Voices in the Ocean Read online

  I glanced at everyone. Several people had tears in their eyes; the children were sitting absolutely still, staring at Ocean with rapt attention. There was a vibe in the room that was sort of intoxicating. I was startled to recognize the feeling: it was the same Zen calm that came over me when I was in the ocean with the spinners. It was the bone-deep peace that arises during meditation, the incandescent warmth you feel around someone you love. It was the opposite of aggravation. My usual life sound track, a low hum of anxiety, had simply stopped. Was this dolphin consciousness? If so, we should try it more often.

  Ocean continued to talk about her experiences with the dolphins; her conviction that they were not just out there chasing fish, but actively transmitting knowledge. “When they are playing with us,” she said, “they are giving us information.” A man with a goatee piped up, asking for specifics. “There are some far-out things,” Ocean said, “but…those are too far out.” “Don’t stop now!” someone pleaded. “Well,” Ocean said, hesitating only for a moment. “There was one thing I wouldn’t put in my book. I was afraid I’d lose all credibility.” The room hooted encouragement. “They said there are ET vehicles underwater,” she continued. “They travel the waters of the planet and there are docking places where the dolphins can actually swim inside these spaceships. They showed me a picture of them.”

  “Are the ships over at that bay we call the End of the World?” a ponytailed woman wearing a tie-dye sweater asked. “I heard that’s a place where they go.”

  “They’re pretty much wherever they want to be,” Ocean said. “I mean they probably need some amount of depth but…have you seen them there?”

  A number of hands shot up. “I know people who have seen them come out of the water,” a man with a German accent said, his pupils dilated with excitement.

  “We’ve seen what I would call plasma ships,” Ocean confirmed. She pointed to a group of Dolphinville residents who were nodding vehemently. “We were out on the boat together and we all saw it, this giant white pulsing form that was about the size of a football field. We could swim into it—if you were in it you could see yourself, but if you stuck part of yourself out you couldn’t see that part. It was the most ecstatic feeling.”

  “The dolphins were swimming through it,” Ocean’s friend Celeste added. Celeste was in her seventies, with long white hair and an elegant manner. She was the most athletic-looking septuagenarian I’d ever seen, besides Ocean. “But these dolphins—they weren’t our dolphins. They looked like spinners but then they didn’t once you got into the plasma. They didn’t have a mark on them, and they were lighter. They weren’t from here.”

  “Everything was different about them,” another woman agreed emphatically. “They were not our dolphins.”

  The room erupted in murmurs. “Wowwwww,” said a young woman with a flock of birds tattooed across her shoulders. “Someone in Hilo told me he met a mermaid,” another guy offered. He was dark-eyed and rangy, folded into the corner but eager to share. “She was ten feet tall and she came out of the water and she had big teeth and long hair.”

  Ocean nodded. “Interesting.”

  “She said she lives off Maui,” the guy added.

  “I think they’re going to make themselves known, more and more,” Ocean said. “I think they’re being brought in now because we’re open to them. So there will be sightings. It’s great.”

  “All the channels are open,” the guy agreed.

  The discussion of underwater UFOs had turned the conversation away from dolphins, but Ocean steered it back. We would wrap up with a “jump” into their realm, she said, a meditation in preparation for meeting them tomorrow. As everyone shut their eyes and reclined against cushions, she turned on some seriously trippy music, the notes soaring and diving. I felt woozy, as though my head were melting. “Okayyyy,” Ocean began, in a purring voice. “Please relax as we prepare to enter another timeline. For now, be aware of each other. Kindred souls, joining together with pure intentions. Expressing our love and peacefulness. As you breathe deeply, feel the love enlightening all of your body. Your bones, your muscles, all of your organs. Your bloodstream and your nervous system. All activated into pure love…” The music swooned. Some people had slid down so they were laid out on the floor. A ceiling fan ticked overhead.

