caught his limit, just for the love of it, though he always throws those fish back. Once the fish is in the boat, however, before throwing it back, he does something he tells me is customary among people who love to fish. He kisses it.
WHALES
A hundred and fifty years ago the waters around Provincetown were so full of whales, it was possible to harpoon them from shore. The front yards of most houses sported, as lawn ornaments, whale jaws and whale ribs, often bedecked with morning glories. If a pod of whales ventured close to shore, whalers jumped into their boats and herded them onto the beach. Shebnah Rich wrote of one such melee in his book, History of Truro:
The vast school of sea monsters, maddened by frantic shouts and splashing oars, rushed wildly on the shore, throwing themselves clean onto the beach; others pursuing, piled their massive, slippery carcasses on the first, like cakes of ice pushed up by the tide, till the shore presented a living causeway of over six hundred shining mammals, the largest number at that time ever driven on shore in one school. They landed at Great Hollow. The news reached the church just at the close of the morning service. During the next few days while the stripping was going on, thousands came to the circus. Some who had never seen such an aquatic display were wild with delight, jumping from fish to fish and falling among them as among little mountains of India rubber.
The surviving whales now live, largely unmolested, some distance out to sea. We who once killed them as recklessly and rampantly as pioneers killed off the buffalo of the prairies can pay to get on boats that will take us out to see them.
For years I resisted going out on the whale-watching boats. It felt unseemly, even grotesque, an intrusion on the privacy of creatures who ought better to be left alone. I could not imagine standing on the deck of a whale-watching boat without feeling like someone Diane Arbus would have been all too glad to photograph.
I was wrong. The whale-watching excursions are miraculous, and I urge anyone who feels reluctant for any reason to simply get on a boat and go. While I’ve tried to shy away from promoting any one local enterprise over another except when it seems absolutely necessary, I should tell you that the Dolphin fleet is the one operated by the Center for Coastal Studies, which uses the profits to fund its ongoing study of the migratory and other habits of whales.
The trip takes about four hours, and much of that time involves churning your way across empty water to get to the places where the whales feed. Whales are migratory—they winter to the south and come north in summer. You are most likely to see humpbacks, which are barnacle-bearded creatures, snouted, with broad black-gray backs and pale gray bellies. Their mouths (like most whales, they eat plankton) are gigantic hinges set high in their heads, and their eyes, surprisingly small, are set far back and low, close to their mouths. You may also see pilot whales or schools of dolphin. I should warn you that from day to day and summer to summer the whales are capricious in their choices of feeding grounds. They are always out there, but some summers they are too far away for the boats to get to where they are and back within four hours, and some days they seem simply to have decided to be in a place where the boats are not. Whale watches are gambles. You might see no more than a distant breaching or two; you might return having witnessed nothing beyond a distant almond shape, expelling a miniature spray of water. I have been on a fruitless trip during which, after hours of sailing around and seeing nothing, a middle-aged woman stood at the prow of the boat, wearing a pantsuit and holding a straw clutch decorated with straw strawberries, and said, “Ooh, come on, you finky whales.” The leviathans did not respond.
On a good day, however, you will see them come to within feet of the boat, and it is one of the more remarkable things that can happen to a human being. The whales don’t seem to mind the boats—if anything, they seem mildly curious about them, the way a land-living creature might wonder about a rock or a tree it could swear hadn’t been there yesterday. They are docile but