WHERE'S WILLY?(Brief Article)

It was a hell of a time to be in Iceland, although by most accounts it is always a hell of a time to be in Iceland, where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down. This was early in August, and it was stormy, as usual, but the summer sun did shine a little, and the geysers burped blue steam and scalding water, and the glaciers groaned as they shoved tons of silt a few centimetres closer to the sea. On the water, the puffins frolicked, the hermit crabs frolicked, and young people bloated with salmon jerky and warm beer barfed politely into motion-sickness buckets on the ferry sailing across Klettsvik Bay. The young people were on their way to an annual songfest and drinkathon on the Westman Islands, a string of volcanic outbreaks off Iceland's southern coast. During the trip, they spoke in Icelandic about Icelandic things, like whether they had remembered bottle openers and bandannas, and then they turned greenish and stopped talking as the boat lurched up and down the huge cold waves. After two hours or so, the waves settled and the boat slowed and glided into Heimaey Harbor, which is ringed by cliffs of old lava as holey as Swiss cheese. Dozens of trawlers and knockabouts bobbed at their moorings, nudging the docks and making that clanging sound that is supposed to make you feel lonely.

A few of the young people, gummy-mouthed and bleary-eyed, roused themselves and gazed out the portholes. We sailed past a row of white buoys strung across the mouth of a small bay.

"Hey! Keiko!" one girl exclaimed, pointing at the buoys.

"Huh?" another mumbled, looking where the first one was pointing. "Keiko?"

"Willy! Free Willy!"

"Oh, Keiko!" the others said, pushing up to the window, yanking each other's sleeves and gawking at nothing but the empty inlet, the glassy water, the blank, looming cliffs. "Keiko! Oh, yeah! Oh, wow!"

The whale was gone, of course; he left in early July, after taking a watery journey with his human overseers to look at other whales--his kin, if not his kith--who had stopped near the Westman Islands for a midsummer feast. Keiko had seen wild whales before, having originally been one himself, and he had been reintroduced to them two years ago, after twenty years of captivity. He watched the visiting whales from a shy distance at first and a bolder one later, but he always returned to the boat that had led him out to open water. Back at his private pen in the harbor, an international staff of humans would massage his fin, scratch his tongue, and compose press releases detailing his experiences at sea. This July, however, Keiko ventured closer to the whales than ever, and then followed them when they headed off past Lousy Bank, past the Faeroe Islands, onward to--well, honestly, who knows? Whales keep their own counsel. The truth about them is that they come and go, and you can't really know where they've gone--unless you've already fished them out of the water, drilled holes in their dorsal fins, and hung radio tags on them. Only a madman would suggest that drilling a hole in a whale's dorsal fin is easy. This is why no one is sure where the creatures that visit Iceland every summer spend the winter--and where, presumably, they were heading late in July.