This Is This

Son, 5, is learning about whales and dolphins in school, like I said back there.

He has been asked by his teacher to bring in from home any videos of whales or dolphins. Not only do I have film of both, but I have home movies that I made.

So last night, I dug out our camcorder tapes of the boat trip in Florida, featuring the playful antics of a pod of bottlenose dolphins leaping in the wake of our boat for a good 15 minutes. Even better, Son can be seen and heard calling out the them before they jump. His class is going to love this. They leap from the Gulf of Mexico every time he shouts to them. They seem to almost obey his command. This is a moment. This should win the kindergarten equivalent of the Grammies - the Peewees, or something. Anyway, I’m the about to be the best dad in the world, or so he will tell his class in the “none of this would have happened without…” speech when they tell him how cool he is. I transfer a few minutes from the camcorder onto videotape.

It’s time to break out the big guns. To follow it with the whales. The Pulp Fiction to my Reservoir Dogs. Seward, Alaska, 1999. The big adventure. The last fandango before the kids were born. The exact spot in the North Pacific where the Exxon Valdez disaster happened, ten years ago that week. The millions spent on cleaning it up the oil had paid off and the whales were back.

I fast forward past the eagles and otter, past the glacier and the sealions to the deep water. I catch a plume of water and there she blows. I hit play and and boat cuts her engines. Two humpback whales breach the water in the right hand side of the frame. They seem to move in slow motion, like beauty does. “Holy Shit! Look!” says Wife. Bear in mind this film is mean for my son’s five year old class.

I scan forward to the next bit, when the whales are right up alongside us. They are as big as the boat and they surface, flapping fins the size of canoes. There is silence in the awe of their powerful tenderness. “Bloody hell!” I yelp, “They’re fucking huge!”

And so it continues that every time these majestic beasts emerge, my wife or I are swearing like the sailors that we were. No records remain of that fateful voyage, not at least until my son starts swearing himself. So his class will miss out on the video of the whales, all because mummy and daddy couldn’t control their potty mouths. They would have learned about a lot more than whales if he had shown that.

Still, the dolphins were good. Voiceover work, anyone?

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