It was a Sunday morning in January 1996, a three-and-a-half-ton orca lolled about in a shipping

container full of ice, strapped to the inside of a cargo plane, flying thousands of feet above

the surface of the earth. It's the outlandish sort of magic we take for granted, the kind that

only happens because we, humans, have scrapped the rules of the natural world

and rewritten them to our whims, making the absurd, a killer whale, flying into something almost

ordinary. It was Keiko, headed to his new home at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, a relatively small

regional facility in Newport, a few hours southwest of Portland.

So that day was typical of the Oregon coast.

It was raining. It was windy. It was cold.

This is Diane Hammond.

I don't know what my title was, but I was pretty much press secretary to the killer whale.

You were there before Keiko arrived. I was there long before Keiko arrived. I was there before there was an aquarium, in fact. Diane was one of the first staff

people at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, hired by the director, Phyllis Bell, when the place was

little more than an idea. Phyllis passed away a few years ago, but she was the one who took

the call from

Dave Phillips's team, the call in which they made her what must have been a pretty surprising,

some might even say, desperate, offer. If we were to pay to build an enormous tank at your aquarium,

would you be willing to temporarily house a killer whale? Everybody else had said no by then.

We were definitely not the first approached.

There was the sense of, if you guys don't help us, we don't know what we're going to do with him.

And there may be nothing we can do for him, but let him die.

Those were the stakes, as far as Diane remembers them, life or death.

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