PUBLICATIONS Slow Rolls in the Fog

Slow Rolls in the Fog An excerpt from Spirits of the Coast: Orcas in Science, Art and History

By ‘Cúagilákv Jess Housty

Once when I was a little girl I was in a skiff with my father. The vessel reminded me of a piece of driftwood: curved, light, and somehow a little impermanent.

As we puttered slowly down the channel, a pod of orcas appeared. It was as though they’d manifested out of the dense fog, and although they overtook us quickly, their pace seemed to slow to match their curiosity. They surfaced and dove too quickly to count them all; it was orcas all the way down. They performed lazy rolls, the calves clumsy as they practised their spyhopping. Occasionally an adult would breach, with the elegance of a salmon and the enormous power of rolling thunder.

Their clicks and cries made the skiff shake, and their vocalizations vibrated up into my bones. The hull of the boat was the most fragile of liminal spaces dividing me from the whales, and the closeness made me feel a sense of deep safety—like the ocean was a womb and they were the pulse of my mother, beating all around me.

They paced us for awhile, the females and their calves closest to the boat and the rest of the pod radiating outward. The dorsal fins that cut the surface were dark against the backdrop of the ocean, and darker against the fog. And there we were, my father and I, cupped in the curve of our little skiff with the barrier between ocean and sky dissolving all around us. Gradually, the pod carried on ahead of us. And the last we saw was a magnificent bull whose massive head plowed straight toward our boat, turning into a slow dive so close to us that the top of his dorsal fin was within arm’s reach just before he disappeared beneath the hull.

I thought I would feel bereft in that moment; instead, I felt full. And to this day, nearly three decades later, that moment is what slips into my mind when I think of the definition of prayer.

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