Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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swimming over and over into the side of his concrete pool. Whale advocates believe he was suicidal. On her arrival, Lolita was named after Nabokov’s unlucky heroine and “married” to the much older Hugo, a.k.a. Humbert. The two mated—once in the middle of a whale show—though Lolita never got pregnant.
I watched archival footage of skits that Lolita and Hugo performed over the years. In an early 1970s routine, Hugo goes up against the “boxer” Scrap Iron MacAtee. Scrap Iron comes out in a white robe, red silk shorts, and boxing gloves. Hugo, to taunt him, spins around with his tongue out. Scrap Iron gets into a small rowboat, which Hugo knocks over, and then he drags Scrap Iron to the side of the pool, where he is down for the count. As the announcer counts backward from ten, Lolita, who has been hiding, rises up and splashes water on Scrap Iron. The two whales do a victory lap around the pool, then jump up together, reaching their noses twenty feet in the air to touch two balls suspended over the water.
In 1980 Hugo was successful in killing himself. He died after swimming violently into the concrete wall of his tank. The attending veterinarian, Dr. Jesse R. White, wrote in his necropsy report that Hugo died of an aneurysm of a cerebellar artery.
After Hugo’s death, Lolita continued on alone. In one film from the 1980s, her trainer rides her in nearly every position imaginable. Standing on her back, holding on to her dorsal fin as if Lolita were a surfboard, lying on her back, lying on her white belly in a human-animal embrace. The trainer stands on Lolita’s snout, as she shoots him up and out of the water. The trainer sits on Lolita’s head and he is again shot up out of the water. In one routine, as the trainer stands on Lolita’s back and she swims, her tail flapping with exaggerated movements like a giant bath toy, one, two, three dolphins jump onto her and ride her, along with the trainer, as if Lolita were a flatbed boat.
I became obsessed with Lolita. I read blogs about her and joined Facebook pages committed to her release. I searched Miami library websites for early Seaquarium footage. She was a kindred menopausal creature I felt unreasonably drawn to. “I desperately wanted to be close to animals,” writes Charles Foster in his 2016 book, Being a Beast. “Part of this was the conviction that they knew something that I didn’t and that I, for unexamined reasons, needed to know.”
So with no real plan I flew down to Miami from New York. I wanted to be near a postmenopausal whale, and to protest, along with animal rights activists, for her freedom.
The Miami Seaquarium could be considered kitsch, with its 1960s space-age concrete architecture and chipped pastel paint, but it’s too sinister, more Floridian Gothic. A scuba diver scrubs crud off the glass from inside the giant aquarium, a skull flag flies over the pirate-themed playground, and a sea turtle with what looks like algae growing over its back floats glumly in a bathtub-size tank.
In the killer whale stadium, with its carnival-sideshow vibe, Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” blares over the speakers, and three trainers in wet suits walk out onto the concrete platform. The young women smile and wave. Lolita’s tank seems even smaller in person, not much bigger than a backyard swimming pool. It’s hard to believe a creature as big as a van, used to swimming a hundred miles a day, must remain in this barren concrete pit. This is the first show of the day, and from reading about whales that live in sea parks, I know that Lolita is hungry. They keep her hungry so she will do her tricks. A trainer with a long braid down her back makes a sharp hand signal, and Lolita swims to the front of the tank and twists up from the water. Spray flies off her gigantic, glittering body, and the crowd cheers.
The large screen behind the tank lights up, showing footage of L pod, Lolita’s family, as they swim free in the Salish Sea. Lolita rests with her chin on the concrete as a recorded voice tells about the endangered Southern Residents. Lolita appears to be watching the screen; maybe she knows that when the movie is over, she will get another chunk of fish, but maybe she remembers her family. I had read that Hyak, the captive whale used in the marine scientist John Ford’s 1980s echolocation study, knocked his head often against the observational glass to signal that he wanted researchers to show him the picture book made up of images of his wild relatives.
The calls Lolita continues to make have been identified as L pod vocalizations. One scientist speculates that she may not comprehend she’s three thousand miles from her home waters. Lolita may think the Salish Sea is just over the Seaquarium’s jumbotron.
“The question that truly occupies [animals],” writes J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Animals, “as it occupies the rat and the cat and every other animal trapped in the hell of laboratory or zoo, is: Where is home and how do I get there?”
After the film is over, Lolita waves with her pectoral fins and slaps her tail. Each time the crowd claps, Lolita heads back to her trainer for a fish. Finally the trainer, looking bored, feeding Lolita with one hand and sipping on a Slurpee straw with the other, shoots her hand down and then straight up. Lolita plunges underwater. She is gone for several minutes before she launches up and completely out of the water, her body hovering over the blue. Her breach is akin to a biblical miracle, a spectacle my eyes see but that my brain can’t absorb. The crowd is silent as she lands in an upward cascade of liquid lace.
Breach: (1) A broken, ruptured, or torn condition. (2) A gap (as in a wall) made by battering. (3) A leap, especially of a whale out of the water.
To be stuck in a small cramped place, to wait for outside intervention. Is it stupid to compare my captivity to Lolita’s? Is it insensitive to actual captives, real prisoners? Yes. But it does not negate that while I am not in a tank, cage, or cell, I have felt my menopausal world shrinking, my freedom decreasing. “For I have missed the feeling,” the poet Laurie Sheck writes in her book Captivity, “of being able to go somewhere else, / Delicately barred as I am / In this slow conversion of myself into nothingness.”
I have struggled with why Lolita’s captivity feels familiar to me. Why I find her dilemma so compelling. I recognize the feeling of being held captive, not literally, like Lolita, but metaphorically. A female captivity always binding but that, without fertility, tightens further. I am restricted, stuck in the box the greater culture uses to enclose and reduce older women. Lolita must be what the Seaquarium defines, a creature who does not want to be free, a prisoner who must be grateful to her captors, a female who does tricks in order to be fed.
As the crowd cheers and Lolita swims back to her trainer, I wonder if she’s feeling sorry for us, her spectators. It’s clear there is something wrong with us. We are, on some level, blind. I wonder, as I watch Lolita rest her chin on the concrete, if she is enraged, as all captives are at first. Or if she feels, as some women do after years of captivity, a misplaced gratitude.
Captivity from the Latin captivitas, means “bondage,” often in the sense of a person held by the enemy during war. It also means “blindness.” Captives are commonly blindfolded, but the captor also experiences a sort of moral blindness. I wanted to get close to another menopausal creature, but I see that Lolita’s captivity, while bringing her closer physically, actually makes it impossible for me to get an authentic sense of her, to see her at all.
After the show, techno music hammers, and Lolita logs by the side of the tank. She floats with her eyes closed against the sharp chlorine. It’s terrible to see her lying lifeless, but better than an earlier bit when she was trained to “catch” the kisses spectators threw at her. Ken Balcomb, the founder of the Center for Whale Research, thinks Lolita suffers from Stockholm syndrome. She is bonded to people who deny her freedom. In this way she’s not unlike heroines in human-captivity narratives; in order to survive in an unspeakable environment, she must establish a long-term relationship with her captor. Some advocates assume that Lolita’s compliance is chemical—that she’s on both tranquilizers and antidepressants. Her suffering as a creature torn from the wild and alone in her small watery cell is palpable. People push in, hold their cell phones above their heads, and smile.
The next day, I stand in front of the Seaquarium with twenty other protesters and try to turn away cars. From where we rally, alongside the Rickenbacker Causeway, we can see across the parking lot to the Seaquarium entrance as well as the concrete backside of the killer whale stadium. The sun is roasting. I can already feel my shoulders burning and the skin of