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  Keiko: the political whale EVELYN SHARENOV
 We know how this story ends. But the larger-than-life subject of Kenneth Brower's profoundly affecting biography "Freeing Keiko: The Journey of a Killer Whale from Free Willy to the Wild" captured us -- and the events surrounding Keiko's life and death tell us much about human nature. Keiko was captured as a calf off the fjords of Iceland in 1979. Lured by the movement of the day's catch of herring, the young orca left his mother's side and was tangled in fishing nets. Brower uses the metaphor of Icelandic saga to recount Keiko's story. "Sagas are all about loss . . . the loss of a whole world," he paraphrases a scholar of the form. "The world Keiko lost is a world of unearthly beauty . . . a nearly perfect featurelessness . . . of a sort we never see on land -- some prologue to the book of Genesis, the world all a blue-green void. And then suddenly Creation," Brower writes of the otherworld -- the sea. Orcas are the most physically attractive of the large sea mammals, with smooth skin and beautiful markings. They have language and family. And we capture and train them to perform tricks for treats of herring. Keiko was sold to an aquarium in Mexico City, where he languished for a decade in a warm shallow pool on a diet of frozen fish. He was puny, in poor health and a lackluster performer, but the Mexicans loved him, and Hollywood discovered him. "Free Willy" premiered in 1993; it was a huge success, especially with children. When news got out that its star was at least 1,000 pounds underweight and afflicted by painful skin lesions, Richard Donner, executive producer of "Free Willy," did what Hollywood producers do best -- raised money and assembled a cast of thousands for this saga. David Phillips, an environmentalist with the Earth Island Institute, and Lanny Cornell, a veterinarian, are easily the human heroes of this story. In January of 1996, when they transported Keiko to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, the orca was near death. Keiko was a good patient and allowed Cornell to perform the blood draws and diagnostic tests that would heal him. For Phillips the goal was always rescue, rehabilitation, release. Keiko thrived in Newport. Restored to orca beauty and grace, he was a social animal, peering at the familiar faces of his rescue team from his tank. He was good for business and popular with journalists. He had no orca companions or contact with orcas since his internment in Mexico. A chorus of dissenting human voices looked out for Keiko's good, and many of them believed he should remain in Oregon. Brower, an environmental activist and author, cautions the reader against our tendency to assign human thoughts and feelings to killer whales. Yet it is nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize Keiko. "[Keiko] had to be released," Brower asserts. "There were huge risks and unknowns: Keiko was steadily growing stronger, heavier, more skillful at catching live fish, yet this grown whale, twenty years old, was infantile in his understanding of the ocean . . . when he had flown in from Oregon, his habit had been to gather his Boomer Balls and various rubber duckies about him before tucking in for the night in his tank." When we send our own children forth into the world, they know more of earth than Keiko knew of the sea. Keiko's gradual reintegration into frigid Icelandic waters and orca society was marked by daily trips farther and farther out of the fjords; his trainers tracked his movements from a boat. Each evening Keiko returned to his humans. Changes in funding and an injury under the ice did not augur a final release into the wild. The saga ends with a heroic struggle. There were heroes and villains along the way. Keiko was, after all, a costly symbol, an experiment not repeated, a political whale. Brower's lyrical and emotional biography is compelling reading for everyone. Evelyn Sharenov recently reviewed "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls for The Oregonian.
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