Oceans of Tears
Home in Mexico City, as the weeks went by, the memory
that stayed in my mind was of the morning I'd sat alone on the
bluff over Laguna San Ignacio, listening. I could still see the
color of the sky, the mountains a pale Maxfield Parrish pink
in the distance. I could feel the tingly heat of the sun, the
way I had to squint from the water's sparkle. The whales' blows
were etched into my mind like a song. I'd taken a tour -- an
often silly conveyor belt of a tour -- and yet come away with
this. It seemed as strange as having found a plum in a lemon
tree. I held it in my mind. I turned it over, and over.
In truth, I'd never given much thought to whales. Whales were
something to do with a homework assignment, cobwebbed skeletons
in a natural history museum. I'd gone to Laguna San Ignacio more
curious about Baja California's eco-tourists than the whales
they'd come to watch. I did not touch a whale, but seeing them
up-close did, after all, change the way I thought about them.
It took a while for me to admit to myself, but seeing them like
that, and hearing them, so many, in that huge nearly empty place,
was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life.
Eco-tourism was not without its drawbacks, however. The tourists
brought dollars, but also garbage and sewage. There were small
Mexican tour operators on Laguna San Ignacio; but the serious
money went largely to U.S. tour companies, like Baja Expeditions,
that had the infrastructure and know-how to sell packages to
people who just as easily might decide on the Galapagos, biking
in Holland, or for that matter, a few days baking on a beach
outside the Holiday Inn somewhere in the Caribbean.
"Eco-tourism doesn't leave much for the locals except low-level
jobs," the Mexican activist and poet Homero Aridjis told
Newsweek. It's an old argument. As V.S. Naipaul pronounced back
in 1962, "Every poor country accepts tourism as an unavoidable
degredation." I could see it for myself: it was the Mexicans
who drove the pangas and dug the latrines and washed the dishes.
On the other hand, eco-tourism did provide some good jobs, including
for Sergio Flores, the well-spoken cetologist, and Alejandro
Flores, the cook who hoped to work one day as a chef in a hotel.
It also provided an incentive to care for the environment at
a time when too many people were fishing too few fish. In short,
like so many others, it seemed to me a complex situation.
And one I was very privileged to have been able to explore. Not
many Mexicans can shell out for an eco-tour; nor would many be
interested even if they could. "Environmentalism is a luxury
that developing countries can't afford," I've heard a top-ranking
government economist say on more than one occasion (echoing none
other than President Echeverría). But there is this: They
may never go on an eco-tour, but millions of Mexican children
care about whales because they care about one whale that they
saw and they heard: Keiko, the orca that performed at the Reino
Aventura amusement park in Mexico City, the star (along with
an "animatronic" rubber orca) of the phenomenally popular
movie Free Willy.
On the single day of January 6, 1996, nearly 30,000 parents and
children filed past Keiko's tank at Reino Aventura. Later that
night, as many as 100,000 people lined the expressway and crowded
onto its pedestrian overpasses to wave goodbye as Keiko was driven,
packed in ice water in a UPS crate with a sticker reading "THIS
SIDE UP," to the Mexico City airport. So many of his fans
attempted to accompany the "Keiko Express" flat-bed
rig in their cars -- some of the police in the motorcade even
brought their children -- that the fifteen mile trip to the airport,
which began a little after midnight, took until 3:30 in the morning.
Mexican TV and newspapers gave the event full coverage, interviewing
Keiko's pretty young trainers; showing Keiko's handlers coaxing
him into his sling to be transported; the huddled families wrapped
in ponchos and blankets, and the children crying and waving.
"Que se quede, que se quede," Let him stay, they chanted,
let him stay. "Keiko! Keiko!" One man held up a placard
that said "¡SUERTE KEIKO! Familia Sánchez."
Good Luck Keiko! The Sánchez Family.
Keiko was being flown in a C-130 cargo plane to his new seven
million dollar tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, paid for by
the Free Willy Foundation with donations from all over the world.
The Reino Aventura amusement park, which had bought Keiko for
$350,000 dollars, was letting the Oregon Coast Aquarium have
him for free. Keiko was being rescued, just like Willy in the
movie.
