I was reading through some of my old social media posts and thinking about whales. I have a friend who is terrified of whales. She’s from California—Bay Area—and once in elementary school they rounded up all the kids and said, okay kids, we are going on an adventure! An educational adventure! They piled up all the kids on one of those long, flat raft boats and took them out onto the ocean, the great mysterious. They said, okay kids, look out there and see if you can see any whales. They strained their little pupils until they couldn’t see anything but the fog and after an hour they were going to call it quits when all of a sudden everything got real quiet. The water around their little raft got dark, and the heads of the kids whipped around and they saw a tail bigger than their yellow school bus flip out of the water directly behind their boat with a splash, sending them careening on a huge wave. Everything was fine. My friend, she has what she calls an irrational fear of whales. I’d say it’s pretty rational.
When I was in elementary school I didn’t like animals much. My brother, though, he loved them, so we were constantly watching crocodile hunter, Big Steve Irwin, and Jeff Corwin. One time my brother did a report on an endangered species, and he chose the beluga whale. Their white bodies looked like those cheese sticks you get in sack lunches as a kid, and they were just so weird looking, I related with them. You know they call that bump on their head a melon? How degrading. Science calls it a fact. It contains this fatty tissue, and is malleable, and all round and helps with something called echolocation. Dolphins and bats use that too, you know, but they don’t have to walk around being called a melon head. I felt like I understood. Sometimes I have a melon head and I have to stare at it in the mirror and everyone tells me that I was born this way and that I can’t change it because of science, but it still sucks that everyone has to call it a melon head.
Some people say the beluga whale is beautiful. I saw one once, in captivity. I stared at its naked body. It looked so isolated, in its tank all alone. The manatees, you know, they had friends. The walrus was entertaining all the visitors by vomiting on the glass they were looking into. The killer whales were doing all these special tricks with the trainers, causing all sorts of animal-lover riots and animal-hater entertainment, and the beluga whale just floated around. They travel in pods, the belugas. They travel with the whole extended family! Mom, dad, crazy Aunt Mary. What happened to this poor guy sitting in this tank by himself? I imagine he was trapped. Trapped by something, or someone he didn’t recognize, and saved by some well-to-do money making human.
I guess it could have been the other way around. Maybe his pod got stuck. Beluga whales hang out in the icy areas, up by Russia and Canada, the Arctic, where nobody really likes to go much. The ice sometimes gets a little out of hand and sometimes they get stuck under it. They have this thing where they can dive for 25 minutes—25 minutes! A half hour later they pop back up, like hey, I’ve been under here for quite some time now and I came back up for some oxygen before I passed out! Then imagine the day when you come back up for air and there is nothing but a huge, thick sheet of ice the same color as your skin and you hit against it but it hurts the melon on your head and you can’t breathe and then you’re gone, subject to the next polar bear or killer whale that comes along, an easier prey. I think that’s what happened to me. Maybe my pod got lost. Or maybe I never had one to begin with.
I had this piano teacher in kindergarten. She was a typical really nice old lady and lived just down the street from my elementary school in a two-story light pink house. I walked over there instead of taking the bus on Wednesdays for my lesson. One day I knocked on the door and she wasn’t home. Just her adolesent son. So he sat me down on the couch and told me to wait. I waited the whole 45 minutes and thought my mom wasn’t going to come and that she and my piano teacher had forgotten about me entirely and I was terrified of the boy in the room downstairs. When my mom came back to get me, I ran crying into her arms. I never went back. I guess I’m scared of pods. I might be scared of attachment.
The thing is, belugas don’t really stay in pods for very long. They move around. They are like the social butterflies of the whale world. They only really find a mate they want to be with about every twenty years, which is a lot since they only live to be about thirty years old. That’s once in a lifetime when two whales find each other and say, hey, I like you better than most of the other whales. Let’s have a kid. And then a year later they switch to another pod. Maybe it’s like Instagram. Maybe they would rather have 12K followers than just 12 who they are really good friends with. Perhaps they just leave when someone makes a comment about their melon. They don’t deal with any crap.
Their name comes from the Russians, with the word for white being bielo. A beautiful color to be, really. Some think they look naked. I think they look like cheese sticks. But I don’t think they care much. It’s probably hard, I imagine. To have your species dying off. To always be watching over your shoulders for the next Russian hunter, or Inuit, or polar bear. To not swim under the thicker ice. I guess that the whales don’t care what people think. They just love. They love their pods, they love their kids, the people. You know that Belugas have facial muscles that allow them to smile and interact? And in 2009, a beluga was the animal to pull a Chinese diver to the surface instead of pulling her down. That’s when I find I’m the happiest. It’s when I don’t let myself get in the way of listening to someone, or to lifting them higher. It’s when I don’t care that I’m not at my prettiest and help my neighbor with her trash anyway. Those soft melon-headed whales really know how to find purpose, even though they look like cheese sticks.
