not in any way bovine. They are, of course, immense, though you don’t comprehend that fully until you’ve seen one up close. They are benign, enormously powerful, and unconcerned with us. They are, at close range, utterly fleshly. Their slick backs are scarred and notched; the flesh of their underbellies is scored with pliant-looking ridges you could sink your whole hand into. Their heads and bodies are sometimes freckled and dappled like an Appaloosa’s hindquarters. Being mammals, they are not entirely hairless. Their eyes have short, bristly lashes. They snort and sigh and exhale; they expel jets of water through their blowholes, which form spangles of iridescent mist over their backs. They smell powerfully of fish and of themselves, a smell like that of fish but oilier, deeper, so potently rank, you suspect it may linger in your clothes and hair.
If you’re very fortunate, you may see a whale jump straight up from the water, three-quarters of its length, and crash down again. A whale when it jumps is, momentarily, aloft, suspended: all that tonnage, all that blubber, though the word blubber is hard to apply to such sleek and muscular beings. If you see one jump, you will understand how perfectly built they are (you who were never really meant to walk upright), how much like living torpedoes. There is nothing about them that does not speak directly to their ability to swim. Their flukes are enormous, gracefully curved, broad and flat, covered with barnacles. Their mouths, meant to scoop up vast quantities of plankton, constitute almost a third of their bodies; their heads in profile are wedges that terminate in the broad hard-rubber rims of their mouths, which meet in an overlap, like the lid of a box.
The whales don’t jump often, at least not for the benefit of whale-watching boats. They are more prone to breaching, their heads underwater, showing their scarred, glistening backs as they take in oxygen through their blowholes. After a minute or two they dive again. Their backs disappear underwater, and a moment later, as they angle themselves to dive, they flip their two-pronged black tails up from amid the chaos of churn and foam they’ve created.
I once stood at the rail and watched a humpback swim under the boat, no more than twenty feet down, so we could see its whole body, so we could fully understand how buoyant it was and begin to understand that it truly occupied the water. The whale was deep green in the green-blue water, shadowy as an X-ray, netted with pallid light. The sight was stirring and somewhat frightening, not because the whale could or would damage the boat but because it was revealed, briefly, in its realm, the vastness that lay under us, with its schools of darting fish; its granular, sun-filtered green that would deepen by slow degrees to jade, lusterless emerald, and then pure black; its submerged cliffs and plains and valleys where, among the fissures, darker fish swam over a bare, porous landscape of rock without needing to see; where pinpoints of luminescence drifted and anemones waved their translucent petals.
Epilogue
KENNY AND I met in Provincetown over fifteen years ago. I was living in Brooklyn then and had gone up for the weekend with my friend Bob Applegarth (whose ashes we scattered several years later on the big dune at the end of Snail Road). Kenny, who lived in Manhattan, was in Provincetown for a week by himself, though he was not often by himself once he got there. We spoke to each other casually, as strangers do, in an art gallery, then ran into each other again, later that night in front of Spiritus, where we exchanged phone numbers. If we hadn’t happened onto each other that second time, I suspect we’d never have met again, and we’ve wondered over the years whether we were likely ever to have met, under any circumstances, in New York. It seems doubtful. We had little, outwardly, in common. But Provincetown is the kind of place where people who are not technically supposed to meet at all not only do so but see one another over and over again. Kenny and I have been together all of the last fifteen years, and we still go to Provincetown every chance we get. We imagine ourselves, only half jokingly, as old coots there, prone to a little more gold jewelry than is absolutely necessary, walking wire-haired dachshunds on leashes down Commercial Street. I can think of worse fates.