Nowhere Man 11
A crown of laurel
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David McTaggart wasn’t a mean guy. Yet no one, including Steve, the least confrontive of men, could say they had never felt the razor’s edge of his tongue. David, or Tag as we called him, was responsible for forming Greenpeace International. Tag was a guy who led by his actions; either you got behind him and leant him your support or you got left behind to play catch-up in later years. Many did not follow, seeing his motives as that of a warmonger, out to make trouble. Greenpeace was a ‘direct action’ environmental protest movement. Cutting its teeth on confrontation and action, leaving questions to be asked later.
Either you liked David McTaggart, or you did not. There wasn’t much to think about. Yes, he sometimes took the law into his own hands but in so doing, placed himself into the archives of Greenpeace history.
There was still the immigration drawn-out regulations for Katie’s citizenship. We had returned from Baja after what felt like a honeymoon. I could not get enough of her, spending time in the water, hearing her delight. All of which assured me we were of similar minds, especially the capture of live dolphins in exchange for huge sums of money in order that they could be taught tricks. It violated, in our minds, a natural duty of mankind to reasonably protect every species.
Katie was vitally important. She wanted to know everything that felt important to me, as I her. We even talked about working with Greenpeace together.
We both wanted children. Katie, however, didn’t want to wait. She couldn’t stop smiling when she told me so, cutting bread at the breakfast table.
I learned, mostly at breakfast, that Katie had this whole philosophy on life. Plan for nothing. Katie had returned from her experience in Baja with a new belief. Maybe the things we believe in and appreciate are worth the personal danger.
“What a colossal thing to do if you care about the problem, and we do care, don’t we?” She said.
The truth is, I was pretty much done with heroic stuff. But having seen Katie with the whales and understanding what was enacted upon them in the southern oceans made it feel personal.
“Make me pregnant. Then go with Steve and Tag. I will deal with the immigration issues while you’re away. When you return we will be married,” Katie said, buttering the toast.
It was that simple. But it wasn’t.
I was deeply in love with her. The idea of leaving, being distant when head over heels in love with her, gave me pause, then a headache because the fear of losing Katie was enough to put me in intensive care.
The bed squeaked all night long.
Tag wanted to know the difficulties of having a chopper take-off and land from a ship’s deck. I explained that such a matter is a deeply complex subject, involving clearances, and the primary concerns of weight and balance. You have a certain amount of power available, and if you exceed that, the engine will be trashed in two seconds. That power needs something to work against.
When lifting from the deck, there’s only a few feet when the down-wash meets the surface, giving the initial lift. It was a conversation about aerodynamics, not readily understood by him. The lift generated from solid ground, is then secondly increased by forward movement, around 40 mph. That’s when the aerodynamic wizardry takes over, and generates even more lift, but, in order to get to that point you have to stay in ‘ground effect’. There are various ways of doing that, depending on the situation. Dropping off the side of the ship, and using the water surface to generate ground effect, is one method used to achieve this. But if I can get into a headwind situation, that helps me enormously. I only need another 30 knots of ground speed to reach 40.
Taking off is the easy part.
The maximum range of a two seat helicopter is about 180 miles. Taking off from a ship’s deck is always optional. Landing, on the other hand, far from land, is mandatory. Get it wrong and it’s a lot of paperwork. Forget the difficulty.
What the helicopter allowed me to witness was butchery on a massive scale. The towing boat took up a position at the stern of the factory ship. Heaving lines were thrown from the factory’s stern to the towing boat and the line lashed around the whale’s tail. The factory end of the cable was attached to a winch. The whale then dragged up onto the stern decks.
One giant cable was hooked into the whale’s smiling jaws, one hook into a lower jaw, and another into the upper. Then the big rattling, gushing, and hissing of the steam winches as they took up the strain and the massive jaws were heaved wider and wider with a great bone creaking crack, muscles as thick as a man’s leg being torn apart, sockets slowly wrenching. And then the whale’s jaw gave way with a mighty snap and the flensing women rushed in to hack through the last bloody tissues.
Other women were standing in a row down the enormous carcass, and they swung their great flensing knives back over their shoulders and then swiped them down from behind their heads, hacking deep into the raw fatty flesh, chopping it wide open, and with each swipe warm blood cascaded.
The potholes in the deck were 5 feet wide, belching fumes of boiling whale fat, and between the potholes, the skeletal carnage remained.
The wreaking havoc, the quagmire of blood, flesh, and fat shin deep. Mountains of animal carcass, twice the height of a man, torn, ripped apart, hacked and sawed up. And behind the factory ship, attached to the towing boats were half a dozen more magnificent animals that had suffered harpoon explosives fired into their lungs, drowning them, and then their grooved bellies pumped full of air, waiting to be butchered.
I documented the position of the whaling fleet and signaled Tag. I had enough filmed evidence to prove this fleet was not whaling for any scientific purpose.
When I set the chopper down on deck, Steve was first up to greet me. I thought he was just eager to get hold of the camera, but he wanted to tell me I was going to be a father. I’d been away from home, away from Katie for twelve weeks. On a day when I believed mankind was going to hell, it felt like my head had been crowned with laurel.