Читать книгу Flash Count Diary - Darcey Steinke - Страница 10

When I read that female killer whales also go through menopause, I was coming off yet another sleepless night. I’d taken a break from the novel I was working on, a book about a woman who becomes unrecognizable to herself, to read the science section of The New York Times. Inside was a story, based on a scientific paper by Darren Croft and Emma Foster, on how, like human women, Southern Resident killer whales go through menopause and then have a long post-reproductive life. The older females not only live thirty to fifty years after menopause but they also lead their pods—complex cohesive family groups—particularly in times when salmon, their main food source, is scarce. Elder females have a plethora of ecological information and all whales, even younger males, choose to follow the post-reproductive females.

I went from the Times directly to YouTube and watched clip after clip of killer whales. Killer whales, or Orcinus orca, are the largest members of the dolphin family. They are as long as twenty-five feet and weigh up to seven tons. Their dorsal fins can reach six feet. Killer whales’ brains are four times as big as our own and, like ours, have spindle cells that have been linked to empathy. Mothers raise one child at a time. They nurse for several years and teach their offspring to speak, forage, and follow the rituals of their pod.

I watched SeaWorld footage of Corky, a fifty-two-year-old post-reproductive female, on her back, waving her dorsal fins at the crowd. Katina, forty-one, slides herself onto a concrete ledge as part of a marine show. Lolita, fifty, swims tight laps around her small tank at the Miami Seaquarium. Wild whales live into old age, but in aquariums most die within five years. Lolita is the second-oldest whale in captivity and the only survivor of the Puget Sound capture of 1970, when Southern Resident whales were herded by boat, airplane, and explosives into nets. Lolita is an anomaly, moving into her forty-fifth year as a captive performer. Footage shows her swimming in her pool, the smallest orca tank in North America; its width is less than four lengths of her body, its depth less than one length. She swims frenetically from wall to wall, like an agitated soul trapped inside a concrete body.

My favorite footage shows wild whales underwater. They are harder to see as they call to one another with clicks, squeaks, buzzes, donkey brays, and an unnerving sound like a human voice on helium. I watch them dive down so deep I can barely see them on my screen—it’s as if they’ve moved down through my computer, through the top of my desk, and are hovering in the dark space below, just white patches in black water.

I listened continually for the Southern Residents near the San Juan Islands via the Lime Kiln hydrophone, an underwater microphone that streams live sound and records whale vocalizations as the orcas pass through Haro Strait. Mostly I hear boat motors, tide fetch, ebb, and flow. As I worked at my desk in Brooklyn, there was an overlay of sound from the Salish Sea, the whales’ home waters. When I was sad, I’d double down, listening while also watching footage of the Southern Residents on YouTube or flipping through pictures of whale encounters at the Center for Whale Research website. The center, on San Juan Island in Washington State, has been studying the Southern Residents since 1978.

I began to dream of whales. In the first, a small calf beaches. I know she’s young because her white patches are still orange. As I move closer to the body, the calf’s black fluke rises in what appears to be a wave. For a while the whales that move through my sleeping head are intact but appear in incongruous places. A tall dorsal fin in the Delaware River, rising beside my inner tube. A pod breaching and spy-hopping in the upstate lake where I swim. In one dream, the whales are tiny—I’m startled to find one in my bowl of soup. Other times the killer whales are colossal, as big as a city bus but liquid, flowing, like oil over the roof of my house in Brooklyn.

One night the whales lose their definition, their specific physical characteristics, and are more like shining orbs hovering over the hardwood floor. They look like I feel when I am floating in a dream. The dream might have a different story line completely—say, my reoccurring one of being sent back to college to live in a dorm room—but the whales are still there, spots of energy wading over the grassy campus quad. Sometimes their energy shuts off and they fall to the ground, a mass of fetid blubber. In a recent dream, two whales were laid out in an L shape on my bed. I was confronted with the reality of their bodies, an intimacy so excruciating it was almost obscene.

The whales accompany me, not unlike other invisible presences: a boyfriend whose physical tenderness was hard to get out from under and, more recently, my mother, a phantom whose proximity both tears and quickens. The whales’ presence is similar in sensation to—psychic pressure, sudden jerks at the edge of my eye—but different from being haunted by a person. The whales remain near but separate, unknown.