  Somewhere in the near distance, I heard chickens. The only other noise was the shushing of palm trees tossing in the wind. Ocean spoke in low, hypnotic tones: “Now, we send our love into the ocean. We ask the dolphins to be with us, to play with us in the beautiful waters here. We connect with the consciousness of Mother Ocean. The dolphins are sending their frequencies back to us, and in this moment we give thanks to them for all the joy that they bring, for their example of kindness, compassion, family living, connection to their environment. We are grateful. And we look forward to swimming together with them—our pod and their pods, together.”

  I felt myself smile. Spaceships or not, it was hard to argue with that.

  Just after dawn the next morning I drove to Honokohau Harbor, watching the sky turn from navy pink to apricot blue to lavender gold. At the docks, we split into two groups. Most people boarded a double-decker boat that could comfortably hold everyone, but Ocean waved me onto a smaller vessel, a powerboat that only took eight. On deck I could see Jan, a lithe diver and skipper, casting off the ropes, and Celeste, her silver hair in a sporty braid, storing her gear like a pro. It was Day 4 and Ocean, I could tell, was angling for a respite, a morning of restoration among the spinners, without having to answer dolphin or UFO questions every ten seconds. While the other boat loaded its heap of snorkeling gear, our captain, an easygoing, ample-bellied man named Kit, suggested that we shove off immediately, because fishing boats had radioed a sighting of a pod of pilot whales cruising five miles offshore.

  Without much notice to the others, we headed out. Searching for a pod of pilot whales on the move is a long-shot proposition, but Kit ventured west with purpose. Somehow, I knew we would find them. I was thinking about what else we might encounter this far out, and watching the profound blue of the deep ocean overtake us as we sped away from land, when the radio squawked again: another sighting, closer. We drove about a mile in that direction and stopped, rocking on a light swell. Everything was quiet, the ocean luffing against the hull.

  “Whooooofff!” A pilot whale surfaced with a sudden gust of air, a hundred yards away from us. “Pooooooshhh!” Another whale came up right beside him. Their black backs rolled and dived; we could see their bulbous heads, their swept-back dorsal fins and missile-thick bodies. Then, more fins, all around. These animals were three times the size of the average spinner. “There are at least forty in the pod,” Ocean counted, doing a 360-degree scan. “And they have some calves with them.”

  Kit drove ahead; he would position us far in front of the pod so we could jump in and swim with them as they passed. I fiddled with my mask, feeling a steady adrenaline drip. I’d never been frightened around dolphins, but at twenty-feet long and tipping in at three tons, these were more like orcas. Also, I was aware of pilot whales’ reputation as stubborn, rather sulky animals who’ve been known to express their displeasure in creative ways. I thought back to one unpleasant incident that occurred in these waters, under more or less these exact circumstances, when a pilot whale had snatched a swimmer by the ankle and yanked her forty feet down. The woman barely escaped drowning.

  Still, I knew I couldn’t miss the chance to observe them underwater. Compared to the spinners, the pilots had an air of gravitas. These were short-finned pilot whales, but there are also long-finned pilot whales, the two species closely resembling one another. Both were members—along with false killer whales, pygmy killer whales, melon-headed whales, and orcas—of the group of dolphins known as “blackfish.” Like killer whales, pilot whale pods are focused around matriarchs, mammoth mommas who run the show, and whose sons stick with them for the long haul. Grandmothers, too, play a pivotal role: for up to fifteen years after their bree
ding years are over (at around age thirty-five), female pilot whales continue to lactate, and help nurse and baby-sit their podmates’ calves, bolstering their survival chances.

  Ocean, suited up and ready to launch off the stern, turned and in her husky, gentle voice informed me that pilot whales are usually accompanied by oceanic white-tip sharks, one of the nippier models. No one knows precisely why, but the two species often travel together. “So just keep an eye out behind you,” she added, with a grin.

