Alex Wilkes came from a long line of whalers. Or so his mother claimed. In his youth he had desired nothing more than to kill one of those magnificent and ancient beasts, and in his adulthood that desire still lived within him (although it was subject to periods of dormancy). During his homelessness he had went to the public library and emailed the leader of the Makah tribe, in hopes of being invited on one of their whale hunts, claiming to be a direct descendant of a chieftain lost to history. She never replied.

His oldest mother, Sally, was unemployed, and his youngest, Maddie, was a school teacher. They had paid one of their male friends $350 to fuck Maddie in 1997 and in March, 1998, Alex was born. Sally and Maddie had too much love for each other and little to spare for Alex. He was often treated as a knight in the chessboard of Sally and Maddie's petty conflicts, used as leverage or to guilt one another. Growing up, he felt more attached to Sally, and as time progressed, this attachment to her remained. Sally had the body and demeanor of a charismatic butch grandmother but in her private life was unstable and conniving and often pitiful in her arguments with her lover– and Alex, insecure and chaotic since consciousness dawned on him at the age of six, felt more in common with Sally then Maddie. When he turned fourteen his mothers got divorced and two years later Sally was homeless. He asked Maddie to take her back, but she refused, so he ran away and lived in the second growth forest outside Eugene with Sally.

Alex would break into Maddie's house and steal cans of food and leave notes detailing how much he hated her and instructions on how to feed his tortoise. He learned how to fish and wanted to learn how to hunt but they couldn't afford a gun. Their nights were spent like a Steinbeck novel; splitting endless cans of beans, frying endless trout, Alex blowing on a harmonica and Sally belting Appalachian ballads and misremembered sea shanties. It would get cold at night but humans have adapted to find ways to abate that so they would be cozy in their tent, letting the shortwaves of NPR on their battery powered transistor radio lull them to sleep.

Four months after he ran, sheriffs came to their campsite and arrested Sally for kidnapping. That was the worst day of Alex's life. When he came home to Maddie, she hugged him, and he was sullen, then when she left to teach the next day and he was home alone he cracked the toilet in half and poured flex seal down the sink and left bacon frying directly on the spiral burner then stole all the cash she kept hidden in her makeup bag and drove her car for two miles before crashing it into a seventy year old madroné tree and then he became truly homeless.

He was alone most nights. When it got too cold he went to warming shelters and there would talk to fellow transients. He would play the harmonica on the streets for money and occasionally kids and friends from his high school would recognize him and all would ignore him, except for Luke. He camped in the skate park and heard screams and the banging of metal on metal from the tents that surrounded him, and learned to sleep lightly lest others came and robbed him. Luke offered Alex a place with his parents, but teenage pride demanded that he refused. Sometimes he was hungry, so he tried shoplifting and was subsequently banned from 7/11. The department of human services would come looking for him since he was technically not an adult so he learned how to blend in with the cracked sidewalks and burned patches of grass along with the other boys of the underground.

The police came and told him he needed to vacate then charged his alias for camping on city property. After that, he moved his tent to a spot down by the river and was never fully dry until summer. Mold grew in his ears and his hearing diminished and he was kept awake from the pain. One day he came back from performing and saw his tent and possessions sunk, so he used what money he had at Mcdonald's but they kicked him out after he finished his double cheeseburger meal and that night was the coldest of his life. Then he came back to Maddie, and she couldn't legally refuse him. When he came of age he was obliged to become a transient again.

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The only thing Alex had managed to recover from the river was a waterlogged copy of Moby Dick, Sally's favorite book that she would read to Alex during their nights in the woods. When he became a transient for the third time he would read and reread the rhythmic passages, and the disciplined chaos that it took to kill a whale struck a chord with him. He remembered Sally's tales of her grandfather, who, according to her, was one of the last captains of a whaling schooner in the United States. He would go to the public library and do genealogy searches to see if he had any tribal claim to whaling, and, when he found none, decided to invent one.

