Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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literature about Lolita’s captivity and the plan to release her back into her home waters in Washington State. A young man in a VEGAN T-shirt holds up a hand-lettered sign: LEAVE ANIMALS THE FUCK ALONE. Two young women are in orca costumes, black hoods lined with pink, their generous sleeves as pectoral fins. A little boy named Juan protests with his family. He has drawn a picture of Lolita and written above it: EXTRAÑO A MI MAMA!
Not all protesters want the same thing. Some want Lolita to be retired to a sea pen in her home waters in Washington State. Others just want her to be allowed to rest, to not have to perform in show after show every day of the week. One woman wants the Seaquarium to build an overhang so Lolita can have some relief from the blazing Floridian sun that cracks and dries her skin. A few protesters don’t believe Lolita will be released but hope, by letting people know about her suffering, to turn public opinion against cetacean captivity. Not all the protesters are young. An older Russian man holds a picture of Saint Francis with lettering that reads SHE HAS A SOUL TOO. His name is Oleg. “Once you can feel for the animals,” he tells me, “you are really in the world of the air and the water and the butterflies, not just down here trying to make a living.”
I want Lolita’s story to end in escape and deliverance. I want her released back to her home waters in Washington State. She went on a long journey, underwent extraordinary ordeals and humiliations. Now she must return home and be reunited with her family. Without reconciliation, there is no closure. Even if she is released, there is no telling if she’ll be able to overcome her captivity. After eighteen years of being held captive in a backyard shed, Jaycee Dugard continues to be haunted by her loneliness. “Today I sometimes struggle,” she writes in her book A Stolen Life, “with feelings of loneliness even when I am not alone … Hours turned into days, days to weeks, and weeks to months and then years.”
At the very least, activists hope to force the Seaquarium to build Lolita a bigger tank, a legal-size one. In recent years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has finally acknowledged what supporters have known: Lolita’s tank does not meet all space requirements set by the 1966 Animal Welfare Act. It is too small. PETA filed a motion to strip Seaquarium of its license to display large mammals. Seaquarium responded as it does each time activists press for Lolita’s release. In a statement, Andrew Hertz, the Seaquarium director, emphasizes her age: “The approximately 50-year-old post-reproductive Lolita…” He goes on to list the ocean’s many dangers, implying that the sea is too wild a place for the over-the-hill female whale. Hertz seems unaware that post-reproductive matriarchs pilot their pods. They are neither frail nor apprehensive but in every way leaders of their communities. Whales much older than Lolita command their pods in the Salish Sea. Ocean Sun, an eighty-five-year-old whale believed to be Lolita’s mother, is one of the leaders of L pod. And a whale fifty years Lolita’s senior, the 104-year-old matriarch known as J2, or Granny, guides the J, K, and L pods.
What was happening to me was hard to explain to other people. Whenever I tried, I found that language failed, that I could not explain how the whales had both infiltrated me and given me hope. I felt bewildered. I’d always been suspicious of animal-obsessed people, like the PETA girl on the subway who once shoved the corpse of an electrocuted fox in my face. How do you explain you’ve been enchanted by a creature, an apex predator? I felt like the Maori girl in the film Whale Rider. The film alternates between footage of whales swimming underwater and the girl, Paikea, struggling on land with Koro, her grandfather. Koro does not believe girls can lead. The relationship between girl and whale is subtle, delicate. Paikea must ultimately ride a whale in order to convince her family, her community, and herself that she possesses both essential wildness and strength.
It was all so embarrassing. I am not Native American. I am not even a girl. Though I am a female in the midst of a crossing. I am a fifty-three-year-old woman, an urban person on the back side of middle age, drawn for the first time in my life to an animal, to Lolita, but also to J2, the Southern Resident matriarch, Granny. I watch footage of J2 playing with a dolphin, of her breaching and spy-hopping with her family after a salmon feed, of her swimming beside younger pod members, staying close to them, as if giving advice.
“Storylessness,” writes the feminist Katha Pollitt in her foreword to Carolyn Heilbrun’s book Writing a Woman’s Life, “has been women’s biggest problem.” Heilbrun felt that women have been confined to erotic narratives and that a common cultural understanding leads to the altar. Our story ends with a house, babies, a loving husband. “This story,” Pollitt writes, “not only fails to fill a lifetime, it puts the plot line in the hands of others, men who do or do not admire, love, offer marriage and make full female adulthood possible.”
Menopause, with its loss of fertility, its dislocation, frays the narrative further. I have felt that my story was over, that nothing more would happen to me. Unless, of course, I divorced again and the old marriage plot could be invigorated, albeit with less sex appeal and lower stakes. But what if the postmenopausal narrative, like the prepubescent one, is focused not on romance, but on a creature? Like the stories I loved at twelve, Charlotte’s Web, Misty of Chincoteague, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I am not interested in girl meets boy, but in woman meets whale. “Questing,” Pollitt writes, “is what makes a woman the hero of her own life.”
3 The Animals
Long before Darwin uncovered the evolutionary forces that linked us to animals, menopause itself was associated with the ineffable, the bestial, the base. A French medieval alchemist explained that if you took a hair from an old woman’s mons pubis, mixed it with menses, and planted it in a dung heap, “at the end of the year you’d find a wicked venomous beast.” Edward Tilt, the author of the popular 1857 book The Change of Life in Health and Disease, associated the change with violent behaviors, drinking binges, stealing, suicide attempts, and recklessness with money. One of his patients, he claimed, believed the devil had lodged inside her womb. “Something is sent to the brain,” he wrote, “so that women are no longer the mistresses of their own actions, she is fuddled with animal spirits.” Tilt, a medical educator and member of the Royal College of Physicians, wrote that hot flashes were preceded by “strange sensations, which resemble pulses, like a live animal throbbing in the stomach.”
One of my menopausal correspondents wrote to me: “Reporting that I finally get the whole animal thing regarding menopause, suddenly my physical body is very present. Heart palpitations. Strange bloating. Shape shifting like a motherfucker.”
The anthropologist Ernest Becker has written that menopause is an “animal birthday,” a reminder of our “creatureliness.” Other animal birthdays for woman are menstruation and birth, but both, unlike menopause, come with captivating and all-consuming new worlds. Sexual desire rises with menstruation, along with physical pleasure, intimacy, the vagaries of romantic relationships. Birth brings the transformation of motherhood; our brains are reworked so that a new and tiny person’s needs supplant our own.
Only menopause arrives without absorbing directives. Instead of new obsessions and responsibilities I feel a nothingness, a negation. It’s a void created in part by an oversexed patriarchal culture that has little room for older women. The message, never stated directly but manifesting in myriad ways, is an overwhelmingly nihilistic one: Your usefulness is over. Please step to the sidelines. Counterpart to inner emptiness is an outer invisibility. One woman told me that after she turned fifty, she felt herself becoming more invisible each day. In the novel Calling Invisible Woman, Jeanne Ray writes about Clover, a fifty-four-year-old housewife who discovers that a pharmaceutical combination of hormone replacements, calcium tablets, antidepressants, and Botox has made her and other women her age literally invisible. The novel’s real horror is not the invisibility itself, but that no one, not even her husband, notices that she is missing.
In turning to animals, I wanted to study a few female mammals in middle age, hoping they might be a conduit to what the philosopher William James, in one of his lectures, called the “more.” I’m not sure if menopause, with all its needling, exhausting symptoms, triggered or exacerbated the dark feelings of spiritual malaise I started to have at fifty. But I found the texture of my soul not Melville’s damp and drizzly November but a cold and newsprint-y March. I less wanted to knock off people’s hats than I,