  Kit cut the engines and told us we could slip in, two by two. The ocean was crystalline, a six-dimensional heaven of azure, lapis, and sapphire. Even with such lucid visibility there was no spying the seafloor out here: we floated in water miles deep. “Starboard!” Kit shouted, pointing. I saw a pair of whales surface nearby; they were headed straight for us. I dove and so did the pilots, and soon they loomed into view beneath me, two huge adults with a calf tucked below them, swimming by slowly and sounding me with their echolocation clicks and creaks and squeals, like an undersea radio receiver tuning into the snorkeler station. There was a stateliness to the pilots’ movements, and they emanated waves of that entrancing calm I had become so fond of. Sunbeams played through the water and danced across their bodies like spotlights.

  The whales dissolved into the blue and we clambered back on the boat; Kit shuttled us ahead and then dropped us in their path again. If bothered, the pilots could have simply dived out of sight: they can go fifteen minutes between breaths. One of their hunting strategies for squid, their main prey, is to sprint-dive at 20 mph down to 3,000 feet, an effort so strenuous they’ve been nicknamed “the cheetahs of the deep sea.” Pilots are even thought to compete with sperm whales for the ultimate prize: Architeuthis, the giant squid. In the Canary Islands, they’ve been spotted swimming along with four-foot-long tentacles trailing out of their mouths.

  The pilots didn’t shy away from us; they passed closer this time, allowing the calf to slide out beside them. The mini-whale was curious, eyeing us with interest. I hovered, lost in awe. Time went sideways. At one point I realized that I’d forgotten to breathe. My lungs contracted but I felt no panic, even though I was twenty feet down and wearing a weight belt. Was I narked (divers’ slang for drunk on nitrogen, bent on bubbles)? How could I be? I didn’t have tanks. But that’s how I felt. If more people swam with wild cetaceans, I thought as I kicked to the surface, we wouldn’t need drugs. We wouldn’t need legalized weed. We wouldn’t need Xanax or Prozac or Ecstasy.

  I made my way back to the boat and we set off again, following the pod and then overtaking them. The other dive boat was alongside us now, the others clamoring to get in with the whales too. At the first opportunity, dozens of people jumped into the water. The process took a while and by the time everyone was situated, the pilots were gone. I swam around searching for them, but all I could see was a blue infinity, and someone on the large boat swishing a pole camera around to investigate the scene. “Shark!” I heard one of the divemasters call out, but I couldn’t spot it. Later, we would watch video footage of an oceanic white-tip knifing around us, just outside our field of vision.

  While we were in the water, Kit heard radio reports of a spinner convention just up the coast, a gathering of three to four hundred dolphins. We split from the others again, jetting north toward Kohala to see if we could find them. As we motored, I told Ocean how blissfully untethered I’d felt among the pilot whales, unconcerned with banal things like gravity and time and even air. She nodded, laughing. “My whole goal is to get people into that place,” she said. “It’s love and gratitude. And it means a lot.”

  The sun glinted down on the water and the water sparkled like sun. As we drove, Jan passed around fresh mango and pineapple spears. I sat next to Chrissi, a soft-spoken Canadian in her early twenties with freckles and a tomboyish quiff of red hair. She had traveled here from Nelson, a hip, outdoorsy town in British Columbia. Like all of Ocean’s followers, Chrissi had a colorful set of personal beliefs. “I was very interested in Sirius,” she said, explaining why she’d been drawn to Hawaii. “I read everything I could get my hands on. Then I found Joan’s Web site and I started reading about dolphin consciousness and I thought, ‘This is perfect. This is like a dream come true.’ ” Swimming with the spinners, Chrissi told me, had helped her cope with crushing grief. Not long ago, she had lost her father; and then her beloved dog, Topaz—“my baby, my best friend, my everything”—had died too. In the face of this double-header heartbreak, Chrissi’s outlook was so sweet, so relentlessly sunny and hopeful, that I felt humbled by meeting her.