His great grandfather, Raymond Wilkes, had not been a captain, but rather an able bodied seaman on the John R. Mantra, the last whaling schooner in New England. His father previous and his father's father and all their brothers and sons had been employed in New Hampshire and Rhode Island and New Jersey as carpenter's or stone masons but when their pride and violence caught up to them they would walk or hop on trains to New Bedford, Massachusetts, stealing apples and chickens and (if lucky) goats along the way. Once in New Bedford they would get enough liquor for a night then sign an x on a contract that would take them to the North Atlantic long enough for the police union of Warwick or Cranston or Lebanon or Morristown to forget the specific charges.

Once on the schooners, the Wilkes men would try to curb their chaos as much as possible. Oftentimes it wasn't successful. The worst punishment occurred to an Andrew Wilkes on the day before the siege of Fort Sumter. He had been arguing with a well-liked black man over the merits of slavery, and the argument soon descended into a fist fight. Andrew Wilkes knew when to duck and when to strike, and with one punch he knocked the base of the black man's skull into a pole with a rusty nail sticking out of its center. An hour later he was lashed forty times, and twenty minutes after that his body was being slammed over and over on the port side of the ship, the barnacles making his skin look like tenderized meat. He survived two days after the ordeal. Once his corpse was blessed and tossed overboard, crewmen swore they saw him following them in their wake, his pale head bobbing below then over the waves, a one eyed gull perched on the top of his skull, a smile not of this earth forever carved into his smooth face. His head finally sunk and the gull finally flew away when they threw the embalmed body of the man he had killed overboard as well.

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The best day of Alex's life was on March 8th, 2017, two days before his birthday. He had walked and hitchhiked to the Siuslaw bay eleven days prior and, once there, had set up his camp and started constructing a makeshift raft and oars and a harpoon. He wasn't exactly suicidal, but had come to a point where he didn't much care what happened to him. He decided he would float out to sea and observe where the current took him. If it was Japan, so be it, if it was North Korea, so be it, if it was the bottom of the Ocean, so be it.

He spent half the day paddling out of the bay and was capsized twice on the surf. A crowd was watching and recording him on their phones, and an old timer asked him what he was doing, and he smiled and said "whaling". The geezer laughed and within a half hour the riptide had taken Alex two miles out to open water.

As he watched his sick blend with the dirty green waves, he realized he could actually die, and he became more terrified than he had ever been. Shore was invisible over the swells, and even the tell tale buoys of crab pots had faded. The only thing he could see was the water. His boat was rocked and he almost capsized again, and he clutched both sides of his raft as he tried to remember which way east was when he had to swim.

The sun was setting and he figured out which way west was. Not that it mattered so much. His clothes were soaking and he couldn't stop shaking. One more hour and the sun would be gone and night would come and he would be truly lost. The Ocean was vast and the water came from lands of ice and mythic bears and could not sustain the necessary 98.5 degrees of a man in solely cotton attire with no neoprene or rubber gaskets for more than eighteen minutes.

He never believed in God but nobody is an atheist when they're about to die. He crossed himself as best he could over and over again, trying to remember if it was the left or right breast he should start with, hoping it didn't matter. Hail Mary full of Grace....hail mary full of Grace...who art in heaven? He was too tired. His brain was foggy and he was irritated and terrified. This is what you wanted, right? He thought of his nights spent with Sally, singing by their blue green, smoky fire, pathetically juxtaposed against the night sky. Farewell and adieu, ye fair spanish ladies.

It was a day too beautiful for the Oregon coast in March. There were no clouds or fog, only the serene orange of a dying sun.

" Farewell and adieu, ye fair Spanish ladies". Half of it had retreated below the horizon.

" Farewell and adieu, ye ladies of Spain". Only a quarter of it remained above the waves.

" For we've received orders to sail back to Boston, and it shall be a long time fore we see you again". There was an impossibly bright flash of green that Alex, like a moth about to glide towards a death lamp, couldn't look away from. And then the sun was gone. And for a moment Alex was alone. As he always had been. Then he saw the impossible rising grey back, the baseball sized eye.

