My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (38 page)

Where’s Willy?

It was a hell of a time to be in Iceland, although by most accounts it is always a hell of a time to be in Iceland, where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down. This was early in August, and it was stormy as usual, but the summer sun did shine a little, and the geysers burped blue steam and scalding water, and the glaciers groaned as they shoved tons of silt a few centimeters closer to the sea. On the water, the puffins frolicked, the hermit crabs frolicked, and young people bloated with salmon jerky and warm beer barfed politely into motion-sickness buckets on the ferry sailing across Klettsvík Bay. The young people were on their way to an annual songfest and drinkathon on the Westman Islands, a string of volcanic outbreaks off Iceland’s southern coast. During the trip, they spoke in Icelandic about Icelandic things, such as whether they had remembered bottle openers and bandannas, and then they turned greenish and stopped talking as the boat lurched up and down the huge cold waves. After two hours or so, the waves settled and the boat slowed and glided into Heimaey Harbor, which is ringed by cliffs of old lava as holey as Swiss cheese. Dozens of trawlers and knockabouts bobbed at their moorings, nudging the docks and making that clanging sound that is supposed to make you feel lonely.

A few of the young people, gummy mouthed and bleary-eyed, roused themselves and gazed out the portholes. We sailed past a row of white buoys strung across the mouth of a small bay.

“Hey! Keiko!” one girl exclaimed, pointing at the buoys.

“Huh?” another mumbled, looking where the first one was pointing. “Keiko?”

“Willy! Free Willy!”

“Oh,
Keiko
!” the others said, pushing up to the window, yanking one another’s sleeves, and gawking at nothing but the empty inlet, the glassy water, the blank, looming cliffs. “Keiko! Oh, yeah! Oh, wow!”

THE WHALE WAS GONE
,
of course; he left in early July, after taking a watery journey with his human overseers to look at other whales—his kin, if not his kith—who had stopped near the Westman Islands for a midsummer feast. Keiko had seen wild whales before, having originally been one himself, and he had been reintroduced to them two years ago, after twenty years of captivity. He watched the visiting whales from a shy distance at first and a bolder one later, but he always returned to the boat that had led him out to open water. Back at his private pen in the harbor, an international staff of humans would massage his fin, scratch his tongue, and compose press releases detailing his experiences at sea. This July, however, Keiko ventured closer to the whales than ever, then followed them when they headed off past Lousy Bank, past the Faeroe Islands, onward to—well, honestly, who knows? Whales keep their own counsel. The truth about them is that they come and go, and you can’t really know where they’ve gone—unless you’ve already fished them out of the water, drilled holes in their dorsal fins, and hung radio tags on them. Only a madman would suggest that drilling a hole in a whale’s dorsal fin is easy. This is why no one is sure where the creatures that visit Iceland every summer spend the winter—and where, presumably, they were heading late in July.

But Keiko—which means “lucky one” in Japanese—is the most watched whale in the world. He has a satellite tag and a VHF transmitter and three nonprofit organizations vested in him, along with millions of spectators waiting to see if this famous, accomplished, celebrated whale, who has lived most of his life as a pet, will take to the wild. Every day that Keiko is on his own, his location is tracked by satellite, relayed over the Internet, and then plotted on a marine chart in the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation offices in the Westman Islands, a row of neatly penciled X’s tracing his arcing route through the sea.