When Lolita arrived at the Miami Seaquarium in 1970, another older whale was already living there. Hugo, a Southern Resident captured a few years earlier, was a large male with a collapsed dorsal fin. All male whales in captivity have collapsed dorsal fins, a sign of ill health from a diet of frozen fish and overly warm tank water. Hugo also suffered from zoochosis, self-destructively swimming over and over into the side of his concrete pool. Whale advocates believe he was suicidal. On her arrival, Lolita was named after Nabokov’s unlucky heroine and “married” to the much older Hugo, a.k.a. Humbert. The two mated—once in the middle of a whale show—though Lolita never got pregnant.

I watched archival footage of skits that Lolita and Hugo performed over the years. In an early 1970s routine, Hugo goes up against the “boxer” Scrap Iron MacAtee. Scrap Iron comes out in a white robe, red silk shorts, and boxing gloves. Hugo, to taunt him, spins around with his tongue out. Scrap Iron gets into a small rowboat, which Hugo knocks over, and then he drags Scrap Iron to the side of the pool, where he is down for the count. As the announcer counts backward from ten, Lolita, who has been hiding, rises up and splashes water on Scrap Iron. The two whales do a victory lap around the pool, then jump up together, reaching their noses twenty feet in the air to touch two balls suspended over the water.

In 1980 Hugo was successful in killing himself. He died after swimming violently into the concrete wall of his tank. The attending veterinarian, Dr. Jesse R. White, wrote in his necropsy report that Hugo died of an aneurysm of a cerebellar artery.

After Hugo’s death, Lolita continued on alone. In one film from the 1980s, her trainer rides her in nearly every position imaginable. Standing on her back, holding on to her dorsal fin as if Lolita were a surfboard, lying on her back, lying on her white belly in a human-animal embrace. The trainer stands on Lolita’s snout, as she shoots him up and out of the water. The trainer sits on Lolita’s head and he is again shot up out of the water. In one routine, as the trainer stands on Lolita’s back and she swims, her tail flapping with exaggerated movements like a giant bath toy, one, two, three dolphins jump onto her and ride her, along with the trainer, as if Lolita were a flatbed boat.

I became obsessed with Lolita. I read blogs about her and joined Facebook pages committed to her release. I searched Miami library websites for early Seaquarium footage. She was a kindred menopausal creature I felt unreasonably drawn to. “I desperately wanted to be close to animals,” writes Charles Foster in his 2016 book, Being a Beast. “Part of this was the conviction that they knew something that I didn’t and that I, for unexamined reasons, needed to know.”

So with no real plan I flew down to Miami from New York. I wanted to be near a postmenopausal whale, and to protest, along with animal rights activists, for her freedom.

The Miami Seaquarium could be considered kitsch, with its 1960s space-age concrete architecture and chipped pastel paint, but it’s too sinister, more Floridian Gothic. A scuba diver scrubs crud off the glass from inside the giant aquarium, a skull flag flies over the pirate-themed playground, and a sea turtle with what looks like algae growing over its back floats glumly in a bathtub-size tank.

In the killer whale stadium, with its carnival-sideshow vibe, Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” blares over the speakers, and three trainers in wet suits walk out onto the concrete platform. The young women smile and wave. Lolita’s tank seems even smaller in person, not much bigger than a backyard swimming pool. It’s hard to believe a creature as big as a van, used to swimming a hundred miles a day, must remain in this barren concrete pit. This is the first show of the day, and from reading about whales that live in sea parks, I know that Lolita is hungry. They keep her hungry so she will do her tricks. A trainer with a long braid down her back makes a sharp hand signal, and Lolita swims to the front of the tank and twists up from the water. Spray flies off her gigantic, glittering body, and the crowd cheers.

The large screen behind the tank lights up, showing footage of L pod, Lolita’s family, as they swim free in the Salish Sea. Lolita rests with her chin on the concrete as a recorded voice tells about the endangered Southern Residents. Lolita appears to be watching the screen; maybe she knows that when the movie is over, she will get another chunk of fish, but maybe she remembers her family. I had read that Hyak, the captive whale used in the marine scientist John Ford’s 1980s echolocation study, knocked his head often against the observational glass to signal that he wanted researchers to show him the picture book made up of images of his wild relatives.

The calls Lolita continues to make have been identified as L pod vocalizations. One scientist speculates that she may not comprehend she’s three thousand miles from her home waters. Lolita may think the Salish Sea is just over the Seaquarium’s jumbotron.

