Grayson

grayson

GRAYSON
By Lynne Cox
Harcourt, 2006

Category: Young Adult or Adult Nonfiction

I arrived home on Friday and have spent the time since reconnecting with my family, washing a few thousand loads of laundry, and lying in the hammock with GRAYSON. It’s good to be home!

Grayson is a baby gray whale that author Lynne Cox, a champion open ocean swimmer, encountered during an early morning training session when she was seventeen. The book opens dramatically, with Cox realizing, ever-so-slowly, that something is in the water with her:

“It wasn’t a rogue wave or a current. It felt like something else.

It was moving closer. The water was shaking harder and buckling below me.

All at once I felt very small and very alone in the deep dark sea.”

Can you say BEELINE FOR THE BEACH? But Cox is a much braver woman than I:

“… the sea’s surface erupted nearby. There was a rushing and plunking sound.

Like raindrops hitting the water. But nothing was falling from the sky. This was wrong.

Very wrong.”

This goes on for pages, for what must have been hours for Cox, and her main reaction is this:

“Stay calm. You need to focus. You need to figure out what this is.”

I am in awe. Somehow (how?), Cox stayed calm, focused, and figured out her companion was a baby whale that had lost its mother. What follows is a lesson in communication-beyond-words, quite possibly the most magnificent interaction between human and whale that has ever been recorded.