Breathing with Whales: The Survival of Compassion
Holly J. Hughes
(360) 297-8022
hhughes7@earthlink.net
Breathing with Whales: The Survival of Compassion
“It is no longer the survival of the fittest, but the survival of compassion.”
Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken”
I dip my paddle. The kayak carves the water, each stroke sending me forward, paddle gliding back, small cyclones of water whorling to either side. Mist lies low in the spruce and hemlock, layering like a Sumi-E painting in every shade of green and gray. The surface of the water glistens, luminous, though we haven’t seen the sun for days, and the silence deepens, punctuated only by the dip and swing of my paddle. Kurt is in the lead; I’m bringing up the rear in the other single, and the rest of our group of twelve are in doubles, spread out like a dot-to-dot drawing between us.
We’ve been paddling this bay in lower Chatham Strait in Southeast Alaska for three days now and are beginning to move with less effort across the water. We paddle in silence each morning, except for agreed-upon signals to point out a humpback whale or eagle’s nest, or to call for a rest. At last, gradually, we are moving into silence. At this moment I notice that, without trying, we are all paddling in unison, like a sea creature with many arms moving across the still sheen of the sea. Finally, I feel like I belong here, along with the phalaropes, puffins and murrelets.
It’s taken many days to reach this place. We spent two days in Petersburg, waiting for a break in the weather. Even though it was July, low pressure storm systems were rolling through, and we needed a 500-foot ceiling for the float plane to fly. Finally, after giving the group orientation at the Scandia House and turning its conference room into our staging area, we get the word to head for the float-plane dock. We load our gear into the van, then, from the dock, pass the bright-colored dry bags and boxes of food from person to person in a brigade, stowing all in the bowels of the plane. Then we’re cinched down in our seats, headsets on, and flying over the tangle of spruce, hemlock, and muskeg that comprises most of the islands of the Alexander Archipelago. From where I peer out the scratched plexiglass window, I see only trees, water, and muddy ribbons of logging roads. No people, no towns, no highways, no telephone wires. The land – most of it the Tongass National Forest– is a patchwork of clearcuts, wild forest, and every stage of growth between.
At our campsite on Long Island in northern Chatham Strait, we set up tents in the crescent moon curve of the beach, just above the tide line, the sites agreed upon in advance with the Forest Service. Since we’re in a designated wilderness area, we are abiding by a “leave no trace” philosophy; our impact will be less here than on the fragile floor of the forest behind us. I set up the kitchen, hooking up the two-burner stove to the propane tank with a crescent wrench, organizing our food for the next six days in boxes and dry bags. Then I cover the boxes and bags with a blue tarp, set small Tupperware containers filled with Pine Sol around the perimeter, an old tactic to discourage black bears.
We settle easily into a routine: rising at 6 am to the conch Kurt blows to rouse us, sit or walk in meditation for an hour, breakfast, then on the water to paddle in silence. Meals begin in silence, then relax into conversation, inevitably deepened by the inner and outer space. The days flow by like water, and soon we are in a timeless rhythm, rising with the sun, sitting, paddling, walking, eating, sleeping — much of the time in silence. This is a diverse group, people of varying backgrounds, temperaments , and interests, all united by the desire to experience Southeast Alaska in a more intimate way. We are reaching a point where being together in silence feels as natural as speaking.
This is my first trip working with Kurt, though we’ve long known each other, traveled the same waters. He worked on salmon seine boats for many years in Southeast Alaska while putting himself through college and Harvard Divinity School. After a brief stint as a university chaplain in the late 70s, he found himself drawn to the more earth-honoring tradition of Buddhism. He continued to fish in Alaska, but his spiritual path turned East, encouraged by his friendship with Gary Snyder. In 1994, Kurt founded Inside Passages, with the goals of providing a means for people to explore meditation in the Alaskan wilderness and of sharing the land he loved, his life coming full circle. We share a love for these waters, growing out of a familiarity based on many seasons: Kurt’s 25th season, my 20th.
