Hello,
Iām Kate Pennington, a writer & artist with a passion for whales and their (our) environment.
I grew up in Greenwich Village, only a few blocks from Union Square Park where the first Earth Day Celebrations took place April 22, 1970. I was three. Once upon a time there was a photo of me sitting on my father’s shoulders while we stood among the crowd. I can’t say I remember the day much, I was three at the time, but the image always stuck with me. Twenty years later I was volunteer staff for the twentieth anniversary Earth Day in Times Square. Dad came by my station to say hi and see the crowds. In between those years there were trips to zoos, aquariums and Natural History museums. My Dad was a city-kid to his core. He liked to borrow the quote “I am two with Nature” but he was game for road trips to the bits of it we could reach beyond NYC limits. We’d take hikes in the woods and even climbed to the top of a (short – it was the Catskills) Mountain, and trips on Pete Seager’s sloop the Clearwater.
Sometime in the 80’s I got my first copy of “Songs of the Humpback Whales” The world altering collection of Humpback whale songs gathered and produced by Roger Payne. I loved them so much I put them on my answering machine for a while š In 1987 my dad took me on my first whale watching trip off of Province-town, MA and it was amazing! We saw two Humpback whales (which I have since submitted to HappyWhale.com and gotten ID and information about one of them) and to the amazement of even the boat Captain, a Blue whale! Two years later spent two weeks in Maui as an intern with the Pacific Whale Foundation supporting researchers studying the Humpback whales who travel to Hawaiian waters every winter to mate, breed, and give birth. That was a stunning two weeks. Among other things, I was able to get in the water with a mother and calf. I was supposed to be taking photos, but my mind went off line and I forgot everything but the amazing – Enormous – whale coming towards me. I looked at her, saw her beautiful eye, and watched her calf swim close to her side as it looked at me. Amazing barely covers what that experience was like.
I did not, however, come home and apply to graduate school to become a Marine Biologist. The reasons are complicated and related to how female presenting kids in the 70s and 80s were often discouraged from entering the sciences. I was also a theater kid who grew up in and around theaters and art studios, and love it. So I figured I wasn’t losing anything to follow that life path. That path went… differently than I had pictured it, but really well. I got to do a lot of very cool and interesting projects with amazing people. Made no money, but well… that’s how the arts are these days.
In 2016, after a lot of twists and turns that included marriage and two kids, a ritual theater company, two covens, several communal households, lots of cats, an amazing community of friends and loved ones, and ten years of health issues, my husband and I took a trip to Alaska and while there went whale watching. We didn’t see a lot of whales, but we saw enough to reconnect me to that early love. Every year since, with the exception of 2020 for obvious reasons, we have gone whale watching. Because we live around three hours from Monterey Bay, CA we’ve done most of our whale watching down there, which is good because the Bay is like a dinning hall and playground for many different types of whales. You can see whale pretty much any time of the year there.
In 2024, while attending a Sci-Fi and Fantasy writing conference, I kept getting into discussion about whales. I didn’t mean to keep talking about whales, though by that point it had become a common event. As I met folks and we did the inevitable introductions, whales would come up…because that was what was taking up the most space in my brain (I had started working on a set of Sci-Fi stories about whales even). The wild thing was, people would light up and ask questions. This happened most of the four days of the conference culminating with several new friends informing me that I needed to start and newsletter and let them all know more stuff about whales. That newsletter launched in November of 2024. Six months later I was plotting my next trip to Monterey that would include three whale watching trips in three days. By the end of that week I understood that I was walking a new path and began plotting a path back to school for a science degree.