Because You Want to Book Club #12: "Grayson"

“Free Willy” was an awesome fucking movie. I don’t care what anyone says about it. I am a sucker for whales; the gentle giants of the sea whose days might sadly be numbered. “Grayson” by Lynne Cox is yet another book much like the not quite as nautically inclined “The Raw Shark Texts”. Both were picked up because I liked the covers. While “Raw Shark” was fictional, metaphysical, and had the shape of a shark cut out of the cover, “Grayson” is a true story, much shorter, and had an illustration of the cutest whale I think I have ever seen.

“Grayson” is the true story what Cox, a long distance swimmer and author of “Swimming to Antarctica”, found following her one March morning when she was only seventeen while training off the coast of Long Beach, California. The early morning swim had been gruelling and the entire time she was convinced that something very large and possibly dangerous was following her. When she arrived at a nearby pier to turn around, a fisherman she had known for quite some time told her not to go ashore.

Cox was being followed by a baby grey whale. If Cox were to swim back onto shore, the baby whale would follow her, beach himself, and his lungs would collapse. The baby whale (dubbed Grayson by Cox for being the son of a grey whale) had become separated from his mother during a pilgrimage from the North to the shores off of Mexico. Instead of turning her back on the creature, Cox decides to help the little one find his mother before it is too late.

Helped by the lifeguard services, local fishermen, and a herd of dolphins, Cox decides to keep swimming as long as it takes to help get Grayson back to his family and his only source of food. It ends up being the most grueling and draining experience of her young life, but in order to keep the baby whale in a positive frame of mind, she never once gives up hope no matter how tired or hungry her body becomes.

From that description you can see that it is either a take it or leave it premise. You will either be moved by the story or the more cynical minded could see it as a waste of time. While being a short book to begin with (just under 150 pages) the first three chapters are slightly tedious in their descriptions of other ancillary aquatic life. I think I am a fairly cynical person and I don’t throw the word inspirational around much, but Cox’s tale is truly inspiring. There is really no other word for it. It is very rare to find an author who can wilfully admit that some of the greatest lessons they learned in life came from something other than a human being, and it is even rarer to find one that writes as beautifully as Cox. Overall “Grayson” is a great way to pass a lazy afternoon.

Grade: A