My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (40 page)

Then, on July 7, he was gone like a shot. The trainers had led him out to the waters near Surtsey, where several pods of killer whales were rounding up a ration of herring, and Keiko headed over to them and didn’t turn back. Days went by, and he was still loitering with them. The project staff checked on him, noted that he was getting on nicely, and then slipped away without his noticing. More days went by. The summer was in full bloom. The sun hung in the sky until close to midnight; the ice creaked and melted; the sheep, now so heavy with wool that they looked like four-legged snowballs, clipped the grass down to the rock on the cliffs surrounding the empty bay pen. In late July, a huge storm muscled in on Heimaey, and for days it was too rough to send anyone out on the water. The satellite was still transmitting coordinates from Keiko’s radio tag, but there was no way to tell whether he was with other whales and eating or floundering around, lost.

By the time I got to Heimaey, Keiko had been on his own for almost a month. I went down to the office the morning I arrived, during the three-hour window of the satellite feed. It is a large room across from the harbor, outfitted with a motley array of cast-off desks, boating magazines, foul-weather gear, and photographs of a loaf of bread that one of the staff members had baked in the still-warm crater of Heimaey’s volcano. A handful of people wandered in and out: Fernando Ugarte, a Mexican scientist with a master’s degree in the killer whales of Norway; John Valentine, an American whale-training consultant, in town from his home in Thailand; Colin Baird, a Canadian now running the Heimaey office; Michael Parks, a marine operations coordinator who is from Oklahoma but lives in Alaska; a Danish whale scientist; a sailor from Ireland; and three Icelandic staff members, one of whom was an awesomely musclebound former Mr. Iceland. Charles Vinick, the executive vice president of Ocean Futures, had flown in the day before from the group’s Paris office to organize the effort to figure out where Keiko had gone. Naomi Rose, a marine-mammal scientist with the Humane Society, had also just arrived on what had been planned as a trip to check Keiko’s physical fitness.

“It looks like he’s spent all this time with wild whales,” Vinick said. “To me that’s, like, wow.”

Michael Parks was plotting the satellite information on a marine chart. “He’s south today,” he said. “Jesus Christ, he’s here.” He was pointing to a spot southeast of Surtsey, several inches off the chart.

“He’s making the decisions now. He’s in charge,” Vinick said. “He could be gone for good.” People drifted over to examine the chart. It looked as though Keiko were traveling sixty or seventy miles a day and was now too far away to reach by the project’s fast but open-deck workboat. It was decided that three people would take a sailboat in Keiko’s general direction. This would put them out of regular radio range, making it impossible to receive the updated satellite coordinates. But one of the staff people knew a company in Reykjavík that rented satellite telephones that would work at such distances and arranged to have one flown from Reykjavík to Heimaey—or conveyed by ferry, if fog, which rolled in regularly, kept the island airport closed. Then another group would carry the phone out to the sailboat on the little workboat. Vinick also wanted to hire a private plane to fly overhead, but none would be available for a couple of days. Once they sighted Keiko—if they sighted Keiko—they would either leave him alone, if he seemed to be eating and keeping company with other whales, or lure him back to the pen, if he seemed distressed or lonely or hungry. By the time all the arrangements were made, everyone seemed a little exhausted, as if they had laid out plans for an armed invasion.

We took a boat out in the harbor to check on the pen. On the deck of the equipment shed was a dead puffin, probably blown sideways by the storm. Inside the shed, someone had posted a list of possible new behaviors to teach Keiko that included “Pec slap and swim,” “Bubble-blow underwater,” and “Swallow Jim in one piece.” A crew of divers was scheduled to start cleaning the seaweed off the net in preparation for winter, although now it seemed like a bootless task, given that Keiko might never come back.

But it was a good day, all things considered. The Humane Society had just revealed that it would take over managing and funding the project, and Craig McCaw’s ex-wife, Wendy, announced a grant of four hundred thousand dollars for Keiko. In the afternoon, the fog thinned, flights made their way to Heimaey, and the rented satellite phone arrived. As we loaded gear onto the workboat, a gray-faced local woman, bundled in a man’s overcoat and red galoshes, hollered from the dock, “How’s my Keiko? Is our star still out there?”