Kurt has signaled a rest. I catch up with the group and we all sit, droplets of water streaming off our paddles. The high shriek of an eagle echoes across the bay. My mind drifts back. I first came up to Alaska in 1978 with my college sweetheart and soon-to-be husband to make money for graduate school. At the end of the season, when it was time to go to school, we bought a fishing boat instead. We gillnetted for salmon for four years here in Southeast Alaska, then ran tenders for four years, running up the coast as far north as Cape Romanzoff before working our way back down the Aleutians, to Kodiak, and Prince William Sound for the herring and salmon fisheries. Later, when our marriage unraveled, I left fishing and returned to Southeast to skipper Crusader, a 65- foot wooden schooner, for the Resource Institute on week-long educational seminars on native culture, photography, writing and natural history. Each summer I find my way back to Alaska, working on research and charter boats in whatever way I can — sometimes skipper, sometimes mate, sometimes cook — drawn back always by these waters I love.
A loon breaks the surface, tips back its head, and calls, its voice still raising the small hairs on my neck, recalling my first seduction by wilderness in northern Minnesota, where I grew up. I spent all my summers at a YMCA camp, where we’d paddle heavy old wooden canoes for days north into the Quetico, retracing the routes of the French Voyageur fur traders. The seduction was complete. I discovered the joy of spending days watching the sun arc across the sky, of settling into the timeless rhythm of life on the water. Why isn’t this my real life? I’d wonder, as I reluctantly returned to civilization and school each fall. Perhaps inevitably, I’d begun to dream of Alaska, where I imagined it might be possible to live and work in wilderness.
Years later, commercial salmon fishing offered such an answer. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the scale of the Alaskan wilderness I encountered when I first went ashore after the long boat trip up the coast. After a week on board watching the forest drift past, I was restless to experience it close up and rowed ashore in the skiff. Thrilled to find a web of trails in the tall grasses above the tide line, I set off, slowly realizing, with each step deeper into the trees, that these trails were made by bears, not humans. I remember standing on that shore as this realization came into focus, that thousands of miles of forest stretched to the north, farther than I could imagine, unbroken by roads and telephone lines, forests whose inhabitants were not people but bears, ravens and salmon. Ahh…so this is wilderness.
Each season since, I am reminded why I return: the chance to experience such wilderness, to be part of this river of life much larger than my desires. Here, we are humbled each day by the weather, are reminded to stay in the present with whatever comes, to see the beauty in it, to not wish for it to be otherwise. Fog and wind– and float planes don’t fly, boats stay tied to the dock. Each year we watch the salmon return, spawn and die, their bodies becoming food for bears, eagles, and eventually, nutrients for the Sitka spruce that line the streams.
Silence. I dip my paddle. The sea flows in silver and onyx swirls. It feels good to paddle in silence after so many seasons with the throb of a diesel engine in my ears. During my fishing years, I looked forward to the moment when we’d shut the engine down and the world would flood back in. Until then, I was simply passing through the landscape, a visitor, not at home. Now, as we settle into life on the edge of the sea, we begin to know it, slowly. We know where the sun will rise (if we can see it-many days not), where the sea otters play at night, where the humpback whales feed. We know the snag where the bald eagle hangs out to wait for salmon in the morning, another snag where he fishes in the evening. We know where to find the clearest drinking water, where the pink salmon spawn, where the blueberries will be shaken loose from their thin stems by the black bears. We begin to listen deeply, not just to our own hearts, not just to each other, but to the land and what it can teach us.
At lunch today, Kurt reminds us that Buddhism holds that intimacy is necessary for compassion, that we cannot truly love that with which we are not intimate-and we can’t be intimate with that which we don’t know. This intimacy must extend to all sentient beings, reflecting the Buddhist concept of interbeing, or interconnection. We are so accustomed to defining intimacy in human terms, yet when we can listen deeply enough, we see that the universe trembles with it. After all, the word “intimate” comes from the Latin intimus: inmost, deepest. As the poet Jane Hirshfield suggests in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, “intimacy occurs not only within the body of ankle, breast and thigh but also within the larger body of the earth.” She goes on to say that “when we begin to see the landscape as the animals themselves see it, undistorted by clamorous self-assertion, a widened constellation of being emerges to graze and root and swim.”
