Grayson Read Online Free PDF Page B

expanding the possibilities of what could happen. It was very much like actors improvising: If they work together, stay in the moment, respond to one another in a positive way, they keep their skit going, moving forward,but as soon as someone puts forth something negative, the improvisation shuts down.
    I needed to improvise, to stay in the moment, to remain positive, because I thought the baby whale would pick up on my energy. Maybe that’s how he found me in the first place.
    Steve understood this. He said, “The baby’s mother has to be searching for him. She’s probably calling him right now. A whale’s vocalizations travel great distances under the water. She may be calling out his name, if whales have names. And I bet she’s very worried.”
    “Do you think we’ll be able to see her if she’s in the area? How big do you think she’ll be?” I asked.
    “If she’s nearby we’ll see her. Male whales average thirty-five to forty-five feet long. Females are a few feet longer and they weigh between twenty and thirty-five tons.
    “I think you should swim back to the jetty,” Steve suggested. “That’s probably where he lost her. Try swimming. He might follow you, like a puppy.”
    The baby whale was swimming near the pier pilings. Even though I was trying to keep the negativethoughts at bay, I didn’t want to follow him under the pier. I didn’t like swimming into the shadows. There were all sorts of sinister things under the pier, things that liked to reach out and grab you.
    There was always fishing line, which often got tangled around the pilings, stretching across from one to another. The fishing line was invisible, so when I swam between the pilings, I could get tangled up in it. This freaked me out, especially when I felt an incoming wave. I knew that if I didn’t get free of the lines the wave would smash me against the rough, dark brown wooden pilings, which were covered with white, razor-sharp barnacles and purple and black mussels. Both could shred the skin like a cheese grater.
    Being under the pier made me feel anxious. The old fishing lines often had rusty hooks dangling right at face level. Worse than that was the colony of pier crabs that scurried sideways on the pilings over the barnacles and mussels with their arms stretched out, waving back and forth over their heads, ready to pinch anyone who got too close. Once a friend told me that a pier crab had pinched him. I didn’t want to have a similar experience.
    More than that, it took considerable skill to maneuver through the pier. There were five rows of pilings in some sections and four rows in others. In some cases it was better to go straight through the pier right between the pilings; in other cases, it was better to swim through on a diagonal. When a wave hit, it didn’t matter which way you went. The key was to make it through without being rammed into a piling and really getting hurt.
    When I saw the baby whale swimming toward the pier, I wanted to yell out to him, Don’t swim there!
    But he had no fear. Instead, he threaded his way through the pier, increasing his exposure time and possible danger.
    But he made it through without a snag, and so I followed, riding a wave through the pier as he had done. And I laughed. It was so much fun. The more I tried, the more I could do, and if I listened and watched, I knew I could learn a lot from the whale.
    Glancing back, I noticed a dark navy line of water paralleling the beach. The wave was building, increasing in height as the bottom of it hit the ocean floor. The wave hit the pier with so much force it shook.
    The wave grew to five feet, caught the baby whale, suspended him in the air, and propelled him toward the beach like a flying log.
    All I could see was the breaking back of the wave. And again I wanted to warn him: Watch out for that wave or it will beach you. You have to swim fast to get outside the break.
    But the whale simply dropped his fluke, so he was vertical in the water,