Live Encounters Magazine Volume Two November-December 2024.
An Empty Chair by the Cliff
Reflections on Special Friendships by José Truda Palazzo, Jr.
Atop a windy cliff bordering the wild shores of Península Valdés, in Patagonia, lies a rusty old folding chair that once lived inside a small, corrugated tin hut with ample windows opening towards the sea – now long gone after being blown away by one of the legendary windstorms which ravage these latitudes from time to time. The lonely chair, however, is still there, defying time and the elements.
This chair once belonged – or will eternally belong, rather – to a friend of mine. Dr. Roger S. Payne, one of the greatest geniuses of our time, and founder of modern non-lethal whale research. Together with his first wife Katy, Roger was the first to understand that humpback whales not only produced aleatory sounds, but created veritable songs, with themes that were repeated by several individuals in the same population during mating season, and which varied over time and between breeding areas, eerie and harmonious melodies which helped save not only their species, but all great whales, from extinction by the greed of whaling fleet barons. Roger’s recordings of humpback whale songs reached millions of people around the world, including on long-play records issued from 1970 onwards and in a flexible one inserted in a special edition of National Geographic magazine in 1979, right in time to fan the flames of a growing global movement against whaling. Thanks in no small part to his efforts, commercial whaling was banned in most of the world’s seas in 1986, and whales started to walk back from the brink.
Roger also realized from his early studies in the Caribbean that humpback whales could be individually set apart by the rather distinctive patterns of black and white (and long-lasting scars) in their tails, veritable “fingerprints” which helped, once you had these markings photographed and catalogued, figure out whether they frequented the same breeding grounds over time, where they migrated for food, how they interacted, which calves were born from whom, and other very important traits that helped understand their biology and behavior. Before these findings, “whale research” was basically done by jumping aboard a whaling vessel, measuring, weighing and making notes on dead whales and their organs.
Individual markings on whales were not exclusive to humpbacks, though. In the early 1970’s, Roger moved with his young family to Península Valdés in Argentina, a portion of the Patagonian semidesert that juts out to sea nearly halfway between Buenos Aires and Tierra del Fuego, to study a much rarer species, the southern right whale, which survived in a still numerous breeding ground in the two gulfs encircling the peninsula and its high fossil-laden cliffs. Round, black, docile and easily approachable, right whales could be told apart by a different set of markings: the callosities in their heads, covered in yellowish or whitish cyamids, a small crustacean also called whale lice. His favored research area, named Camp 39, overlooked San José Gulf and is teeming with whales every winter and spring. Here, Roger built his tin hut by the tall cliff from where he spent countless happy hours studying “his” whales, and laid the foundations of long-term cetacean studies that would influence two generations of scientists and marine conservation initiatives across the globe.
I was fortunate enough to have met Roger at an International Whaling Commission conference in Buenos Aires in 1984. By that time my little group of volunteers had just rediscovered the surviving population of right whales off Southern Brazil, and he was immediately excited by the prospect of collaborating with us. In 1985 he would invite us over to Península Valdés, where my brain swelled with knowledge and insights, and our friendship flourished. Over time, I would meet Roger here and there, from Massachusetts to South Africa to Buenos Aires, and there would always be many laughs and an inordinate flow of information and ideas.
It had been a while since I’ve been to Camp 39, and in my most recent visit, climbing the path to the top of the cliff, finding the empty chair and looking down on the frolicking right whales in the calm clear waters of the gulf, I had to contend with conflicting feelings. On one hand, I was trapped in a deep sense of loneliness and loss watching that scene, as if contemplating a full orchestra without its maestro; on another, which fortunately replaced those thoughts quite soon, a sense of wonder, gratitude and fulfillment of having been blessed both with Roger’s presence in my life and the legacy he left for me and all of us, of these magnificent whales multiplying slowly but steadily down there in the gulf, of our enhanced awareness about our lives being so interconnected with these still mysterious but no longer distant creatures.
Roger Payne is likely a good example of the special friends that transit through one’s life with enough power (light) (energy) (meaning) (choose one or many!) to change it profoundly. I have always been a person of very few true friends, perhaps a symptom of growing up interested in books and Nature in a country where most people – regardless of social and economic status – are illiterate and only care about soccer or celebrity gossips, and couldn’t give a damn about our planet and its woes. But walking through life over the last six decades has been a journey molded by friendships with those rare individuals who see beyond the soccer field (or, in most recent times, the cellphone screen). But how do you find and develop these special friendships that help define one’s character and, ultimately, one’s destiny?
I wouldn’t want to enter into the swampy realm of the old dichotomy of nurture versus
nature. Perhaps our genes do have a major say in who we will become, culturally speaking;
perhaps not that much. In my particular case nurturing had a lot to do with it. My father was my first great friend and maybe a good example of that too. An economist by profession, he had the blessing of going to school to learn with some of the very last scientist-priests of Brazil in the 1930’s and 40’s, mostly naturalists who took advantage of the liberty given by the Jesuit order to roam the country, explore and write. When in my teen years I started to show an acute interest in environmental activism, the young student who had walked the wilds of southern Brazil with his enthusiastic teachers in numerous excursions, seeking an understanding of the exuberant Nature all around, came out from the heart of the old bank director to guide me in my life-defining path.
