News Releases

Copyright 2006 by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm

By Mike Parfit

I have no eloquence, no pretty words, no joy. But I have things to tell you, about beauty and blame.

Suzanne and I attended the Mowachaht/Muchalaht memorial ceremony on Monday. It was good. In addition to the members of the band with whom we share love and affection for this kakawin they called Tsu'xiit, the memorial was attended by Greg Rusel and Ed Thorburn, the fisheries officers who had spent so much time with Luna, and who had tried to lead him to the pen against the wishes of the band. There were handshakes between DFO and First Nation members. Ed knew Luna almost the very beginning, in late 2001, and though Ed's face did not betray him during that service, as ours did, we know his pain is huge. We can only hope that the ceremony brought him some kind of balm with which to start healing.

For us the most beautiful and difficult time happened two days before. On Saturday afternoon Suzanne and I went out on the water with Donna Schneider, the cook on the Uchuck III. Donna was Luna’s longest friend. She saw him when he first arrived, and has loved him since.

The day was clear. The sun shone. There was no longer a storm to drive ships and barges in off the open sea. We went straight from Gold River to Mooyah Bay, the place we always have called Luna’s “familiar territory” because it has been tradition not to be specific about his location.

We stopped the boat in the middle of the junction of several passages of water, between Anderson Point and Atrevida Point, if you have a chart. When I saw Luna, I usually marked his approximate locations on my GPS with electronic waypoints, which showed up on the GPS chart as little red flags. We stopped among many flags. We shut down the motor and drifted. We had all understood the news from Friday, and knew it was true. But our hearts did not believe it.

We sat in the boat, silent, each of us alone. Our own breath held, we waited for a breath to come from the sea.

None of us could speak. Little waves lapped on the hull. Sea lions barked, from far away on the log booms over in the southwest corner of Mooyah Bay. The boat’s motor cooled, making little ticks. They were not like the sound of echolocation. All three of us believed that Luna was going to make another miracle in his life and would do what we always called stealth whale. I think he had learned that boats that saw him coming tended to speed away, so he had developed this technique of approaching boats with a long, invisible, underwater swim. We believed he was already on his way to us, and would suddenly pop up right next to us with a blast of spray.

He did not. I looked across the expanse of water, as I have so many, many times. Luna was always elusive, except when he was completely in your face. You could look for an hour and make up your mind that he was not there, and your mind would populate with worries. Then, poof, there he was and things were OK again. Surely that would happen again. Surely.

No. It wouldn’t.

We had flowers with us. Slowly we began to throw them into the sea. They floated away behind us on the easterly breeze as we were carried west by the current. I had told a newspaper reporter that we would throw flowers and say goodbye. But we only managed the first part.

And whom shall we blame for this great loss? The heart weeps and the heart seethes, and the heart demands to exact a price from those who have caused it pain, in the vain hope that some kind of relief can be purchased by what the broken heart imagines is the more deserved pain of another.

In the press and on websites we have seen a pouring out of recrimination. We find that both terrible and understandable. We are often overwhelmed by waves of anger and desires to blame. Our pain at this loss is greater than we had ever imagined it would be, and the bursts of anger we feel are more intense than is in any way justified. In fact, I found to my dismay that I threw some of the flowers hard, as if hitting out at the water for withholding our friend.

I am afraid I know why I seek to find blame. Yesterday, in the middle of one of those spasms, while I was lashing out in my mind, I realized I was doing something really weird. Although my rational mind was simply seeking to find lessons in tragedy, my wrecked heart was doing something entirely different. It believed that if I could find out that someone had really done something wrong, I could take my grievance to some kind of a magical judge who would decree that because such injustice had been done we would get Luna back.

Grief is deep and complex, and I am afraid that sometime it will make me say something that will unnecessarily hurt someone who is also in pain over this loss. I may have already done so. If so, please forgive me. That is terrible. Because, when I look at it carefully and try to be honest, it comes down to something very hard for me to deal with. For all my anger at outside forces, I am as much at fault as anyone.

