It all started with orcas

Day one of the trip, and I got to see them. Four of them. A mother, “Chunky,” and her three sons. Briggs transient orcas (meaning of the mammal-eating variety of orca ecotype that frequent the Salish Sea). Best of all, I got to see them with my son and my parents. My parents, who, for all of the mind-blowing adventures they have experienced in their lives (that’s for another blog), for having spent most of their lives living along the waters of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, had never been whale watching. And the importance of orcas to me in this adventure cannot be overstated. I’ll get to that later and sporadically in my blogging, but not all at once.

Briggs transient orcas near the San Juan Islands.

Today was beautiful for many other reasons as well. I woke to a view that will take my breath away every morning that I wake to it, no matter how many times that I do: the view from my parents’ home. This was the first time I had visited their home since they moved into this house. Although I was born in Seattle, we had since moved around the Northwest, Southwest, and Alaska, and in my adulthood, I had wound up on all corners of this diverse country. I suppose that the most realistic answer to “where are you from?” for me must be, still, Seattle.

The view from my parents’ home on Whidbey Island, overlooking the Salish Sea.

The beauty of the Pacific Northwest was never lost on me, but prior to this trip, I had not spent time on Whidbey Island. Finding myself here now, back on the Salish Sea, I still feel a strange kind of homecoming. My earliest memory involves being on a nature trail with my mother while attending a family reunion in Vancouver, BC, when I was a toddler (okay, there is a slight discrepancy here about my age at the time to be addressed later, but for now lets just say that sometimes the magnitude of the memory distorts the timeline, doesn’t it, Dali?). We came to a cliff overlooking a cove, in which we saw…you guessed it…orcas. They were surfacing, but also turning sideways in the shallow water and rubbing their sides against the pebbles on the beach, a behavior that Southern Residents have been known to engage in to exfoliate their skin. This memory is so powerfully seared into my senses that I can visualize every detail, and it may be part of why I became absolutely obsessed with orcas thereafter as a kid.

Am I talking about orcas again?

Here’s the thing. I am on this journey to study the powerful connection between women and the sea. Orcas are the embodiment of oceanic feminisim. They are matriarchal societies led by grandmothers; they are one of only four other species of animal on earth besides humans that experience menopause to facilitate the role of grandmothers in leadership (the other three are also cetaceans). They normalize single motherhood; they mate in passing, and offspring stay with their mothers their entire lives. And don’t even get me started on how they are leading the revolution against the oligarchy with the yacht shenanigans off of Spain.

Me, my son Jack, and my mom at Deception Pass, Washington.

I digress.

The rest of the day continued to be lovely. Between visiting downtown Coupeville and driving over the Deception Pass Bridge, I got to feel how the flora and fauna of the Pacific differ from the Atlantic coasts. The massive green ferns. The softness of the lighter green moss. The abundance of sea stars at low tide, which Jack delighted in observing on the pilings. The smell of the kelp, a slightly different species of brown algae from the sugar kelp I had just encountered a few weeks before in Maine.

Biodiversity is splendid and intricate and so powerfully precise.

Jack on the wharf in Coupeville, WA.

In downtown Coupeville on Penn Cove.