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mothers’ backs.
    I still wanted to touch him to somehow reassure him, but I couldn’t reach far enough. So I thought as strongly as I could: Don’t worry, little guy, we’ll find her.
    I glanced across the ocean’s surface. It looked so big. I would take you to your home if I could, I thought, as loudly as I could. But you don’t really have a home. It’s all that water that stretches out around us.Or maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe your home, everyone’s home is simply where your loved ones are. Then that’s really home. I will take you home. We will find her.
    The lifeguards said they would search for her. They would radio Steve if they saw anything at all. They would radio the crews who were on patrol in different waters off Long Beach, and they would radio other lifeguard departments at Surfside, Sunset, and Huntington beaches to see if they had sighted a single female whale, one that seemed lost, or confused, or wasn’t migrating north.
    So the baby whale and I continued swimming to the north jetty and once we reached the rocks, we stopped and scanned the water.
    There wasn’t a huge hole of dark blue made by the impression of his mother’s body diving into the sea, or a long trail of blue, or even a fluke. There was no sign of his mother.
    I treaded water and the baby whale floated near me. We watched and waited for five minutes, and when I didn’t see anything, I decided to turn around andreturn to the pier. But when I started swimming freestyle, the baby whale didn’t follow.
    He dove suddenly and disappeared.
    Three minutes passed and there was no sign of him.
    I was worried; I knew he could hold his breath for five minutes, maybe more, but he had just vanished.
    Taking a deep breath, I dove under the water to look for him. Using wide breaststroke pulls I dug deeper into the water column, moved down through the thermocline, and the farther I went, the colder the water became. The color faded away. Wave surge churned the muck on the seafloor and the visibility dropped to ten feet.
    Slowly, with my legs extended over my head, I turned in a circle, trying to see the baby whale.
    My ears were filled with the sounds of the city. It was like walking through Times Square in New York City during the height of rush hour. Sound in water travels four times faster than it does in air and it travels farther, but the sounds surrounding me seemed to be amplified by the water. And I felt the energy wavesof the fire truck and ambulance sirens, the rumble of a jet airplane taking off from Long Beach airport, the deep throb of a helicopter flying directly overhead, the sound of swarming mosquitoes as three racing Jet Skis buzzed within a few yards of me.
    There were more sounds, sounds I couldn’t distinguish, and perhaps sounds that were too low for me to hear. There were so many ships heading for Los Angeles Harbor or traveling north or south along the California coast; maybe their sonar made so much noise that when the mother whale called her baby, he couldn’t hear her. Or maybe he was crying out for her and she couldn’t hear his cries. Maybe she was using her sonar to try to locate him, but with all the interference from the ships’ sonar and other sound waves moving through the water column, she couldn’t locate him.
    My lungs were burning, so I used large breaststroke pulls to return to the surface, releasing bubbles from my mouth and letting the water lift me back to the surface. I was disappointed. I had thought I would be able to find the baby whale. Maybe he had given up on me. Or maybe he was swimming far away in deeper water.
    I decided to swim out parallel to the jetty. Taking three large breaths I hyperventilated so I would have some extra air in my lungs. I kicked my heels over my head like I was doing a handstand on land and made large rounded breaststroke pulls so I could dive down quickly.
    As I pulled myself deeper into the water, the waves slowly bounced me up and down. It was like entering