How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

In New York City, in the waters by the Rockaways, it is easy to see whales. I learned this last year on a whale-watching boat called American Princess. The trip was nearly four hours, so I bought a hot dog and seltzer (elsewhere on the boat, the real pros smuggled aboard a platter of shrimp cocktail and two bottles of sparkling wine). As we left port, a volunteer naturalist with Gotham Whale, the city’s marine mammal advocacy group, narrated the excursion. “There’s no guarantee we’ll see a whale,” she said, adding that this disclaimer had become necessary after an unlucky cruise left some would-be watchers asking for their money back. The American Princess did not control the whereabouts of the whales, she explained. When she told us that in the eighteenth century, before they were hunted to near extinction, New York’s waters teemed with whales—humpback whales, fin whales, sperm whales, and right whales—people around me gasped, muttered to one another, and looked around the waters as if the long-dead whales had left some sign of their past abundance.