The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing in an encounter with the majesty and mystery of what is not ourselves — birds migrating at midnight, the magic of autumn, the grandeur of Machu Picchu; almost always, in consonance with William James’s criteria for transcendent experiences, they are ineffable. Still, we are here to tell each other what it is like to be alive and language remains the best technology we have invented for bridging the abyss between one aliveness and another.

Few encounters with the wildness and wonder of this world can be more powerful than that with an orca, and no one has painted a more moving word-portrait of that encounter than Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager.

Seventeen centuries after the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described the largest member of the dolphin family as “an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth” in a small passage of his thirty-seven-volume natural history encyclopedia, Carl Linnaeus named it Orcinus orca — “the demon from the underworld.” But while this striking marbled creature is nature’s most successful and creative predator, it is also the tenderest, paying the same high price of consciousness that we pay. To encounter an orca is to both to face something almost incomprehensibly other and to face the depths of ourselves. Strager channels that transcendent duality throughout The Killer Whale Journals (public library) — the riveting record of how she escaped the cage of theory that was her landlocked biology degree and Trojan-horsed her way into an expedition to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, breaking in through the cracks of the patriarchy to study Earth’s most powerful matriarchal society by volunteering to cook on a small research vessel.

She writes:

Killer whales are unconcerned with our attitudes. They don’t need our love or our hatred. How we understand and interact with a big predator like the killer whale is instead a reflection of ourselves and how we want to live with the complexity of other animals around us.

To come close to an orca is no easy endeavor, even for those who have ventured to the remotest and most undisturbed reaches of the oceanic wilderness. Strager recounts the thrill of trailing two elusive male orcas in the setting sun, the hint of their presence turning the sea into “a piece of heavy silk… gently moved by invisible hands.” But even when they vanish beneath the still surface, other senses can reveal their presence. Recounting her first experience of eavesdropping on the sea’s undersound with a hydrophone connected to an amplifier, she writes:

Through the headphones, I could clearly hear the splash and gurgling from the hydrophone as it sunk, and then the quietness of the big sea, with a low thrumming in the background, which I would later learn was the sound of boat traffic in the distance. But through the muffled noises of engines and water, I also heard the most incredible sounds, eerie and melodious at the same time. Like a tropical bird singing a mournful song or people whistling from far away across a deep valley.

[…]

Somewhere, in the vast ocean below me, in the great darkness under the leaden surface of the sea, animals were calling and responding to each other.

Understanding — which is a thing of the mind — that these majestic animals are dwelling below the surface is one thing, encountering them with the full creaturely sensorium of bodies meeting in space is something else entirely. Strager reflects on the inner transformation sparked by her first direct encounter with an orca:

A large male came up right next to the boat, so close that I could see water running down his gleaming skin. A pearly black eye just in front of the white eyepatch stared right at me. It was just a quick moment, but it stayed with me after the whale was gone. I realized that this huge killer whale had been checking us out — just as we were checking them out. To sense the awareness and curiosity of another being, and perhaps even its desire to connect, shatters an invisible barrier. It perforates the solitude of being human in a wild world where we are surrounded by creatures we don’t understand and can’t reach.

Immense and indifferent, the orcas have no sense of or concern with the myths and legends we have woven them into, the Instagram sensations and the scientists’ journals. And yet we share the kinship of curiosity, that yearning to apprehend what it is to be another — the only thing that saves us from the existential loneliness of being ourselves.

Couple with the fascinating science of what it’s like to be an owl, then revisit what orcas can teach us about love and loss.