Whales Revisited
Provincetown
“Your father was an architect?” asked David, a medical genetics friend from Banting’s unfortunate first year at the School of Medicine.
“Yes: Upstate New York. Trained at Cornell. He did small churches and private residences,” replied Banting casually looking around David’s recently purchased but largely unfurnished apartment. “Why?”
“Do you know what Commandment Boards are?” David asked, showing depth to his architectural history, at least more than the usual pediatric medical doc in training.
“Sounds like I should but I’ve not been in church for years. David, if you don’t mind my asking, you’re Jewish. Why such interest in Colonial churches?”
“Why Banting, this is New Haven, remember? What they have here goes far back, and we might as well see what’s to see while we’re here…”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll give you a call sometime before I go over, if you’re interested. They are located on The Green”
Here was an interesting, maybe even amusing, diversion he had not considered.
“Sure: call me…”
* * *
During his off hours, he looked ahead to Halloween that year: his girlfriend had a birthday and would be bound to visit. But it was Halloween the previous year that had been odd in a way he could not fully describe.
The holiday had both secular and religious roots as the Celtic festival and celebration Samhain in Ireland, a night on which departed souls returned to the fields and meadows of their old haunts. There was something in this, the way Banting was himself attached to the fields near his childhood home, although once departed for college years back, he had not returned.
Halloween the previous year, and before the robbery and assault that occasioned his move across campus from the School of Medicine, had been spent in New Haven with his Bethesda friend visiting.
Natalie, a pediatrician and likewise a postdoc Fellow in Human Genetics, had invited the couple to a Halloween party held by a friend of hers on the Psychiatry Staff.
It turned out one of the most bizarre nights of his life.
“Nat mentioned your interest in feminism…and witchcraft,” one had casually approached him at the party while his girlfriend was chatting in a dark corner.
“No; well, yes. I am a biologist, not a cultural anthropologist, but yes, there seems to be a longstanding tradition of bigotry against scientists as sorcerers early on, at least in old Europe. It is that angle, the arcane and eccentric scientist that others view with suspicion, that interests me...”
“You suggesting it was different here in America?”
“Well, certainly, basic science had always attracted a certain, you know, odd sort, perhaps less sociable than most, cooped up with books and formulae. At least that seems to be the narrative pushed by Hollywood…”
“Actually, I’m interested in film history, myself…”
“Good; perhaps you can fill me in sometime…now, please excuse me,” was Banting’s parting comment as he threaded through the costumed crowd, almost unable to hear himself think amid the blaring music and flashing strobe lights. It had been just that sort of strobe that some were sensitive to; in others, epileptic fits resulted.
“Natalie, look, I know these, some of them are friends, but are these people normal?” he asked and was shot an amused glance in return, her face shadowed and colored by the light show. She had not disagreed: it seemed to amuse her.
Psychodrama.
Someone near him had uttered this as a shout in approval of the way the party was trending.
The most notable among those arriving in costume, was one who was arrayed, left side male, right side female. As the curious type he was, Banting was always interested in what costumes various personalities chose, and why, and what their choice to dress outside their normal identity, revealed.
He and his girlfriend had pleaded fatigue and had ended up leaving as the psychiatric Halloween celebration seemed to drift in an unpleasant direction. As he looked back over his shoulder, the image of a fire-lit tribal night in some uncivilized landscape passed briefly. Perhaps if he had known these psychiatric professionals a little better, he might have been less unsettled as the party got wilder.
Much later, a year in fact, he briefly recalled that party and the stereotype that those who chose counseling and abnormal psychiatry as careers, had issues others did not share.
* * *
Sunday, October 10th found Dr. Peter Banting, Fellow, Muscular Dystrophy Association, Department of Biology, Yale University, New Haven, huddled beneath the covers with a fan blowing forty-five degree air into his efficiency apartment.
That upper room in a nineteenth century carriage house on Maple Street was charming, and he felt fortunate to have found it not far from campus, off Whalley Avenue north of the undergraduate campus and New Haven Green.
Although all the amenities needed by a Fellow were within easy reach, there were unsettling rumors that the neighborhood was no safer than the hostile, barren streets he had abandoned nearer the School of Medicine a year earlier.
An adverse feature was that the direct, as-the-crow-flies route to his new position at Kline Biology Tower, ran through a rough section, as bad as that near the hospital and in some ways worse. His usual detour whether he walked or drove, took him into town, then a sharp turn to Kline Biology Tower.
