Once upon a time, my grandparents lived in Santa Cruz, California, in a house whose big kitchen windows looked west over the nearby ocean. Grandpa, at the time working a civil service job requiring a daily commute, rose early to go to work. Grandma just rose early because she was a morning person. Thinking about this always leaves me slightly bemused. I'm not entirely sure I believe in morning people. So far as I'm concerned, they're like nutrias* or something.
Regardless, my grandmother, the mythical creature, voluntarily got up when Grandpa did and, by the time he'd driven off in a state of robotic stupor, functioning on automatic and/or caffeine, she'd brewed herself some nice hot tea to enjoy while she cleaned the kitchen, made herself breakfast, got ready for her own job, and presumably solved world hunger, found the meaning of life, and fed Schroedinger's cat as well.
This particular morning, she decided to go for a walk on one of the paths along the cliffs lining the beach. She'd been out for a while when a dark shape moving in the water far below caught her attention. It was a blue whale. My grandmother, mind you, had mind-bogglingly good vision; even through the dazzle of light on the waves, closer examination revealed another, smaller whale moving beside the first.
At first, as you might imagine, the sight of a mother whale and her calf delighted Grandma, who decided to amble down the pathway's stairs to the actual beach. The whales drew closer, though, and closer yet, until, to her horror, Grandma realised that the mother's course steered her straight toward a parched death on the shore, and her trusting baby with her.
And this, dear reader, is when my grandmother, who had been a teacher at age sixteen, who had bossed around generals and whom, as a woman in the 1950s, held a prominent executive position in a well-off business, lit out across the beach, waving her arms wildly and yelling "Noooo! No, no, no no no!" at the pair of whales.
I can only imagine the surprise of the man she ran past on the beach. I'm not sure if he was fishing or what, as Mum and Grandpa's versions of the story differ, but there he was. Grandma, intent on the whales, didn't notice him, but he sure noticed her, and watched her dash out into the surf up at her knees, yelling at the whales and flailing her arms back and forth in unbounded enthusiasm for her role as the new Director of Marine Mammal Traffic.
At long last, the whales turned aside, thus presumably saving my grandmother from the awkwardness of explaining to paramedics why, exactly, she'd been found in the Pacific Ocean, half-drowned and fully dressed. She stood there in the surf, trousers plastered to her legs, and had begun to slowly lower her arms to her sides when the man behind her spoke.
"It's deep enough for them, right up to the shoreline. The mothers bring their calves up here to get them away from the sharks." He paused a moment, visibly attempting to keep the question in check. It got out anyway: "If they had come up on shore, what on earth were you planning to do about it?"
For some reason, she didn't have an answer for that.
*Link to my other blog, a list of strange things my loved ones (self included) have said - deliberately or otherwise. Mostly otherwise. It's mildly NSFW, because sometimes we cuss.
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