Holding my mask against my face with my right hand and my Nikon Z7 underwater camera with my left, I stepped off the edge of the small trawler, and with a splash I found myself in a new world: blue, endless, and empty.
I’d been a professional marine wildlife photographer for almost a decade, but this trip checked a lot of “first time” boxes, and I was more nervous than I’d been in years. With only a handful of exceptions, every one of my 207 professional dives since signing with National Geographic had been from the deck of one of the many ships in the well-maintained fleet employed by their usual contractors. If you’d asked me a year ago whether I’d ever be 200 miles off the coast of Guam in a rusted fishing trawler from back when World War One was still known as The Great War, I would have asked for some of whatever you were smoking.
I like to tell people I worked for National Geographic, but the reality is I was a freelancer, and when freelancers don’t have worthwhile photos to sell for long enough, NatGeo takes you off the list. Once that happens it’s time to start looking at other lines of work. After my award winning pics of the Golden Jellyfish in Palau’s Jellyfish Lake in January 2020, I’d done nothing. Nothing NatGeo wanted, anyway. With the end of the 2021 fiscal year two months away and contractor cuts to follow, I was expecting to be on a bread line before MLK Day if I couldn’t wrap my lens around something extraordinary very soon.
Following my latest unsuccessful endeavor I found myself in this exact Guamanian saloon drowning my worries in Filipino Tubâs (six or seven at least, factoring heavily in what came next) when a retired fisherman, from Massachusetts of all places, bought me another. He’d put away quite a few himself by this point and was practically unintelligible when he mentioned his plans to head east the following dawn to follow a rumor of humpback whales migrating South toward Papua New Guinea. I have good sources for such professional opportunities and hadn’t heard anything, but desperation trumps skepticism any day of the week. I bought the next round and asked to tag along. Excited to have company he happily obliged, and I didn’t get a look at the state of his vessel until my tanks were full and my gear was piled dockside the next morning.
Six hours later the engine sounded like it would rattle its last breath any minute, and I hadn’t seen one sign of life save for my once-again drunken companion, when a titanic silver humpback erupted from the water off the starboard bow, hung silhouetted against the sun with all the glory of an angelic choir, then almost capsized our dilapidated craft when it splashed through the surface and disappeared. With an explosion of hope, I readied my camera, fins, tank, and BCD, checked my levels, zipped my suit, and followed.
When the bubbles cleared…nothing. Emptiness, except for the angled shafts of sunlight piercing and atomizing in the blue vacuum around and beneath me. Looking endlessly down, I remembered my very first open water dive years before. Standing amazed on a vast plain of sand and coral thirty feet or so beneath the ceiling of the water’s surface, it gave the strange impression of being indoors; an immense room without walls, fading into hundreds of feet of crystal clear Caribbean visibility. But now, in conditions somehow even clearer but without any frame of reference whatsoever, I struggled to process the infinite abyss below. Billowing prismatic pastels near the inverted horizon, shading down, down, down, from sunlit turquoise to cobalt to darkest navy midnight as light itself was lost to depth.
Surfacing and pushing my mask up my forehead, I squinted and shaded my eyes and found my companion on the trawler’s deck with a pair of binoculars in hand, shrugging. Resettling my mask and submerging again, I peered into the ocean distance in the direction the whale had been facing when it disappeared. I used my Nikon’s zoom and rotated in place, surveying, searching for the whale, any whale, anything at all in the universal void. Humpbacks rarely travel alone; I’d expected a pod of a dozen or more, especially with the migration distance we’re talking here, so something didn’t feel right. Wildlife photography is a game of patience, but after ten minutes of absolutely nothing I started thinking about calling it quits.
That’s when I heard it. The song of the humpback whale is one of the most energetic and complex in the world, and can often be heard from dozens of miles away, but when I turned again to find the source of this melancholy vocalization I saw an adult male cruising my way only a few hundred feet off. I kicked laterally and raised my camera trying to dramatically frame what I hoped would be my professional salvation when a deep bass reverberation - no whale noise; more a shockwave through my chest than something registering as sound - sent a ripple through the firmament around me. Through my camera’s LCD viewfinder I watched a massive black tentacle reach out of the depths, wrap around the fifty-foot whale like an octopus snaring an anchovy, and withdraw in an instant into the invisible depths. So quickly was this enormous cetacean erased from its position that a whirlpool funnel formed to fill the space left behind before quickly dissipating.
I don’t know how long I floated there utterly dumbfounded, staring unfocused into the void, unable to process what I’d seen. A moment later - seconds? An hour? - a mechanical rumble pierced my cognitive haze and I looked up to see the rotating propeller of the rusted fishing boat speeding away, leaving me floating there in the ocean vastness. Alone. Or, not.
Bewildered as I was, panic didn’t even occur to me. The engine drone faded and disappeared, and I was left in absolute silence. It may have been a kind of autopilot kicking in to fill the mental emptiness, but slowly I raised my camera and began panning around once again before looking down. From empty nebulous blue, circular definition began to materialize, hundreds, thousands of miles beneath me: a gargantuan lidless eye, wreathed in writhing black tentacles, faint around the edges, gradually coalescing as it languidly rose from the abyss.
Wide-eyed and empty, I clicked the shutter.
I stared into that abyss and the abyss stared back, long enough for the emergency oxygen indicator on my wrist to start panicking. That’s happened to me only once before, and it means I must have floated there for hours. I may not have noticed the vibration at all if that drunken asshole hadn’t come to his senses, turned around, and hauled my dead weight out of the water.
The fact that I still had that single photograph at all to present to National Geographic is thanks to a two-dollar length of braided nylon that attached my camera to my wrist. But alas, despite the extraordinary nature of my subject, “professional salvation” turned out to be no more than wishful thinking. I was out of my mind to think NatGeo might actually print it, rather than put a rush on my contract cancellation amid allegations of fraud.
I don’t dream much anymore, maybe once a month or so, and every time I do I see it again. They say nobody dreams the past, you don’t dream memories, and I think they’re right. That’s just something that happens in the movies. Every time I see that eye again, it feels like I’m somehow truly staring at it anew. Present tense. And I can’t help but feel it’s staring back.
Anyway, can I top off that Tubâ? Or are you ready to close out?