St. Ronan’s was the crest line street of large Victorian Mansions, of privilege and private wealth. However, just a block or two down their backside in the direction he might travel if the shortest route home were considered, were industrial areas and a few factories so vulnerable that parking lots were often surrounded with high chain link topped with razor wire.
* * *
He opened his eyes, aware of the brightness of the room with the beatific grin of a cat staring him in the face. He would find this feline habit endearing, and rolled over to face the window. Beyond the reds and yellows of the Connecticut autumn, a cheerful and promising Wedgewood-hued sky shone beyond such skyline as he could see peeking out from the overhang of the old roof.
The light wind and morning sun completed this window view and landscape portrait. Now, he glanced out the northern windows, the spruce, elm and black cherry remained still verdant as the pots of Christmas cactus on the window shelf. It was a new day, and although last Sunday’s New York Times lay untouched by his bedside, curiosity would move him to newsstands again, for the latest news.
He threw back the covers and strode naked into the bathroom.
The past week’s weight work had begun to show an effect by scales and the mirror. The weekend before he had flown to San Diego, and had gained ten pounds. At any other age, it might not have bothered him.
At thirty-one, with any small sign of illness or lassitude, he immediately would assume to be stigmata of incipient old age, decrepitude and death. At twenty-five, he had jogged every morning at San Pedro High School overlooking Los Angeles Harbor as the sun came up, more as an exercise in will or philosophy than need. By age thirty, there was a certain pressure and panic in his hurried moves to snap off a hundred, then two hundred sit-ups.
Young men don’t slide easily into middle age, nor do they part with the exuberant, athletic strength of their youth. Banting was surprised when ten pounds disappeared in a week of hard exercise and dieting, and dismayed his abdomen, despite its hundred sit-ups, could still boast persistent belly.
That night, Banting thought with no small satisfaction, how anyone might write the inevitable intimate scene for a novel. He thought of his girlfriend who had visited recently and what they had done with their spare time. He could excuse such obsessions as a biologist.
For a moment, he thought of a set of chromosomes, his own, neatly aligned with their partners in a scheme known as a karyotype, neatly paired as if for an annual physical exam. But for Banting, each pair seemed to subtend a separate subcellular wedding. Without expertise, it was hard to know which member of each pair came from his father, and which from his mother.
Except.
Yes, except.
The sex chromosomes, X and Y, were obviously different, as different as a naked man and his naked girlfriend, call them Adam and Eve.
He could imagine his own sex chromosomes, in each and every cell of his body, arguing. The X was his mother, the Y, his father. That there might be disharmony in each and every cell, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, was obvious. So much better if they got along, at least well enough to avoid distracting him.
Of course, such things were very real, not fantasy, to a postdoctoral biologist.
Overall, however, he loved her very DNA, this woman he found himself thinking of as the embodiment of human creation and his hope for a happy future. Whether their antecedents had known each other at Salem centuries earlier or not, she was the one.
Thus were Banting’s musings on witchcraft and sex as it is portrayed in the written word, not at the cell level, but at the panting, urgent, desirous level of experience.
Yes, it might be a dirty joke as written. In the words of someone whom he’d forgotten, the only difference between pornography and art was words: the action and rhythms were identical.
If too explicit, he reasoned, a disservice excluding the reader’s own experience via his imagination, was done. Without a reader’s imagination, it is just another love scene, another meat on meat that interests only the perverted. Now in order to transcend the implication, the writer must be implicit and allow full participation of the reader. So, by implicitly encouraging through phrases and cues, the reader’s imagination worked to the benefit its ingenious author.
Or something: he was at that stage in his life, a reader, not a writer, but his best thoughts and inspiration had evolved in a realm that anyone untrained in biology, would wholly miss.
What they did not realize was that any man with parents, knew something about the biology of sex, and any man who had become a father, was an experimental biologist of the most profound sort.
* * *
Banting was amused with the origins and writing of ghost tales that evening, and had concluded that it must follow the classic, time-honored format provided by a long literary and cultural history, best informed by the folktales collected by the Grimm Brothers’ Märchen (Folktales, 1812).
The writers list in English had dealt with ghosts was impressive: Shakespeare; Dickens; Washington Irving; Poe; Henry James...
Ghosts were a universal cultural invention, and had always been. It was the fundamental unease with the concept of one’s own death, that struggled to fabricate tales of explanation.