CALL ME ONLY SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED
.
Who wouldn’t want to have seen the great black-and-white whale? Who wouldn’t want to scratch his tongue, look into that plum-size eye, take a turn around the bay pen on his back? All I saw of whales in Iceland were two humpbacks who dived a few feet from the workboat, flourishing their tails like ladies’ fans. Keiko was far away by then, headed for Norway, where he panhandled from picnicking families and romped in Skaalvik Fjord. What a choice! In the entire world, the only country that allows commercial whaling is Norway, and a member of Bergen’s Institute of Marine Research suggested that it was time to stop the madness and put Keiko to death. But the children who swam on his back and fed him fish reportedly found him delightful, as has everyone who has ever known Keiko. He played with them for a night and a day, the luckiest whale in the world, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Shadow Memory

When my grandmother died a few years ago, I was given her formal china, her silverware, a fur-lined lap robe, and her
Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition
—an old brick of a book, leather-bound, with skin-thin pages and black half-moon thumb tabs. I was more taken with the china and the silverware than the
Webster’s
; after all, I had much newer dictionaries, as well as a computer that could spell and find synonyms on its own. One afternoon, in the throes of spring cleaning, I decided to get rid of it. Before pitching it into my rummage box, I riffled idly through its pages. I flipped past the color plates showing house flags of steamship lines, and the multicolumned Table of Oils and Fats, and the pen-and-ink drawings of diploids and seed weevils, and page after page of ant-size type defining “gressorial” and “sacrarium” and “tingle,” until I came upon a page—“Luna Cornea” through “lustless”—that was stuck lightly to the next. I peeled the pages apart. Between them was a small four-leaf clover, all of its leaves facing upward, its long stem curving into a lazy “j.” The clover was still green, or at least greenish, and the leaves were dry and perfectly flat but hardy and well attached to the stem. A little stain of clover juice was printed onto the pages it had been pressed between.

It was startling to come across these two lives, pressed between pages: my grandmother’s and this weed, which she must have found—when? When she was out for a walk? At a picnic? Had my grandfather found the clover and saved it for her? Or had some other suitor offered it to her, hoping for his own luck? Had my grandmother tucked it into her dictionary and then forgotten it? Did she pick this page for a purpose? Or did she just place it somewhere in the middle of the book and fail to note the page, so that when she went back for it weeks or years later, she couldn’t find it and never saw it again? Not since my grandmother died had I had such a distinct sense of her—a sense of her as I’d never actually known her, as a young woman with the time and patience to sort through blades of grass, looking for four leaves on a clover, believing in the luck one might bring her. And I believed I was lucky, too, having been so close to losing it, to discarding it, to never knowing what I had in my hands.

So this is what’s left behind, these things that end up as our real inheritance—the flotsam and jetsam of life, the stuff that drifts into our hands and into history, the chance impression, the little shadow each of us casts, the fragile thing someone carefully catalogs and cares for and then forgets or maybe doesn’t, the image of an image that conjures a memory that is either real or imagined—these are here, plucked and pressed between the pages, so they will stay fresh forever, or forever slip away.

Afterword

It’s always a pleasure to revisit a place or, in this case, a story about a place, and it is always fascinating to see what time has done to it. I often keep track of the places and situations I’ve written about—they stay wired into my consciousness well after I’ve unpacked my suitcase, filed the travel vouchers, finished the piece. Nothing ever stays the same, of course. The story feels eternal, fixed, and complete, but it is really only a shard of a moment, and, in no time at all, the place will have transformed, the story evolved, the characters changed.

Sometimes the proof of this evolution is inescapable, such as the sad bulletin about Keiko’s sudden death in Norway just a few months after I’d seen him there lolling in his fjord, when I was following up on the story “Where’s Willy?” Keiko was not old for a wild whale, but very old for a captive one. Since one of the great puzzles of his existence was figuring out whether he was essentially a wild whale or a captive whale, it was hard to determine whether he should be considered not old or very old. Turns out he was very old—or at least old enough to get a bad case of pneumonia, and to suffer it secretly until it was too late to help him. So his saga ended in the fjord he’d found on his own, during that one summer when for a while it looked like Willy would finally go free.

