The Dolphin in the Mirror Read Online Free PDF

filled in the rest. One of my earliest childhood memories is of a neighbor tidying up her yard and accidentally disturbing a nest of wild rabbits near our house. I felt it was my job to find all the baby rabbits and the mother, and take care of them. I was a born animal rescuer. Injured birds. Injured frogs. Injured animals of any kind. Little Diana of Assisi was always there to make things right.
    Later, I toyed with the idea of becoming a vet, as many kids who love animals do. I also had a talent for art, however, and so after high school I attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. Eventually, I pursued a career in theatrical set design and I began an MFA program in theater and communication at Temple University. It was then that I met, worked with, and married Stuart Firestein, the director of an experimental theater company in Philadelphia where I was a set designer for several years.
    But even as I was building theaterscapes, I had a strong pull toward science. One day, I had an epiphany under the most bizarre of circumstances. Stuart and I were participating in an actors' workshop in Poland run by the famed Polish counterculture director Jerzy Grotowski; I'd been quite honored to be invited to take part in it, especially given my limited acting experience. I found myself in a darkened warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, in the company of about two dozen actors, most of whom spoke no English. As part of an experimental exercise, we were making animal sounds in the dim building. I was thinking to myself,
This is really interesting. I can't speak to these people because I don't know their language and they don't know mine, but we are communicating with one another by making animal calls across the darkness.
I cannot explain it now, nor could I at the time, but I experienced a powerful intuition at that instant, as if a voice were saying to me,
This is not right; you have got to get back to science.
When I told Stuart, "I'm out of here, I want to work with animals," he thought I was completely crazy. *
    Crazy or not, I applied to the Speech and Communications Department at Temple University and was accepted into a PhD program in bioacoustics, a cross-disciplinary field that combines biology and acoustics. I had to scramble to take some basic science courses before I could embark on a graduate program, which I was fortunate to be able to fashion for myself around the science of analyzing animal calls, language development, symbolic behavior, animal behavior, cognitive psychology, and communication theory. I wanted to be equipped with skills to understand the communication and behavior of other minds, animal minds. But even then, dolphins were not in the picture for me. That would require one of those chance events many of us experience once in a great while, events of no great inherent significance but that have the effect of changing our lives.
    It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in the Germantown section of Philadelphia in the late winter of 1976, perfect for settling down for a couple of hours of serious reading of the
New York Times.
I was now a doctoral student in my first year of graduate school. Stuart and I were living in an old pseudo-Tudor apartment building in a lovely wooded neighborhood. Freezing winter rain was running down the mullioned windows, distorting the images of the trees outside so that they looked like part of an impressionist painting. The apartment was sparsely furnished with props from retired stage sets I had designed. I was sitting at my dark mahogany carved desk, a prop from the show
Mark Twain Tonight!
Prominently displayed in the International News section of the
Times
was an article on the killing of whales and dolphins, accompanied by a big photograph. It was as if I were somehow primed for that moment, because I read every word avidly, turned to Stuart, and said, "It's terrible that these animals are being killed off, and we know so little about them." I wrote much the same sentiment in a diary