A Momentary Pause
By Charlotte Austin
When I was in my twenties, I moved across America fourteen times. The reasons varied – college, graduate school, jobs, wanderlust, love – but each time the journey was been made by car. The drive I made most often was along the thirteen hundred miles of Interstate-5 that run vertically along the West Coast connecting Tijuana and Vancouver. I drove that road in both directions, sometimes alone, sometimes with my dog, once with a lizard named Hank riding shotgun in an emptied-out glass pickle jar. North and south and south and north, I rode that asphalt through it all: the tightly packed bustle of the neon Los Angeles sprawl, the hazy fields surrounding Sacramento, the wide and misty beaches of Oregon, the jagged gray peaks of the glaciers in Washington’s North Cascades. Many of the drives blur together in my memory now, scattered images of rest stop bathrooms and singing alone to music turned too loud. But there was a moment, once, during one of those drives that I’ll never forget.
I was driving north on the twisting grapevine of the Siskiyou Mountain range, having just crossed the border from California into Oregon. Each switchback made my Subaru shudder under the weight of the cramped load it carried – ball bearings, I’d been told – and let me catch glimpses of the Pacific, a blue-silver gulf glittering sharply in the sun. I had been behind the wheel for eight hours already that day, fueled by gas station coffee and an unspoken desire for the open road, and I was beginning to reach that hazy point of solo driving when everything seems stripped clean by the wind and the light and the road. There was hardly any traffic, just the occasional trucker rumbling by with a load of produce or products or petroleum. Then, suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bay explode.
A gray shape had erupted, leaping high into the air for one moment’s weightlessness before crashing down to shatter the water’s calm. Water droplets flashed in the bright midday sun and through my open window I heard the seagulls scatter, flapping away to squawk their annoyance from above.
I slowed the car, downshifting through the gears, and pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the road. Forgetting not to slam my car door, I looked both ways along the empty freeway before jogging across, vaulting the median divider. At the edge of the pavement, I kicked off my sandals and slid-fell down the steep embankment to the beach. It was a small, nondescript bay – beautiful, in the manner of that part of the coast, but no more remarkable than the ones in either direction – that had been ground down to rock by salt and sand and seawater blown in on the wind. When I got to the water, letting the foam of each wave kiss the tips of my toes, I waited.
When the whale breached again, it was as though time slowed into silence. I was close enough to count the barnacles on the wide gray body, feel the low-pitched scream resonate in my belly. When I licked my lips, I tasted salt. It was as though a secret had been torn from the sea, something much large than myself. I’d had feelings like that once or twice before: wandering the ancient forests of Northern California, surrounded by trees wider than the length of my body and impossibly old; another time, in Alaska, watching a glacier carve a valley into the side of a mountain in less time that it took for me to catch my breath. But I had never – still have never – been so close to that power.
The whale breached one final time, twisting in the air, his sleek body glistening in the sunlight. Afterwards, I stood there for the better part of an hour, watching the way that his underwater movements changed the patterns on the surface of the bay.
Gray whales, I’d read later, migrate ten thousand miles twice each year – easily the farthest of any known animal, contemporary or extinct. They travel between the Arctic Ocean, where they feed off the coast of Alaska, and the tepid coastal waters of Baja, Mexico, where they give birth to calves the length of a Volkswagen bus. They swim for weeks without stopping – night and day, not eating or sleeping – at five miles an hour, so that each leg of their journey takes just under three months. With a lifespan of over fifty years, they don’t reach maturity until well into their teens, but once fully grown, gray whales can be over fifty feet long. Fourteen thousand pounds of blood are pumped each minute through an aorta wide enough for a human to crawl through.
Gray whales have been known to produce an astonishing range of sounds – moans, rumbles, growls, even songs – at decibels louder than a jet engine during takeoff. Despite centuries of falling prey to unnatural and capitalistic predators, their route of migration has not changed, and the three hundred individuals that remain make the journey relentlessly, as though driven by a force more powerful than even they know. It is rumored, I have heard, that the population that migrates along the West Coast is particularly intuitive, approaching whale-watching boats to let their backs and tongues be scratched by tiny quivering tourists.
What is known about those whales is almost nothing, does not scratch the surface of the identity of an animal whose cerebral cortex alone is five times the weight of a man. It is not known, even, why they breach. Some say they leap into the air to catch glimpses of the world above the water; others say it’s to scratch an unknown itch. I wonder, sometimes, if the scientists studying those whales have ever taken a road trip.
I’m older now and have not made that drive in more than ten years. Still, the brain always contains two opposing desires: the urge to stay and the urge to run. Even now, where I have settled for longer than ever before and call myself happy, I sometimes wake in the early hours of the morning, clawing my way out of my lover’s encircling arms to scramble out of bed, pull on my shoes, and run. I push myself, on those mornings, to feel the pleasure-pain of my heart beating against my rib cage, and I often find myself thinking about those fourteen trips up and down the West Coast: a windshield caked with heat and fingerprints, tires bald to the cords, and that whale, leaping into the air.
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Charlotte Austin lives, works, and writes in Seattle, though wandering is one of her most dear passions. She has a bachelor’s in Environmental Science from the University of Washington, and is in her first year of a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Her hobbies include climbing mountains, baking cookies, and growing tomatoes.
Photograph used in conjunction with Flickr’s Creative Commons Agreement. It can be found, in its original form, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23338158@N03/2244520656/.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