My father, already in his 70’s, would take me to conservation groups’ meetings, buy me an enormity of Nature-related books which were both expensive and rare at that time, and drive me around to meet conservation icons, and eventually to Patagonia, which would somehow become a prelude to my meeting with Roger Payne.
Being so young when I met these special friends who were much older than me meant that I was at an optimum time to absorb their teachings and, to a great extent, their views on life and our duty towards other species. But it also meant that empty chairs would become a constant in my history of friendships. And all of these empty chairs have taken hold in my mind with the dual nature of an atomic particle, sometimes hurting for the missing presence of these special people, and other times filling me with joy for having partaken in their company and wisdom. And these empty chairs take many, many forms. A walk along the Guaíba lake in Porto Alegre (get your Googlemaps ready for this part!) watching the portentous native fig trees by the road reminds me of Augusto Carneiro, who pioneered most of the fight for urban flora and fauna in Southern Brazil and got me into the global campaign against whaling (thereby leading later to the meeting with Roger Payne).
A trip to the hills of Santa Teresa in Espírito Santo led me to the trail ending by a waterfall where Augusto Ruschi, a celebrated hummingbird researcher, is buried, and who befriended me in 1979 right around the time when he was doing press conferences carrying a shotgun and daring the corrupt State authorities of the time to come and cut down his forest sanctuary as they were threatening to do for a “development”(they never did and the forest and its hummingbirds are still there). Strolling down to the foot of Leme hill framing the limit of famous Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, my mind floats to the many memorable chats with Admiral Ibsen Câmara, former deputy Chief of Staff of our Armed Forces Command and staunch opponent of Japanese whaling interests in Brazil, and a strong advocate of national parks and protected areas.
Names and places, deeds and ideas, shared bonds which somehow have become who I am and also become a long-lasting legacy through the parks I helped create and the species I was able to help save from oblivion.
Not all chairs are empty though.
Roger Payne’s chair by the cliff is in fact surrounded by others which are full of both himself and other unique minds. In the same trip that I mourned Roger’s physical absence and celebrated his permanence in the whales and people he touched with his mind (sensu Leonard Cohen), I reunited with Claudio Campagna and Guillermo Harris, two intellectual giants whose contribution to Patagonian conservation cannot be adequately described in words; with larger-than-life Rodolfo Werner, who leads the Latin American charge for the protection of Antarctica, the planet’s vital and fragile regulator; with Adalberto ‘Peke’ Sosa, who first led Roger to see the right whales up close in his small boat and, now in his eighties, continues to lead the family who built the longest-running whale watching company in the world (please read more about in my article printed in the July 2021 issue of Live Encounters).
Back at Peke’s family home I hastily send some whale photos over to Dan Morast in the United States, who “adopted” me early in my activist career and helped me and many other developing country folks rock the Whaling Commission and defeat the whalers’ misdeeds. I think of my recent bouts with cancer and hope for our chairs to not be vacant anytime soon so I can keep drinking on their friendship fountain and aspire to they enjoying mine too.
Far down the line of chairs by the cliff of life are the younger friends who also mean so much for one’s spirit. From Márcia Engel who valiantly led the Brazilian Humpback Whale Project for almost three decades and against all odds made it become the foundation for the largest and longest-running whale research and conservation program on Earth, to the Project interns that bring inquisitive vitality to our work with their never-ending (I hope) quest for a better world; to the new generation that continued Roger Payne’s work at the Whales Conservation Institute in Argentina; all the way to my closest friend and ally Nalu, my wife and dive buddy.
Why so many names in an article to be read by people who may never get to know them better? Because by thinking and writing them here and elsewhere, be their chairs empty or full, every time one thinks about how past and present friends make us who we are, I think they all become alive and closer, and somehow receive the best energies of those reading their names and learning about their importance for the world.
Because of that, of the way that we remember our friends, Roger’s chair is no longer empty now, and perhaps my younger friends will one day make my own chair by the cliff to be filled with their thoughts and actions – inspired, I would wish, by my own legacy.
Find your empty chairs by the cliff and celebrate them. Visit your friends’ chairs which are still in use, either in presence or mentally, more often. The world is in great need of more people who are not islands in the void, but constantly and endlessly built by the presence, the ideas and the warmth of others – and it needs it right now.
© José Truda Palazzo, Jr.
José Truda Palazzo Jr. is a wildlife gardener, environmental consultant and writer with a career spanning 46 years and 14 books published as author or co-author. He served for almost two decades in government delegations to international conservation treaties and is a co-founder of many conservation organizations around Brazil and South America, having led successful campaigns for the establishment of several Marine Protected Areas in his home country. José is also a Member of the IUCN (World Conservation Union) Task Force on Marine Mammals and Protected Areas and its Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group, a Life Member of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and a Board Member of the Brazilian Humpback Whale Institute, having received in 2023 the Animal Action Award of the International Fund for Animal Welfare for his lifelong efforts to protect whales around the world.