Featured May 17, 2008
 
Tonight’s featured writer is Doug Thompson, author of Whales: Touching the Mystery. Doug says he came to his life’s work through a passion for whales. Along the way, he says, he became a Rhodes Scholar, although he spells it a little differently: R-O-A-D. What’s more, he says that everything in life that’s important to him, including his wife and his dearest friends, came to him from whales. It sounds to me as if he’s a man in the right line of work.

But I’m anxious to hear Doug for a very personal reason.

Some years ago I had a close encounter with whales at the other end of the coast of which Doug writes. I was fishing for halibut out of Homer, Alaska. We limited out in the morning and couldn’t fish any more, but the captain suggested that if no one was in a hurry to get back to dock, we head north to watch a pod of migrating humpbacks. And so we did.

Our captain gave the whales a wide berth, pulled ahead of them, then cut the engines and we floated on the water, silent except for the slapping of the waves on the side of the boat and some light chatter about the whales. A trio of three whales, two adults and a calf, were swimming a little way from the rest of the pod, and it was clear they were going to go by us only 25 or 30 feet away.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note at this point that I had consumed a couple of beers on the trip north.

As the whales approached us, I leaned over the rail and started doing my best imitation of the song of the humpbacks that I'd heard on recordings. To my shock, when the three whales came alongside us, they stopped and turned in the water to face the boat. And they waited.

“What did you say to them?” the man next to me asked. I confessed to having no idea. “Well,” he went on, “say something else.” But there is frankly something very intimidating about having the full attention of three very large animals, and I remained mute.

They waited and we watched, no one saying anything, for what seemed a very long time. In reality, it was probably only a couple of minutes. Then the whales turned north again to continue their journey, disgusted, I’m sure, wondering what kind of jerk would flag them down and then refuse to have a conversation.

I never think of that occasion without kicking myself for being such a coward. So I’m anxious to hear from someone who has experienced whales at the level Doug Thompson has. I’d like to thank the Oregon Coast Aquarium and the Mountain Writers Series for helping make this reading possible.

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz
Photo by Cindy Hanson