The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Two autumns ago I was rowing offshore from my trail down to the beach in my little rowboat. My favorite crabbing spot is about a quarter mile out where my pots get dropped 75 feet or so. It was a sunny afternoon, nobody on the water as far as I could see, the Sound flat as glass, the world quiet except for my homemade oars touching the water each stroke. My perfect oyster.

When the water is that still, you can hear a long ways the distinctive whoosh of a whale expelling air through a blowhole, and sure enough, just off my bow another few hundred yards, I could see the killer whales moving north in a slow procession, occasionally breaching, their black and white coloration appearing and reappearing. In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve only seen orcas rarely. The grey whales are pretty common, but not the killers. So I just sat back for awhile and enjoyed the show.

This year the alarms have been sounding that the pods are diminished to the point of potential extinction. Well, duh. The resident orcas are down to under one hundred and the sad sight of one mother carrying her dead baby on her nose for day after day captured the hearts of even the hardest hearted. So that lately we’re hearing demands to breach the dams back as far as the Snake River in Idaho and to clean up the Sound and to widen the culverts on the spawning streams. To save the Orca! To save the killer whales!

The orcas are the latest spotted owl. Their habitat has been despoiled, their food supply has been overharvested, their spawning grounds have been silted over and closed off. Yeah, they’re in trouble. So are the salmon. So are the sharks. So are the bottom fish. So are most everything out there in the Puget Sound basin, my Dungeness crabs included.

So are we. We’re not going to breach any damns on the Columbia or the Snake Rivers. We’re not going to save the whales. We waited too long. We overfished our waters, we clogged our streams, we clearcut down to the rivers’ edge, we didn’t give a damn until it was too late. Way of the world. We’ll drill the Arctic, we’ll dredge the sea, we’ll mine the National Parks, we’ll cut the redwoods. There are always people, folks with power and money and a greed that has no bounds, who will justify it. They’ll say that global warming is a hoax, that the earth is theirs to plunder, that we need the minerals, the oil, the hydro-electric, the fish and all the rest.

The orcas are up against some bad odds. What we don’t seem to realize is we’re the orcas.

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