Among the Whales

How are you holding up?

I suspect I’m not alone in cycling through various forms of anger over the Epstein files.

What devastates isn’t just the exposure; it’s the documentation of how routine—and how reinforced—the enabling was. Epstein’s world appears less hidden than managed: a machinery of access and favors in which powerful men continued to engage, correspond, and benefit, their continued participation effectively absorbing his crimes into the apparatus that kept it running.

The release of the files itself has repeated the pattern. Victim identities were exposed while the names of associates and enablers remain protected, turning “transparency” into yet another burden borne by those already harmed. What survivors are asking for is not spectacle or procedure, but agency and urgency: protection for victims, full disclosure that does not sacrifice them, and accountability that finally targets the networks that enabled the abuse rather than managing reputational risk.

Three weeks ago, Adrian and I spent a week on a boat with no internet. Each morning arrived without headlines, without the reflexive reach for a phone and the day’s fresh outrage. At first the absence felt strange—almost irresponsible—before it became clarifying.

In the midst of these dark days, that week reads less like escape than preparation: stamina for attention, resistance, and endurance. What follows is an attempt to share some of that with you.

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The whales come back.

Every January they travel nearly eight thousand kilometers, from the cold North Atlantic feeding grounds of Greenland, Iceland, and Norway to the warm, protected waters of the Silver Bank off the Dominican Republic.

These shallow waters offer no food—only mating, and birth. Here, adult humpbacks court and compete, pregnant females arrive to calve, and newborns are sheltered from cold, predators, and rough seas.

We came not as explorers, but as students—hoping to be tolerated, prepared to be refused.

Each day demanded restraint: engine stilled, movements slowed, intentions softened.

A careful choreography on how to approach, how to wait, how to accept acceptance or refusal.

If one moment must stand for all of it, let it be this: one afternoon we slipped from the boat and into the water, bellies first, the softest entry we could manage, fins stirring the blue only briefly. And there they were: a calf no more than two weeks old, circling his mother’s vast head, lingering along her rostrum, keeping close, while returning again and again to the surface for breath.

The baby whale was all softness, nothing yet fully decided. Blubber still negotiating its shape, not yet in command of buoyancy, making small, patient agreements with gravity. A tail that didn’t quite know what to do with itself, learning, moment by moment, the grammar of movement. Even his dorsal fin curled like a question mark, unfinished.

He moved with the clumsy holiness of something newly arrived in the world.

I held my breath, as if breath itself might be an intrusion.

Above us, a full rainbow arced as light caught the ocean’s spray—am alignment of light, breath, and water.

I squeezed Adrian’s hand, anchoring the moment in the only language sturdy enough to hold it.

The video he took never saved. The ocean kept it.

We were awestruck, holding hands, as whales rose beside us—blue, luminous, close enough to hear their breath break the surface. Their breathing stitched sky to sea.

A sound like weather.
The body of the world breathing.

Another mother moved with a yearling large enough to leave her side. He did not.
The marks of orca teeth scored his tail fluke.
Love here was not instruction. It was proximity. It was staying after harm.

Against all of this attentive stillness, the male humpbacks erupted into motion.

Competition pods—what scientists call fight clubs—breached and thrashed in tight, exuberant loops. Desire spilled directly into movement. As multiple males converged around a single female, the water churned with urgency.

When one of these groups turned its attention to our boat, the sea seemed to reorganize itself around them. They slipped beneath our hull and reappeared alongside us, massive bodies with an ease that felt almost teasing.. One moment the water lay calm; the next it fractured—tails lifting high and crashing down in thunderous blows, pectoral fins flashing white, rising and falling like oversized hands applauding their own exuberance.

Size and curiosity, spoken in splash and shock, briefly admitted our small boat into their world.

During one of these encounters, Adrian caught a whiff of whale snot, a small but undeniable intimacy.

Mothers and their calves did not linger for company; they seemed to know that the males trailing them were not guardians but suitors in pursuit. The body may be capable of beginning again almost immediately, but it rarely chooses to. Most mother humpbacks wait two to three years before calving again.

After our daily encounters, the routine of dinner, showers, and sleep felt insufficient—too narrow for what the day had given. At night we lay on the deck beneath the stars, whose vastness could hold the intimacy of those hours, as if the ocean had handed us off to the cosmos for safekeeping.

The shift came quietly. Just after our final day with the whales, something in my body went wrong. On the boat, everything rocked twice—once with the waves, once inside my skull. By the next day, the fever had arrived.

I messaged my doctor. Antibiotics began. The fever stayed—unmoved, a stubborn animal pacing my bloodstream.

A day-long boat ride back to port, then the flight to New York. Bags dropped at the apartment. Then the emergency room.

In my hospital bed, the world rocked the way it does after time at sea,

Sepsis.

I had believed that sort of illness belonged elsewhere—to other bodies, the elderly, the already dying. Not to mine. Not to someone who swims with whales, walks the beach, plans with the quiet confidence that the body will cooperate.

I was flooded with IV antibiotics, bright and serious. I needed to be well enough for back surgery on Monday, and then for the chemo and radiation already waiting, lined up in careful sequence.

For several days, I negotiated with my own cells, coaxed the fever down.

But the body does not make promises. Like the whales, it follows older maps than the ones we draw for it.

Somehow—miraculously, stubbornly—I made it through. In a single week: sepsis, back surgery, chemotherapy, and a root canal. Radiation followed the week after.

I’ve started to recognize the timing: the pilgrimage first, then the reckoning. The body waits for the quiet.

And still, I am grateful that we saw the whales first. That the illness came later.

That there was time to be near something just begining.

I think of the calf most often.

Circling his mother’s head.
Returning to the surface.
Not yet buoyant.
Not yet sure.

Alive.

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A different mom and calf moment:

Here, the yearling—his tail fluke marked by orca scars—rises for air before nestling back beneath his sleeping mother:

One movement, two worlds: fluke rising into air, then passing back into water: