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Authors: Joshua Horwitz
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dorsal fin and bounced into the ocean.
Ken turned out to be the only person on board who could handle a shotgun well enough to actually make a mark. After a couple of shots, he figured out that the tags were heavy, so you had to aim high to compensate for gravity. And you had to lead the moving target, just as his stepfather Cal had taught him to do while duck hunting. Before dinner of the first day’s tagging, Ken was promoted from dishwasher to marksman/dishwasher. By the end of their two-week tour, he’ d successfully tagged almost 200 whales.
Those two weeks aboard the
Lynnann
were bliss. After years as a loner adrift in his own world, Ken had finally found a peer group and a mission. It was his first time at sea, and he loved everything about it: the boat, the whales, the shotguns, and especially the company of two world-renowned cetologists who knew the answers to all his questions about whales.
During that tagging trip, Ken began photographing whales. He’ d been taking nature photos ever since high school, and shortly before the tagging trip Ken had seen a spectacular photo-spread of humpback whales in
Life
magazine. 1 At the time, almost no one had photographed whales in the wild. Fortunately for Ken, the same keen eyes and quick reflexes that made him a good whale tagger enabled him to capture photographs of whales from the deck of the
Lynnann
.
Aboard the
Lynnann
, armed with a whale-tagging shotgun and a camera.
By the end the trip, Rice offered Ken the job of expedition leader on another tagging trip over the summer. When Ken returned home, triumphant, Anne wasn’t there to celebrate. She’ d taken their one-year-old son, Kelley, and moved back with her parents in Sacramento. Ken begged her to come home, but she refused. She knew that Ken was doing what he’ d always wanted, but it wasn’t what she’ d signed up for. She missed the clean-cut kid with the winning smile she’ d met at the gas station. The one who was heading to law school, not the one who hung out in whale processing plants, who went to sea for weeks at a time and came home smelling like a fishmonger.
Ken was crushed that his young family was breaking apart. A month later, when Anne began seeing a medical student across campus, Ken couldn’t handle it. He dropped out of grad school and took a volunteer job with Dale Rice tagging whales. After a series of trips marking gray whales in Baja, Rice offered him a full-time job working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So Ken moved to Berkeley and worked at the Richmond whaling station collecting specimens. Day after day he searched for Discovery tags in the piles of offal and in the cookers, verified the length and legality of the catch, and took samples of their blubber, earwax, stomach contents, and gonads.
His divorce papers arrived that spring. Two months later, he heard from the draft board. Now that he was neither married nor a student, Ken was reclassified as 1-A eligible. It was the summer of 1965, and troop levels in Vietnam were escalating rapidly. Dale Rice suggested a “deferred occupation” that might keep the draft board at bay. The Smithsonian was directing a contract job for the US Army, banding birds in the Pacific, based out of Honolulu. All things considered, the middle of the Pacific Ocean sounded to Ken like a pretty good destination. 2
Ken spent a year at sea, moving from dot to dot in the central Pacific and the Hawaiian island chain. From there, he progressed to a seemingly endless string of central and South Pacific atolls. Every few days, he would disembark from the mother ship aboard an inflatable boat packed with a tent, food, and water, and thousands of aluminum leg bands. He’ d find landfall, set up camp, sleep all day, and work all night banding birds that nested on the ground along the shore.
Bird banding on Hull Island in the North Pacific, 1966.
It was classic stoop labor, like planting rice in a paddy. Insects feasted on his
Ken turned out to be the only person on board who could handle a shotgun well enough to actually make a mark. After a couple of shots, he figured out that the tags were heavy, so you had to aim high to compensate for gravity. And you had to lead the moving target, just as his stepfather Cal had taught him to do while duck hunting. Before dinner of the first day’s tagging, Ken was promoted from dishwasher to marksman/dishwasher. By the end of their two-week tour, he’ d successfully tagged almost 200 whales.
Those two weeks aboard the
Lynnann
were bliss. After years as a loner adrift in his own world, Ken had finally found a peer group and a mission. It was his first time at sea, and he loved everything about it: the boat, the whales, the shotguns, and especially the company of two world-renowned cetologists who knew the answers to all his questions about whales.
During that tagging trip, Ken began photographing whales. He’ d been taking nature photos ever since high school, and shortly before the tagging trip Ken had seen a spectacular photo-spread of humpback whales in
Life
magazine. 1 At the time, almost no one had photographed whales in the wild. Fortunately for Ken, the same keen eyes and quick reflexes that made him a good whale tagger enabled him to capture photographs of whales from the deck of the
Lynnann
.
Aboard the
Lynnann
, armed with a whale-tagging shotgun and a camera.
By the end the trip, Rice offered Ken the job of expedition leader on another tagging trip over the summer. When Ken returned home, triumphant, Anne wasn’t there to celebrate. She’ d taken their one-year-old son, Kelley, and moved back with her parents in Sacramento. Ken begged her to come home, but she refused. She knew that Ken was doing what he’ d always wanted, but it wasn’t what she’ d signed up for. She missed the clean-cut kid with the winning smile she’ d met at the gas station. The one who was heading to law school, not the one who hung out in whale processing plants, who went to sea for weeks at a time and came home smelling like a fishmonger.
Ken was crushed that his young family was breaking apart. A month later, when Anne began seeing a medical student across campus, Ken couldn’t handle it. He dropped out of grad school and took a volunteer job with Dale Rice tagging whales. After a series of trips marking gray whales in Baja, Rice offered him a full-time job working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So Ken moved to Berkeley and worked at the Richmond whaling station collecting specimens. Day after day he searched for Discovery tags in the piles of offal and in the cookers, verified the length and legality of the catch, and took samples of their blubber, earwax, stomach contents, and gonads.
His divorce papers arrived that spring. Two months later, he heard from the draft board. Now that he was neither married nor a student, Ken was reclassified as 1-A eligible. It was the summer of 1965, and troop levels in Vietnam were escalating rapidly. Dale Rice suggested a “deferred occupation” that might keep the draft board at bay. The Smithsonian was directing a contract job for the US Army, banding birds in the Pacific, based out of Honolulu. All things considered, the middle of the Pacific Ocean sounded to Ken like a pretty good destination. 2
Ken spent a year at sea, moving from dot to dot in the central Pacific and the Hawaiian island chain. From there, he progressed to a seemingly endless string of central and South Pacific atolls. Every few days, he would disembark from the mother ship aboard an inflatable boat packed with a tent, food, and water, and thousands of aluminum leg bands. He’ d find landfall, set up camp, sleep all day, and work all night banding birds that nested on the ground along the shore.
Bird banding on Hull Island in the North Pacific, 1966.
It was classic stoop labor, like planting rice in a paddy. Insects feasted on his
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