TITLE: The Copper River Orcas

DESCRIPTION: From faraway, the orcas whistles resound through our boat's speakers like a saxophone chorus playing a beebop refrain. Certain calls occasionally rise above the fray, slithering, soaring, and dive-bombing with the wild abandon of a Charlie Parker solo. Other calls seem to balance this boldness, they fold in upon themselves like a dainty flower closing its petals at sunset. A musician plays a few tentative notes in response. The whales turn silent for a minute or two. When we hear them vocalize again, it is much louder, a sure sign they have moved closer. If they come close enough, the orcas start echolocating the boat, perhaps trying to discover the source of the music. At two hundred feet, the clicks remind us of a woodpecker knocking on a tree. At twenty feet, they sound like a machine gun fired directly into the boat cabin. Now the orcas are whistling at such a loud volume their calls seem to explode into the darkened room, settling in like an army of occupation. The overall sensation is not so much that the orcas are close by and vocally active but, rather, that one of them has inhaled the boat with all of us inside it. We feel like latter-day Jonahs and Giopettos, although if not precisely swallowed whole into the belly of the whale, then certainly our ears are being sucked inside the moist lips of it's vibrating blowhole. Vocalizing at the volume of a loud rock and roll band, every sound an orca makes (and some it doesn't) suggests linkage. When a skilled musician mimics their calls with aplomb, no one aboard is left unaffected. By the time the whales have made their exit, everyone feels spit out, exhausted, quenched...and witness to a bona fide encounter. At such a moment, the question of whether the dialogue was genuine or counterfeit seems moot, a sorry attempt to superimpose an analytical frame over a profoundly emotional and spiritual experience. (from The Charged Border by Jim Nollman [Holt]).