I sort of cheated and wrote two memories that are related in my mind, and I share them here. Enjoy!
A
Meadowlark and a Killer Whale
MCWC #25
October
2018
The monkey bar was calling my name one grey morning, so I put
on my mittens and hopped on my purple one-speed bike to pedal up the gravel
road to the school yard. The street was lifeless, and so was the park across
the street from my house, except for the sparrows nesting in the budding
willows near the footbridge, and the tiny tadpoles underneath it. No school today,
so I would have the whole schoolyard to myself.
I pedaled as hard as I could and back-slammed on my brakes,
leaving a satisfying three-foot skid in the dirt behind me. When I got to the
stop sign on school street, I stopped, though there wasn’t a moving vehicle for
miles. Plenty, Saskatchewan, was always sleepy on Saturday mornings after the teenagers tore up and down the wide Main Street in their noisy cars on Friday nights. The
school parking lot was empty, though if I closed my eyes, I could still see the
principal’s car stuck in the melt-water canals that Norman, Carol and I had dug
through the snow with sticks just two weeks earlier. We hid in the willows when
Mr. Smyshnyk got stuck, afraid that he’d be mad. Carol and Norman almost missed
their school bus home.
I walked my bike over the curb and ditched it on the wide
sidewalk that led up to the old 3-storey brick Stuart school. Without kids
around, it seemed huddled into itself, but I wasn’t about to feel sorry for it.
I had to get to the monkey bar. What a treat to have it all to myself. No
Benita to hog it for the entire recess. Being a town kid who went home for
lunch, my time on the monkey bar was limited. The farm kids had half of the lunch
hour to play, but it took me the extra time to walk home and back. During the
short recesses, I never managed to escape the school fast enough to reach the
monkey bar first.
Kids today would laugh at our coveted monkey bar – a single
pipe that came out perpendicular to the post holding up one end of a four-swing
set, supported by a vertical bar that dove into the dusty ground. A kids’ chin-up
bar, really, though tiny blonde Benita had a way of throwing one leg over the
top and spinning her whole body around it at dizzying speeds. What she did
looked like fun, and I’d always wanted to try it, but the few times that I
coaxed Benita to share and actually had a chance, I’d been too scared and
self-conscious to be that daring. Benita, on the other hand, was fearless.
I pulled myself up onto the bar and sat for a moment, then
dropped back, feeling its steel chill through my mittens and behind my knees.
Then I let down a leg next to the swing set support, and clamped my arms under
the bar and around my shinbone. The idea was to use my free leg to brace
against the vertical support and propel myself over the bar with my knee the
centre pivot, spinning again and again, like Benita did.
What I didn’t bargain on was that Benita’s boots must have afforded
her ankle more padding than mine did. The first time I pushed myself over the
bar was fine, but the second time I banged my ankle as I drove my body up and
over the top. Still, I kept going. After four or five times around the bar, I
felt slightly motion sick, and I could tell my shin and ankle were getting
bruised. Maybe Benita’s fun wasn’t as great as it looked.
 |
| borrowed from larkwire.com |
Moving slowly toward the bird, I said softly, “Good morning, sir,
and what a lovely voice you have. Can I talk to you like Mary Lennox talks to
the robin in The Secret Garden?” He
cocked his head and stared at me with one black bead-like eye. The closer I got
to him, the more slowly I moved, until his legs tensed, ready to launch him into
the air. I stopped, and he waited. “Where do you live, sir” I asked, “and what
are your plans for this Saturday morning? Do you have a lady and a nest
somewhere?”
He flew to the next fence post as if he was about to lead me
to his place, and I followed him, making conversation. If he had talked back,
it wouldn’t have surprised me, but a full conversation wasn’t necessary. I was
happy just speaking to him as though he was a long-lost friend, admiring his
bright eyes, dark necklace, and yellow breast – and that song! He didn’t sing
it nearly often enough for my liking, so I decided to stop talking and just
follow in silence.
I had never fully explored the school yard before. Grade One
and Two students generally played closer to the school because the bigger kids
used the wider spaces for softball, kickball and other sports that might run
over little kids like me. But that morning, the meadowlark took me on a grand
tour: all the way around the fence perimeter, right to the farmer’s fields out
back, and over to where the High School kids played football. He started to sing
again, and, taking it for conversation, I responded in kind, telling him about
bossy Diane trying to make my little sister eat a mud pie, and my difficulties
with addition and subtraction speed tests. He sang a little song of sympathy,
and listened intently. He seemed to agree that The Secret Garden was a wonderful book for Mrs. Hansen to read to
her Grade Two class.
After what seemed like hours to my seven-year-old self, the
bird stood up tall on his fencepost, and I heard a different birdsong coming
from the grasses in the field beyond the fence. “Is that a lady bird?” I asked.
He stretched even taller, trilled once, and was gone.
That’s when I realized that my hands were cold and my bike
was far away. Plodding around the High School, past the middle school, and all
the way back to where I’d started, I decided that I wouldn’t envy Benita her monkey
bar spinning any more. I’d keep my eye out for meadowlarks instead.
*** ***
There wasn’t a single cloud reflected in the water. I stood,
looking down at a wavy, acne-riddled face staring back up at me until it was
shattered into a thousand watery fragments as the whale silently rose up, just
inches from the railing. She had a piece of yellowish kelp on her nose, if
killer whales had noses, and she bobbed in front of me as if she wanted me to
take it.
