like other dolphins
and you or me.
Imagine, having this sense in addition
to all our others. How much would it add to our perception of the
world? John Lilly and others have theorized that dolphins might be
able to read the internal states of an organism---the tensing of
muscles before an attack; pregnancy, illnesses, locations of tumors
or even the contractions of skin that accompany lying for human
beings. Lilly had speculated that perhaps, because of the
“transparency” engendered through echolocation, there is no such
thing as deception in the dolphins’ world. It bears thinking
about. How much would a universal ability to see deception in other
humans have changed our societies and the occurrences of murder,
war, or Enron-like business activities?
The strange, subtle combination of sound
and feeling came across as a tinny, extremely high frequency ticking
whining: the sound of thousands of dolphin clicks produced too fast
for me to hear them individually. I thought of the Star Trek
episode where a group of human beings on one planet had sped up
their life functions until they were moving and talking so fast that
they couldn’t be seen, and when they spoke, all Captain Kirk’s crew
could hear was a high-pitched whine. That whining sound actually
contained huge amounts of information: the conversations and
thoughts of people over hours of their time, compressed into a mere
few seconds in Captain Kirk’s. If I was as slow as Kirk or Spock in
relation to the speed of these dolphin sounds, the informational
content of the sound passing through me could be immense. Rake and
Shy might be sizing me up in ways I would never understand.
I wanted them to get a good look at me,
though, hopeful that if they knew more, they would fear less. I
slowly turned around in the water, showing myself off to them like a
demented runway model. I extended an arm straight out into the
water, bent it, and then moved it to my side. The two dolphins
buzzed non-stop. They startled a little when I moved too fast, but
eventually I managed to show them all the human appendages and their
range of motion. My hands were the source of the most interest and
caution, underscoring that major difference between our species.
What did they think of human hands?
Later that day near the end of the fish,
first Rake, and then Shy brushed against my hand as they moved
toward the herring. I knew it was not an accident, and was thrilled
that they were curious enough to conquer their fear and quite
possibly revulsion for the extremities previously used to manhandle
(no pun intended) and hurt them.
After the fish were gone, it was very
late, and everyone in the main buildings had gone for the day. I
sat on the edge of the hangar and sang to them in my highest,
clearest voice, hoping its frequencies would overlap at least partly
with their higher hearing range. They looked at me from a foot or
so away as I sang about a white bird in a golden cage, amazing
grace, and boots of Spanish leather. After I fell silent, as the
twilight ended and the automatic lights came on in the yard above,
one of them made a long, complicated sound a somewhere between a
clicking and a hiss. It was the first time I had heard them make a
sound out of water.
The next few days I floated through
classes, listening to the lectures with one part of my mind always
going over the day’s events with Rake and Shy. I knew they were
trying to mimic me, now. They had both begun to vocalize out of
water much of the time I was with them, and I felt sure they were
interested in communicating with me. About what, though? Their
main interest, it seemed to me, was getting me to play with them.
The dolphins began by brushing against
me more often and for longer periods of time when I was in the tank
with them, until Rake came to a stop one day with his back under my
hand, and pushed up against it, then pushed off, gliding against my
palm. He had made me pet him along his body without my intention.
It was an invitation. On the next pass, both Rake and Shy slowed to
a stop on either side of me, and I accepted their invitation with
pleasure.
It was another quantum leap in our
dealings with one another, and by the time I left that afternoon,
they both were encouraging me to caress them everywhere on their
bodies. I wanted to give them something in return for their
overtures, so the next day I bought a fluorescent pink beach ball
and wrote their names on it in indelible marker. I brought it out
after the end of the afternoon session and first showed it to them
from the hangar. They moved quickly away, something I suspected
they might do with such an unfamiliar object.
I got in the water, and with them
watching me from a distance I played with the ball, laughing and
indicating in whatever goofy way I could that this object was fun,
fun, fun! With that kind of value, the dolphins could not stay away
from it for long. Eventually I let it roll toward Rake; he touched
it, and then moved it a little with his chin (or “rostrum” as it is
called by those in the know). I decided to leave the ball in the
tank overnight and see what they might make of it.
By the next morning they both were
pushing the ball around the tank intermittently, quite unafraid of
it. When I was through feeding them in the afternoon, I taught them
“catch”---or rather “throw”, as I would throw the ball to a dolphin
who would then abscond with it. Then he or she would play ball with
the other dolphin, leaving me to blunder through the water in futile
attempts to regain possession of the precious fun object until they
deigned to let me throw the ball again.
Now our afternoons together were only
nominally concerned with feeding them fish. Instead, the dolphins
touched me, bumped against me, turned their bellies up for
scratching, and then invented games of tag and small circular racing
centered around me, the “slow one”. In one afternoon Shy learned to
move into the circle of my arms so I could tow her around or drag
her by her flukes through the water. I played with them for hours
and they never seemed to tire. I couldn’t keep up, especially when
I was bound by my human reality to keep up with all my classes’
homework assignments. Nevertheless, often I would stay late, seated
next to the tank doing my homework and playing dolphin peek-a-boo
while differential calculus made my brain hurt.