In that work, stereotypic themes appeared in unadorned format, anticipated earlier in written testimony taken at colonial Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. These included bewitchment and enchantment of innocent children; children who were often accorded the power to accuse any adults they pleased of witchcraft by claiming maltreatment by defendants; pinching, prodding with needles, and death threats if the children were to reveal what they claim was done to them. Children especially as victims of evil adult actions by those not their legal or biological parents, it appeared, were essential.
The witch as type-cast character, had stereotypic physical and behavioral stigmata, including mental, emotional or temperamental insufficiencies and certain preternatural bodily markings or colorations especially in areas of the body not publicly displayed. Boldness, eccentricity, solitary mumblings in absence of nearby hearers in conversations, and personal activities at unusual hours of the day or night, were behavioral traits arousing public suspicion. A set of criteria, Banting noted, that might well describe most of his associates among the Fellows.
The witches of fable were often ancient, unattractive and in material want, although women at the opposite end of the spectrum in all regards were hardly exempt. Among the biologically-based societal mishaps of uncertain etiology or causation in early societies that might point to witchcraft, especially absent an obvious causation, were miscarriages, crop failures, livestock miscarriages or deaths, and epidemics of contagion.
In this case, Banting observed, witchcraft was often linked to occult science, following the long cultural tradition that men and women of science, as well as early physicians, appeared as evil or good sorcerers and shamans in native cultures. The less a natural phenomenon was understood by the public, the more likely witchcraft had been invoked as a causal agent at a time when education was rare.
For Banting, considerations flew through his curious mind, included meteorology and astronomical events, the Northern Lights, the return and passing of comet Kohoutek, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
Had anyone fully understood the Heavens above the Earth, or the Earth or in the waters under the Earth? There were more or less plausible explanations, but Banting was suddenly aware of an uneasy suspicion of mystery in the universe below the surface of what Fellows like him regarded the limits of their concern.
* * *
“From the perspective of psychiatry, what do you make of witches in general, and demonic possession in particular? You knew about the claims of hereditary preference?”
“Banting, surely you are pulling my leg,” said his friend David as they walked down the sidewalk, hands shoved in pockets against the wind. “As physicians, we deal with the living, not imaginings of the afterlife. Turn here: he Church I mentioned is just around the corner…”
The two friends stepped up the stone stairs and pushed through a heavy door into the silence of the chancel.
The Church was empty of worshippers but that was expected even though it was October 16th.
A guide greeted them from the back of the church.
“No, they don’t remember, much less celebrate the martyrdom of Latimer, Ridley and the following year, Cranmer,” said the Sexton, a caretaker to whom they had been referred when asking after the renovation of colonial Commandment Boards. “1555…they were burned in the street at Oxford…, the ministers, not the boards…”
“Thanks, much for taking time to show us around,” Banting said amiably. “We visit in the capacity as architectural historians and carpenters, not as The Faithful.”
“Not believers?” said the Sexton, arching a suspicious eyebrow. “No matter: we are delighted anyone would take an interest…”
“Colonial New Haven Colony would have followed the dictates of the Queen…” continued the Sexton, unlocking an old door and using his hip to push it open. “Elizabeth…”
“Queen Elizabeth I?” asked Banting, his friend more observing than taking part in the conversation.
“Yes, that’s right. That means the congregation was addressing an edict from several centuries before…even though by 1752 when the first church was built here, there was no love lost between the Royal Family and the independently-minded colonists here.”
“And yet, even today,” the Sexton continued, “…there is an affinity for many of the Anglican traditions of early America…”
* * *
Banting, as he went about his morning routines, considered how the human mind, so often confronted with incompletely observed natural events, might have coped.
There were likewise zoological oddities that might not be understood, such as the passing overhead in a fog, of a flight of migrating geese and for mariners, the eerie echoes of the unearthly songs of the humpback whales between Cape Cod and Bermuda, that must have disturbed the slumbers of nineteenth century mariners sleeping with an ear near the oaken hulls of otherwise silent sailing ships.
In his overworked imagination, Banting added colors and textures of the ghost story that had not yet crystallized in his mind’s eye, aware such a notion might not find an expression this early in his scientific career, but might suddenly arise later in life, like a phantom unborn, and yet still eager to breathe on its own.
However, despite painterly and literary visions, he still lacked a plot, but worse, had no fundamental talent for invention of events that hung together as a story. He simply had no plan of action, despite how clear and crisp the various characters seemed that particular October evening in his poorly lit but sunlight-flooded carriage house in New Haven.
He had to get out more often, a voice in his head whispered.
* * *
After coffee, he thumbed through the stack of library books.
