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Whale TalesThe Gray Whales of San Ignacio Lagoon |
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A Page From Heather’s Baja JournalBy Heather SomersThe travelers:
Here we are, finally in repose. After 1500 miles of dusty, bumpy roads, hypothetical situation stories, word association games, intimate recounts of intimate encounters, and the broken silences while the CD player offers a five second delay over every single pothole on the trans-peninsular highway and the mudflat trail out here, the cowgirls are finally chilling. We have met Santo Maldo and our voyage has been elevated. Divine intervention led us in the dark to Campo Cortez, and we are full bellied at last with fresh fish tacos and outstanding quality coffee and our minds float easily like the egrets in the estuary beside us.
Idling in the middle of the mouth of the Laguna, a string of black dots appeared on the eastern shoreline. First dozens. Then hundreds. And then within the course of minutes, a |
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Jan 9, 2003 Campo Cortez Laguna San Ignacio, Baja California Day 7
The whales put us in quite a place yesterday. Like some deeply strange movie, we were in the sci-fi life of another planet. The magnificent silver, white, black, blue arching spines of their perfectly prehistoric backs dancing around us in the water. We were all sensing the courtship dance~that perhaps these were not yet mothers and children, but parents-to-be, choosing each other, mating and winding around one another in a most blessed ceremony. Dolphins emerged in every direction on the horizon, silver-black in the shining waters of this Pacific Lagoon. We would simply go, stop, wait, and this swirl of dreamlike beauty would arise.
Moments waiting were not anxious, but still and soft and sun-kissed as we stared at the craggy inland mountains of Baja's volcanic spine, or the metallic surface of the salt wonderland broken by tiny silver fish, long squiggly fish, diving terns. Then they came. 
brigade, a battalion, a legion of thousands and thousands of cormorants were moving in infinite droves over the water. Like ribbons in the breeze, the line would pick up in a seemingly random procession, fly higher, guiding those next in line up in perfect alternation, then at some other incalculable point, drop back down to the water level, creating an undulating string of life winding and waving like celebratory streamers over this unparalleled performance below; the dance of love performed by some of earth's largest mammals. We are humbled witnesses.