Has it started yet?

Has it started yet? This was a favorite joke of Dan Wagoner, my beloved professor at Connecticut College. We would be setting up a prop or hitching up a costume in preparation to share a dance piece and he’d giggle. “Has it started yet?” We laughed, but the message was clear. From the moment we stepped in front of an audience, we were on stage, even if it “hadn’t started yet.”

And so, headed north on Route 6 towards Provincetown for a whale watch, having given spontaneity the reins, I thought, ‘why not start today?’

At Wellfleet Bay I listened to the sound of hundreds of fiddler crabs scuttling across the hardening mud of a vacant tide. They sounded like a light rain falling, so subtle I had to stop to make sure I was hearing it for sure. An out-of-focus spray of song caught my ear and I scanned the marsh. A sparrow perched on a pile of dried grasses, gave the song again, then flew low across the path in front of me. The yellow triangle around the eye identified it as a Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrow. A life bird.

The boat was already boarding when I bought my ticket, so I strode out along the wharf and down the ramp to the Portuguese Princess. As we motored out of Cape Cod bay and headed for Stellwagen Bank, I pulled on first fleece, then sweatshirt. I claimed my place by the bow railing, reveling in the wind in my face. The low dunes of the Provincelands receded behind us. Abruptly the captain turned the boat northwest and in the distance, frolicking beside another whale watch boat, I could see a humpback breaching again and again. We stayed with him, “Pitcher”, for perhaps a half hour as he dove and breached, rolled on his back and slapped his flippers on the surface, and dove to breach again and again and again. Wilson’s Storm Petrels peppered the surface with their feet and a single Sooty Shearwater wheeled low over the waves.

Full of the sea and wind, licking salt spray from my lips, I stopped by a local potter’s stall on Macmillan Wharf and bought a hand turned plate the color of the sea when a whale lingers just below the surface. “I’m taking the ocean with me,” I told the potter, and he smiled.

It had begun.

(this photo is from the Dolphin Fleet's Website: http://www.whalewatch.com/photos/photohumpback/index.php)