Here, it was Linton’s book that provided an early clue that he might write, that might be abandoned in an attic, only to resurface decades later.
Linton’s summary provided the most common literary elements found in the classic ghost tale or story of witchcraft, for the two were intertwined.
The first element was emergence of demonic possession of a previously normal villager. The finding that the possessed person spoke in an impossible tone of voice or language is also described in classic religious texts and folklore of several cultural traditions. Among the Salem transcripts and in the Bible, is the demon or satanic figure, who will not divulge his proper name, often used to justify the finding of demonic possession. Likewise, age-inappropriate sexual behavior in a young child was thought to indicate the presence of an outside malevolent influence.
The forces of nature, especially those animals known to be dangerous to humans, also are common elements in such folktales going as far back as the serpent of the Book of Genesis and before.
Such biological topics caught Banting’s eye and captured his interest perhaps more than the sociological aspects of ghosts of the dead and demonic possession of the living. It was not surprising to Dr. Peter Banting that evil and malevolent intent might be ascribed to wild animals that were larger and more powerful than humans, and in many cases early in prehistory, were direct competitors with early hominids for resources and shelter.
Literature and religious traditions were rife with supernatural wild beasts, unique for color or size or behavior, that manifested as evil incarnate, intent only on the destruction and annihilation of human life and comfort.
As zoological nemeses, the creatures imputed with evil, were larger, more powerful, more resistant to human intervention and weapons and thereby an unusual challenge to human ingenuity to conquer.
These often embodied the face of demonic evil and conveyed the beastliness of an unusually large and violent predator such as a bear, a large wolf or other canid, a headless bear or a large scaly reptile reminiscent of a dinosaur, an alligator or komodo dragon as the physical manifestation of a demon who is otherwise of recognizably human in anatomical form.
The discomfort with which every human culture in history had regarded individual mortality, had also been played upon by writers with insight into what the human psyche finds both most appealing as well as absolutely most terrifying. Always, there had been the uncertainty of death, the horror of accidental live burials, or the return to vital animation of partially decomposing corpses as zombies.
There was terror in the posthumous return of a loved one, or a domestic family pet with whom there had been great trust and love, in a malevolent, murderous and revolting physical form.
* * *
Banting’s reading at an early age had worried his mother. She had gone so far as to ask her pediatrician whether boy his age normally spent so much time reading.
And yet Banting’s curiosity was not limited to natural science.
English Victorian writer Oscar Wilde had always been high among Banting’s list of great stylists of fiction. The two Wilde literary pieces that Banting would return to, as he considered the invention and writing of his own ghost story, included The Picture of Dorian Grey and the short work in which an American family buys an English manor in which the baronial owner has been murdered, but haunts his old estate.
In these finalized literary works, and the clues offered in religious tradition and historical testimony and adjudication of alleged witchcraft, Banting might find an antecedent, even if many years passed between that particular Thursday night in on maple Street in New Haven, and the actual writing of such fantasies.
He fully realized that among lay people, as a scientist, he would bear the taint of sorcerer and conjurer, even as medical and biological science, as it developed, would engender lingering images and impressions that were the fertile output of talented, but perhaps deluded, authors.
Among the first feminist authors who came to significant attention by crafting a horrifying tale based on Greek and Roman myths and that human aversion to intervention in the process of creating new human life and life forms, was youthful Mary Wolstencroft Shelly and her immortal work Frankenstein. It posited the immoral success of a doctor in a castle who found the secret to resurrecting the dead by means of electric impulse administered to a makeshift and fabricated corpse. The result was a much maligned and traditionally misunderstood beast who, in retrospect, is one of the most sympatric creatures in all of English literature, but whose impact is still remembered in the modern age of biotechnology and the debate over abortion and the nature, timing and identity of human life.
Banting had often thought a modern, anti-Shellian tale, perhaps Frankenstein Revisited, might result in greater public tolerance for genetic engineering in the human species.
Yes, Banting had before him, all these considerations, possibilities and opportunities spread before him on the tiny, inexpensive drop leaf side table used as the desk he had purchased from a company named Unfinished Furniture.
Had he been less preoccupied with human gene mapping, there might have been a better chance that such ideas might have led somewhere productive, but all these notions passed in a flurry of distractions that particular night a week or two before Halloween that year, never to return as a dream, an ambition or a concern.
Banting might have played the part, and tried to take advantage, agnostic that he was in the weeks he was not an outright but passive atheist, of the surrounding idiosyncrasies of established American Protestantism he still saw around him, in their time-honored and cynical attempt to play on and exploit human gullibility. The human spirit, uncertain about itself and its infallible gravitation toward superstition when it did not comprehend something or when it refused the logical and correct explanation that required education to adopt as reality.
