I'm John Moallem. I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.

This is a story that I wrote for the Voyages issue of the magazine in 2019 about a terrible

accident that happened on a trip I had taken with two friends. It was a real privilege,

almost 20 years later, to report out what happened and find some clarity about something

that felt disorienting and traumatic at the time.

So here's my story. It was just a kayaking trip until it upended our lives.

The whale sighting happened right away, minutes into day one.

John, Dave and I had just been dropped off on a remote Alaskan shoreline, an hour and

a half by boat from the closest speck of a town. John was working as a sea kayak and

guide that summer in Glacier Bay National Park and he'd invited us up for a seven day

excursion during his week off. As the boat that delivered us vanished, the drone of its

engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off, it became unthinkably quiet

on the beach and the largeness and strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent.

It was a familiar phenomenon for John from the start of all his trips, a moment that

people instinctually paused to soak in. To me, it felt like those scenes of astronauts

who having finally rattled free of the Earth's atmosphere slip into the stillness of space.

Except that we weren't in space. We were on Earth. Finally, really on Earth.

We were only starting to move around again, packing our gear into the kayaks when we heard

the first huff of a blowhole, not far offshore.

John was ecstatic. It seemed to him as if the animal were putting on a show, swimming

playfully in the kelp, diving, resurfacing, then plowing its open mouth across the surface

to feed. He took it as a good omen, though I had no idea at the time, he was anxious

...