It was around 1977-78, I was living in the Hudson Valley in New York in a bad relationship.  The man in question was at work one Saturday and I was reading an article in The New Yorker that captured my imagination.  It was all about whales.  Being a midwestern girl, it was all news to me.  I knew they were mammals, I knew the story of Jonah and that was about the extent of it.   I didn’t know about baleen and that through the baleen these monstrous creatures lived on teeny tiny ocean krill (for that matter I didn’t know what ‘krill’ was).  I didn’t know there were so many different species of whales.  I didn’t know that blue whales are the biggest creatures that ever lived, bigger than dinosaurs even.   I didn’t know that some species had been hunted to near extinction.   I didn’t know they communicate with each other.

The article’s focus was a first person account of how the author had done something that was very new and rare at the time.   In New England, off Cape Cod, there was a company that took people out whale watching.   This was the coolest thing I could possibly imagine and inspired me to learn more.  I was in a soul-sucking situation and I went to the library and pulled out books on whales, one of which was encyclopedic.  I bought some paper and drawing pencils.  I started to draw whales from the pictures in the book.  I was mesmerized and took notes on details about them.  No, I don’t have them anymore.  I know.  Sometimes you can throw away the wrong stuff in a purge.

Not long after we went to New York City and visited the Natural History Museum.  I went directly to the ocean wildlife section – I wanted to see a model of a blue whale if they had one.  The exhibit room was off the main hallway, you could see the exhibit through a wall of glass doors  that led to a stairway down into the room.  I meandered around – there was a model of an Orca “killer” whale.  Wow, that’s pretty big.  There were other models of other critters that I don’t really recall.

I was disappointed that there was not a model of a blue whale.  I mean, there are models of dinosaurs, how much bigger could a blue whale be?  When I’d had my fill and accepted that I would not see a blue whale this day, I started to walk up the flight of stairs. I turned around to scan the room one more time.  No, nothing to see here.  As I turned back to continue my trudge up the stairs, out of the corner of my eye up near the ceiling, I saw something that looked like the baleen I had been drawing at home.  I turned again to face the room and as I looked up, I realized that baleen was connected to a model that hung from the ceiling and which nearly spanned the entire room, length and width.   It was so huge I had not even noticed it – it was as if it were part of the ceiling.  I stood there in awe and then made my way back down the stairs and spent a good amount of time (it took that long) looking at the model from every conceivable angle.  From that moment on, to see a blue whale was on what we now popularly refer to as my “bucket list.”

I did one thing in New York that astonished the people I hung with (it was generally an entire circle of bad relationships, and they didn’t have a lot of respect for my intelligence and certainly not for the part of the country from which I hailed) – the midwestern girl convinced them that going whale watching would be a great thing to do.  I organized a trip to Cape Cod – got the whale watching reservations, picked out and reserved a hotel for about eight of us, bought the Dramamine and told them what they would need to bring for the boat.   We saw fin whales and all agreed it was an amazing experience.  I didn’t stick around much after that.  I was outta there…

These days whale watching is as common as deep sea fishing.  All the years I lived in San Francisco I never got out to do it again.  Last summer Al and I went to Alaska and had the joy of watching a young whale breach – not once, but several times.  At the time I asked my silly self why I had not gone out again when it was right in my backyard.  I vowed I would rectify that situation.

Not long afterwards we got the word that we were moving.   I now live approximately 15 minutes from Dana Point, CA hopping off spot for Dana Point Wharf Whale Watching and today I can scratch something off my bucket list.  I saw a blue whale.  I saw him a lot.  The captain of the boat was informative and respectful.  The whale would come up, take three or four breaths and disappear.  We would wait patiently for ten minutes or so and he would come up to greet us again.  There was a marine layer and it was evening, so he looked gray but one thing was certain – he was mammoth.  It took him forever to rise out of the water and take the breath and then arc back down.   He stayed in pretty much the same place for an hour, sometimes to our left, and to our right, then over there, now over here.   Once he was close enough that it was possible to see that he was indeed blue.  Then one time after we hadn’t seen him for awhile the captain said he’d gotten a call from another boat and somehow our whale had moved quite some distance away.  (They can tell by his unique dorsal fin which was a bit ragged) We followed for one last glimpse and then made our way back to shore, a huge pod of dolphins eating dinner and hopping around us and playing under our boat.  This riotous group including a mama and her babe, who looked like a fish you could catch with a pole and flipped out of the water in perfect synchronicity with his mom.

When I was sitting on that saggy couch in New York, depressed and feeling trapped, I never in a million years thought that 30 some years later I would find myself living in California, out on a boat with my ever-so-wonderful husband, watching a blue whale and even more unlikely, that I would be able to do it whenever I want.  The Groupon ticket, half price, was $16.  For $32 I can scoot around and look for whales any time I want to.

Dreams really really really do come true.