I looked around for guidance or permission, but my family and
the rest of the tourists had moved over to the four o’clock show, and the whale
trainer had disappeared behind the stage door. I could hear the emcee two tanks over giving the same spiel we'd heard at the sea lions' 2 o’clock performance. But I’d had enough of people, and just wanted my
space; reruns of sea lion tricks didn’t impress an introverted 14-year-old me. Until
the young orca showed up, I was feeling more than a little melancholy and out
of sorts.
Miracle moved a few feet to the right, her near eye watching
my reaction. For reasons unknown, I decided to move with her. She moved back to
the left, and I sidestepped again. She came a little closer to the railing, her
piece of seaweed still on her nose. There was no one to tell me not to, so I
reached over the railing, took it from her, and tossed it into the middle of
the tank. She sank into the water, swam under the kelp, and came up with it on
her nose, bringing it back to me. Fetch.
“You’re lonely too, aren’t you?” I said. I took the kelp and
threw it in a different direction, and she brought it back again, her graceful
body making only the slightest waves on the surface of the tank. I was
delighted. The crowd at the Sea Lion tank laughed and cheered, clearly amused by Sally the
costumed seal’s dancing, but I was communing with a killer whale. “Do you mind
being cooped up like this?” I asked her. “Would you like to swim free?”
Our family had heard the story of the baby killer whale that
had been found off the BC coast riddled with bullets. Fortunately, Miracle was rescued
by marine biologists and brought to Sealand for medical care in 1977. By the
time she recuperated, she had bonded with Sealand staff, and no one seemed sure
whether she would be adopted or killed by a pod of wild orcas, so she remained
as one of Sealand’s attractions, learning tricks and performing through the
summer months. Two years later, our family decided it would be interesting to
see Miracle with our own eyes.
She definitely wasn’t a baby anymore. The whale tank’s
railings were marked in different shades of blue, and during Miracle’s
performance, Uncle Scotty made the mistake of wandering off and standing alone behind
a light blue railing while the rest of us stood in the navy section. None of us
knew that light blue indicated where Miracle did the kinds of tricks that would have
emptied the tank had it not been made of netted enclosures surrounded by floating walkways in the Pacific itself. Uncle was soaked to the skin, and it seemed
that Miracle was pleased with her performance, nodding toward him when she took
her “bows” at the end of it all. We laughed as he took off his tank top and
wrung it out, but it was a hot afternoon, and we kids kind of envied him being
cooled off by such a cool whale.
And here I was, hanging out with her! After a few more
sessions of fetch, Miracle left the kelp in the water and came to take a long
look at me, raising herself up so we could see eye to eye when I rested my chin
on the railing. “Bored, eh?” I said. “I would be too, except for you.” She
rolled to her side and flapped a flipper, then powered across the tank doing
the motorboat impression that soaked our flip-flopped feet behind the navy railing
during her show, and she made me laugh again at the raspberry-like sound she
was making.
 |
| borrowed from sites.google.com/site/ ordercetacea/home/killer-whale |
On her way back toward me, Miracle changed direction and
leapt into the air, her splash not quite reaching me. “You missed,” I told her
when she surfaced, and she flashed a big smile. Then she disappeared underwater
for a while, and I could tell where she was only by the occasional appearance of her top fin
where she was practicing her “Jaws Impression.” Eventually, she surfaced to my right. I
sidestepped to be in line with her, and she opened her mouth and smiled again, displaying a regular row of large teeth and a marvelous pink tongue. I stepped to the left a few paces, and she
went under and came up in line with me. It felt like playing peek-a-boo with a
little kid. I wished I had a few fish to offer her.
The sea lions were working on their grand finale and Miracle
and I were back to playing fetch when my dad came looking for me. “Why didn’t you
come to the sea lions?” he asked. “Been there, done that,” I said, cool as a
sea cucumber, “but I’ve never played fetch with a killer whale before.” Miracle
had resurfaced with the kelp, and I took it off her nose and handed it to Dad,
who threw it toward the middle of the tank. Miracle retrieved it, and this
time, after I took the seaweed, I dared to run my hand along the side of her
jaw, showing off a little. Her mouth opened, and I nervously pulled back and
threw the seaweed once again. Dad laughed. “Better than the sea lions,” he said,
as Miracle went after the piece of kelp.
When the sea lion performance ended, my sisters and cousins
came running over to see what was going on. “Just hanging out with Miracle,” I
said. At the sound of so many feet running toward us on the deck, she had slipped
underwater, just her top fin and fluke showing now and then. I wondered if
maybe she was an introvert, like me, but she surfaced with the kelp. I took it
from her, and we showed my family the fetch game. “Let me try!” shouted Ronald,
my ten-year-old cousin. I handed him the kelp, and Miracle dutifully brought it
back a few times for my sisters and cousins before Dad announced that it was time to go back to our
campsite and make supper. Ron was disappointed, complaining all the way to the
parking lot. I was the last to leave Miracle’s tank, wishing that I could give
her a hug.
*** ***
I suspect all human beings are born with a sense of kinship
toward other creatures. It’s only natural for toddlers to converse with
caterpillars and lady bugs. But somewhere along the line, many of us lose that
sense of connection.
I haven’t. My conversations with other creatures have
continued well into adulthood, sometimes to my embarrassment – neighbours
walking our back alley have overheard me talking to crows and squirrels and
even honeybees. I’d like to blame Mary Lennox in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
beautiful book, but it comes naturally, and it’s not something I would ever
think to prevent. It just happens, and it makes me happy. I’ve realized that it’s
part of who I am, no small thanks to a meadowlark and a killer whale.
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