O Rare Leviathan

They sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent....
—D.H. LAWRENCE
Whales Weep Not

First it seems you have lowered yourself into a bucket of absurdly blue paint. The clear Hawaiian sea absorbs all other color. You sense depth only because shafts of sunlight, refracted by the surface, converge on a point uncomfortably far below. The blue is so uniform in all directions except up that you can see perfectly well that there is nothing to see.

Then comes an outrider, a dolphin, moving swiftly, its body as mottled as marble. It turns its head and fixes you with a pulse of clicks. You are echo-located. As the dolphin passes, it knows the number of your ribs, the churning of your heart.

A great quadrant of the sea darkens and divides into shapes, and you have no time to wonder whether whales are oversentimentalized, because here they come, at alarming speed. The leading-animal, a female, has a second dolphin riding the pressure wave ahead of her jaw. The nine-foot dolphin seems a guppy about to be inhaled by a salmon.

The whale is powerfully undulant and—you see as she nears—pleated and knobby. Beneath her, within a protective circle made by her 15-foot pectoral fins, glides a calf a third her length. Those two are followed by a running battle. Four adult male whales, one with white pectorals that flash turquoise through the depths, lunge and collide, arch and bash heads. The sea is filled with otherworldly squeals, chuffs and wails. Huge mushrooms of bubbles are sent into spirals by the beating of the great tails. The ridges down the pursuing whales' spines have been scraped raw.

Because their sounds are born deep within 80,000-pound bodies, and because you can't tell sound direction underwater, the whales' exclamations seem to come from far away and all around. The impression is of being in a vast room ringing with significance, the whole of it ungrasped.

These leviathans are not waiting around to be deciphered. In the 15 seconds before they are beyond the sphere of your vision, the whales fill the blue and define its space. They are ships in flight, genuinely extraterrestrial. They might as well have rows of winking lights. You break the surface, at once awestruck and voracious, wild to know what you have seen.

You climb—bug-eyed, shivering, yipping—back aboard the 15-foot Zodiac inflatable boat used by Deborah Glockner-Ferrari, who, assisted by her husband, Mark Ferrari, is studying the distribution, reproduction and behavior of these humpback whales. For 14 years Glockner-Ferrari has been out among them with camera, notebook and tape recorder during the four months of the year that the whales gather off Lahaina, Maui.

"That's an active group," says Ferrari, employing the rather mild term for males fighting for dominance while accompanying a female about to enter estrus. "Those males at the back are having semifinals to see who gets a title shot at the escort male, the one in the prime position closest to the female." As you sit on the warm rubber gunwale of the boat and shed fins, mask and snorkel, you see that the horizon is bounded by the islands of Molokai, Lanai and the whale's-back profile of Kahoolawe. The mountainous bulk of Maui behind you shields these waters from the northeasterly trade winds.

That's why the town of Lahaina—which grew up as a port for 19th-century whalers—is here. That's why the whales are here. Newborn humpbacks, though 14 feet long and weighing two tons, are born with only a small amount of insulating blubber, so they must be introduced to their world in a warm, protected sea, or so the Ferraris speculate.