Grayson by Lynne Cox Page B

advised me: “Lift your head up often and look all the way around you. If a boat approaches, you move out of the way. Don’t count on them seeing you.”
    I swam with Grayson one hundred yards off the pier, two hundred yards, three hundred, four hundred, and on a breath, I looked back over my right shoulder. The pier and the people on it were becoming smaller and smaller. We continued swimming near each other. Grayson led the way. He swam directly toward the oil rig and I followed in his wake. A couple of times he slowed down and stopped dead in thewater. He seemed restless and sort of agitated. He probably hadn’t eaten for at least a few hours. His energy level had to be dropping.
    “Come on, Grayson. Let’s swim out there and see if we can find your mother,” I said, encouraging him, knowing he couldn’t understand a single word, but hoping he would somehow understand the thought.
    Words are sometimes too small, too confining, to convey the depth of thought and strength of emotions. How does a whale communicate love, hope, fear, or joy?
    He looked so small in the enormous sea and I wanted to protect him somehow.
    Maybe you communicate with your heart. That is what connects you to every living thing on earth. Use your heart. It is love that surpasses all borders and barriers. It is as constant and endless as the sea. Speak to him with your heart and he will hear you. No matter how close or far away she is, she loves him. And from that he will have strength. He will.
    Let him know that he is also in your heart.
    The sky was changing: Thin clouds were masking the sun and the water was becoming a dull opaqueblue. The water temperature was dropping too. It must have been about fifty-three degrees.
    There were a few fishing boats on the horizon. But as I followed Grayson’s “footprints” in the water—the indentations he made with his fluke in the ocean’s surface as he swam—I grew increasingly uncomfortable.
    Unconsciously, I turned and looked at my feet. The tiny footprints they made when I kicked dissolved instantly. I shuddered.
    There weren’t any breakwaters or jetties to buffer the strength of the current. Using the oil rig as a reference point, I could tell that we were drifting to the north at about a knot, a little faster than one mile, per hour. The oil rig that had been directly in front of us was sliding to our left. And the ocean’s surface was cracking with a northwest breeze. The sea was rising into waves a foot high.
    Grayson was swimming hard against the resistance of the waves. He was breathing more rapidly, his
poof
ing sounds were more frequent. He seemed to be very stressed.
    And he was changing course abruptly. He was swimming north toward the oil islands off Long Beach, andthen he turned in a half circle, and swam south toward Surfside Beach. It seemed as if he couldn’t decide what to do. Then he came to a complete halt.
    He hung on the water’s surface. His eyes opened wider than before.
    “What is it, Grayson?”
    He turned toward me, and he tilted his head and looked at me with one eye.
    He seemed to be waiting for me to follow him.
    I really didn’t like being so far from shore. But I swam toward Grayson anyway, with my head up.
    There was something in the distance, floating on the water’s surface.
    We moved closer. It looked like white lily pads were floating on the water.
    We swam nearer and the lily pads grew larger. They were ovals three to four feet in diameter with scallop-shaped tails. The ovals were different colors—gray, olive, black—and they fluttered.
    They were giant fish, giant ocean sunfish called Mola mola, basking on the ocean’s surface, absorbing the sun’s warmth through their skin. They shimmered silver, and as the light shifted they became luminousand ivory like the moon on a clear black night. They had small dark eyes and light pink oval mouths attached to a snout. They were the heaviest bony fish in the world, weighing up to five thousand