Lester David
Boys’ Life magazine
Reach for Stars
Original painting by Wyland © 2003.
8
SAVING
THE SEA
For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
Jacques Cousteau
AUTH © The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.
This Magic Moment
If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in the water.
Loren Eisley
It was like many Maui mornings, the sun rising over Haleakala as we greeted our divers for the day’s charter. As my captain and I explained the dive procedures, I noticed the wind line moving into Molokini, a small, crescent-shaped island that harbors a large reef. I slid through the briefing, then prompted my divers to gear up, careful to do everything right so the divers would feel confident with me, the dive leader.
The dive went pretty close to how I had described it: The garden eels performed their underwater ballet, the parrot fish grazed on the coral, and the ever-elusive male flame wrasse flared their colors to defend their territory. Near the last level of the dive, two couples in my group signaled they were going to ascend. As luck would have it, the remaining divers were two European brothers, who were obviously troubled by the idea of a “woman” dive master and had ignored me for the entire dive.
The three of us caught the current and drifted along the outside of the reef, slowly beginning our ascent until, far below, something caught my eye. After a few moments, I made out the white shoulder patches of a manta ray in about one hundred and twenty feet of water.
Manta rays are one of my greatest loves, but very little is known about them. They feed on plankton, which makes them more delicate than an aquarium can handle. They travel the oceans and are therefore a mystery.
Mantas can be identified by the distinctive pattern on their belly, with no two rays alike. In 1992, I had been identifying the manta rays that were seen at Molokini and found that some were known, but many more were sighted only once, and then gone.
So there I was: a beautiful, very large ray beneath me and my skeptical divers behind. I reminded myself that I was still trying to win their confidence, and a bounce to see this manta wouldn’t help my case. So I started calling through my regulator, “Hey, come up and see me!” I had tried this before to attract the attention of whales and dolphins, who are very chatty underwater and will come sometimes just to see what the noise is about. My divers were just as puzzled by my actions, but continued to try to ignore me.
There was another dive group ahead of us. The leader, who was a friend of mine and knew me to be fairly sane, stopped to see what I was doing. I kept calling to the ray, and when she shifted in the water column, I took that as a sign that she was curious. So I started waving my arms, calling her up to me.
After a minute, she lifted away from where she had been riding the current and began to make a wide circular glide until she was closer to me. I kept watching as she slowly moved back and forth, rising higher, until she was directly beneath the two Europeans and me. I looked at them and was pleased to see them smiling. Now they liked me. After all, I could call up a manta ray!
Looking back to the ray, I realized she was much bigger than what we were used to around Molokini—a good fifteen feet from wing tip to wing tip, and not a familiar-looking ray. I had not seen this animal before. There was something else odd about her. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
Once my brain clicked in and I was able to concentrate, I saw deep V-shaped marks of her flesh missing from her backside. Other marks ran up and down her body. At first I thought a boat had hit her. As she came closer, now with only ten feet separating us, I realized what was wrong.
She had fishing hooks embedded in her head by her eye, with very thick fishing line running to her tail. She had rolled with the line and was wrapped head to tail about five or six times. The line had torn into her body at the back, and those were the V-shaped chunks that were missing.
I felt sick and, for a moment, paralyzed. I knew wild animals in pain would never tolerate a human to inflict more pain. But I had to do something.
Forgetting about my air, my divers and where I was, I went to the manta. I moved very slowly and talked to her the whole time, like she was one of the horses I had grown up with. When I touched her, her whole body quivered, like my horse would. I put both of my hands on her, then my entire body, talking to her the whole time. I knew that she could knock me off at any time with one flick of her great wing.
When she had steadied, I took out the knife that I carry on my inflator hose and lifted one of the lines. It was tight and difficult to get my finger under, almost like a guitar string. She shook, which told me to be gentle. It was obvious that the slightest pressure was painful.
As I cut through the first line, it pulled into her wounds. With one beat of her mighty wings, she dumped me and bolted away. I figured that she was gone and was amazed when she turned and came right back to me, gliding under my body. I went to work. She seemed to know it would hurt, and somehow, she also knew that I could help. Imagine the intelligence of that creature, to come for help and to trust!
I cut through one line and into the next until she had all she could take of me and would move away, only to return in a moment or two. I never chased her. I would never chase any animal. I never grabbed her. I allowed her to be in charge, and she always came back.
When all the lines were cut on top, on her next pass, I went under her to pull the lines through the wounds at the back of her body. The tissue had started to grow around them, and they were difficult to get loose. I held myself against her body, with my hand on her lower jaw. She held as motionless as she could. When it was all loose, I let her go and watched her swim in a circle. She could have gone then, and it would have all fallen away. She came back, and I went back on top of her.
The fishing hooks were still in her. One was barely hanging on, which I removed easily. The other was buried by her eye at least two inches past the barb. Carefully, I began to take it out, hoping I wasn’t damaging anything. She did open and close her eye while I worked on her, and finally, it was out. I held the hooks in one hand, while I gathered the fishing line in the other hand, my weight on the manta.
