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Appreciating the Whale: Part II
On the Road with National Geographic In January 1996, I returned to the Silver Bank with some new expedition members and the fun really started. I knew right away that Mike deGruy and I were going to get along as we both stifled laughter observing the rest of the National Geographic Explorer film crew trying to cope with seasickness. Mike is one of the world's top nature cameramen both above and below water. And he's spent his fair share of time bouncing around boats in various ends of the earth. He even had a Pacific reef shark try to chew off his arm back in the 1970s leaving enough scars to win any bar room contest of diver stories. So I didn't expect the ten-foot seas we were battling today to bother him too much. But Boyd Matson, the show's host and resident talking head, was a bit less experienced. When he boarded the expedition vessel in Grand Turk at 5:00 AM that morning, I had already placed him under "fashion arrest" for carrying more that fifty pounds of hair care products in his luggage. Boyd had hosted the National Geographic Explorer series for about a year then since taking over from actor Robert Urich and he's got to be one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. He kind of looks like a Nordic cross between Robert Redford and Huck Finn with a tousled head of blond hair right out of the J. Crew catalog. For a balding guy like me, it was disgusting. Right now he was wiping the fruits of his last "heave ho" out of that million-dollar hairdo and working on his best thousand-yard stare while silently praying that the damn boat would stop rocking. Lined up next to him in white-knuckled angst were producer Claire Vande Polder and sound... More »
Appreciating The Whale: Part I
There's been plenty written about the natural history and scientific behavior of whales, but I wanted to share some far more personal accounts of whale encounters viewed from the long standing relationships that I have been lucky enough to experience over the course of five decades. Since I am neither a scientist, mammalogist, shrill left-wing activist, nor a Norwegian harpooner, my sagas with whales are simply those of the lay-person who had the extraordinary good fortune to share the wild with some of God's greatest creatures and accept them on their own terms. I made mistakes, blundered occasionally, scared myself silly a few times, but generally reached a rare understanding and appreciation of whales that could only be attained through repeated contact since early childhood and a stubborn nature that drove me to form my own conclusions about whale behavior and how to interact with the leviathans. Over the years, my photo images would record behavior previously undescribed or misunderstood by huffy science professionals and help open some minds that had frequently remained closed to observations by those outside of academia. And, as you'll see, I had a bit of fun doing along the way. [caption id="attachment_596" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Appreciatiing the Whale -- photos c by Bret Gilliam"][/caption] The Moby Dick Influence If you're in my age group (born in 1951), the earliest impression of whales was probably some version of Melville's classic Moby Dick (no, not the porn version, you degenerates). I read the book as a child in grade school in spite of the confounding literary style and confused biblical references that soared over the head of nine-year-old who only was interested in the exciting whale parts. Fueled by my own visions of the novel, my parents consented to take me to visit the historic Mystic Seaport where much of the "New Bedford"... More »
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