Hub and Spoke. Audio collective.

This is Rumbel Strip, I'm Erica Heilman. A lot of them hang vertically when they sing.

And there was a whale that was sort of at about 45 degrees,

at about 20 feet beneath us and as soon as I got in the water my ears and head

were just full of its singing. The water is vibrating with the whale's voice so you become a kind of

of its song. You vibrate with its voice. You ring like a kind of bell.

Wales and grunts, vibrate you in different ways and some of them you can't hear they're beneath human hearing but

they vibrate at such low frequencies that all of you kind of rumbles.

I wondered whether it was like listening to people talking when you're in the womb

you know as a child as a unborn child whether you feel the sounds from the world around you through water in your mother.

I mean it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced.

I want to feel it again. That's Tom Mustel. He's a conservation biologist and he makes beautiful films about where nature and people meet.

He's worked with Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough and he's been shad on by bats in Mexico and recently he finished a book called How to Speak Whale.

I read it in one day and it made me cry at least three times, not because it was sad, but because it describes the very real possibility that someday, maybe even in my lifetime, will begin to understand the complex language of whales and all that that

understanding would imply. Also I cried because it made me want to swim near a

whale and listen to one sing underwater and that probably isn't going to happen.

Tom was in southern Vermont interviewing Roger Payne, a scientist whose 1970 album

Songs of the Humpback Whale galvanized the Save the Whales movement and really developed

our understanding of whale behavior and culture.

So while Tom was here to interview Roger, I drove down and interviewed Tom we sat in a floating Japanese tea house near Roger's place for hours and I didn't want to stop until he had told me every single thing he has ever learned about whale

behavior and every story that he could think of. He was really polite about it and

I don't know why I have this insatiable feeling about Wales and wanting to understand them.

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