Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul by Jack Canfield Read Free Book Online

around the world. Many people wanted to help, and so did I.
    I had been introduced to Keiko through the Mexican tourism authority at Keiko’s residence at the Reino Aventura Park in Mexico City. The minute I leaned over the holding tank and saw the five-ton animal, I knew I had to do something . . . quick. His flippers and flukes were covered with skin growths, and he was thousands of pounds underweight. It sounds kind of strange, but Keiko and I bonded. As I scratched him I said that I would return and do everything I could to make sure he was returned to his native waters off Iceland.
    In exchange for his release, I agreed to paint a giant public mural of Keiko swimming free with his family at the entrance to the park. A few months after the mural was completed, Keiko was moved to a larger, temporary home at the Oregon Coast Aquarium to recuperate and prepare for his return to Iceland. Eventually, he gained weight and learned how to catch live fish. He was ready to be flown back to the cool waters of his northern home. Millions of children who had raised nickels and dimes to save Keiko were now keeping their fingers crossed, hoping that Keiko would soon be reunited with his orca family in the wild.
    The transition took some time. Keiko continued to undergo rehabilitation in a special baypen near Iceland’s Westman Islands and eventually began to take more interest in his natural environment. For the first two years, he seemed content to travel back and forth between his pen and the wild ocean, not quite certain about what to do with the strange underwater wilderness to which he had been returned. There was certainly nothing human about it, and for most of his life, that was all he had known. Then, during a training rendezvous with a small pod of orcas at the southernmost tip of the Westmans, Keiko bolted toward open sea. This time, however, he didn’t turn back. A satellite transmitter indicated later that he was headed for Norway and soon had taken up an active, healthy residence in Taknes Bay. Suddenly, for the first time since his capture more than twenty-two years ago, Keiko was not in a captive facility or a netted pen. His decisions were now guided by instinct and his innate orca intelligence— an intelligence that we have yet to fully comprehend.
    No one can say for certain what the future holds for this special whale whose journey has taken him so far. But I, like millions of others, am hoping that after all these years of captivity, he can adapt and thrive in the wild and become truly free—not in the way of some Hollywood script—but as nature intended from the very beginning.
    Wyland

“Matthew, did we agree to adopt a whale?”

    © The New Yorker Collection 1993 J.B. Handelsman from cartoonbank.com . All Rights Reserved.

Angus
    I t is an old dream: To travel on the back of a benevolent sea beast down to some secret underwater garden.
    Stephen Harrigan
    In June 1999, I was filming California sea lions at a rookery on Los Islotes in the Sea of Cortez with my friend and fellow marine biologist Seth Schulberg. Every day we took the scenic road out of La Paz, Mexico, past the fuming harbor of Pichilingue to the playa beyond, where we met our skipper, an Antonio Banderas look-alike named Jose Antonio. We began a session of calisthenics that consisted of passing two tons of cameras, dive gear and gas tanks from the car to the boat. From there we bounded through the Canal de San Lorenzo in our equipment-laden panga, toward the breathtaking desert island bluffs of Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida, until the foghorn of sea lions and their bleating, shivering pups announced the presence of Los Islotes.
    The Mexican government had granted us permission to film, provided that we worked sensitively and did not cause undue disturbance. I had stationed myself in the water next to a huge, angular boulder and was getting good footage of the big dominant sea lion bulls when a four-thousand-pound male elephant seal appeared