The more he pondered the ghost tale as a paradigm of expository writing, the more perennial and seasonal favorite occurred to him. For example, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as another source of ghost lore to supplement the themes of classic Shakespearean theater in the feast scene in which the ghost of Banquo reappears to Macbeth.
The ghost tale was traditionally a cultural vehicle for demonstrating a moral principle, much like a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. In addition, such tales might also illustrate the principle of just retribution to an evil doer, in a society where the evil often triumph more often than the just. There was a socially acceptable characteristic, satisfied lust, to great violence done to an evil character, or one who is portrayed an evil, a human pattern often employed to great, if unjustified, effect, in modern politics.
Before closing his weary eyes that night and pulling up the covers, Dr. Peter Banting laid such things to rest by writing the better ideas out in skeletal outline for some later day when more time and mind were available.
There would be time when his own imagination, freed from prior work, would lead the way, but that stage would be some time ahead.
* * *
“Look David, thanks for meeting me,” Banting said over a cup of coffee weeks later.
“No problem, and thanks for going to that Church with me. Otherwise, it might have been a little..er…”
“Uncomfortable?” suggested Banting. “You didn’t know at one time I was Episcopal, did you?”
“So: I’m a Jew, but not really…” David replied. “Glad to have someone interested in old architectural details along…”
“What I had hoped to ask…”
“Yes?”
“How is Uta?”
“Oh: Uta. She’s nice, why?”
Banting wasn’t expecting a straight answer about a powerful faculty member who might hold the key to David’s future when he completed his Fellowship. He knew she wasn’t happy he had jumped ship to transfer across campus, ostensibly as a result of his assault.
“Can you keep a secret?” Banting leaned forward, catching the curiosity rising in David’s tortoise shell frames. At a glance, he might have looked like a comic Groucho, Jewish nose with the moustache, but having a beard made it less noticeable.
“Sure.”
“When I first arrived in New Haven, I didn’t know she had separated from Bertold…”
“Her husband?”
“Yes: she didn’t tell me the truth of her situation until I arrived at her door, her isolated farmhouse in Guilford, with no other place to stay…”
“Yes: nice spot. Has her own pond…no neighbors…So?”
“She seemed eager to have me join her in the sauna she had built in the cellar…just the two of us.”
David’s mouth seemed as amused as it was discreet. He seemed to be waiting for more. He finally spoke after staring at Banting a moment.
“So, the two of you…”
“Yes.”
A few minutes later, as they finished the dregs of coffee, Banting broke the silence.
“Do you think she practices witchcraft?” was what was on Banting’s mind…
September 25, 26, and 27
The items, Professor Carl Sagan had recommended sending Roger Payne’s recordings of humpback whales along with other cultural artifacts into deep space aboard the Voyager II spacecraft in 1977.
Among Banting’s wide-ranging interests was acoustic biology, and how it focused on communication among animals. Payne’s work was a first.
Sociobiology was best appreciated, when the owner of one cat, brings in another, but the catalogue of feline vocal communications, including the obscure evolutionary significance of their purr, remained a mystery.
In part, acoustic biology was application of physics and analysis of sound patters to deduce roles that generation of sound and sense of hearings played in the life cycles of various organisms. In particular, the most compelling evolutionary needs met by detection and processing of sounds to elicit behavior, were survival of the individual, that is, detection of predators and locating prey.
Of course, acoustics played a delightful role in care of the young, as any parent of a newborn would learn as infant slowly accumulated the rudiments of verbal communication.
Life evolved in an individual’s universe of sight, taste and smell: however, hearing and vocalization had more to do with individual interaction with others. Whereas the former sensations were private, the latter, by its nature, requited two or more individuals, a communicant’s interaction with a second individual whether it was kin or prey.
There was something striking to suddenly discover meaning in vocalizations emitted from other animal species, whether it was the needs, moods, demands and pain of a cherished house pet, the shock on first hearing at midnight of banshee-like mating shrieks of the wild fox in mid-January, the territorial squabbles of songbirds in the early hours on an isolated farm, or the philosophically and spiritually compelling notes of the greatest of all mammals from the oceans of the Earth.
* * *
Here was a link that resonated with Banting.
In music was encrypted mood and meaning. Acoustic memory during extremes of emotion, was as often triggered by songs, and sonic environment, as by aroma.
