The Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia

Reviewed by Nicols Fox

Sunday, August 5, 2001

THE EYE OF THE WHALE
Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia
By Dick Russell
Simon & Schuster. 688 pp. US$35

The evolution of even a powerful idea from sound bite to cliché to
cultural dustbin doesn't take long these days. "Save the Whales"
became "Save the Ales" in short order, and it didn't seem to matter.
The whales had been saved, as the whale-watching crowds leaning over
the railings of excursion boats could attest to. Time to move on.

Thus a hefty tome devoted to the California gray whale takes one by
surprise. Do we need this? We do. Dick Russell has written an
extraordinary book. It is big and heavy, with a complex construction
and a maddeningly confusing cast of characters, but worth every
minute devoted to it.

This particular whale, long reputed to be ferocious, has a known
migratory route that takes it from Mexico's Baja Peninsula to the
Bering Strait. Russell follows the route up the coast to Alaska and
then around to Siberia, including the remote Sakhalin Island (the
included maps are essential), interviewing scientists and naturalists
as he goes, and this is the backbone of his book. But to look simply
at the whale is not enough. The lives of whales and humans are
tightly interwoven, and the full accounting of this creature's
current state is more complicated.

Russell has several important stories to tell about that interaction,
any one of which could stand alone. Each reveals a challenge to the
gray whale. The area around the San Ignacio Lagoon in Mexico, where
in winter the whales calve and raise their young, was in danger of
becoming a giant salt-production facility. A group of activists,
including Mexican poet Homera Aridjis, organized to fend off this
threat, confronting powerful economic and political interests.
Farther up the West Coast a Native American tribe, the Makahs, has
received permission to begin whale hunting again, but the community
is split between opponents and supporters of the hunt. Defending the
whales is awkward for environmental groups that would otherwise
encourage traditional tribal activities. Both oil exploration and
Navy sonar may well cause great distress to the whales, which are
sensitive to sound. This issue is of growing concern. On another
front, the Japanese, for whom whale meat is a delicacy, want to lift
the ban on commercial whaling. The recent meeting of the
International Whaling Commission extended the present moratorium, but
only for one year.

In recent years the gray whale has made a dramatic comeback from near-
extinction during the height of whaling -- in 1930 the species was
thought to number only a few dozen. Now researchers tracking these
whales are discovering thinner animals with fewer calves. The whales
eat up to a ton a day of tiny shrimp-like creatures, and a sufficient
supply may well hinge on water temperatures affected by climate
change.

Those who visit San Ignacio Lagoon today find the whales to be
increasingly friendly -- behavior that coincided, oddly enough, with
the declaration of the lagoon as a protected area. Often they
actually approach boats, sometimes lifting them gently into the air;
mother whales with calves present their offspring, allowing the
calves to be touched and petted. On occasion, these massive animals
roll to one side and look straight at you. All those who have had
this honor testify that looking deeply into that huge eye is a
transforming experience.

With so many stories to tell, Russell's compelling challenge must
have been weaving them together into a seamless whole. He doesn't
entirely achieve that goal. The seams show, and occasionally he
becomes a prisoner of his tape recorder, but for all that it is a
masterful tailoring job. In the end the threads knot.

His solution to bringing all this together is to create a book within
a book. He dips into history to bring us the biography of a man who
was a renowned whaler, a fine writer and an accomplished naturalist.
Russell returns to the story of Charles Melville Scammon again and
again, with reason. Capt. Scammon began as one kind of man -- a
clever and successful whaler -- and ended as another. His book Marine
Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America, written late in
life from his journals and notes, is a classic, and his observations
of gray-whale behavior have, over the years, proven quite reliable.
Yet Scammon was at his most intriguing in what was perhaps the midst
of this transition, when he could describe the frantic effort of the
whales to escape the men in their small boats with their torpedo
harpoons, then the churning, bloody waters of a successful kill. He
could then record calmly the number of whales taken and the barrels
filled with oil, measure the carcasses, inspect the contents of their
stomachs, make detailed drawings -- yet in almost the next breath
write of the loving, nurturing behavior of the mothers with their
calves. This is a portrait of a man both conflicted and yet neatly
detached.

There is little popular support today for the resumption of
commercial whaling, yet the reader will wonder, as does Russell, when
the excursion vessels chase the whales, and the tourist-held video
cams take aim, if we have really ever stopped hunting them.

Nicols Fox is the author of "Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick."

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