I followed the continuing saga of Joan Byron-Marasek for months after I’d finished writing about her. After dozens of hearings and dozens of lawyers and dozens of schemes to delay the inevitable, she lost her final round of appeals, and the State of New Jersey came and took her tigers away. They are now living in a wild animal sanctuary near Houston, Texas. Animal hoarders have a staggering rate of recidivism—that is, most of them begin collecting again shortly after their animals are removed—so I won’t be surprised at all if one of these days we see another story about Byron-Marasek, announcing that she has assembled another menagerie.

What else has happened since I completed these journeys? Well, Centro Vasco, the Cuban restaurant in Miami that I profiled in “The Homesick Restaurant,” closed just a few months after my story was published. According to Jauretsi Saizarbatoria, whose family owned the restaurant, Centro Vasco was firebombed after a performance there by a Cuban singer who was on good terms with the Castro regime. The Saizarbatorias suspected that right-wing anti-Castro activists were involved, and they were so disheartened that they decided they had had enough of the atmosphere in Little Havana. Midland, Texas—which was the hometown of a mere candidate for president at the time of my story—is now, of course, the hometown of the president. Herb Spitzer, owner of the Sunshine Market (from “All Mixed Up”) did follow through on his plans to retire a few months after I finished my reporting; in fact, I ran into him in Florida a few years later, and it appeared that golf and real sunshine suited him even better than groceries and the Sunshine Market had. I’ve driven by the market a few times since the story was published, and it looks good, but much more corporate now—much less the one-man show, the neighborhood place, that it had been when Spitzer was still there.

Craig Fleming, the CEO of Thomas Kinkade’s company Media Arts, was forced out just a few weeks after I interviewed him; so was the next CEO, and the next one—a sign, most likely, of some softness in the Kinkade market, which had also prompted a group of Kinkade gallery owners to sue the company for misrepresenting the value of their product. The Kingdom of Bhutan, which had been television-free at the time of my visit, has since given in to the march of modernism and decided to legalize the idiot box—and even instituted a national network, which I’m told broadcasts the Bhutanese equivalent of school-board meetings. Of the women who went on the Bhutanese fertility trip I wrote about in “Fertile Ground,” one has adopted a child and another has had a baby since coming back from the Himalayas, and perhaps more are still on the way. The JonBenet Ramsey murder case, which is the story that propelled me to write about children’s beauty pageants (“Beautiful Girls”), is still unsolved, although at least once a month, some wild-eyed tabloid like the
Weekly World News
claims to have exposed JonBenet’s true killer. As far as I know, though, the gloom that her death spread on the pageant world has lifted and the pageants are back in full swing: babies in spangles and toddlers in ball gowns competing to be the prettiest girl in the world.

On the other hand, some things I’ve written about haven’t changed at all. Hervé Halfon, the owner of Afric’ Music, is still threatening to leave Paris, but hasn’t yet made a move; Gray’s Papaya still has good deals on hot dogs and papaya juice and still has mustard that gets stuck in the spout; kids in Cuba still live to play baseball; Mount Fuji is and ever will be the pure image of everything Japanese. Pat and Jim Bannick still proudly hang on to their party line, and unless the phone company pries it out of their hands, they plan to hang on to it indefinitely. Tina Turner has still not visited my apartment. Travel around the world is hardly as carefree now as it was when I wrote about Thailand in “The Place to Disappear,” but I’m sure that another generation of kids has found its way onto Khao San Road and is merrily drinking beer and watching free movies at the Khao San cafés.

What has truly not changed, and I hope never will, is my feeling that the world is an endlessly surprising and amazing place—that each time I overload my suitcase and head out the door, each time I think of something or someone I want to learn more about, each time I pull out my pen and start scribbling notes, a new adventure is beginning, I’m lucky to be on it, and wherever I am is exactly the right place.