I could have stayed there forever! I was totally oblivious to everything but that moment. I loved this manta. I was so moved that she would allow me to do this to her. But reality came screaming down on me. With my air running out, I reluctantly came to my senses and pushed myself away.
At first, she stayed below me. And then, when she realized that she was free, she came to life like I never would have imagined she could. I thought she was sick and weak, since her mouth had been tied closed, and she hadn’t been able to feed for however long the lines had been on her. I thought wrong! With two beats of those powerful wings, she rocketed along the wall of Molokini and then directly out to sea! I lost view of her and, remembering my divers, turned to look for them.
Remarkably, we hadn’t traveled very far. My divers were right above me and had witnessed the whole event, thankfully! No one would have believed me alone. It seemed too amazing to have really happened. But as I looked at the hooks and line in my hands and felt the torn calluses from her rough skin, I knew that, yes, it really had happened.
I kicked in the direction of my divers, whose eyes were still wide from the encounter, only to have them signal me to stop and turn around. Until this moment, the whole experience had been phenomenal, but I could explain it. Now, the moment turned magical.
I turned and saw her slowly gliding toward me. With barely an effort, she approached me and stopped, her wing just touching my head. I looked into her round, dark eye, and she looked deeply into me. I felt a rush of something that so overpowered me, I have yet to find the words to describe it, excep
t a warm and loving flow of energy from her into me.
She stayed with me for a moment. I don’t know if it was a second or an hour. Then, as sweetly as she came back, she lifted her wing over my head and was gone. A manta thank-you.
I hung in midwater, using the safety-stop excuse, and tried to make sense of what I had experienced. Eventually, collecting myself, I surfaced and was greeted by an ecstatic group of divers and a curious captain. They all gave me time to get my heart started and to begin to breathe.
Sadly, I have not seen her since that day, and I am still looking. For the longest time, though my wetsuit was tattered and torn, I would not change it because I thought she wouldn’t recognize me. I call to every manta I see, and they almost always acknowledge me in some way. One day, though, it will be her. She’ll hear me and pause, remembering the giant cleaner that she trusted to relieve her pain, and she’ll come. At least that is how it happens in my dreams.
Jennifer Anderson
A New Dawn for Whaling in Taiji
Whaling in Japan goes back to prehistoric times, when villagers along the coast would butcher dead whales that washed up from the sea. An old Japanese proverb says, “A whale on the beach is wealth for seven villages.”
In 1606, Japanese whalers went out and killed their first great whale. Working from tiny boats, using nets and hand-thrown harpoons, they were like Cro-Magnon men taking down a mastadon.
Later in the same century, whales became scarce in Japanese coastal waters because of the industrial whaling of the Americans and Europeans offshore. Japanese whalers borrowed their competitors’ techniques and expanded into large-scale whaling. During the 1940s, facing food shortages during and after World War II, the Japanese turned to whale meat to fill their diet.
During the early post-war years, the International Whaling Commission was formed to address the depletion of the whale populations. At the same time, new technologies made it possible to study whales in their habitat, to learn their social structures and to hear their songs echoing across the deep.
Conservationists began to protest the killing of the whales, and one by one, the world’s nations stopped whaling, with Japan remaining as one of the few holdouts.
Throughout these centuries, Taiji, a little town on the southern coast of Japan, has occupied a central place in the whaling story. It was from Taiji, in 1675, that Japan’s first large-scale, organized whaling expedition was launched. Even now, more than 90 percent of the town’s people work in the whaling industry, and they see whale hunting as part of their cultural heritage. The ongoing slaughter has brought whaling, and specifically Taiji whaling, under attack.
Into this charged climate, in the mid-1980s, Taiji’s town leaders invited me to their community. They hoped that an artist, even a whale-loving artist, would listen to their concerns about what they saw as the destruction of their heritage. If I could hear them out, they thought, I might help turn aside the international criticism directed against them.
I walked through this beautiful little town, perched on steep, forested hillsides and surrounded by the sea. Out in the bay was a lot of activity.
A small fleet of fishing boats, working in tandem, closed a gap in a bay just below the town hall. I knew enough about Taiji’s whaling methods to guess what I was seeing, but I had to ask.
I was right. What I was seeing was a group of whalers herding a pod of pilot whales into the tiny bay. When they finished the roundup, they would secure a net across the opening of the bay and then slaughter the whales the next day.
Pilot whales travel in groups of as many as fifty, and the kind of kill I was seeing can wipe out a whole generation, along with the young. It’s hard for the whales to come back from that kind of devastation.
All through the discussions with the mayor and the town officials, I kept thinking about what was going on outside the window. They said that even though they killed the whales, they still honored and respected them.
I told them that whale watching is taking hold in other countries, and it’s becoming a bigger industry than whaling ever was. Taiji’s officials were open to that, but they still wanted to hang on to their tradition of hunting.
