Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

Her tail swished. The Janus swayed a little; the Sister had moved the entire boat. My hand was beginning to cramp up, curled around the camera. I saw an eye, dark and inscrutable. A row of teeth appeared. The Sister mouthed her prey like a dog deciding whether to accept a treat from its master. Then she swallowed the dead seal. She took it down whole. The gulls, I noticed, were gone. The presence of the Sister had scattered them like leaves in strong wind. The scene was eerily quiet.

“She’s on her own for once,” Forest said. “I wonder where the Twins are?”

“When shall we three meet again?” Galen said.

For half an hour, we watched her. Galen retrieved the dummy, a Styrofoam surfboard, from beneath a bench. He pushed it over the side. The Sister seemed uninterested, though. She continued to nose through the slick of blood, verifying that she had devoured every last morsel of meat. Her dorsal fin was peppered with holes; it looked as though she had taken a round of buckshot. Galen shook the surfboard temptingly so it quivered like a seal. But the Sister was not fooled. Having finished her snack, she lounged on the surface. She did not hold still — without motion, her gills would cease to function and she would suffocate — but she swam forward in the smallest possible increments, inch by inch. Basking in the sun, she appeared to be taking the shark version of a catnap.

Forest gunned the engine. The Janus trolled toward the Sister’s retreating frame. I shivered as we pulled up alongside her again. She was big enough to take her place as an islet in the archipelago.

“Pet her,” Forest told me.

Galen stretched out a hand and laid it on the shark’s back. Cringing, I waited for her to react. One swipe of her tail could have shattered our hull. If she was in the wrong mood, she could swamp the boat and devour us all in a matter of minutes. Galen kept his fingers planted on the patchwork of scales. There was no discernible response to his touch. He patted softly, his eyes wild. After a moment, I reached out too. The shark’s flesh was cold, rough to the touch. I stroked her rib cage, a gentle, caressing movement, then drew my hand away with a cry of pain.

My fingertips were bleeding. It looked as though I had used a cheese grater on them. Behind me, I heard Forest chortle. Everything in this place, even the shark’s skin, was dangerous.

THEY COME IN the late autumn, passing the islands in droves. I have seen them sliding through the sea like nightmares. Despite their size, the whales have an elusive quality. They camouflage themselves as waves, as clouds, as islets, as reflections of light. Blue whales. Gray whales. More than once I have found myself staring at what appears to be an empty ocean, only to observe a column of mist rising against the sky — a gasping exhalation — and realize the sea is full of bodies.

Mick is our whale expert. It is his job to count and catalog the animals’ numbers, to keep track of the males, females, and juveniles. They are heading north in search of krill. Baleen whales, the largest animals on earth, survive by eating some of the smallest. They are traveling to the ice caps, where there are fields of krill so dense they make the water opaque. Mick has been there. He has seen gray whales swimming blindly in a bath of food, singing to one another in apparent joy.

The humpbacks are his favorite. They move in family groupings, forming intense bonds. Nomadic by nature, they lack any notion of permanence or home. They are the opera singers of the aquatic world, yet most of their music falls into the subsonic or supersonic range, beyond human hearing. Our ears are paltry, tiny things. My whole body could fit into a humpback’s lung.

Before people filled the ocean with noise — boats churning, oil rigs thrumming, undersea cables vibrating — whales were able to sing across the entire planet. Mick told me this. I was struck by the image, not of the animal, but of the music itself. A single, throbbing note. I imagined the vibration passing through forests of kelp, setting jellyfish to movement, tricking shellfish with its resemblance to thunder so they cowered in their homespun caves. One strong note over sandy, wave-swept terrain — the oceanic equivalent of deserts — where nothing could grow and no fish lingered. One strong note over coral reefs and canyons, teasing dolphins into an answering chatter, bothering the seabirds where they rested between sea and sky. Finally this music would find its audience: another whale, clear on the other side of the world.

The presence of these animals has unsettled me. They are not predators, and they are not prey. They exist outside the food chain. In some ways, they exist outside normal space and time. They live in a realm of large, slow things — tides, storms, and magnetic currents. They often plunge into the inky depths of the ocean, down where the sunlight fails. They inhabit a blue world, away from land, dipping from water to air and back again, sliding between darkness and glow. It is rare for them to come close enough to the coast to be seen by human eyes. The Farallon Islands are unusual in this way, as in so many others. Autumn in this place is Whale Season.

It is November. Early November, I think, though I can’t be sure. I haven’t looked at the calendar in quite some time.

Thus far, I have failed to photograph the whales. I have tried, but they have defeated me. They are always too far away to succumb to my telephoto lens. They are too big to fit into the frame. There is something inartistic about their bodies, too. Some quality is lost in translation. Their ears and eyes vanish among their barnacles and scars. Their mouths are oddly shaped. Their blowholes are grotesque orifices, falling somewhere in appearance between a volcano and a rectum. Even the babies aren’t photogenic. Gray whales are fifteen feet long when they’re born, clocking in at two thousand pounds.

Undaunted, I continue to work. I have climbed Lighthouse Hill and sat on the slope for hours, looking to the west, where the whales pass by at irregular, unpredictable intervals. They are mysterious. They have been cropping up in my dreams, swimming through the moonless oceans of my mind, swishing their tails, displacing gallons of water, singing loudly enough to wake me.

The other day, I saw a blue whale. I was high on the hill, trying to plant my tripod on the crumbling granite. The creature rose up without warning. The noise caught my attention first — the whistling gasp of its breath. Fifty feet from shore. A rare thing. A marvel. It was bigger than a building, bigger than a dinosaur. I knew the numbers — the amount of school buses that would balance out its body on a scale, the quantity of football fields that would constitute its spine.

But I could not capture this girth on film. I got a snapshot of its nose. Its maw, mottled with algae. A gigantic flipper flinging droplets like throwing stars. The tail, off-kilter. It reminded me of the parable about an elephant in a dark room. One person touches the trunk and describes the animal as a tree, the next touches the torso and describes the animal as a wall, and the third touches the tail and describes the animal as a rope. My photographs were similarly fragmented. Only pieces, rather than the whole. No grandeur. No force. No sense of power and size.

I was scrolling through the images I had taken — all unsuccessful and unbeautiful — when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned so swiftly that I lost my footing. Andrew stood there grinning. His red cap was askew, the gold emblem winking at me. I skidded down the slope, flinging out a hand. Andrew caught my arm. He pulled me up, then yanked me against him. He wrapped me in a hug.