I draw stroke, pull alongside a rocky beach to peer into the dense tangle of Sitka spruce, hemlock and cedar. Because this is a wilderness area, these forests will be preserved in their natural state. When I first came to Alaska in 1978, the Tongass forest was still intact, spruce and hemlock marching up the rocky hillsides in every direction. Twenty years later, you can see a clearcut on the shoreline almost no matter where you are anchored. For many years in the late 80s and early 90s, old growth trees were cut and loaded onto barges. They were exported round (losing jobs for the local economy) or processed en route to Japan, with some of the wood ending up, regrettably, as chopsticks. Other trees were taken to Sitka or Ketchikan to be ground into pulp. Local residents and conservation groups, like the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC), attempted to fight the forest service, to challenge the way the Tongass was being managed. Finally in the mid-90s, state and national conservation groups entered the fray, bringing the issue to national attention, eventually slowing the export of trees. Logging slowed under the Clinton administration, and as one of his last acts, Clinton made an executive order to halt road building in the Tongass. (As it is, the miles of roads already built could stretch to the east coast and back). For a few months into the Bush administration, it appeared that the Tongass would be protected. In the meantime, other gains were made: the pulp mills in Sitka and Ketchikan shut down in the late 90s, all salmon streams must be left in their natural state for 100 feet on either side, and the state’s main industry is no longer logging but tourism. Now, impact is measured by how many cruise ships arrive each day, some ships carrying as many passengers as you’ll find in the entire town of Skagway, pop. XXX. We don’t yet know what this impact will be, though conservation groups have been voicing their concerns, in in especially pristine waters like Glacier Bay, the number of cruise ships who can enter each day is limited by the National Park Service.
We choose our battles. While I sent money to SEACC (Southeast Alaska Conservation Council) , wrote letters and circulated petitions, I chose to offer my deeper service to environmental causes through educating others about the earth. Where I teach at a small community college in Washington state (with the Olympic National Park within easy driving distance), my students still often say their only contact with the natural world is The Discovery Channel or other nature documentaries. Yet, most nature writers and conservationists describe having a direct encounter with the natural world while growing up. In his book, The Thunder Tree, Robert Michael Pyle points out that it doesn’t need to be a large area; a vacant lot will do, but it must be a place where we feel at home in the natural world. When I reflect back on the students who are concerned about the earth, they have all had an experience of connection with it, sometimes, poignantly, watching the woods they loved be cut down for a new development. It’s not that I expect my students to become nature writers or conservationists, but without some contact with the natural world, their response is often apathy or cynicism, fostered by watching too many news programs showing yet another oil spill, another species going extinct. How can we blame them for checking out if they’ve never felt that connection in their bones? How will we love what we do not know? How will we protect what we do not love?
A Harper’s article tells a moving story of a group of children from Hartford, Connecticut, who took their first field trip out of the city in 6th grade. When they came to the river, they all clapped. They had never before seen a river, never seen anything so beautiful, the teacher said. But my students –who have seen rivers– also speak of their disillusionment, their despair, their sense that it’s too late: the planet is already trashed. One quarter, when I was co-teaching an environmental ethics class, my colleague and I walked into class and felt a wave of despair rise like a tsunami. It was the fifth week of the quarter and we’d just been studying population and world hunger. As the reality of exponential growth settled in, we watched our students sink lower in their chairs. We knew we couldn’t continue until we addressed it, so we pulled our chairs into a circle, invited their feelings. We listened as they voiced their sense of hopelessness, that we can’t turn around this destructive path we’re on, that they’re inheriting an earth that is on the brink of self-destructing. How to turn this in a positive direction? We agreed to focus on positive actions, to look for examples of solutions, to think about small changes we can make in our own lives, even if we can’t change the world. As we talked, I found myself wondering how I maintain my own sense, not of optimism, but of hope. I know in my heart I can’t give up hope, and when asked, say so. Isn’t it too late, though? they ask. Isn’t it too late?