I wondered about the insistence from
Rake and Shy that we play together. Wouldn’t I, in their place, be
hard at work learning my captors’ language so I could demand they
set me free? I was assuming a great deal there, I knew. The value
system I was using was human, as was my puzzlement at their
nonchalant use of their intelligence mainly for physical contact and
play. Perhaps I should bear in mind the words of Douglas Adams in
his book, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish! He suggested:
“It is a popular and important fact that
things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet
Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than
dolphins because he had achieved so much---the wheel, New York,
wars, and so on---whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck
about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins
had always believed that they were far more intelligent than
man---for precisely the same reasons.”
Admittedly, Adams was a science fiction
writer, but that did not prohibit him from being correct about
reality, whatever that was. And I really did not have claim to the
dolphins’ reality. It could be and probably was vastly different
from my human reality, which, if I were honest, I did not understand
any more than a small fraction of, anyway. For me, even the stock
market existed only as a vague sort of mathematical construct,
except that it was peopled with men in suits who committed suicide
in great numbers during the Depression. That was as far as I went
in understanding what obviously had some great importance in human
reality. Other aspects of human reality would remain
incomprehensible to me, as well. Why have a national debt? Who did
our government owe the money to? Why was money such a huge issue at
this level, where (hello?) all the money was printed, for heavens’
sake?
Instead, I had concentrated my attention
on a logical and scientific understanding of the natural world’s
phenomenology, figuring that everything of any true importance could
be found there. A brief but effective education in the concept of
“alien worlds” via my ideological mentor, Mr. Spock, had revealed
the arbitrary nature of human societies as they might compare with
the vast possibilities of other forms of intelligent life. The less
I was burdened with human standards and thought patterns, the more
possible it was that I could be truly open-minded. Even so, I had
to read words like those of Adams to remind myself that
open-mindedness, if I really wanted to be fully open, would require
frequent trips outside of normal logic and all kinds of willingness
to let go of human ideas and human priorities.
Over the next few months we became
progressively closer, physically---at ease with each other.
Eventually I could hold them in my arms. But other things were
happening as we learned to trust each other. The two dolphins were
very different in the way they interacted with me. Rake was always
the more rowdy one; he loved to tease, to touch, and to push the
envelope. Shy would sometimes follow Rake's lead, but most of the
time she was a gentle and close companion, a comforting dolphin
shadow who stayed next to my right side whenever I was in the
water. In both of them I saw a bright, improvisational
intelligence, which they expressed through mimicry, creativity, and
a shared sense of humor.
I attempted to teach them new behaviors,
such as playing relay catch, or leaping on command, and they met me
halfway, guessing at what I was trying to teach them until they
reached the correct conclusion. I would not realize, until later,
after years of training other animals, how much the dolphins had
contributed to the guesswork of communication between us.
They wanted; they tried, every moment,
to understand. I could see the aching curiosity in their eyes at
each new thing I brought into their world, so I explained each one
to them in words they did not comprehend, simply because I hoped
that by my voice they would know how much I wanted them to learn.
We did not have the bridge of a shared language between us. I did
not know the first thing about building such a connection. So I did
the best I could, just as they did.
I brought them a mirror, and we moved
for ourselves, saw our reflections, and knew who we were. Their
eyes would widen with amazement, and I could now catch the moment of
comprehension in their eyes. Later I would hear that only the
higher primates were supposed to have the capacity to recognize
their own image. But Rake and Shy recognized themselves and
carefully examined other images as well, from far beyond their
world.
I brought them poster-sized photographs
of deserts, mountains, and jungles, of animals and people from the
countries of the earth. I showed them paintings: Gaugin, Maxfield
Parrish, Georgia O'Keefe. I played music on a tape recorder and on
a flute at the waters' edge, listening to their silent attention or
scattering of vocalizations to each small note and high melody. I
sang to them in the evenings, after the scientists had gone home and
the institute had emptied.
One day I let myself into the asphalt
yard early, and discovered Rake and Shy sleeping. In this state
dolphins are as close to unconsciousness as they ever come without
risking death. They hang motionless near the surface for several
minutes at a time, until, with a slight push of their pectoral fins,
they raise their blowhole above the water. Then they exhale, take a
deep breath, eyes still closed, and sink below the surface again.
At the time, I did not even know that dolphins could sleep,
yet I recognized immediately the same silent vulnerability of any
human being asleep.
In that instant, it suddenly became
clear to me that these were sentient beings. Their normal awareness
was gone from their faces, and with it gone, they were visibly
empty. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the sun had created a
sparkling slice of golden light where the dolphins lay. They were
taking advantage of the sun's warmth, and they moved around the
circumference of the donut tank with the slice of light, like a
giant sundial in reverse, the two dolphins as its hour marker.
