The Day We Saw the Whale

It happened exactly one August night at three in the morning. It was an August night at three in the m̧orning that would happen every year since the year I turned twelve, but it was the year I turned twenty-five when the realisation had hit. One August night every year, during the Santa Marija period, all six members of my family would pack a week’s worth of food onto the sailing boat and sleep onboard. At three in the morning, my father would wake up and start the boat, the rest of us fast asleep, and set sail in the direction of Sicily. He would start the boat this early so that by noon we’d pause at the shore of Portopalo, have a swim, and eat the baked pasta that would have been prepared in Malta. Following a nap we’d continue our way to Marsamemi.

It was a routine established once and henceforth anticipated each year: a collaborative mission that centred the splendour of the sea. Starting the journey at three in the morning would mean being halfway there by breakfast time. Then one only had to endure a mere four hours of gruelling sun, encouraged by the promise of a cool dip once the anchor was cast. Those four hours would still feel like they lasted all eternity, with the Sicilian horizon, once the excitement of the appearance of the horizon after four hours of sea void dissolved in the sun, appearing to be stuck in place at a particular distance. The engine starting at three in the morning would jolt the whole family awake, of course, but we would all soon go back to sleep basking in its hum, knowing that we could not be in safer hands and feeling as light as a feather at the prospect of rest being our sole duty for the nine some hours to come.

So at twenty-five years of age, fast asleep in the cabin I shared with my sisters, I was woken up by the engine starting. For a moment, I expected to curl up and fall right back to sleep, still under the charm of the sandman that had visited at around ten o’clock the night before. But by some somnambulist force I dragged my body out of the cabin and up on the deck where my father was pulling the ropes. I remember it being too dark to tell whether my presence on the deck surprised my father, who was focused on manning the boat. He did not question my being awake, in any case.

Still half asleep, I heard myself announcing to him that I will keep him company for the early hours of the morning. I made us both a cup of tea and got myself a blanket and we sipped the tea from the enamelled mug as the Grand Harbour’s glow got smaller and the stars got bigger. We silently looked out for any shooting stars that travelled still onwards after the recent dmugħ ta’ San Lawrenz, occasionally commenting on what was within our visual reach: light pollution, darkness, satellites, Orion’s belt, the sea.

I woke up that night despite a big part of my mind willing myself to go back to that sweet cocooned slumber, ferried with the rest of my siblings and our mother by our father, our captain. But there also awakened a small voice in my mind, perhaps one that was more wary, more cautious, but more empathetic and humanising of my father. One that pulled him from the skies of my endless, daughterly admiration to the earth where the rest of us lay, determined to keep him in the skies. As I dragged myself over to the deck, knowing that I would never be able to remain asleep during this journey, or on any future journeys, the part of me that deemed the flesh of my father immortal died, allowing the thought of my father one day dying to be born and take its place. What jolted me awake at three in the morning that night was not the engine starting, but the realisation that my father was not invincible after all, and that he was even vulnerable, manning the boat by himself with the responsibility he carried for the five of us, a pride he nurtured weighing on his shoulders. I knighted myself responsible for him that night, and stood watch in the early hours of the morning, under the guise of wanting to see the vestiges of the Perseids.

We were alone, just the two of us for three and a half hours. We watched the tenebrous West and the luminous East merge and dissolve to form daytime. The disappearing stars somehow meant that my father was a little less vulnerable now, and I could soon resume my slumber. I wriggled out of my blanket and made us both another cup of tea, and the kettle’s whistle woke my brother up. Ever the fan of endurance, I kept my brother and father company and then decided it was finally safe for my guard to retire. My back turned to my brother and father, and I was climbing down three out of four steps to the cabin when my brother cried out.

For the split second until my brother announced his reason, until I could decipher the excitement in his exclamation rather than an imagined dread, my heart rate soared and I flew back out onto the deck. My flight to protect my brother and father from whatever peril may have struck turned to absolute delight as I registered what my brother had just exclaimed: Hawn balena! (there is a whale!). This sentence, a foghorn for the rest of my family to scamper on deck, was the beginning of the most magical few seconds our family had ever experienced at sea.

By the time I was on deck looking into the direction my brother was pointing, most of the whale was submerged. It generously left its visible blowhole spurting out water with that spectacular sound which, up until then, was one only imagined in our collective consciousness. The more the gigantic body, as big as the boat we were in, became smaller as it sank to the depths, the more a feeling of fear and vulnerability rose in me as the idea of the thalassic unknown became an impressive reality. Would the whale emerge in our vicinity? What if it hits the hull accidentally? What if it hits the hull deliberately? Impossible to sleep after the surge of adrenaline, I remained on deck surveying the sea, desiring to witness it on its next emergence. It never did, and to this day I have not been blessed with a whale sighting, not even in the deliberate three-hour whale tour I went on in Iceland four years later.

Unlike the hypervigilant and joyous buzz I had felt that morning, and that wore off into a pleasant memory with time, the dawn of the realisation of my father’s vulnerability has remained with me since. Like the love and admiration I eagerly claim for him, the realisation continues to evolve and grow exponentially. That day, the whale understood that my refusal to go back to sleep at 3am was not uneventful, and it sealed this inauguration. Its saluting presence is a gift I will forever cherish.