The call of the spotted whale, a tale for lockdown times

This is a story of spotted whales, Yankee whalers, and stellar dogs. Of secret places that carry melodious names and shelter abandoned old mansions. It portrays what I remember, but that I cannot guarantee all is true. It describes how, when one wanders looking for a compass, destiny places you, in the precise instant and without warning, at the right beach and at the right time.

It´s about gray whales, mothers and their babies that chose, for mysterious reasons, not to return to their ancestral calving lagoons in the Sea of Cortez. And it’s about the hidden places that helped save those magnificent leviathans after they were butchered to the brink of extinction by whalers in Baja California. Let me tell you the story.

Of all the marine mammals, the gray whale may be the one that has elicited most interest among the self-proclaimed sapiens. It is one of the most primitive living whales, and the only one that feeds by sucking crustaceans from the ocean floor. It´s also the only whale on planet Earth that has recovered after being chased and hunted down and slaughtered by humans. Every year, as winter approaches, the gray whale swims from its summer feeding grounds in Alaska and Siberia to the Mexican lagoons of Pacific Baja California, a one-way distance of over 7000 km, or 4500 miles: Ojo de Liebre, San Ignacio, and Guerrero Negro Lagoons, and Magdalena Bay.

It’s a mind-blowing wonder that takes your breath away. In 1861, Teodoro Riveroll, governor of Baja California, bitterly complained to President Benito Juarez about the gray whale´s carnage. And thanks to Mexico, the gray whale’s calving grounds on the Baja California Peninsula were protected, and it recovered from the slaughter of the Yankee whalers.

In many parts of Sonora and Sinaloa, gray whales are known as ballenas pintas, or spotted whales. The name comes from the spots, like freckles, that barnacles—those primitive crustaceans with calcareous shells that spend their lives anchored by their heads to the backs of the whales—paint on the whale’s skin. Barnacles live a happy life gazing at the sun, the moon, and the stars; until the cold water and whale´s lice (actually, small crustaceans) evict them, leaving all those spots as souvenirs. As the whales grow older, they became more freckled. Just like our own elders.

If you were to drive south from Guaymas, Sonora, 300 km, you would arrive at Tojahui. I ask myself now, forty years later, if the two abandoned old mansions on the beach where I camped for several months, are still there. Gossip says the narcos shoo people away from the area now. I know nothing about that. Tojahui, which in the Mayo Indian language means rip, today has 18 inhabitants, and is located between Yavaros and Las Bocas. Legend says that in Las Bocas there is a round plaza where, on serene afternoons when the sea waves crash against the shore, their sound gets amplified in stereophonic, and the echoes of people´s whispers reverberate and turn to screams. I’ve not yet meet anyone who can tell me if this is true or not.

Tojahui is surrounded by beaches with names such as Bajerobeta, La Filomena, Jimarouisa, Camahuiroa and Bachomojaqui. Much more evocative names than those of the scientists who “discovered” the ballenas pintas there in 1954, and of those that endured looking for them until they lost themselves in their quest—Gilmore, Mills, Harrison, Ewin, Brownell, Findley, Vidal. The first four have already left this planet, and the others are in the waiting line.

Accompanied by Sirio, I stumbled upon those two abandoned old mansions, known as Las Casonas de Tojahui, in December 1981. Sirio was a Siberian husky-Alaskan malamute mix. That is to say, Sirio’s ancestors were from Alaska and Siberia, just like the gray whales. I borrowed Sirio for my journey to Tojahui from my good friend Rogelio. With this worthy canine accomplice, we eavesdropped, crouching and frightened, with the howling hungry coyotes that prowled the old mansions at night. And together we also found beach-stranded sperm whales and dead leatherback sea turtles and witnessed fin whales being chased by killer whales. We even eagerly pursued the smell of sea lion blubber that someone cooked on a nearby beach.

It has been said that, in the XIX century, 500 ballenas pintas sought refuge in the bays and lagoons of Sonora and Sinaloa, inside the Sea of Cortez—Santa María, Altata/Pabellón, Navachiste/San Ignacio, and Topolobampo/Ohuira—and during the 1850s and 1860s, some 200 (not including babies) whales were killed there. They couldn’t escape from the harpoons of the relentless Yankee whaler captains who also prowled the west coast of Baja California. Close to shore, off Las Casonas de Tojahui, whales gave birth to their babies; the same beach American ichthyologist Lloyd Findley and I had discovered, in our cluelessness, beginning to study gray whales four decades ago. Such are the strange and sinuous paths of life, as my close friend Carmencita would say.

Today, no ballenas pintas come to Tojahui. Perhaps the growing coastal populations of Homo sapiens have scared them away, or perhaps they just got bored with the place, or maybe in their collective memories the navigation map to Tojahui was somehow lost. No one knows for certain. Such is the sad and incredible story of those candid leviathans and those soulless Yankee whalers who hunted them down for their oil.

P.S. I have just become aware of a bolero singer from Sinaloa known as “El Tojahui,” whom in his time of leisure fishes and sings. You can listen to him here, if you care about norteño boleros and accordions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=041AIMf1mBA