Do Squid Really Get to Be 100 Feet Long?

         It was close to three a.m. and I’d manned the helm since midnight. The rustling of the boat’s passage through the warm Hawaiian waters, her foaming wake, and the soft wind were the only sounds to keep me awake. My mind drifted, I steered by old habit and the boat stayed true to her course. We were returning to Oahu from Necker Island in the Leeward Chain.
         Suddenly, I felt an unnatural tingling at my back. The hair on my neck stood up, and a giant fear took hold of me. The strangest thought crossed my mind and made me laugh aloud, even though my body remained in a petrified state of fear.
         An image had popped into my mind, that of a giant squid, and a slimy tentacle slipping over the transom of the boat, which was all open behind me. My laughter died, and though I couldn’t, I must not, look behind me, I had to!
         Nothing was there. Only the flashing foam under the sweet, bright moonlight, and the massive, breathing ocean sighing under and all around me. I smelled the diesel fumes, the old tobacco from my skipper’s smoking, the scuppers. He had closed the companionway, so I couldn’t see him, but I heard his snores. It was all familiar, comforting. So what was this strange horror?
         It got worse and worse. My shoulders shrank in toward my chest, and my heart raced. There was such a prickling at the back of my neck, and the skin shivered and trembled on my bare legs and back. I couldn’t stop myself from peering around every few seconds; I felt something there. My mind was playing tricks on me, it had to be. But this had never happened before, I was an old hand, had traveled maybe a hundred thousand miles at sea. This was my home, the swell, the wind, the sea salt in every breath I took in. What was this weird dread?
         I couldn’t concentrate on steering, and the sails all took to shivering, I was luffing up in the wind, and risked being backed into a jibe. I had to focus on my steering, but how, when every atom of my brain screeched a primitive warning – danger! Danger! It was the old fear of the hulking predatory shadow in the night, beyond the firelight. My only firelight was a dim glow from the binnacle and the running lights, red, green, muted, they would not protect me.
         My breath came so fast now, and I had to slam a fist in my mouth, to not shout out for the captain to get up here, now, it was an emergency! Suddenly, an explosion at the surface, as far as I could see! My puny lights were overwhelmed with brilliant light all around me, at the level of the sea, and flashing yards into the air.
         Tens of thousands of fish were leaping into the air, and each added its flash in the night, its moment of phosphorescent fame and glory. Together, they lit up the sea in a rare-to-human-eyes spectacle of light and sound.
         Each individual splash was like a raindrop that, added to its thousands of brother raindrops, created a soothing music, like that of rain.
         But after the first few instants of rapture, when I forgot everything to contemplate such ethereal beauty, the fear came back. It gripped me still more tenaciously and the awesome sight and melodious sound brought me no comfort. The sudden eruption of fish had only added to my shock, and then, in a leap of logic, an idea got a foothold in my mind. The boiling water around me, half-fish, half-sea, was the scene of an age-old struggle. For the fish to be airborne meant a predator was in chase, in full hunt, and my boat was in the middle of the fray!
         All of a sudden, I heard a gigantic splash to leeward, and the helm spun in my hands, the boat skewed out of control. Then my adrenalin kicked in and cleared my mind for action. I pulled in the mainsheet, twisted the wheel back, and got the sails filled again. We couldn’t risk an accidental jibe; maybe break something essential to staying afloat. I was now steering with my back to the wheel; I had to keep an eye on the stern, where nothing separated me from my ghostly enemy. I must have shouted out, because I heard muffled groans and the sound of tossing in the bunk. Or maybe that terrifying presence, whatever it was, had penetrated the dreams of my skipper, who, as all good skippers, possessed that sixth sense, where menace to his dear boat is concerned.
         Then I saw it, an immense form lifted itself from the water, graceful as a ballet dancer, its delicate lower jaw open to let a river flood out of its long mouth. Its massive forehead shone wetly in the moonlight. A sperm whale! How that would have caused raucous joy in the old days of the grease pots and ivory. But not to me. I am fond of my frail leaf of a wood and resin boat, my floor and ceiling, my walls, my home. I liked my life, too, no, I loved it, and did not want to sink to my death, glorious but unspoken, in the trough of the ocean.
         The whale ate great mouthfuls of mackerel, each big enough for four humans to make a dinner of. I glimpsed his white teeth, fourscore and twenty more of them, as he tossed his jaws up to swallow again and again. He seemed in great haste; the schools were bursting out and up, to left and right, with all their flashes of green neon, and the moon shone lovingly down on the carnage, the delicious dining of one of Nature’s great beasts. The giant sperm whale splashed about happy as a baby in a tub. Then he suddenly became still, and his head turned slowly toward me; he lifted his head above the surface and worked his tail, maneuvering to slip in beside my boat. His skin touched the starboard side, and the boat and I both shivered. He let himself slide downstream, to be level with me -- another living being, but with a strangely rigid form compared to his own. He turned his head and gazed at me with one big, meltingly soft eye. He seemed to be apologizing for his voracity; yes, it wasn’t so very polite to show so much delight in killing and eating. His intelligence sought mine, it shone through that long gaze, and then he blinked and slid under. I sighed and closed my eyes.
         Yet the fear remained.
          It was not the whale that had set my senses quaking; I knew it in my bones, skin, and hair, in my jaw, sore from my clacking teeth. He was curious, that whale, but at heart, as indifferent to me and my toothpick of a boat as to a gnat. No, it was something else, and it was still prowling about, I felt it. As the minutes passed, though, I felt less and less anxious, and suddenly it was gone, like a bubble that burst with a pop, like the last scene of a cartoon. I was living a cartoon, inside the reel with Bugs and Tweety and Jules Verne.
         The skipper came up the companionway then, and stuck his tousled head out the hatch. “Wazzit?” he asked groggily.
         “Nothing, go back to sleep.”
         The next morning, just as I was about to go down below for my tour in dreamland, dog-tired, listless, the captain asks me, as he’s gazing astern, “Hey, dj’you get sick or what? The transom’s all sticky!”
         My senses prickled again and the hairs on my scruffy neck rose up. I looked over the back of the boat, where the teak transom met the swirling blue tropical water. Something had whipped or climbed or gripped there, leaving a long streak of shiny, sticky larval-like matter, a trail pearly and innocent now in the dawn, up the transom, over the rail, and right onto the wood slats of the engine hatch…just behind the wheel.
                                              THE END