WHAT IS KNOWN
about Keiko is this: He is an
Orcinus orca,
commonly called the orca or killer whale; weighing as much as ten thousand pounds, the orca is the largest member of the dolphin family—big mouth, big teeth, big appetite. Like humans, orcas can kill and eat almost anything they choose. What they usually choose is herring, salmon, or cod, but some orcas prefer to eat sea lions, walruses, and other whales. They have been known to neatly skin a full-grown minke whale, bite off its dorsal fin, and eat only its tongue, a behavior that has been construed as either a tendency toward ostentatious epicurean wastefulness or a cross-species reenactment of an Aztec virgin sacrifice. Orcas seem to have no taste for humans. Only two people have ever been killed by captive killer whales, and both deaths involved the same whale, Sea World’s Tillikum, who held his victims underwater to drown them but did not eat them afterward. Orcas are found in every ocean on the planet and have enjoyed relative invulnerability from hunting; they are twenty times less blubbery than sperm whales and have therefore been less valued for oil, and their meat is far less tender and flavorful than that of minke whales. They are, on the other hand, fiercely smart and remarkably educable. They are also handsomely outfitted in black and white with a grayish saddle patch—more appealing by far than, say, the transcendent horribleness, the blank ghastliness, the strange and awful portentousness, of a gigantic white whale. Therein lies the killer whale’s real weakness: its suitability for being displayed and taught to perform silly tricks, made all the more marvelous by its reputation as a ruthless assassin.

In 1964, the Vancouver Aquarium commissioned a sculptor to kill an orca to use as a model for an artificial one. An orca was harpooned, but it managed to survive, so the aquarium decided to make the best of the sculptor’s ineptitude and display the live whale rather than build the plastic one. The whale was named Moby Doll. She was the first orca in captivity. She died after eighty-seven days but had been observed enough to demonstrate the species’s considerable intelligence. More than a hundred and thirty orcas have been captured for display since Moby Doll’s misadventures. Many of them came from Iceland, until all whaling in the country was halted in 1989. Currently, there are about fifty orcas in aquariums and amusement parks around the world, and their scarcity has made them each worth a million dollars or more.

Keiko’s beginnings, however, were humble. He was born near Iceland, in 1977 or 1978, and was captured in 1979. For a few years, he lived in a down-in-the-mouth aquarium outside Reykjavík, which raised most of its money by catching and selling killer whales to other aquariums. In 1982, Keiko was sold to Marineland, a park in Niagara Falls, Ontario. There he was bullied by older whales, and in 1985, Marineland sold him to Reino Aventura, an amusement park in Mexico City.

The whale facility at Reino Aventura was too small, too shallow, and too warm for an orca. There were also no other whales to keep Keiko company. He developed an unsightly pimply condition around his armpits and had the muscle tone of a wet noodle. He could hold his breath for only three minutes and wore down his teeth by gnawing the concrete around his tank. He spent much of his time swimming in nihilistic little circles and had a lethargy that some saw as foretokening an early death. In spite of this, and in spite of his droopy dorsal fin (which is symptomatic of nothing but made him look sad), he was much adored. He, in turn, was fond of children and cameras.

AFTER DINO DE LAURENTIIS’S
1977 disaster epic
Orca,
Hollywood had shown little interest in cetacean films. Into this void, a writer named Keith Walker submitted to the producer Richard Donner a script about a mute orphan boy who lives with nuns and befriends a whale at an amusement park. In Walker’s original script, the boy is silent until the end of the movie, when he releases the whale into the ocean and cries out, “Free Willy!” Donner, an environmentalist and an animal lover, liked the script’s intentions and passed it to his wife, the producer Lauren Shuler Donner, and her partner, Jennie Lew Tugend, for development. Tugend and Shuler Donner thought that the story was too sugary. They rewrote the boy as a juvenile delinquent, the whale as a petulant malcontent, and the amusement park operator as a penny-pinching crook, but they kept the climactic release.

Once Warner Bros. agreed to underwrite the project, Tugend and Shuler Donner went out to audition the killer whales of the world to play Willy. Twenty-one of the twenty-three orcas in the United States belong to Sea World. The company’s executives reviewed the script, shuddered at the message of whale emancipation, and declared all of its orcas unavailable for movie work. Shuler Donner and Tugend looked further. In Mexico, at Reino Aventura, they found not only Keiko but also a dilapidated facility that would be perfect for the film’s fictional dilapidated facility, as well as park owners who were disposed to let their whale appear in a pro-wild-whale, anticaptivity movie.

Free Willy,
which was shot on a lean budget of twenty million dollars, had a cast of mostly unknowns and starred a child actor named Jason James Richter, who was the same age as Keiko: twelve. No one imagined what a success it would become, although Shuler Donner had an inkling when, after an early research screening, a man approached her, held out ten dollars, and said, “Here, use this money to save the whales.”