For those who aren't familiar with the last few months of Luna's life, I must explain. Last fall, after the First Nations stewardship ended when the funding ran out and the permit expired, Suzanne and I believed that Luna still needed attention. We took on providing that. We were not asked to do this by anyone. We took it on because, on the rational side of things, we believed it was inappropriate for us to be writing a book and doing a documentary about a being whose life was in danger, without attempting to help save that life. On the emotional side, we simply cared too much about Luna to watch tragedy unfold. We stepped in because we couldn’t help it.

As the weeks and months went by, the system worked out fairly simply. Our boat was too small for both of us, and we had a lot of work at home that had to get done. So Suzanne worked at home and I went out on the water. I fitted a desk where the second seat would be, so I could write while I was out there. I put a tarp over our leaky canvas roof so the computer wouldn’t drown. Then I spent days and nights on the water near Luna. Many of you have read the reports that came from this work.

One thing must be said now. You did not read about everything I did. I could not be altogether honest, because I was afraid that if I was I would be officially forbidden to continue. I will be honest now. I did not make a habit of playing with Luna, but on several occasions I led him away from problem encounters. Most of these were with fish farms. In the last few months he has caused damage and concern at those places, and when I came past and saw Luna engaged in that kind of activity, and then saw Luna come toward my boat, I did not speed away. I let him follow. Usually I then led him across the bay, then motored slowly up Zuciarte Channel toward the open ocean, to see if he would follow.

Usually, when I got into Zuciarte, Luna chose not to go any farther. Once, however, he followed me up Zuciarte to within two miles of open water, which I found hopeful. I had many daydreams about a reunion at the mouth of the Sound if he could just learn to headquarter out there instead of behind stone acoustic barriers in Mooyah. But after that one time he didn’t go that far again.

Once I did lead him to the sea. He was far out of Mooyah, around on the west side of Bligh Island. I had been looking for him for hours and was quite worried. Do you remember the photos of his recent breech? It was that day. I saw a spout and then the breech. What a relief it was! When he came down from the big jump he did stealth whale right over to me and started playing with the boat. I could see the edge of open water in the distance, and decided that I’d just leave the motor turned off. I drifted at about two knots all the way out to Yuquot. I was looking straight up at the lighthouse when he finally left and headed back into the Sound.

This told me that getting him to the sea regularly would not be hard. Unfortunately I felt that I had so pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in leading him out those two times that I did not seriously try it again. Now I wish I had done differently. But there are many wishes.

The point of all this is that I found it extraordinarily easy to get him out of troublesome situations. Although I didn’t do this very often, I knew how straightforward and effective it could be.

One of those events included an incident that occurred starting about 11 p.m. one night, in which he was out in the middle of a very active log-loading operation, and was playing around a big tug much like the one whose prop killed him.

Luna was very determined to hang out with these powerful boats. He loved the energy of their work, and he would pursue them far across the bay when they showed up. I even think that on several occasions I heard him call exactly when the first distant sounds of their engines murmured into the waters of the bay. Was he welcoming their presence? Who knows? I never worried about these big boats, because he loved them so much and because he seemed to be so agile in his movement around them. We marvelled at his precision in moving around everything in the water, including props.

I have learned from a newspaper article that the crew of the General Jackson sometimes played with Luna, and I am very concerned that people may imagine wrongly that this is why he was with that boat to begin with. I can say with certainty that it was not. It was the boat's energy that drew him. Even when no one paid attention to him all day, he would work with these boats, pushing logs, playing in the wakes, going underneath to feel energy blasting from the props. The crew did not attract him to the General Jackson; the boat did.

That's what was happening on the night I remember. Luna was having a great time in the frothy water. But what concerned me in the case of the loading operation was the logs. Luna would sometimes show up underneath the area where cranes were picking up logs and hoisting them into the barge, and I knew that Luna would not be able to get out of the way if a log fell from a crane. So, when Luna zipped over to my boat shortly after midnight, I thought, "I'm going to get him out of here." I motored slowly away and he followed. I took him all the way out into the middle of the junction of passages opposite Anderson Point. He didn’t go back to the tug until it was towing the barge away and there were no more logs to fall from the sky.

