Oceans of Tears
by C.M. Mayo

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The following essay is excerpted from Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico with permission of the author.

Ecotourism was not without its drawbacks, however. The tourists brought dollars, but also garbage and sewage. There were small Mexican tour operators on Laguna San Ignacio; but the serious money went largely to U.S. tour companies, like Baja Expeditions, that had the infrastructure and know-how to sell packages to people who just as easily might decide on the Galapagos, biking in Holland, or for that matter, a few days baking on a beach outside the Holiday Inn somewhere in the Caribbean.

"Ecotourism doesn't leave much for the locals except low-level jobs," the Mexican activist and poet Homero Aridjis told Newsweek. It's an old argument. As V.S. Naipaul pronounced back in 1962, "Every poor country accepts tourism as an unavoidable degredation." I could see it for myself: it was the Mexicans who drove the pangas and dug the latrines and washed the dishes.

On the other hand, ecotourism did provide some good jobs, including for Sergio Flores, the well-spoken cetologist, and Alejandro Flores, the cook who hoped to work one day as a chef in a hotel. It also provided an incentive to care for the environment at a time when too many people were fishing too few fish. In short, like so many others, it seemed to me a complex situation.

And one I was very privileged to have been able to explore. Not many Mexicans can shell out for an eco-tour; nor would many be interested even if they could. "Environmentalism is a luxury that developing countries can't afford," I've heard a top-ranking government economist say on more than one occasion (echoing none other than President Echeverria). But there is this: They may never go on an eco-tour, but millions of Mexican children care about whales because they care about one whale that they saw and they heard: Keiko, the orca that performed at the Reino Aventura amusement park in Mexico City, the star (along with an "animatronic" rubber orca) of the phenomenally popular movie Free Willy.

On the single day of January 6, 1996, nearly 30,000 parents and children filed past Keiko's tank at Reino Aventura. Later that night, as many as 100,000 people lined the expressway and crowded onto its pedestrian overpasses to wave goodbye as Keiko was driven, packed in ice water in a UPS crate with a sticker reading "THIS SIDE UP," to the Mexico City airport. So many of his fans attempted to accompany the "Keiko Express" flat-bed rig in their cars some of the police in the motorcade even brought their children that the fifteen mile trip to the airport, which began a little after midnight, took until 3:30 in the morning. Mexican TV and newspapers gave the event full coverage, interviewing Keiko's pretty young trainers; showing Keiko's handlers coaxing him into his sling to be transported; the huddled families wrapped in ponchos and blankets, and the children crying and waving.

"Que se quede, que se quede," Let him stay, they chanted, let him stay. "Keiko! Keiko!" One man held up a placard that said "SUERTE KEIKO! Familia Sanchez." Good Luck Keiko! The Sanchez Family. Keiko was being flown in a C-130 cargo plane to his new seven million dollar tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, paid for by the Free Willy Foundation with donations from all over the world. The Reino Aventura amusement park, which had bought Keiko for $350,000 dollars, was letting the Oregon Coast Aquarium have him for free. Keiko was being rescued, just like Willy in the movie.

Keiko/Willy was instantly recognizable because of his fallen dorsal fin, which was the result of a vitamin deficiency. Rather than standing up straight like a big triangle, it curled over like a broken finger. For ten years he had been kept in a tank that was barely large enough for him to turn around in. His water was chlorinated and artificially salted, far too warm, and inadequately filtered, so that he was often swimming in his own wastes. He suffered from warty eruptions on his skin; his teeth were worn down from nervous chewing on the edge of the tank; and he was, at 7,700 pounds, more than 1,000 pounds underweight. Keiko's job was to perform, dancing to disco music, leaping for a mackerel, letting his trainers plunge their heads into his mouth, and giving kisses to his "girlfriends" -- young women selected from the audience.

Then, in 1993, Free Willy hit the movie theaters. When it became known that its star was living in similar circumstances as the fictional Willy before his rescue, there was an international outcry. Reino Aventura did not have the resources to build Keiko a larger and better tank. They attempted to find him a new home, but his skin disease made this impossible, since the parks and aquariums that considered taking him would have had to put him in a tank shared with other whales or dolphins. Free Willy's producers tried to send Keiko to Cape Cod; Michael Jackson offered to build him a home at his Neverland Ranch in California. Finally, Dave Phillips, director of the Earth Island Institute, established the Free Willy Foundation and marshalled the millions of dollars and the support of both Reino Aventura and the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums to build Keiko his new home in Oregon.

It was terrible that this orca had been made to live in a cramped and dirty tank. But was it a tragedy that Keiko came to Mexico? Millions of Mexican children saw him perform at Reino Aventura, as well as on TV and in films. They watched Free Willy, Free Willy II and Keiko en Peligro ("Keiko in Danger," a side-splittingly bad -- I actually watched it -- Star Trek rip-off about visitors from outer space returning to Earth for their orca). They bought stuffed Keiko toys, rubber Keiko toys, Keiko T-shirts, Keiko baseball caps and backpacks and lunchboxes.

To a degree, this was cheap mass merchandizing no different from the onslaught of Barneys and Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But Keiko was not a cartoon, he was a living animal, a prisoner of human hubris. Still, even as he wiggled to disco music and leapt up like a dog for a snack, for many of these children he was an ambassador to Mexico --- not only for whales, but for all the animals in the seas, and for the seas themselves.

I think the greatest tragedy was that Keiko had to leave Mexico. Every Mexican, whether he watched Keiko leaving from the side of the Mexico City expressway, or whether he saw it on TV or read about it in the newspapers, was reminded of how poor his country is in comparison to its neighbor, where seven million dollars can be marshalled to build a tank for a single animal.

Keiko's new home, the Mexicans were told, was four times bigger than his old one in Mexico City. It was filled with cool seawater which was exchanged and purified every twenty-four hours. It had waterjets for Keiko to play with; reversible currents for him to swim against; submerged rocks for navigation practice; and reef-like designs on the bottom to rub on. Every day Keiko would be fed 300 pounds of restaurant-quality fish, and he would no longer be made to perform.

When Keiko's team of wetsuit-clad handlers tried to herd him into a holding pen in his tank at Reino Aventura, he porpoised over the webbing of the net and escaped. The crowd broke out in an ecstatic cheer: "No se quiere ir!" He doesn't want to go! Keiko jumped over a second time, and the crowd went wild, cheering and clapping and hooting at the TV cameras. But then, when the handlers dragged him into the pen and eased him into a sling, there was an eerie hush.

As the crane hoisted him high up into the air and aligned him above his UPS crate, Keiko cried out, zzzeee! "Keiko se nos va," Keiko leaves us, said Mexico City's Reforma the next morning in a full-color spread on the front page of its "People" section. Lloran a 'mares,' -- they cry oceans of tears.

This essay is excerpted from Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (The University of Utah Press, 2002) with permission of the author. All rights reserved. To read more excerpts visit the author's website: http://www.cmmayo.com. C.M. Mayo can be reached via email

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