Cooper

                                                                                                                Short Non-fiction by Teresa Troutman  

     “Come on, Cooper.  Come’n over.”

       I was up to my armpit in salt water, cold as the Pacific Ocean where it had been pumped in, filtered and led through an arterial system of aging pipes into several of the concrete tanks on the lower concourse of the park.  It was winter now, the water was numbing my whole body as my veins brought back the cold blood from my fingers into my heart.  Cooper lived in this medium, the cold, wet and salt was as natural to his being as walking through the night air was for me.  I was alone here on the night shift; “graveyards” were more natural to me, too, than working the days and afternoons when crowds of schoolchildren ran wild between the fish aquariums, seal lion shows and penguin parades.  At three a.m. I was alone, but not lonely.  I knew, for Cooper, I knew to my bones that he had to be one of the loneliest creatures on the planet.

     Pacific Common Dolphins travel in kinship groups that very often number in the hundreds.   On the backside of Catalina Island, I had once seen one of these ‘superpods’ of the black, tan and dusky ivory dolphins traveling in a moving mass of white-tipped waves, diving and wheeling and jostling with the current until they had sprinted even with our craft.  The fastest took the position of lead surfers, allowing the boat to push them forward on the pressure wave that preceded the forward bow.  Five hundred dolphins, all moving as one, swam alongside and shared for a few moments of their time with us in a kindred journey across the surface of the miles-wide and fathoms-deep Pacific.

      Yet, here was Cooper, at Marineland, a single common dolphin adrift in a cement tank, twenty-five feet wide and six feet deep.  He was alone.  I reached out my arm, waggling two of my fingers as far out as I could without losing my balance as I had every night since I had become the night caretaker.  Cooper, as always, was hovering with the tip of his tapered rostrum nosed into the stream of water coming into the tank.  He barely moved.  He only floated.  I didn’t know if he was sleeping or if he dreamed dolphin dreams of fish to be eaten and of warm waters to make and have babies, or maybe there was something of the flowing water over his beak that reminded him of the waves, of the surf, of the wild rides on the bow of ships.  Maybe he could still sense the depths of the ocean coming in through the five inch pipe that made this prison a little more bearable as a home.  I could only imagine what he might see in his mind’s eye.

     Sometimes it took only a few moments and there were nights when it took much longer, but in time he would recognize that someone was reaching out.  His body would float back, move a little from side to side.  A little bit of drift would bring him further back, away from the side, where he would begin to buzz.  Dolphins both see and hear with a sense humans have only crudely re-created in sonar and I could feel those fast pulses grow stronger as the drift brought him closer to my hand.  Not a threat, never a threat from me.  Just patience.  I was there because I knew deep in my soul, in that place where I search for the missing other, where my heart breaks in the space between alone and lonely, I knew he welcomed a touch.

      Still drifting, with no obvious intention, Cooper moved closer until, with his rostrum swinging back and forth before my hand, there was contact.  I immediately flattened my hand and drew my palm back along his rostrum, caressing along his lips to the melon-forehead, feeling the inner-tube texture of his skin.  The day of hovering and swimming in repetitive circles, around and around (always counter-clockwise although no one could explain why) had left his skin covered with a thin coat of algae.  My hand, as he passed by, smoothed his skin until his tail flukes passed out of reach.  A lazy figure eight turn, he’d circle back to be stroked again, each pass taking off another layer of the film coating his body.  Tip to tail, like a cat enjoying a good brushing, my hand would reach out and wipe clean the slate of his body. 

     How hard it was to finally pull back my hand and do the things that had to be done each night.  The orca’s mackerel had to be thawed for the next day’s show; one of the bottlenose dolphins was pregnant and needed a welfare check.  At four a.m., I would stop by the walrus pen and give Bluto, the juvenile delinquent of walrus-dom, a good rub of his whiskers.  Georgie-Girl, an adult raised here, had lost that privilege when she had, as a joke, blown a mouthful of fish-smelling water up my sleeve as I had, kindly and ignorantly, rubbed her muzzle.  Keeping Cooper company was not explicit in my job description but, as I watched the trainers show up for their day’s work, followed by the aquarists and aviarists to tend to the fish and fowl at the park, I always last noticed the single dolphin, alone in his abbreviated world.  One lone, uncommon dolphin hovering at the outflow, growing slime on his back like an unweeded garden.