The Whale Watch
The kid hadn’t wanted to go to Hawaii. He wanted his parents to leave him alone with the house, so he could be independent and imagine he was grown and on his own. But his parents had heard too many stories of teenagers having wild parties when they were gone to permit it to happen to them. Of course, he was not the kind of kid that threw wild parties, or the kind that had friends who went to them. That the kid’s parents didn’t know this about him both annoyed and pleased him. He liked being inscrutable, but wished they made more of an effort.
All right, he’d go to Hawaii, but he’d do his best to let his parents know he was annoyed. When his mother carefully spread sunscreen on everyone before the beach, he was annoyed. She had a big floppy hat, for god’s sake. When his stepfather stood solemnly before a sunken battleship, he was annoyed. The war had been fought and won years ago. Get over it, already. When they both, in their own way, invited him to go with them to see a volcano, he was annoyed. His mother in her chirpy, catch more flies with honey than vinegar way, annoyed him; and his stepfather, in his gruff, chuck him on the shoulder way, annoyed him. Quit acting so phony, he said. He pulled a random book from the resort’s shelves and hid behind it. He read his book all the way to the volcano; all the while his parents gawked at the steam rising from a hole in the ground, and all the way back. By then, they knew he was annoyed. They weren’t so phony in the morning.
The book the kid read on the day of the volcano annoyed him, too; but he had to keep reading it, so his parents would know he was annoyed. It had started off great: a mad whaling captain hijacked his own ship to go hunt for the particular whale that had chewed off his leg. But then it bogged down in the details of whales and whaling and irrelevant tales from passing ships. People just screw everything up when it could be simple. Just go get the whale, for crying out loud; and just leave me alone, and stop acting so phony.
The next day, his stepfather announced they’d be going on a whale watch and he could come if he’d like. Or he could stay in the hotel room and read about whales, if he’d rather. At this moment he was more annoyed with the author at not getting on with his book than he was with his parents for not letting him live his life, so cast the book aside and went with them. Seeing as though the author was in no hurry to find the whale, he’d go find one himself.
The contrast between the whale watch and the whale hunt of his book couldn’t be more distinct. They paid their dollars and lined up in front of a yacht, rather than a stalwart sailing vessel. The ship had a logo of a smiling, cartoon whale painted on its side. They boarded over an OSHA certified gangplank and were served pina coladas, his carefully non-alcoholic, by bland, white jacketed stewards. The kid thought he’d rather jostle with the savage aborigines of his book’s crew. The captain was a two-legged oceanographer; and the water, at least within the developed confines of the harbor, was as smooth as a new sidewalk.
That’s just the problem, the kid thought. The world’s gone soft and cautious. A hundred years ago, a guy my age could leave home and match himself against the greatest beasts in the wild ocean, then return to his parents a bronzed, bearded man. Now parents lead their teenagers on a leash. They’ve turned whaling into a walk in the zoo.
The ship slipped away from the pier and accelerated its engines, mercifully precluding all conversation. The kid stood at the bow like the craft’s figurehead, cleaving the wind with his face. In this manner, he gained the headlands and was out at sea before anyone else aboard. Here he felt emancipated. The air was as soft and clear as a pure thought, while the full-bodied sea heaved like the chest of a sleeping beast. High clouds skidded across the sky, their wispy vapors as changeable as a youth’s character, the murderous urges of the deep sea lurked below. Everything was as one as heads and tails, male and female, thought and emotion, freedom and danger. Like the watchful eye of a cook, the tropical sun supervised the boiling bisque of air and sea, clouds and fish, and one frail minor, pitching in a frail shell.
Soon the kid was crabbed by seasickness, chucking his breakfast over the side. A dough-faced steward conducted him below decks, where his mother laid his green head on her lap.
The kid had just started to feel better when the crew spotted some whales and reduced the speed. Below decks emptied as the passengers crowded to see. The kid and his family went up with the rest, but the ship, not making headway, lolled all the more in the swells. His mother pointed gleefully at the whale’s spouts and his stepfather fiddled with his camera, but the kid lurched to the far, empty rail to barf again into the sea. There he stood alone, watching his chunky puke run down one side of the leaning ship, while the pod breached, blew, and slapped on the other side.
