The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
A giant full of charisma
If I could have changed places with anyone in the world these last few days, I would have chosen Nan Hauser, an American marine biologist, whose encounter with a humpback whale during an expedition to the Cook Islands probably saved her life.
As the whale gently nudged her through the water with its head and appeared to enfold her with one of its long pectoral fins, she kept filming.
The results were shown on BBC news amid the welter of grim bulletins from Syria and the White House and sundry variations on a theme of Brexit, a wondrously timely reminder that there is still beauty and grace and compassion and wildness out there in the wide world if only we are prepared to open our eyes to it.
Several times, her own hand comes into shot making contact with the whale’s head as it closes in again and again to urge her away from where, unknown to her at that moment, there was a cruising tiger shark.
I wonder what she was thinking as the whale turned towards her and did not stop when it was within touching distance, but rather, deliberately chose to make physical contact. Then did it again and again.
Only at the very end of the film clip does she notice the shark. As she clambers aboard, the whale surfaces nearby, almost as if it was taking a bow. You can hear her voice calling to it.
“I love you too. Thank you. I love you.”
Under the circumstances, I imagine I might have said something similar.
I turned for guidance to the best book about whales I have ever read – Among Whales by whale biologist Roger Payne. On the subject of getting into the water with them, he writes: “When I first did it, it seemed rather like putting on a straitjacket and rolling around on the ground in front of a polar bear…”
Having pointed out the whale is at least 4,000 times more powerful than you, there is a heartfelt “but”…
“The wonderful thing, of course, is that the whale does not take advantage of your condition. It doesn’t blunder into you, or smash you against the bottom in 15 feet of water when you are below it. Instead, it manoeuvres with consummate skill – sometimes missing you only by inches… at the last minute it lifts its flukes over your head so as not to touch you. It is a miracle, and like all miracles, must be experienced to be believed.
“It is, I feel, the most valuable thing the whale has given us – the knowledge these largest of “monsters” are gentle.”
The astonishing thing about Nan’s film is just how gently she was ushered through the water by a whale that so deliberately made physical contact.
I have never got into the water with a humpback whale, but I have been very close to one indeed, leaning over the gunwhale of a whale-watching boat in Glacier Bay, Alaska.
The whale came right alongside, inches from the hull, first the snout, then a couple of seconds later the blowhole, and then the eye.
Oh, that eye! The eyeball was four inches across. And in the most blatant way imaginable, it made eye contact. What did it think of what it saw? The effect on me was that I felt sought out, chosen, the subject of a predestined moment. I felt as if everything I had ever done in nature’s company was a kind of preparation for this, this looking into a humpback whale’s eye as it looked into mine from less than 10ft below me.
So you will not be surprised to hear that I will be putting in quite a few hours in the coming days along the Fife coast in search of the humpback that has just turned up there, and which may be the same one that visited at this time last year.
If it proves to be the same one, then this is the whale whose portrait is on the wall in the room where I write, a painting by Fife-based wildlife and landscape artist Leo du Feu. So now it’s personal again.
I don’t plan to get into the water with it, this being the North Sea in January rather than the South Pacific in summer, which was the setting for Nan Hauser’s brush with destiny.
But I can well understand why she voiced her love for the most charismatic creature on the planet, and why she laughed with delight as it dived, or as Roger Payne put it, “transfixed by the deliberate grace of its departure”.