Keiko/Willy was instantly recognizable because of his fallen
dorsal fin, which was the result of a vitamin deficiency. Rather
than standing up straight like a big triangle, it curled over
like a broken finger. For ten years he had been kept in a tank
that was barely large enough for him to turn around in. His water
was chlorinated and artificially salted, far too warm, and inadequately
filtered, so that he was often swimming in his own wastes. He
suffered from warty eruptions on his skin; his teeth were worn
down from nervous chewing on the edge of the tank; and he was,
at 7,700 pounds, more than 1,000 pounds underweight. Keiko's
job was to perform, dancing to disco music, leaping for a mackerel,
letting his trainers plunge their heads into his mouth, and giving
kisses to his "girlfriends" -- young women selected
from the audience.
Then, in 1993, Free Willy hit the movie theaters. When it became
known that its star was living in similar circumstances as the
fictional Willy before his rescue, there was an international
outcry. Reino Aventura did not have the resources to build Keiko
a larger and better tank. They attempted to find him a new home,
but his skin disease made this impossible, since the parks and
aquariums that considered taking him would have had to put him
in a tank shared with other whales or dolphins. Free Willy's
producers tried to send Keiko to Cape Cod; Michael Jackson offered
to build him a home at his Neverland Ranch in California. Finally,
Dave Phillips, director of the Earth Island Institute, established
the Free Willy Foundation and marshalled the millions of dollars
-- and the support of both Reino Aventura and the Alliance of
Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums -- to build Keiko his new home
in Oregon.
It was terrible that this orca had been made to live in a cramped
and dirty tank. But was it a tragedy that Keiko came to Mexico?
Millions of Mexican children saw him perform at Reino Aventura,
as well as on TV and in films. They watched Free Willy, Free
Willy II and Keiko en Peligro ("Keiko in Danger," a
side-splittingly bad -- I actually watched it -- Star Trek rip-off
about visitors from outer space returning to Earth for their
orca). They bought stuffed Keiko toys, rubber Keiko toys, Keiko
T-shirts, Keiko baseball caps and backpacks and lunchboxes. To
a degree, this was cheap mass merchandizing no different from
the onslaught of Barneys and Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles. But Keiko was not a cartoon, he was a living animal,
a prisoner of human hubris. Still, even as he wiggled to disco
music and leapt up like a dog for a snack, for many of these
children he was an ambassador to Mexico -- not only for whales,
but for all the animals in the seas, and for the seas themselves.
I think the greatest tragedy was that Keiko had to leave Mexico.
Every Mexican, whether he watched Keiko leaving from the side
of the Mexico City expressway, or whether he saw it on TV or
read about it in the newspapers, was reminded of how poor his
country is in comparison to its neighbor, where seven million
dollars can be marshalled to build a tank for a single animal.
Keiko's new home, the Mexicans were told, was four times bigger
than his old one in Mexico City. It was filled with cool seawater
which was exchanged and purified every twenty-four hours. It
had waterjets for Keiko to play with; reversible currents for
him to swim against; submerged rocks for navigation practice;
and reef-like designs on the bottom to rub on. Every day Keiko
would be fed 300 pounds of restaurant-quality fish, and he would
no longer be made to perform.
When Keiko's team of wetsuit-clad handlers tried to herd him
into a holding pen in his tank at Reino Aventura, he porpoised
over the webbing of the net and escaped. The crowd broke out
in an ecstatic cheer: "¡No se quiere ir!" He
doesn't want to go!
Keiko jumped over a second time, and the crowd went wild, cheering
and clapping and hooting at the TV cameras. But then, when the
handlers dragged him into the pen and eased him into a sling,
there was an eerie hush. As the crane hoisted him high up into
the air and aligned him above his UPS crate, Keiko cried out,
zzzeeeee!
"Keiko se nos va," Keiko leaves us, said Mexico City's
Reforma the next morning in a full-color spread on the front
page of its "People" section. "Lloran a 'mares,'"
they cry oceans of tears....
|