Katharine Payne, whose early investigations with her then-husband Roger, focused on the origin and meaning of underwater recordings made at SOFAR, by a native Bermudian electrical engineer. The engineer had been employed by a defense organization of the United States to develop and deploy sonic technology to detect and localize distant submarines.
The ravine like-typography of the Atlantic floor offshore of Bermuda, because its structure conveyed unique, long-distance sonic properties underwater, could be exploited to measure sonic conductivity of sound waves from underwater test detonations at know distances, to calibrate military detection of adversary submarines.
After divorcing whale studies and her husband, Katy took up a similar analysis of elephant vocalizations in the Central African Republic.
Payne’s comment in an interview, and her background story, struck Banting to his core that summer.
“Along with humans, elephants were among the most gifted by nature with the best memories and most emotional nature.”
Here was a connection that Banting took note of, for in that sentence, Payne had touched upon Banting’s lifelong compulsion of exploiting and defining psychological memes that confer longevity on the written word.
There was a set of hitherto undiscovered characteristics, whether the medium was spoken, sung or the written word, that conferred a selective advantage to that snippet, in that it was more likely to be repeated once heard by others. Dawkins had gotten it right in 1976 The Selfish Gene, however his strongly atheistic bias prevented him from analysis of the mimetic structure of ancient religious texts.
Banting’s upbringing in the Church, and his subsequent abandonment, had nevertheless implanted the seed of recognition that there was something fundamentally mimetic about Scripture, and it had always been an ambition to discover the fundamental biologically relevant property of that liturgy that accounting for its enduring longevity and spread over two millennia.
The property he concluded, was the psychological sensation that the musical motif, or idea, was familiar when in fact, it was wholly novel and unfamiliar, as if a new composition contained within it a basic psychological kernel that immediately struck a chord in memory. As in musical motif, so with the word.
The former was endowed with the properties of acoustic meme, the later with a literate meme.
It was the physics, mechanics and psychology that had attracted him, not the blame and moral failings that some, particularly liberals and environmental activists, immediately ascribed to human culture when nature and civilization seemed at odds.
* * *
Although such musings occasionally occurred to Banting, it was something less lofty that urged him to call her that evening in early September.
“What are you doing at the end of the month?” he asked by long distance telephone.
“More of the same, why?” she responded. “Look I have to make this quick: I am expecting a call from my mother…”
“We could meet at Grand Central, or I could come down to Bethesda…” he tried. “You know how I love the seafood at Bish Thompson’s and that’s only a block from your apartment in Bethesda…”
After their brief call had ended, his mood dropped: what could be done to reignite a delightful interaction? Their on-again off-again meetings that were part romance, part the companionship between two young people afflicted with a similar wide-eyed astonishment with the universe of top level medical research, seemed to vary with what opportunities landed before each of them.
He could not return that evening to indexing new scientific and technological publications in the Human Genome Project, nor did the witches of Salem and New Haven Colony seem interesting.
The last time they had spoken, she had mentioned the natural history trips she made with her sister and brother-in-law south from San Diego into the wild of the Baja Peninsula.
She liked being outdoors camping, and the previous May had surprised him with an all-expense paid canoe safari from wilderness West Virginia, down the Potomac headwaters, roughing it nights on the shore while days were spent in large canoes with other adventurers.
It had been amusing when his most arduous wilderness task was to inform the tour group leader and guide, how he liked his pan-sizzled steak the coming evening.
“I don’t know…” she had said.
Her want of enthusiasm depressed Banting who hadn’t seen her in a while. Perhaps she had found another man in Bethesda and…
* * *
His next call went better.
“Ever been to Point Loma?” he began.
“Sure: when the family moved to Cali from San Antonio, one of their first trips in San Diego was to watch the migration of the California Gray whales down to Baja…”
“Ever get there yourself?”
“No, but I wanted to…” she answered, with a sudden warming of interest in the young man who called her too often. “My brother and I did a marine biology course in Helgoland in college…let’s see, I was in my second year in Munich, so I would have been about 17…”
“What did you study?”
“Oh, it was only ten days, some kind of jellyfish…”
* * *
His grandmother had been both a professional musician trained at Gunston Hall School and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore.
Her career was cut short, when she suffered an accidental knife cut on her playing hand while fixing dinner for her young children, but her injury did not deter her continued writing of poetry. That activity was spurred on when her husband, a Cornell professor, had showed her first work to a colleague on the English faculty who urged her to develop an obvious if rudimentary aptitude.
