Cape May Diaries
30 - Life with dolphins
As we plan our trip to Cape May for Victorian Week 2005, we are undecided as to which whale watch trip we shall take – a new adventure for us. In the past, we always relied on chance to allow us to see the dolphins or whales from shore. This year, we want to hedge our bets a little and pay the fee that will more or less guarantee our catching a glimpse of what we consider magical beings of the sea.
Since I have no desire to swim out from shore to meet with the dolphins the way my grandfather did during his 1926 honeymoon to Cape May, the whale watch boats are our next best choice.
But do we take the route out into deep water or stick to the shadows where we might also collect a bit of local history? We won’t likely decide until we actually arrive.
We first saw the dolphins during our trip here in 1998, one of those incredible and startling moments that made us realize just what a special place Cape May was.
The dolphins and whales swam the waves for all the years prior to 1998, of course, but we simply didn’t notice. Since then, however, we kept our gazes fixed on the sea ever since.
It is as if f we lived in the times of Homer, when such sightings served as omens to the future, and indeed, we came to believe that any year we saw the creatures even from afar was foreshadowing a good year ahead.
With so much going on in our day to day living, we needed all the hope we
could muster, each year bringing us more and more terrible news. When we weren’t being assaulted by terrorists, we had hurricanes to contend with.
We were particularly desperate for hopeful signs after the attack on the World Trade Center a few weeks prior to our coming to Cape May in 2001. For the first two days, we wandered the beach with no sign, each shrinking hour to our departure leading us to ponder what our future year would hold if we did not spot something among the waves.
With less than twenty-four hours left, we just about gave up, and wandered off the beach into the bird sanctuary, stirring up the flocks of swallows that seemed to have inherited the lake and its collection of underbrush, swallows swirling around our heads, in a constant dog-fight with some imaginary air force we could not see.
We could not hide from the images of pending war. All during our trip this year, Coast Guard cadets wandered the boardwalk and Washington Mall, their uniforms stark against the Victorian backdrop. Each man and woman looking much younger than they were, making both of us realize the price a nation paid when it committed itself to military action.
Yet even items that had served as mere tourist attractions in the past took on an ominous air as we wandered. The Atlantus, that sunken World War I concrete ship, Jesse Rosenfeld, a Baltimore businessman, had brought to the Cape to serve as a steamboat landing, now seemed the victim of war, reminding us that these shores had been subject to threats before. World War Two, in fact, has seen numerous ships sunk off the Atlantic coast, many within eye sight of shore bound people like us.
When in a desperate last attempt to catch sight of the more peaceful residents of the sea, we made our way back to the beach, the gun emplacement situated a few hundred yards from the light house brought back the fear of war, made worse by the decrepit condition of the defense installation: its concrete sides green with algae, its gun hole missing the important elements that would ward off danger for us.
It was this image that struck us when we stood upon the hump of sand that
separated the bird preserve from the beach, as if like the rest of the country, we stood on the brink of two worlds: past and present, peaceful and violent.
News headlines promised a future full of violence, yet we had little choice but o step off onto that side, regardless of the uncertainty.
Just at that moment, the dolphins appeared, first one, then another: dark shapes among the dark waves where German U-boats once sank ships. For years, I had equated dolphins with angels or at least angelic-like qualities, caught up in that Flipper TV show mentality that emphasized their good nature.
The first time I saw them for real, they seemed more alien – as if they had just stepped out of a Steven Spielberg film, almost as ominous as
terrorists in their ability to slip passed us without our notice, like
submarines slipping beneath our defenses with the potential to do us harm.
This perception faded with subsequent sightings until on this day in 2001, when we felt at our worst, the dolphin jumped out of the waves to dance on their tails, providing us with entertainment we could not have found outside the clown troupes of a roving circus.
They were the creatures that had drawn my grandfather out of the arms of his newly-wedded wife and made him swim the hundred yards out into the waves to be with them.
This collection pranced among the waves, as playful as kittens, looking every bit the way media had portrayed Dolphins when I was young.
Although too far out from shore for us to hear them, I knew from an interview I had done with someone at a dolphin intelligence research project at the University of Hawaii's Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, that Dolphins talk, and when they are happy they tell you through various noises such as clicks and whistles.
Part of the reason for our taking the whale watch boat this year is to hear the dolphins if possible – and perhaps after a year that has hit us with names like Katrina and Rita – we might hear clicks and whistles indicating a more positive New Year.