The town officials took me out to show me around. We walked around the bay, where the whales broke the surface of the water and disappeared, while the whalers shouted from boat to boat, coordinating their movements as they set the net in place.
On down the cove was the town whaling museum, decorated with a tile mural of a right whale. It wasn’t bad, but it was abstract, and it didn’t bring the viewer any closer to what the whale really is. But the museum had a big blank wall that would be perfect for a mural. I talked to the officials about what I could do with that wall. I knew that if I could paint a wall there, it would show living whales as an object of beauty and not just a commercial product.
The officials liked the idea, and when I left, I truly respected them, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the whales and the herding boats. I was going to catch a plane the next morning, and I tried to put the scene out of my mind and sleep.
I woke with a start sometime after midnight, knowing that I had to do something. I shook awake Kevin Short, my translator and traveling companion, an American who worked for the Japan Times. I told him, “We’ve got to go down and help those whales.” Kevin and a Canadian photographer who was traveling with us and I all went down to the cove.
We stood on the rocks beside the bay, listening to the waves lapping against the beach. By a sliver of moonlight, we could see the thirty adult whales circled protectively around the big dominant male. It was a very spiritual thing to see these animals, so peaceful and harmless, so vulnerable. What kept ringing in my mind was that the next morning they were going to be cut up and sent to restaurants all over Japan. As we watched, the whales would surface at times, clearing their blowholes with a wet sigh.
When I went down to the water, I didn’t know what I intended to do. I didn’t go to that town to be a radical. I had earned the respect of the fishermen and had met the mayor, and I had an invitation to create a mural in their town. Yet as my mind constructed the gory slaughter of the next morning, I had no choice but to go into the water. I took all my clothes off, down to my BVDs, dove in and swam with those whales.
At first, the whole pod drew back from me. But then the group opened up and invited me inside its circle, letting me swim in their midst. One whale actually pushed me toward the net, knowing that I had hands and could help them. As I moved toward the net, carried by the force of the whale’s nudge and this inner compulsion, I saw a baby with its mother. Whale calves are rare, and it was wrenching to know that even if this baby survived tomorrow’s slaughter, it would not survive the loss of its mother.
I found myself at the opening of the bay with my hands on the imprisoning net. I began to untie it.
Kevin Short had lived in Japan for fifteen years, had found a place in Japanese culture, and understood and respected Japanese ways. When he saw what I was doing, he dove into the water and physically dragged me away from the net.
“What are you doing?” Kevin shouted.
“I can’t bear to see these whales being killed,” I said, shaking loose from his grip.
“You know, Wyland,” Kevin came back, “that’s a great, noble thing you want to do, but if you do that, you will set what you have tried to do back fifty years.”
Dawn had begun to color the eastern sky, and at the horizon of audibility was the hum of the whaling-boat engines.
“You’ve already painted one Whaling Wall in Japan,” Kevin continued. He was in the water, standing between me and the net. I didn’t want to listen to him, but he just kept talking. “People are beginning to understand the living whale because of your work, because of the power of your art. If you do this, you’ll kill the very thing that you’ve set out to do.”
The sun came up, and the whaleboats began to come in. I could have released the whales. I’d have gotten arrested, but that didn’t bother me. What
stopped me was that I now had a chance to paint a mural that the townspeople would see every day, a chance that would be gone if I untied the rope.
The question came down to this: Do I try to save these thirty whales, which the whalers would probably have herded up again anyway, or do I continue to paint murals on public walls and museums and inspire people in a positive way?
As I scrambled out of the water and got into my clothes, I tried not to see the whalers loading up their harpoon guns. But I couldn’t hide from my own sense of betrayal. I was torn apart inside, and on the train back to Tokyo, I cried with grief, rage and frustration.
The guilt stays with me today. It’s terrible to think about the slaughter, but I know Kevin Short was right.
I did go back the next year and paint a mural on the wall of Taiji’s whaling museum. A fisherman there told me it was the first time he had seen a living whale swimming. Before that, he had thought of whales only as dead meat.
The Japanese find the whales’ eyes on the mural very powerful, especially the right whale, which makes eye contact with every passerby.
After many years and four Whaling Walls in Japan, whale watching is beginning to take hold there. Young people are turning against whaling, looking for their heritage somewhere else, and calling for an end to whaling in Japan. We may be seeing a new dawn for the whales of Japan.
Wyland
Fighting for Their Lives
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
William Blake
In my nightmares I saw the lifeless bodies of marine mammals washing up on shore. Our nonprofit organization, Save the Whales, was trying to prevent the United States Navy from performing “ship shock” tests in the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary, a biologically sensitive area off the coast of California. The waters were home to endangered blue, sperm, fin and humpback whales, as well as dolphins, seals and sea lions. If the navy went ahead with its plan to test the hull integrity of its new cruisers by detonating 270 underwater explosives—some as large as 10,000 pounds—over the next five years, hundreds of thousands of these beautiful animals would die. The detonations would kill many animals outright. Others would face a slow lingering death from damage to their internal organs and hearing.