That was very early: late in life what kept her alive was her life-long ambition to see her poetry collected and in print as an anthology.
Among the more curious of Esther Louise Snyder Banting’s poems, was an exploration of Herman Melville’s return from sea to attend a family picnic. The picnic was subject of a family photo in which young Melville can be seen, which Esther was shown by her distant cousin on a trip to family in Boston.
Melville had been a relative, thought Banting.
There was a family connection: distant relative of her husband in Boston had a sister who had married Melville, and so the family gossip was especially intimate as Melville’s literary work took hold and generation or two before Esther’s birth.
The essence of Esther’s poem, set at an annual family picnic, was family skepticism and sarcastic censure of the as-yet unpublished, recently returned mariner, about some manuscript or other about a whale.
* * *
There was no family tradition as watermen in Banting’s family, although two uncles had enlisted in the Navy during World War Two, and very far back, the Virginia branch had much grieved at the wounds one midshipman had sustained in the classic confrontation in 1812 between the U. S. S. Constitution and the H. M. S. Gruerrie. That young midshipman had lingered a year or two, then died of wounds after the war.
He was survived by the ivory-handled dress saber awarded him by a grateful government, and that family heirloom would eventually fetch a hundred thousand dollars at a Sotheby’s auction, before exiting family possession, at which point there remained only the tale to tell, but none to tell it.
Banting had been thinking of the whales of Point Loma, witchcraft and his grandmother Esther’s poem, when he noticed an article in the Sunday New York Times.
It described the emergence of Greenpeace, a radical environmentalist gang, that assaulted whaling vessels off Cape Cod, and the founding seven years earlier, of a tourist operation out of Provincetown that for a fee, would ferry paying customers, mostly photographers and activists, to the shallow whale feeding grounds not far from Provincetown, called Stellwagen Banks.
* * *
Thursday morning, he had rented a car in Hamden, tucked the Triple-A maps in the new briefcase he bought to replace the one stolen in his assault the previous year at was reviewing maps while awaiting her arrival at Logan International Friday afternoon.
In a few moments, there she was, pirouetting toward his waiting car, bearing the one and only grin he had ever really noticed and he stepped out to open the door and take her backpack.
“Well?” he grinned back.
“Ohmygod,” she began, obviously delighted to be away from the crowds and cooped up in an airliner next to a screaming baby.
They kissed once immediately, and a second time across the front seat.
“Did you get the plan I sent?”
“Yes, er, no, oh Pete, I just had too much to do…Chuck wanted the antibody work in summary before I left and…”
“Never mind,” he said cutting her off. “The only thing you need to think about is what you want for dinner, and whether you brought warm enough clothing for the sea breeze tomorrow…”
“You really think we’ll see whales up close?” she asked with the enthusiasm of a wide-eyed child.
“Can’t guarantee it: after all, the Captain told me the humpbacks don’t always show up for appointments…”
He handed her the packet of maps, looked around his shoulder and the car moved slowly into the stream of Friday afternoon traffic in Boston.
* * *
Winsor House, on Washington Street, Duxbury had been a tavern since 1803, with a restaurant since 1930.
“I like the swordfish,” he told her hiding behind a menu.
Although he had managed to get her to the rental car, she was still asleep when they pulled out of the Best Western on Brady Street West that grey Saturday morning.
“It should be a short trip,” he promised quietly. “…look over the map at the best way to MacMillan Pier…it is off Route 6 at Conwell Street…we should be at the wharf by 6:45…”
She was not at her sharpest, first thing in the morning, but he glanced over at her closed eyes for a moment. She groaned and turned her head toward the door.
They had not been there five minutes as the sun was coming up, but the cruise began to board, and they felt pressed to reach the passenger line before the gate closed.
It was a mid-sized vessel, maybe 70 tons, and with his head over the railing watching the hull pass the pier and the black waters, he fully expected sea monsters, large and small, to materialize before the ship had passed out of the harbor.
She was bundled up with him at the rail, with both hers wrapped around his arm for warmth. Her gray knit cap, pulled down with her wavy auburn hair scattering around her shoulders in the sea breeze, would have made a fetching picture, but he didn’t want to step away from her.
“…welcome aboard the Captain John & Son, Ladies and Gentlemen. We are pleased to offer you…”
Off and on, the tour guide spoke over a public address system, but the rumbling of the engine and the slight yawing as it broke slowly into deeper water, made it hard to hear.
“How are you doing?” he shouted and she barely glanced up from where she seemed to be burying her face, her arms around his left arm and in his jacket.
