The Lost Baby Whale

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a brief talk given by a woman who, as a teen girl, happened to be swimming in the southern California ocean, when she was felt a mysterious presence in the water below her: too large to be a dolphin. Too large, even, to be a shark.

It was a baby whale. An eighteen foot baby whale. And it was following her. The baby whale, you see, had lost his mother, and was clinging to the only friendly body in the water he could find.

You can't negotiate with a baby whale who has decided to follow you. As with a human baby, you either do what it wants... or it dies.

The girl had a choice. She could return to shore, whereupon the baby whale would follow her, beach itself, and rot in the sun. Or she could stay in the water and help the baby whale find his mother.

No choice at all, really. Fortunately for the whale, this girl happened to be an Olympic swimmer.

I won't spoil the ending (you can read the book yourself), but that single moment, thrust upon her by staggering coincidence and natural process, changed the girl's life forever.

She went on to swim the Bering Strait as a gesture of friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and was namechecked by Gorbachev in a speech commemorating the INF missile treaty. She also was the first person to swim in Anarctica, escorted by a group of friendly penguins.

The woman made it clear that had it not been for the baby whale, whom she named Grayson, her life would have been entirely different. What she thought of as possible in her life was redefined by an utterly singular and strange moment.