A week later. We are paddling to our other campsite, closer to the open waters of Chatham Straits. I dip my paddle, sweeping the mare’s tails of mottled water and light reflecting in the sea down the side of the kayak. Jellyfish drift past, their long tentacles flowing as if to music. We are approaching the north end of the island when Kurt signals with his paddle. Then we hear the whoosh of exhalation as a humpback whale surfaces just beyond us, briny tang of krill lingering in the air. We set our paddles down and, since the whale is very close and much bigger than us, tap lightly on the egg-shaped combing of our kayaks to let him know we’re there. Busy feeding, he’s staying close to the surface, his dives shallow as he works his way down the shoreline. One of the participants is singing “Oh what a beautiful morning” in a lovely Irish tenor when the whale’s tail arches into a black hook and he dives deep, surfacing several minutes later, on the other side of our small fleet of kayaks. We look at each other, stunned. Surely we should have felt the water lift as this 70-ton mammal passed beneath us, the displacement of all that mass? How carefully, tenderly, the whale had passed beneath us, at home in its own watery world. Humbled, we paddled the rest of the way to the campsite in a silence that was widening to extend beyond our small human group resting on the surface of the water.
I return each summer like the salmon for this: to be part of the earth’s community, to know my family as not just human, to learn from the non-human species what it means to be connected to all of life, to experience a sense of compassion that isn’t available through language. Over many seasons in Southeast, I’ve been lucky to be in the presence of humpback whales, and each time I feel a sense of joy at being in the presence of a a generous, compassionate spirit. Camping at the tideline, sleeping with the sea before us, the forest at our backs, I feel cradled and held, but also called to be as strong, serene, and patient as their presence. Each morning when I walk the path through the forest to prepare tea for meditation, the spruce, hemlock, and cedar remind me of these values, their gentle swaying inviting me into a different sense of time that, only when I slow down enough, I feel in my heart.
Several years ago, before the turn of the 21st century, His Holiness The Dalai Lama was asked what qualities were most needed in the new millenium. His response? Compassion, not just for each other, but for all the beings with whom we share this earth. Of course, I think, but the more I reflect on it, the more I realize how challenging a task he sets before us. It is easy, perhaps, to feel compassion for the humpback whales, sea otters and seals; it is more difficult to have compassion for the slugs, mosquitoes, and carpenter ants. And it is even more difficult to see the world, not as we see it, but as they do. Most of us were raised on a Darwinian view of life, that we’re all competing for our slice of the pie, and if we don’t get it first, someone else will. But Darwin knew the natural world as intimately as anyone; his observations came from a sometimes dispassionate, sometimes loving eye. Some scientists now suggest that we might have misinterpreted Darwin’s words: the survival of the fittest could also be phrased the survival of those most able-and willing– to adapt. In her essay, “To Be Taken,” Terry Tempest Williams suggests that indeed “it is no longer the survival of the fittest, but the survival of compassion.” Surely, whether our species survives well into this millenium will depend more on our ability to learn how to live harmoniously with all peoples and beings.
Tonight is our last night at Windfall Island. Tomorrow we will return to our main campsite; the following day we will take down the tents, pack our gear and fly back to Petersburg, weather permitting, of course. We are all trying to stay in the present, to not think about leaving with either sadness or anticipation. And though we tried not to have a preference, it’s true that we’ve been blessed this week with sunny, clear days, and tonight, a full moon. After dinner, we build a fire on the beach from drift logs, gather round it with our Therma-rest sleeping pads, mosquito net hats, Cutters-soaked bandannas to discourage the mosquitoes and cups of mint tea, steam rising into the cooling air. Slowly a sliver of light appears through the trees to the east, a paring of fingernail that swells so quickly we become dizzy at the visible speed at which our earth is spinning. As we settle into the moon-lit silence, we hear a familiar exhalation a few yards off the beach. The whales are feeding just offshore, the wind carrying their briny breath up to mingle with ours and for several moments, because we have the great fortune to be with them, breathe together, in, out, in, out as one. I think about my students, their despair and mine, so distant from here. All around us, whales feed, ravens call. It’s not too late to claim what we love, I want to tell them. It’s not too late to love the earth. It’s not too late to learn to know it. It’s not too late to be kind, that small word making its way person to person, action by action, until it accumulates its full-moon light, no matter how dark the night.