“…crossing the Boston shipping channel…,” boomed the speakers and he finally could pick out the figure on the upper deck with a mike to her mouth.
He leaned closer.
“I said, how you doing?” he shouted again, struggling to keep the camera around his neck from striking her head.
She looked happy, but still not awake which surprised him with the way the salt breeze and vibrations of the steel deck below their feet seemed to change his stance every moment or two: he remembered the phrase sea legs, and knew without some intellectual distraction, motion sickness might overtake him.
“…the Stellwagen Banks average only about 100 feet in depth and we are likely to see…”
“What have you liked best so far?”
* * *
Friday, he had arrived on time at Boston Logan International, for her 6 PM arrival aboard Northwest Flight 78 from D. C. Reagan National Airport. The week had passed in a flurry, but a flood of relief swept across him like the fresh sea breeze, to be away from New Haven and on his own time. It was then Saturday and the wind kept them clutching at each other for warmth as his teeth chattered.
There hadn’t been much time for sightseeing on the Cape, but Plymouth and Duxford were on the way back to Logan on Sunday.
“Can you imagine rocking and swaying like this for eight weeks in 1620?” he asked once on the whale boat and underway.
She seemed shy and reserved, so he shouted it again. For a moment he could imagine they were striking out for the New World, just the two of them.
The salt air made him hungry: there had not been time for a leisurely breakfast before the drive to the pier. However, the ocean was rough, and he was thankful to weather the motions and wind on an empty stomach.
“…if you would direct your attention two hundred yards off the port bow…”
He wasn’t ready. Banting fumbled with his pigskin leather rucksack that hung by one strap over one shoulder when he heard the alarm.
He had failed to switch from 1:2.8 lens to his 1:4/200 telephoto. Glancing over with envy, the others were getting great shots of the distant humpback whale breaching off to the side where those lined up and leaning over the port railing, each with lenses that took two hands cupped around their large unwieldy cameras. By the time his fingers had located the lens amid the junk he had packed, the whale was gone, leaving a distant patch of calm water amid the waves.
“Aw, don’t be disappointed…,” looking up at him. She noted his passing frustration but seemed happy just to be there in the fresh salt breezes.
“…be back in a minute: I’m going to get an apple…” he said disgruntled at the missed opportunity.
With the mass of sightseers on the port gunwale and railing of both decks, the ship had listed slightly in that direction.
He had missed the first sighting, and took an angry bite into the apple as he returned, trying to make the best of it.
Then something happened about which he would marvel for years.
Beyond her windswept and flailing locks, something loomed up from the deep water just a few meters away from where he stood, transfixed. Up close, the form that slowly arose through the greenish, blurred depths seemed impossibly large, and liable to scuttle the ship. He was too excited, hands fumbling, apple still held in his mouth between his teeth, to bring his camera into play as a humpback’s nose sloshed up into the air and slowly rotated to bring one giant eyeball around to stare directly at him.
Amid the rush and scramble of photographers from the opposite side of the ship, he hung as vfar out as he could beyond the railing as they gathered around with their now-uesless telephoto equipment at close range as the giant whale seemed to examine the length of the rail with one eye, slide back down, up once more, and then disappear out of sight.
“Did you get him?” she cried, as excited as a child. “Did you?”
He was shivering from excitement and the chill breeze.
“I….I….I don’t know,” he replied sheepishly.
“Oh Pete!” she cried joyfully with a note of triumph that he could see in her eyes and grin.
“Well, that was something…”
The euphoria and exclamations were interrupted by a chattering, a scolding from the deck above near the wheel house, and he could barely make out the conversation picked up by the mike over which a deck watch crew member held a hand.
“…I explicitly told you to keep an eye out….almost ran over that humpback beneath our hull while you were shading your eyes in the distance…he’s big and close enough that you should have seen him in time to warm me…”
* * *
The Captain John & Son reached MacMillian pier just after lunch, and the departing crowd, some three hundred of them, bubbled with the things they had seen.
“Well…?” he asked. “How does it feel to be ogled by a Humpback?”
They chattered and decided their collective sea-stomach was in no shape for more than a soda.
“We only have about two hours to get you to Logan: don’t know how bad the Sunday traffic will be…”
* * *
The drive from Logan international back to Maple Street was over two hours. He would then have to drop his rental off and drive back into town.
It brought him down to leave her again, but there were films to develop and along with the whales, were good shots of her to keep him company in the approaching weeks.
* * *