The dolphins were originally captured so
they could be sold to a nearby marine park, and I had assumed I
could follow them there. However, when that deal fell through,
buyers from as far away as France and the East Coast began showing
interest. Events were now forcing me to face the reality that Rake
and Shy were simply items of trade to the rest of the world.
Somehow, with the glorious discoveries, our friendship, and the
mutual attempts to learn from each other, I had made up my own
unreal world, with the three of us happily living in it. In all our
thousands of small moments of contact, from all our shared “ah ha!”
moments, Rake and Shy had become my best friends.
It was a Wednesday when the Florida
people came to take Rake and Shy to Miami Seaquarium. I arrived at
the dolphins' tank at 6:30 a.m. and got into the tank with them. I
was half an hour early for our regular morning session, and they
knew something was wrong. They refused any fish. Instead, they
sought out my touch and pressed against me. To my exquisitely
painful astonishment, they seemed to be trying to comfort me. They
stroked me with their pectoral fins, and Shy raised herself from the
water, reaching up to touch my face with her mouth.
I sank down so my face was at the
water's surface and I met her soft gaze. As she looked into me, I
began to cry. She touched her chin to my tears, and I briefly
wondered if I had ever shown her this part of my humanness. There
were so many things I still wanted to show her and Rake. I felt his
pressure against my side, and hugged him close with the arm I kept
around his body. I squeezed them both with all the strength I had,
and I felt their absolute acceptance of me, as they became soft,
nearly fluid creatures who molded themselves to my body.
We stayed together that way, hidden from
the trapdoor entrance around our own disappearance curve, nestling
against the cool green walls of the little island lab, in its circle
within a circle. Then I heard and felt the low rumble, like an
earthquake, which meant the arrival of the large truck with a
mounted crane that would lift the dolphins out of this world. From
the truck they would be loaded aboard a cargo plane and flown
thousands of miles away.
I could not stop crying during the four
hours it took to get both dolphins aboard the truck. I made no
sound, but the tears ran in rivers out of my eyes. I finally gave
up the attempt to stop the watery onslaught and instead ignored the
tears, talking to the men and following their instructions as if
nothing were happening on my face. Rake was more stoical, but his
eyes were now wide with fear, and his body shook with tremors, only
to go rigid with each new indignity as they wrapped him in his
stretcher and hauled him out of the tank. His eyes searched mine
again and again, but my eyes were constantly blurring with the
tears. While Rake remained silent, Shy emitted what must have been
a distress call over and over, only stopping to gasp for breath with
a ragged, gulping noise. At the touch of my hand, her calls would
quiet for a moment, then begin again in a tiny, thin voice that only
Rake and I could hear. It was the most terrible sound in the world.
I burned with shame and embarrassment
for them both as I saw all the dignity we'd taken for granted
destroyed by the quick, rough actions of the men who came to wrap
them up and take them away. Whatever Rake, Shy and I had discovered
had been between us, and it was lost as we were torn apart.
I called Miami Seaquarium the next day
to make sure Rake and Shy had arrived safely, and that they were in
good health. I remembered what I had heard before, "Lags don't do
well in captivity." Lags could live in the wild for forty years or
longer, but when I asked about the life span of lags in captivity I
learned that it averaged about five years.
Once a month I called the people at
Miami Seaquarium to see how Rake and Shy were doing. The trainers
were puzzled at my interest, but they were always polite, and they
always kept me informed.
Rake, always the rowdy, always the
tease, died less than a year after being taken to Florida. He and
Shy were mates, and they shared their tank with two bottlenose
dolphins. The trainer I spoke with told me Rake had died of
pneumonia, probably brought on by “stress of some sort.”
I wanted to ask if any of the other
dolphins in the tank with Rake had held him up to the surface after
he had died, but I could not bring myself to ask the question. I
doubted the trainer had been there at Rake's death, and somehow, any
answer that a human being might give me would not be the answer to
my real question.
My real question of you, Rake, will
never be answered. I have lost the chance to learn the truth from
you. What I did understand when you died was the darkest part of
my mysterious love for your kind. For the first time, I felt the
terrible pain of losing someone I loved, and knew I would never be
the same.
But I still walk along this shore that
looks out into your world, hoping for some sign of recognition from
your kind, believing that the terrible gift of love will show its
reason for being if I can just keep to the search for the truth
about your kind. Because it will also be the truth about myself.
Consciousness can no more be defined than love. It is only there
when perceived or perceiving. It exists, as you and I once did, in
a circular world.
And in my search for truth, I now have
to admit that even with all its power to reveal so many answers, my
beloved science has only led me partway out of the circle of the
island lab. The rest of the way lies out there where your
kind lives, in a world still mostly unexplored, still mostly
unknown---out there in the deep blue wilderness.
The
End
