Yes, I’m twice as big as an average dolphin, and yes, I am as powerful as I look. Which is why you’ll never get to kiss my snout, or shake my flipper, or have me tow you screaming across the training pool for an extra $200. In fact, you’ll never get to see me perform at all: the Ocean Adventure World trainers, in their blue shirts and shiny black legs, wouldn’t dream of putting me on stage, because they’re certain I can’t possibly keep a single thought in my enormous, bloated head. Plus, they’re afraid I might kill somebody.
I sometimes wonder if I’m the only wolphin in the world, but of course I know I’ll never find out. Born landlocked, in sight of the ocean but destined never to touch it, I’m three years old now, and I understand my fate. My only tribe, if you can call us that, is the six other ‘Phins who are kept here. The Leggs—you two-legged ones—call me a Hapa, a half-and-half, a hybrid. The ‘Phins—the Pacific spinners, anyway—call me a freak. The Atlantic bottlenose ‘Phins, my Aunties, call me “poor baby.” But I don’t listen to any of them. I just keep my eye out for the Leggs in the blue shirts. They’re the ones with the sardines.
I pump my tail hard and rise up out of the water, peeking over the foggy Plexiglas barrier to see whether the Blue-Shirts have arrived yet. From here, I can look over the white stone wall that rings the World, across the road lined with dune buggies and rental cars, down to the line of ironwood trees and then the sand and the sea. Offshore Island, with its smooth cone shape and ash-colored slopes, rides in the center of the bay like a floating hat. Mauka-side, towards the mountains, the corrugated wall of the volcano mounds itself against the sky, its lower slopes shagged in green, its shoulder dark against the slow-moving clouds. The smell of the breeze is salty and sweet. The lions roar and the monkeys shriek from Exotic Animal World, the smelly little zoo next door.
I sing my song to the hollow cliffs of Captain Cook Discovery Bay, and listen as it echoes back to me, thin and alone.
There, just entering the channel beside Offshore Island, I see them! The great fountains bursting from the surface of the sea. Rainy season and dry, I have watched those spouts of white from the huge creatures passing south, to the breeding grounds, and then north, to the feeding grounds. The vibrations of their songs seem to shake the very concrete of our pools with the longing, the invitation, the command: Go Beyond. My mother always told me that the Orca who fathered me is of their tribe, the tribe of Whales. It sometimes feels like their calls of transit are meant especially for me—not just a passing greeting, or the announcement of the Royal passage, but an actual summons, invoking me, Wolphin.
But that can’t be. Whether you call me a hybrid or a freak, there’s only one of me, and no way the Great Whales could know of my existence. When their calls rumble in my rostrum and fill my lower jaw with a wiry, wild energy, I drop my head low and plow around and around and around my pool, “doing my doughnuts,” the Leggs call it, until the great creatures at last leave the bay, leaving me to my unending rounds of business. “The business I was born to,” the Leggs say, as if it were a rich legacy and not just careless abandonment in a few feet of water.
But enough of my talk-story. It’s 6:30 AM. The whales are gone. The palm trees dance black against the lavender sky. Whale-gray clouds migrate on the breeze with ponderous grace. When I tell you about this day, I’m telling you about all the days. Other than the weather, nothing ever changes at Ocean Adventure World.