  The spinners were easy to locate. There were platoons of them and even from a distance they were visible, shooting skyward one after another, whirling through the air like corkscrew rockets and careening down with such dramatic splashes that they might have been competing in a spinner X Games. I had never seen them so lively. When we drew closer to the pod, which stretched as far as we could see, the dolphins shot to the front of the boat, jockeying to ride our bow waves. They came speeding in from all directions, and when we slowed they slowed along with us, circling the boat with a puppyish glee. We drifted in aquamarine water above a coral reef teeming with iridescent fish, and if the dolphins were enticing us to join them, they couldn’t have chosen a more alluring spot. For hours we swam there, and so did they. For hours, we played. Nearby, I saw Chrissi underwater, suspended between two dolphins who were imitating her movements. If she dove, they dove. If she hung in the water, so did they. I remembered how my first spinner encounter had jolted me out of the depths of sorrow; I hoped Chrissi was feeling the same effect.

  The spinners were also following Ava, a soulful seven-year-old girl who had come with her mother, Suchi, a friend of Ocean’s. Earlier, Ocean had referred affectionately to Ava as “dolphin bait,” noting that children seemed to draw the spinners’ attention. Dolphins have also been said to gravitate toward pregnant women, whom they can examine internally with their sonar. These anecdotal tales would seem innocent enough, and they might even be true, but not long before I arrived in Hawaii a controversy had broken out over one Virginia couple’s decision to come to Pahoa, a rural town on the flank of the Kilauea volcano, in the hopes of delivering their baby in the ocean, attended by dolphin midwives. Somehow, their plan had made the press, and provoked heated discussion. DOLPHIN-ASSISTED BIRTH—POSSIBLY THE WORST IDEA EVER, reported Discover magazine’s science blog, pointing out that dolphins regularly ingest creatures the size of a newborn; that tiger sharks, too, might be interested in participating when the blood and afterbirth started swirling around. It was also pointed out that the “beach” near Pahoa was actually lava rock covered with spiny sea urchins.

  In the end the event didn’t occur, although several commenters endorsed it, accusing the naysayers of being predictably negative humans. One woman wrote that her dream was to deliver her baby “in the presence of a pack of wolves, to ensure that my child has an intimate knowledge of nature from the very beginning.” Another angrily recalled how she had been shunned for deciding to give birth in a cave “where a mother brown bear currently lives with her cubs,” but confirmed that it had been “an amazing process.” The anti-dolphin-midwife crowd, she said, were assholes. “Yeah, maybe,” someone responded, “but I’ll be the asshole whose baby isn’t eaten by fucking dolphins.”

  It is hard to be objective around dolphins; our emotions are entangled from the moment we see them. Regardless of how spiritually salving it feels to hang out with them, these are undeniably large, professional predators who were, at this moment, supposed to be resting up for a long night of hunting. Their survival depends on their ability to take down the wiliest prey, in rough and roiling conditions that could pit them, at any moment, against razor-toothed sharks. Into this equation comes a batch of humans wanting to…commune. Was it equally awesome for them to be around us? I hoped so—but I was far from certain.

  Afternoon was coming on and a shiver of wind had kicked up, so I swam back to the boat. Oce
an was on deck, wrapped in a flowy cover-up decorated with vivid Pucci swirls. I stripped off my wetsuit and rinsed under a warm hose; soon the others were climbing out too. Jan pulled up the ladder and Kit started the engines to return to the harbor. On the way back we ate cookies and talked about transcendence. “People are evolving,” Ocean said, contentedly. “It’s just explosive right now. We’re learning so much, so fast.” Her hair whipped around in front of her face; the clouds reflected in her polarized sunglasses. We are multidimensional beings. But if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.”

  If the New Age world has adopted dolphins as its totem animal, anointing them finned avatars of higher consciousness, revered creatures whose presence speaks of deeper meaning, it should be acknowledged that other, older groups arrived at this conclusion first. At least fifteen thousand years ago California’s earliest inhabitants, the Native Americans of the Chumash nation, referred to themselves as “the Dolphin People.” Their history spelled it out concisely: This tribe was not merely friendly to dolphins; they considered the dolphins to be their direct relatives. The Pacific Ocean was not just the monumental vista they gazed at from their villages; it was their ancestral home. The Chumash were hunters and gatherers, renowned for their weaving and bead-making skills, their prowess with agile, redwood-planked canoes called tomols, their peaceful, resourceful ways—and they were also full-on marine mystics.