Dolphins in the snow

Kangaroos, elephants, hippopotami and penguins are too awesome for words, but not that versatile. The homely bovine, the useful and amusing chicken, the birds and bees, the noble horse, domestic dogs and cats -- all have made our frail human existence easier, friendlier and at times possible, but often fail to fire the imagination. But your dolphin, sometimes called a porpoise, has to be the most perfect combination of friendly intelligence, beauty, good manners, grace and adaptability in the world. (A close second is his cousin the Orca, who, while technically a dolphin, is just not quite as appealing, probably due to his more imposing size.) With his smiling face, boundless energy and empathy for humans, the dolphin just cannot be beat.

Like a slide show carousel, my brain periodically pulls up dolphin moments from the past, most my own, but some belonging to others: The father of my son, a young surfer in the late 1950s, sharing a wave with a couple of playful dolphin companions, shouting challenges at them. My 13-year-old self in a black-and-white photo holding a fish over a huge tank at Marineland of the Pacific, as a leaping dolphin gently takes it from my excited fingers. Me, in the ocean off the southwest coast of Mexico in the late ‘60s, trying to swim to a pod of dolphins, who tease but always remain a hundred feet away until I am exhausted. Me, fishing in the Sea of Cortez in the ‘80s, throwing pesos off the back of the boat for the trailing dolphins, a practice declared by the captain to bring good luck (it did). My awestruck little friend Laura at the San Diego Sea World, petting the sad-yet-still-friendly dolphins displayed in an open, purpose-built concrete pond, too young still to realize the tragedy of the petting pool. My Turkish family and I on a picnic on the inestimable Büyükada, the children screaming their pleasure at several pods of dolphin arcing serenely in the near distance, headed for the storied Hellespont.

Literary and film dolphins

Before writing this article, which will, I promise, eventually get around to the title subject, I opened up my over-stuffed brain first to the slide show, then to literary and film dolphins. I had to look up some dates, but they were all there on the trusty Internet, just waiting to refresh my memory. The following are those I came up with that I remember personally, although (of course) the cultural depictions of dolphins are innumerable:

 - “Green Dolphin Street” (“Green Dolphin Country” in the UK): This book and the resulting film (1944 and 1947) didn’t have much to do with dolphins, but the title was so cool to a little girl who loved books that I took it off the library shelf in the late ‘50s and managed (barely) to plow through one of Elizabeth Goudge’s lovely, complex romance novels; I got all the way to the end before I realized it was never going to be about dolphins, but only a bunch of very confused grownups. At least I had early exposure to this under-valued English writer, and have enjoyed her since.

 - “Boy on a Dolphin”: Now we’re getting somewhere. Going to the movies was a big deal in the late fifties, and somehow my poor mom didn’t know about the scene where a very young Sophia Loren character, Phaedra, surfaces from a day’s sponge diving in a wet, revealing peasant blouse to haul herself onto a Greek fishing boat, a scene still viewed by many, many people on the Internet. I was too young to notice the romance in the movie, and was only enthralled with the idea of becoming a girl sponge diver in the Aegean and discovering another golden boy on a dolphin like Sophia Loren did. I have been a huge fan of hers ever since, just from that one movie.

 - “Island of the Blue Dolphin”: This 1960 book by Scott O’Dell, also made into a film, was another disappointment from the library shelf, dolphin-wise, but a fabulous adventure tale nonetheless, about a little Indian girl abandoned for years on an island off the coast of California, left to fend for herself, her only friends every animal but a dolphin. After this I wanted to be an anthropologist.

 - “Flipper”: Finally, by 1963, someone must have heard my plea -- this film, never mind the soon-boring TV show that followed, was killer. A little boy and his friend the dolphin play together, communicate like Timmy and Lassie and make the world a better place. It was fun, educated its audience and had a huge impact on the way people thought about dolphins. It also made me green with envy; now I wanted to be a marine biologist.

‘The Day of the Dolphins’

 - “The Day of the Dolphins”: Well, Hollywood being Hollywood, the studios realized what hits clever-animal movies could be, as well as conspiracy-spy thrillers such as the James Bond franchise; thinking more is always better, they combined both to produce this 1973 film. It’s about some scientists who teach dolphins to speak English (of course), only to have them kidnapped by the bad guys, who want to instruct the neo-Anglophile dolphins to become assassins; they train them to attach a limpet bomb to a politician’s yacht. Well, we’re talking Hollywood here. I remember enjoying the suspense but hating the bad guys for trying to make a dolphin do something evil. This film came out after I had finished university, so it didn’t make me want to be a spy.

 - “Shadows in the Water”: In 1992, Kathryn Laskey published one of the best young people’s books ever. Even though in my forties when I read it, I was a kid again, yearning to share the adventures of some lucky children who are not only telepathic with their siblings but also with a whole tribe of dolphins off the coast of Florida. They join their finned cousins in bringing some really awful people, who dump toxic waste in the ocean, to justice. The author even thinks out the problems of human kids swimming long distances with dolphins: how they hold on to their “host,” how the dolphins know when to let them breathe, etc. I was totally entranced -- I felt like the book had been written for me.

 - As filming techniques improved, “Free Willie” (1993), about an Orca whale, and the re-make of “Flipper” (1996) were released. “Flipper” redux was really “Free Willie” with a dolphin, rather than a faithful remake of the 1963 version; both human protagonists are on their way to becoming troubled youth, they are saved by their love for a finned mammal, they learn to love and forgive, etc. Still, both movies are notable both for the wonderful hands-on relationship the boys have with Willie and Flipper and for the personalities of the aquatic stars.

These are only a few examples of tales of adventure and love on the high seas, about humans who love and interact with dolphins, as well as tales with “dolphin” in the title but no interaction with same, which nonetheless bring other benefits, such as introductions to authors and career aspirations; it’s all in the word “dolphin,” if you just listen.

So why this ramble down the dolphin aisle of memory lane? Well, during the second recent snowstorm, you’ll never guess what my husband found while examining the view in front of our house with his trusty binoculars. Well, you guessed right, if you guessed that he found about twenty large dolphins frolicking about in fine form, apparently feeding on a lovely school of sardines or anchovies, just down to the left of the castle near the mouth of the little valley there. I ran to my beloved pirate spy glass in the library and got focused for myself (Lute was being a little stingy with the binocs), then fell in love all over again: the newest addition to my mental dolphin slideshow is the picture of happy dolphins, leaping in jolly competition with some very lively seagulls over a fish buffet swimming in the Sea of Marmara just east of our village, while big, fat, juicy white clumps of snow fell in silence from the slate gray sky. Just when I think I can’t be surprised by Mother Nature any more, she shows me something as lovely and as magical as dolphins in the snow.

*Elsie Alan lives in Gebze with her husband.