On Thursday was out at La Push on the Quileute Reservation, for their welcome-the-whales ceremony. The gray whales who are often at First Beach in this season were much in evidence, very active and hung around for an hour or so. The last bit of the ceremony was a food offering, two teenage boys carried a raft covered with cedar boughs with a salmon on it out through the surf and launched it into the ocean. Right then some orcas appeared, very close inshore. Unusual for this place, they don't come inshore anywhere out there on the outer coast but they did. Looked like transients. Perhaps that means the last part of the gray whale migration, the mothers and babies, has reached this part of the coast, and the transients were hoping for a baby gray dinner. But they apparently don't usually do it at First Beach, and in the midst of all the drumming and chanting and the absolutely astonishing regalia of the ceremony participants, a more magical explanation works just as well.
So finally I have done it, stood on the shore and seen not one but two kinds of cetacea at the same time.
And if I leave out the parts that are not mine to show or tell — understanding that the participants' regalia are as individually recognizable as their faces, and their history is their own — that's all there is to say about it.
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