Free Grayson by Lynne Cox

achieve human-powered flight. His goal was to fly the
Gossamer Condor
a mile in a figure-eight course. The plane was created by Paul MacCready and a group of friends from Caltech; its wings were made of balsa wood and Mylar sheeting, and were attached to a bicycle with piano string.
    All Greg had to do was to pedal as fast as he could to get the airplane airborne, keep pedaling as fast as he could, maintain an altitude of twenty feet off the ground, and keep the plane stable while making a giant figure eight.
    Greg became one of the first to achieve human-powered flight. Like him and his crew, I simply believed he could do it. He worked hard, trained hard, studied birds in flight and in taking off and landing; he looked to nature and tried to emulate it. And he worked with a group of rocket scientists and inventors who saw the possibilities in life; they saw what was and what could be.
    I never questioned why Greg would want to attempt to be the first person to fly using humanpower. It was something that he and his team believed was worth achieving. And I think I felt the same way about the baby whale. Like Greg I believed in trying to do things that people may have thought impossible.
    I believed we would find Grayson’s mother in the vast ocean.
    I had heard that whales sometimes dive into very deep waters so they can talk to each other. Their voices carry a much greater distance in the deep, where the water is denser and colder.
    I wondered if that was why Grayson had swum so far down, to listen or talk. He had been gone for seventeen minutes. And it had seemed like forever.
    I put my face down in the water, and in my mind I shouted, Grayson! I hoped he would somehow hear me.
    Grayson popped up from below the water and swam beside me.
    “Grayson, you are so beautiful. How in the world did you ever find me? How come you came to me to help you? How could you have known that I would?”
    Grayson rolled over and looked at me. In his eyes, Isaw a brightness, a sense of vitality, and a gentle sweetness. I held him in my eyes and in my heart.
    His poor mother, though, had to be frantically searching for him. How in this big ocean would she ever find him?
    Do what you can do, I thought, don’t get overwhelmed by the enormity of something. Break it down into smaller pieces like you do when you swim. Do one thing at a time.
    “Grayson, let’s swim back to shore now,” I said. I had to. I was cold. And tired and depleted. My eyes were burning from the saltwater leaking into my goggles.
    Grayson seemed to understand. He turned with me and started swimming toward shore.
    The current seemed to rise on our backs as if a giant hand was lifting us and carrying us toward shore. I felt a deep sense of relief. I was ready to reach the beach.
    But all of sudden, Grayson dramatically changed course.
    He turned almost completely around. Had he heard his mother’s voice?

seven
    Grayson was swimming so fast underwater that I could see streams of darker water flowing over his head.
    He was dolphin-fast; his footprints were snapping up to the surface with each giant flick of his fluke. His footprints were spaced closely together.
    Grayson was holding tightly on to the water. As his speed increased, the resistance increased. He held on tighter and tighter, swimming faster and faster, and he moved through the water in a line as straight as a torpedo.
    Then suddenly he leaped out of the sea. He transformedhis body into something like a giant cymbal, with the sea’s surface as the other cymbal. He breached.
    He intentionally hit the water at a sharp angle to make an enormous impact that would create noise—and a giant splash. It was the best sideways cannonball I had ever seen.
    Gray whales often breach to dislodge barnacles and sea lice from their skin. But they also do it to communicate with other whales. And I hoped he was trying to communicate with the other whales that might be passing through the area.
    He paused and then took off again,