“The question that truly occupies [animals],” writes J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Animals, “as it occupies the rat and the cat and every other animal trapped in the hell of laboratory or zoo, is: Where is home and how do I get there?”

After the film is over, Lolita waves with her pectoral fins and slaps her tail. Each time the crowd claps, Lolita heads back to her trainer for a fish. Finally the trainer, looking bored, feeding Lolita with one hand and sipping on a Slurpee straw with the other, shoots her hand down and then straight up. Lolita plunges underwater. She is gone for several minutes before she launches up and completely out of the water, her body hovering over the blue. Her breach is akin to a biblical miracle, a spectacle my eyes see but that my brain can’t absorb. The crowd is silent as she lands in an upward cascade of liquid lace.

Breach: (1) A broken, ruptured, or torn condition. (2) A gap (as in a wall) made by battering. (3) A leap, especially of a whale out of the water.

To be stuck in a small cramped place, to wait for outside intervention. Is it stupid to compare my captivity to Lolita’s? Is it insensitive to actual captives, real prisoners? Yes. But it does not negate that while I am not in a tank, cage, or cell, I have felt my menopausal world shrinking, my freedom decreasing. “For I have missed the feeling,” the poet Laurie Sheck writes in her book Captivity, “of being able to go somewhere else, / Delicately barred as I am / In this slow conversion of myself into nothingness.”

I have struggled with why Lolita’s captivity feels familiar to me. Why I find her dilemma so compelling. I recognize the feeling of being held captive, not literally, like Lolita, but metaphorically. A female captivity always binding but that, without fertility, tightens further. I am restricted, stuck in the box the greater culture uses to enclose and reduce older women. Lolita must be what the Seaquarium defines, a creature who does not want to be free, a prisoner who must be grateful to her captors, a female who does tricks in order to be fed.

As the crowd cheers and Lolita swims back to her trainer, I wonder if she’s feeling sorry for us, her spectators. It’s clear there is something wrong with us. We are, on some level, blind. I wonder, as I watch Lolita rest her chin on the concrete, if she is enraged, as all captives are at first. Or if she feels, as some women do after years of captivity, a misplaced gratitude.

Captivity from the Latin captivitas, means “bondage,” often in the sense of a person held by the enemy during war. It also means “blindness.” Captives are commonly blindfolded, but the captor also experiences a sort of moral blindness. I wanted to get close to another menopausal creature, but I see that Lolita’s captivity, while bringing her closer physically, actually makes it impossible for me to get an authentic sense of her, to see her at all.

After the show, techno music hammers, and Lolita logs by the side of the tank. She floats with her eyes closed against the sharp chlorine. It’s terrible to see her lying lifeless, but better than an earlier bit when she was trained to “catch” the kisses spectators threw at her. Ken Balcomb, the founder of the Center for Whale Research, thinks Lolita suffers from Stockholm syndrome. She is bonded to people who deny her freedom. In this way she’s not unlike heroines in human-captivity narratives; in order to survive in an unspeakable environment, she must establish a long-term relationship with her captor. Some advocates assume that Lolita’s compliance is chemical—that she’s on both tranquilizers and antidepressants. Her suffering as a creature torn from the wild and alone in her small watery cell is palpable. People push in, hold their cell phones above their heads, and smile.

The next day, I stand in front of the Seaquarium with twenty other protesters and try to turn away cars. From where we rally, alongside the Rickenbacker Causeway, we can see across the parking lot to the Seaquarium entrance as well as the concrete backside of the killer whale stadium. The sun is roasting. I can already feel my shoulders burning and the skin of my face getting stiff. With a bullhorn, a protester shouts, “Educate yourself!” in both English and Spanish. Others pass out xeroxed literature about Lolita’s captivity and the plan to release her back into her home waters in Washington State. A young man in a VEGAN T-shirt holds up a hand-lettered sign: LEAVE ANIMALS THE FUCK ALONE. Two young women are in orca costumes, black hoods lined with pink, their generous sleeves as pectoral fins. A little boy named Juan protests with his family. He has drawn a picture of Lolita and written above it: EXTRAÑO A MI MAMA!

