Whale Breath

Cohen Drive (21 Miles), Juneau, Alaska



It feels as though spring has finally come. After weeks of rain and grumbling locals, the sun is out in Juneau and the moist new leaves are stretching out under the surprising warmth.

Last night I spent my final evening at a house-sit 21 miles 'out the road'. I paused from cleaning to enjoy the late twilight, walking out onto the balcony overlooking steep forest down to the water. Silver light of the Alaskan summer night spread out on the calm waters below. At eleven o'clock there was still enough light to warrant a stroll down the two hundred and seventeen steep steps to the rocky beach below. I couldn't resist letting my feet, that were bare for the first time in Alaska, take me there.

Padding gently down the stairs I noted the stillness of the night, and listened for the presence of other night wanderers - squirrel? Owl? Black Bear?

"Whhhooosh" The sound, like a gust of wind, hit me. Whales, I thought. Fantastic. Carefully descending, I scanned through the tall Spruce for the tell-tale spray shooting up from the ocean horizon. There. A spray, that smeared vision of the dark glossy water behind, hung suspended - a memory of the whale's breath that breathed it a moment earlier. Then a dark curve was born from the horizontal plane, an inch ahead of the previous spray. A smooth black eclipse, finger-digit long to my eyes, but in reality a mammoth beast of warm blubbery flesh. Whale. This time I witnessed the exhalation, a violent white shout, and a second later, wwwhhooooshh, the sound-wave hit, having finally crossed the distance, the whale already sliding back into her immense underwater world.

I let out my own exhalation. I breathed deep. I looked around, and above, at my feet and to the far-off Chillkat mountain range. I put my effort into this feeling and this moment, in absorbing its clarity into my every atom. I breathed in and out. Sitting, I watched the whale travel and wondered what I knew of her. I didn't know her sex, there was a good possibility she was coming from Hawaiian water because scientists told up she had, and was on her annual trip to Skagway, to mate and return south once more. This on, where had she been? Maybe she had stayed in Alaskan waters. Maybe researchers had misjudged the signs. Nothing is certain in approximate science.

In the grace of her forward motion, the thrill of how enormous both she and her journey was, and the intimacy of her breath touching me, I was moved by these things that happen whether we observe them or not, this precious beauty.