FREE WILLY
pulled in huge audiences right from the start—mostly kids, of course, who insisted on seeing the movie over and over and over, thus answering the movie’s tagline question, “How far would you go for a friend?” with a worldwide gross of a hundred and fifty-four million dollars. What’s more, the producers had attached a message at the end of the movie directing anyone interested in saving the whales to call 1-800-4-WHALES, a number that belonged to Earth Island Institute, an environmental group. The resulting torrent of calls blew the minds of everyone involved—the executives at Warner Bros., the producers, the people at Earth Island Institute. And not just the number of calls, but the fact that many of the callers were asking something that hadn’t been anticipated: Sure, save the wild whales, but more to the point, what about Willy?

“We had no clue that this would involve Keiko as an individual,” says David Phillips of Earth Island Institute. “At that point, he was just a prop in the movie. Of course, everyone had fallen in love with him. The cast was in love with him. Everyone who gets near him gets Keiko virus.”

Keiko, who had become infected with his own virus—a papillomavirus that had caused the pimply irritation on his skin—was still languishing in Mexico, but now he was in demand. The owners of Reino Aventura didn’t want to part with him, but they recognized that he was in poor health and possibly even dying. They had already tried to find Keiko another home, having previously offered to sell him to Sea World, but Sea World hadn’t wanted a warty whale. Now, suddenly, everybody wanted him. Michael Jackson sent representatives to Mexico, hoping to acquire Keiko for his ranch. Conservation groups wanted him for this or that aquarium. Scientists asked to keep him in a tank on Cape Cod for research.

David Phillips, with the support of the movie’s producers, had formed the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation, whose mission was to rehabilitate and release Keiko. Reino Aventura’s owners finally chose the foundation over other suitors and agreed to give Keiko away—but the expense of moving and housing him still had to be met. More than a million people had already contributed to the cause, but in amounts that were usually modest, raised at Free Willy bake sales and by kids breaking open their piggy banks. UPS agreed to fly Keiko free of charge, but the container and other incidentals would cost at least two hundred thousand dollars. Shuler Donner brought several bulging bags of letters to the studio executives—letters demanding to know whether Willy had really been set free and, if he hadn’t, what they were going to do about it. The Free Willy/Keiko Foundation got a million dollars from both Warner Bros. and the film’s other production company, New Regency. The Humane Society of the United States gave another million. Next, the telecommunications tycoon Craig McCaw put in a million, through the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation.

“Craig’s not really an animal person,” McCaw’s spokesman, Bob Ratliffe, said not long ago. “He’s an environmentalist and is interested in the health of the oceans, and—well, long story short, Craig gives the million bucks. And then he gave another one and a half million to build a tank for Keiko in Oregon. His intention was never to be as involved as he became, but he really kind of bonded with Keiko. He went swimming with him. He was actually on the whale’s back, and—well, long story short, he got very involved.”

MEXICAN CHILDREN CRIED BITTERLY
when Keiko was loaded onto a UPS truck and taken away in January 1996, and who could blame them? The park used to allow kids to have pool parties with him in his tank, and now he was leaving for good, traveling thousands of miles north to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. In a documentary film about Keiko, his Reino Aventura trainers, two beautiful young women, were nearly hysterical about his departure, saying he was not just a whale or a job, but their closest friend. The truck carrying him to the C-130 Hercules cargo plane moved at a solemn pace with a police escort, as if it were the Popemobile, and more than a hundred thousand people lined the streets at dawn to say goodbye. In Newport, Oregon, the depressed, gray seaside town where the aquarium is situated, there were more crowds and more tears—Willy was almost free!—and there was the gorgeous new $7.3 million tank that the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation had built for him and the staff of six to care for him, cure him, and get him ready for the big, wide world. Throughout Oregon, there was Keikomania, with around-the-clock news reports and Keiko-cams and special sections in the newspaper about the whale, with instructions on how to fold a broadsheet into a whale-shaped cap.