Not all protesters want the same thing. Some want Lolita to be retired to a sea pen in her home waters in Washington State. Others just want her to be allowed to rest, to not have to perform in show after show every day of the week. One woman wants the Seaquarium to build an overhang so Lolita can have some relief from the blazing Floridian sun that cracks and dries her skin. A few protesters don’t believe Lolita will be released but hope, by letting people know about her suffering, to turn public opinion against cetacean captivity. Not all the protesters are young. An older Russian man holds a picture of Saint Francis with lettering that reads SHE HAS A SOUL TOO. His name is Oleg. “Once you can feel for the animals,” he tells me, “you are really in the world of the air and the water and the butterflies, not just down here trying to make a living.”

I want Lolita’s story to end in escape and deliverance. I want her released back to her home waters in Washington State. She went on a long journey, underwent extraordinary ordeals and humiliations. Now she must return home and be reunited with her family. Without reconciliation, there is no closure. Even if she is released, there is no telling if she’ll be able to overcome her captivity. After eighteen years of being held captive in a backyard shed, Jaycee Dugard continues to be haunted by her loneliness. “Today I sometimes struggle,” she writes in her book A Stolen Life, “with feelings of loneliness even when I am not alone … Hours turned into days, days to weeks, and weeks to months and then years.”

At the very least, activists hope to force the Seaquarium to build Lolita a bigger tank, a legal-size one. In recent years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has finally acknowledged what supporters have known: Lolita’s tank does not meet all space requirements set by the 1966 Animal Welfare Act. It is too small. PETA filed a motion to strip Seaquarium of its license to display large mammals. Seaquarium responded as it does each time activists press for Lolita’s release. In a statement, Andrew Hertz, the Seaquarium director, emphasizes her age: “The approximately 50-year-old post-reproductive Lolita…” He goes on to list the ocean’s many dangers, implying that the sea is too wild a place for the over-the-hill female whale. Hertz seems unaware that post-reproductive matriarchs pilot their pods. They are neither frail nor apprehensive but in every way leaders of their communities. Whales much older than Lolita command their pods in the Salish Sea. Ocean Sun, an eighty-five-year-old whale believed to be Lolita’s mother, is one of the leaders of L pod. And a whale fifty years Lolita’s senior, the 104-year-old matriarch known as J2, or Granny, guides the J, K, and L pods.

What was happening to me was hard to explain to other people. Whenever I tried, I found that language failed, that I could not explain how the whales had both infiltrated me and given me hope. I felt bewildered. I’d always been suspicious of animal-obsessed people, like the PETA girl on the subway who once shoved the corpse of an electrocuted fox in my face. How do you explain you’ve been enchanted by a creature, an apex predator? I felt like the Maori girl in the film Whale Rider. The film alternates between footage of whales swimming underwater and the girl, Paikea, struggling on land with Koro, her grandfather. Koro does not believe girls can lead. The relationship between girl and whale is subtle, delicate. Paikea must ultimately ride a whale in order to convince her family, her community, and herself that she possesses both essential wildness and strength.

It was all so embarrassing. I am not Native American. I am not even a girl. Though I am a female in the midst of a crossing. I am a fifty-three-year-old woman, an urban person on the back side of middle age, drawn for the first time in my life to an animal, to Lolita, but also to J2, the Southern Resident matriarch, Granny. I watch footage of J2 playing with a dolphin, of her breaching and spy-hopping with her family after a salmon feed, of her swimming beside younger pod members, staying close to them, as if giving advice.

“Storylessness,” writes the feminist Katha Pollitt in her foreword to Carolyn Heilbrun’s book Writing a Woman’s Life, “has been women’s biggest problem.” Heilbrun felt that women have been confined to erotic narratives and that a common cultural understanding leads to the altar. Our story ends with a house, babies, a loving husband. “This story,” Pollitt writes, “not only fails to fill a lifetime, it puts the plot line in the hands of others, men who do or do not admire, love, offer marriage and make full female adulthood possible.”

Menopause, with its loss of fertility, its dislocation, frays the narrative further. I have felt that my story was over, that nothing more would happen to me. Unless, of course, I divorced again and the old marriage plot could be invigorated, albeit with less sex appeal and lower stakes. But what if the postmenopausal narrative, like the prepubescent one, is focused not on romance, but on a creature? Like the stories I loved at twelve, Charlotte’s Web, Misty of Chincoteague, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I am not interested in girl meets boy, but in woman meets whale. “Questing,” Pollitt writes, “is what makes a woman the hero of her own life.”