The whale stared at him in the dimming light.

" Where'd you come from?". The whale squeaked then sunk below the waves and was gone. Alex was too tired to cry, and could think of nothing else to do but sing.

" We'll rant and we'll roll, like true Boston sailors". The back rose again and Alex's mouth opened.

"We'll rant and we'll roll, like sailors of Bost-ain". It opened its eye.

" For we've received orders to sail back to Boston, and it shall be a long time fore we see you again". Then it swam as gently as it could to the raft and opened its mouth. Later, Alex attributed what he did next to delirium, or maybe he dreamed it, or maybe all this time Jesus had been a Sperm whale, but he tied the rope of his harpoon to a plank of his raft, then gently placed the harpoon in the whale's mouth, and his raft was moving against the Northern Pacific current, staying buoyant over the calm swells, the back of the whale never disappearing, becoming more visible in the strong light of a full moon. Alex was still shivering uncontrollably and still being splashed by frigid water, and he wasn't sure if the whale was taking him out to open sea to make him pay for the crimes of his adopted forefathers or back to shore in an act of mercy most of us wouldn't be capable of. Either way he kept singing, kept crossing himself,

" Farewell and adieu" hail mary full of grace "ye fair spanish ladies" hail mary who art in heaven "farewell and adieu" hail mary full of grace " ye ladies of spain" hail mary who art in heaven.

The water around the whale was the sickly, weak green that bioluminescent life creates. The moon had set along with the sun and the only light Alex could see were the transitory constellations of late winter and the living ripples of plankton in the whale's wake. He knew which direction the whale had taken him. There was no sign of any lighthouse, or jetty, or the orange house lamps of shore. He was on the open sea; so cold that he had stopped shivering. He didn't care anymore. He was so tired, and in the distance a light was growing, and all he wanted to do was sleep. His eyes were closing, and the light was growing, white, then blue, then white, then blue, and he was with his mother, and they were both singing, but she told him to stop, that it was time for sleep, then all he could see was white, then blue, then white, then blue, then black.

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The scruffy, wiry beard of a fisherman tickling his chin was the first thing to awake Alex. He opened his eyes and saw the scarred face, then looked down and saw the missing thumb. The fisherman smiled, and day old spanish rice fell from his dirty blonde facial hair when he shouted

" Boys, check it out!" The crew shuffled in, the younger ones smiling, the older ones looking disturbed. Alex looked down and saw he was swaddled in a grey, lint blanket, and was naked otherwise. They asked how he got that far from shore and he asked for some clothes. When he was dressed he told them about the raft, about getting dragged out to sea,

" and then the next thing I remember is being here". The crew looked amongst themselves. Finally, the man missing his thumb who had awoken Alex asked

" Was there a whale?" Alex couldn't speak. The man repeated his question.

" Was there a whale?" Alex gulped, then nodded. The man gasped and whispered

"Jonah" and all the other fishermen looked at one another, and some crossed themselves, and some prayed, and all were somber. They gave Alex hot chocolate with wild turkey and half of a reheated Chipotle burrito then when dawn came returned him to shore, swaddled in long johns and overalls three sizes too big.

Alex never told anyone else about the whale. He never tried to explain it to himself. He knew that that singular moment had been the culmination of his entire life, that it couldn't have happened without his mother being arrested, without him getting kicked out and made homeless, without him being so low and uncaring and chaotic that he was willing to risk water filling his lungs and sharks amputating his legs just to waste an afternoon. In that moment, God, or the universe, or the nothing he still thought everything was, had revealed itself, and had saved him, or tried to drown him, or was uncaring about him and simply snagged his frail wooden harpoon in its mouth then got startled by the lights of a crabbing vessel. Alex Wilkes came from a long line of whalers, and just months before had made up indigenous blood so he could continue the tradition. Now all the schooners were run aground and now a whale rescued a Wilkes man.