The point of all this is that I know I might have been able to head off the accident that killed him. After all, I was the guy who had taken on keeping him safe. I knew how to do it, and had done it before, and was concerned about the risks. And I had made a commitment to our own hopes for Luna. I had also made at least a moral commitment to all of you who have read our reports and had your own hopes for a long life for this boisterous sweetheart whom Lisa Larsson, in her grief, calls our brave little whale. Though I was constrained by law from doing all that I wanted to do for Luna, I had promised that I would be around to give Luna help when he needed it, and was willing to bend the law when necessary to get that job done. I was the one on watch.

But on the day that mattered, I wasn’t there. I had tied up the boat and had gone down to our home near Victoria for a few days. There were things we had to get done at home and I thought it was going to be more important to be around all the time later in the season. There are few sadder words to me right now than these: I wasn’t there.

So I am as much to blame as anyone. What was happening elsewhere in the Luna world at the time was OK and hopeful. DFO was talking to both the First Nations and the Gold River community about plans to take care of Luna during the summer. Our own proposals and those of several others were still on the table and we had indications that some successful combination of approaches would have been undertaken. So the process was working, though slowly.

What happened was not a consequence of big things. It was a fluke, an accident. In that case, only individuals who might have prevented it are to blame. The skipper and crew of the tug are not in that category, because they could have done nothing anyway. Again and again I've seen how close Luna goes to props. The crew could not have kept him away. But I do fit the category. He could have been with me instead.

Many friends have assured me that I should not take blame. And I know that in many ways, this kind of guilt is self-absorbed and is a distorted form of vanity. To imagine that I, above others, had the wisdom and power to have prevented this catastrophe is, in fact, claiming more competence than in fact I had. But the bottom line for my heart is that I will never get over these what ifs.

I think that in learning to accept whatever blame is legitimately mine, and in shedding the vanity of taking on too much, I find that I cannot escape my pain by laying blame on others. The reality of this tragedy is that it was a specific event, an accident, which had no direct cause in policy or negligence. It could have happened anywhere at any time, even after a reunion. I can absorb some of the blame, because it indeed happened on my watch. Beyond that, blame is just guesswork and slander and unworthy of the character of the loved one we have lost.

We can surely seek lessons, as Fred Felleman has done so calmly in his essay. And we have to accept that we all share responsibility here. We all cared, but we failed to find agreement, and we failed to learn what Luna really needed. We just failed. But we have to accept also that one of the costs of freedom is risk, and Luna was free and took risks. Could we have lessened those risks? Perhaps. But wherever he was we could not have eliminated them, even by taking away his freedom, where a different set of risks would have come into play. You can lock your child in the bedroom away from fast cars, but then he dies of loneliness or the flu you bring him.

I'm sure assessments will be made. But after we're done with crying and guilt and anger and lessons, none of which will solve our sorrow, we can get on with the more important stuff: remembering one who will always be good and beautiful and utterly blameless: Luna.

On Saturday afternoon at just about sunset, Suzanne, Donna, and I threw our last flowers on the water. We were gentle with the last ones. They all drifted away, and we could no longer see them. The moon began to gather strength in the darkening sky. We had flung flowers, but none of us felt closure. We still expected stealth whale. We always will expect him, on whatever water, and I am sure he will come to us like that in our dreams, a breath from the sea to give us back our joy.

Thank you for reading our words here from time to time, and for loving this whale. We must ask one another for forgiveness, then get on with living. But please, always remember the brave little whale we knew as L-98, Luna, and Tsu’xiit. Think of him flinging himself from the water in that exuberance of life that he always seemed to have, and making a splash you could hear all the way across the bay, and around the world. What a survivor he was! Bereft, solitary, inexperienced, desperately young, he nevertheless forged a worthy life. We will remember that for a very long time. May we be worthy of him.

Mike Parfit
Gold River