They looked around at each other. The room was smoke-filled. They saw each other in Budweiser T-shirts, jeans, dirty running shoes on men who didn’t run. There were Styrofoam cups on the tables. They sat on folding chairs. They heard the sound of the Coke machine when another can fell. A few handsome young men asserted their identity by having grown long hair. Thomas looked at the others, wondering about the money, surprised he’d heard no rumors.

The women who came with the men, some in T-shirts and jeans or hot-pink tops, looked at Ruth with hostility. She was against their men. Her own people.

There were a few older men with their lives written on their faces by the sea, thinking of the whales glimmering in sunlight, the young whales in kelp beds bending, blowing, riding with currents. They were thinking, This isn’t how it used to be for us. It’s not good. They thought Ruth was right, but if they stood up with her, they would lose. Health benefits. Housing. And she was an outcast in some circles, a puzzle in others, a hero among the few. She was a rare woman who was not afraid to use words.

Ruth understood the ocean like the other fishermen. She knew the unpredictable waters, the large waves, the near-collisions, how an earthquake far away could change the currents without warning. But she also knew people. Because she’d been shy as a girl, she learned to see to the core of them, the kindness of a gruff person, the hardness of a friendly one. She saw the vulnerabilities and the cruelties. It gave her a voice.

She said to the crowd, because by now there were people coming in from other towns, “Tell the sea what you are going to do. It is already listening to your words, deciding things in a new language. The whole world out there is waiting to escape your human grasping. The mind of water is listening, the mind of the water is thinking, is willing it another way. The thoughts of the world know. Truth is outside this room of bad choices.”

At the end of all this they would still have wants and needs never fulfilled. Ruth understood that humans could be such empty vessels.

Marco, perhaps, was too young to know what was in the cravings of the other men, too innocent. He’d lived always with those who loved him, protected him, even at the painted white town with the elders. The truth was, he also wanted to know something of his father. He told himself his father had shrapnel in his brain like Ruth told him and had forgotten them or that he’d been through something and lost the thing that made a man, his memory, his soul. Maybe, Marco thought, he could get past that place.

Marco and his father both also believed the rituals were still with them. They did not know the whole story. The selling of whale meat, the opening of the whale fat market of other nations and whaling in other countries.