A Waterman Sees His First Wild Dolphin Pod

This is not a post about horse racing though horse racing has come up a lot lately.

Photo by Taylor Sondgeroth on Unsplash

On the NYC leg of my recent driving trip, I sat in the deep shade of the communal gardens at my friend Johnny’s condo building. He’s been spending a lot of time out there and he and Greg, a retired English teacher with a penchant for crime and mystery books, have struck up a friendship.

On the day I visited, Greg joined us with his rollator stocked with a flask and a laptop to listen to the ponies. He had a system, he said — it had to do with knowing the horses better than the next guy, knowing if they ran the last race and would want a rest, or if they prefer earth or sod better — that kind of thing. It was harder, Greg said, now that everything’s computerized. Used to be, you could know a little more about the paddies in Chicago, for instance — that’d give you a little leg up — now everyone knows everything.

Still, he was a couple hundred up, which was good enough for him, though if the race yesterday had just turned out a little differently … 

Many years ago, Greg took $25k directly from a horse race and put it right down on a house in upstate New York. They sold that house years ago for family reasons he said and I believed him, imagining who might have needed surgery or an education, wondering how much they got in return for the loss of that golden moment when he turned a horse win into a house. Now, an old neighbor of that upstate house who had held Greg’s books in a barn all these years was going into assisted living. The books would have to go — Greg and his wife were going up there next weekend. They’d sell what they could, donate the rest to the local library.

I didn’t say it, but I thought of the local librarians, sorting through Greg’s thousands of books stored in a barn for years, wavy with water, spotty with droppings. They’d all be trashed, or almost all. All those books were history now. We left him sipping at his flask, waving distractedly at us — “goodbye” but also “be gone,” as the horses began to run.

Lauren Hough (author of the wonderful Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing) and Kate Tuttle (editor of the Boston Globe's books section and author of a column there) share a horse betting methodology:

Lauren Hough @laurenthehough

My grandma used to bring us to races and would let us pick the horses. I thought I was a fuckin’ genius for using this standard. (My horse won though and she gave me a whole dollar of the winnings)

Kate Tuttle @katekilla

@LanceEllisor @laurenthehough That's why I always bet on the racehorse that poops in the paddock!

My friend Michèle has been asking me to go to the races with her but instead we’ve ended up hiking. I’ve told you about one hike already, and I can’t wait to tell you about last weekend, when we went to Shenandoah and met some new animals at the top of the path.

Michèle did go to the races with other friends, a couple, and I’m sorry I missed going with them in particular. They’re competitive people, and even more than the races or the betting, what I would have wanted to watch was them — how they got into it. How they developed strategies. Their desire to win an animal proxy war. 

As you might have noticed, I love animals. But sometimes, I love people loving — or at least watching — animals even more.

The whale watching from Provincetown never happened. I feel very torn about that. 

I was scheduled to go on a small boat tour (6 people max) with the only people who did such things from Provincetown. They required vaccination, they could get you in close to the whales. But the day we were scheduled to go out, the weather was too windy — they got a call from the National Weather Service & there was nothing they could do. 

I could’ve gone on a big boat to see the whales but — even though I could stay outside — the crowds looked packed on the deck. I really waffled on this one, and finally decided against it. I’m still not sure I made the right decision.

What I did decide to do was to take a seal tour. This was offered by a company that provided many kinds of trips every day, and the 4:30 seal tour was one of the last boats of the day on a very hot day. After we bought our tickets, I and the three other women taking the tour stood in the shade of the ticket booth, trying to catch a breeze. The woman who had sold me my ticket stayed out in front, laying in the full sun in her bikini. She was just at the age to be unselfconscious enough to be at work in a bikini, but not unselfconscious enough not to worry about it. “Sorry,” she said, taking my $25, “it’s just so hot.”

“It’s brutal out here,” I said. “No worries.” 

She turned out to be the ex-high school classmate of our 19-year-old captain, who was on summer break from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. They were both members of the Portuguese population in town — short, fine-featured, and at this time of the summer, tanned beyond golden into a deep bronze. There’s a Portuguese bakery in the center of Provincetown and a few houses fly the flag. 

It gives you a sense of what the community must be like, when all the tourists leave in fall. “We bleed red and green,” our captain said, “red and green.”

Massachusetts Marines was Ok, the captain said, but he didn’t like the classes part of it. He liked working — he already had three jobs. The job with the seal tours, plus sometimes he’d work with the lobstermen, and he was also training to be a volunteer fireman. I asked him about being a lobsterman. He said it was honest work.

Plus, he had thought he wanted to captain big boats but now he’d seen them, he thought he liked the smaller and mid-sized boats better.

I asked what his dream job was. It was to be a tugboat captain during the winters, maybe a sailboat captain for tourists during the summers. He didn’t want to be a captain full-time for rich assholes like in the show Below Deck. Too much drama.

We pulled out beside these nesting cormorants.

The other three women on the tour were together: a mom and her daughter — the Mom wearing sweatpant cutoffs and a vaguely camo-patterned shirt, the daughter pale and wearing a floral shirt with elastic crimping around the wide waistband, cropped to bare an inch of creamy flat belly — plus a slim, fancy aunt wearing artfully ripped white jean shorts. They were all from Boston, or around there. They didn’t talk much in the heat, or maybe had no need. All of their arguments — the big ones, anyway — were behind them.

The captain mentioned that someone had seen a dolphin recently and we should keep our eyes peeled and right then — yes! A fin! The daughter and I spotted it. And then another! A dolphin pod!

Our captain said he had never seen a dolphin family before. Maybe he was putting us on but he was pretty guileless, I think he was telling the truth: somehow, here was a Massachusetts waterman who had never seen a dolphin pod. Maybe they’re not common on the Cape. Maybe they’re usually farther out than he goes. Who knows. Maybe it’s silly of me to be shocked. But I’ve seen — how many wild dolphins? I’ve been so lucky, and spent a fraction of the time on the water.

The captain even suggested that we stay with the dolphins and not go see the seals at all — “dolphins are much better,” he said. I said I’d be up for it, not wanting to commit before hearing what the other passengers had to say. They said nothing, just watched the dolphins balefully. After a little while, the captain pulled the boat away, towards the seals.

There were two types of seals: harbor seals and grey seals. Both were swimming, which made it more difficult to tell them apart, though not impossible — grey seals are larger and have more spots.

The captain, who came to visit the seals on these tours four or five times a day, was trying to train them to respond to his whistle. He whistled for our benefit, and some of the seals turned to look, but they might have been responding to any loud noise. I didn’t say anything though.

We returned back to dock slowly, smoothly, with the setting sun. The day that an American-Portuguese waterman sees his first wild dolphin pod — it seemed a day heavy with import. A cooler night approached, fresh for the picking, lucky enough to bet on.

Wishing you all the luckiest, most wanderful week.

(Oh, and if you miss whale content, my friend Diana recommended this wonderful Radiolab podcast on orca vs. humpback whales.)