It was the first day of September, 2002, and a 13-year-old boy named Howard Nessig was spending the waning days of summer with his family at their seaside cabin on the Norwegian coast.
They lived most of the year on a farm an hour away, but he loved these summers. There might be 15 people staying there at any one time, his extended family, his uncles, aunts and cousins, and there was always something to do, someone to hang out with. They'd go fishing, biking, swimming. They'd catch crabs right at the shoreline, pull them from the traps and boil them, cracking the shells open against the rock and eating them fresh. One afternoon, his dad and sister took their small boat to go out fishing, while Howard stayed behind with his mom.
When his sister and dad came back, how were good to hear them shouting, trying to get his attention. So we got down on this dock and we just, what's going on? And then we saw that they had something beside the boat in the ocean there. That something was a killer whale.
Howard's dad explained that the beast had come up beside their little boat just popped up out of the water. And yeah, they were scared. The animal was enormous. But when they tried to get away, he followed and not in a menacing way. They pointed their boat toward home and the strange killer whale simply swam alongside calmly, like a stray dog just happy for some company.
It was Keiko, of course. By this point, he'd been gone for four weeks, had made his way from Iceland to this tiny seaside town in Norway without any human help. And now here he was, nonchalantly doing just what he'd been trained to do for years. Follow a boat.
At the dock, Howard was enthralled. He'd never encountered an animal this big, this close. He doesn't even remember being afraid, nor did he stop to think too much about what happened next. He had to get near this animal. And so just like that, he jumped in the water and found himself swimming with this strange but apparently friendly killer whale. Swimming so close, he could touch him. It was not like touching a fish, it was harder but more
to call it smoother and harder than the fish. And I remember holding my hand over his breathing hole or when he blew air out, it was striking. And all that day Kegel was theirs, just howard, his family, a handful of neighbors, their kids, and the cold, peaceful waters of a Norwegian fjord. A quiet, out-of-the-way place suddenly made electric by the presence of a friendly killer whale.
The pictures of that long summer day are pretty incredible. Howard and one of the neighbor kids and their swim trunks clamber onto Keiko's back as if this 9,000 pound creature were a plaything, an oversized beach ball or a giant black and white floaty. Keiko doesn't seem to mind, never strays too far or shows any inclination to leave. Quite the contrary, he lets himself be scratched, moving through the water while the children laugh and the sun tilts ever so slightly toward night.
Later, when Howard was trying to sleep, he lay in bed just listening. His window was right by his bed and he could hear the whale, hear Keiko. He was just outside our cabin in the ocean there and he was lying and making these sounds. He was crying for either attention or for loneliness or just to have company, I guess. So I went out and stayed by him
Howard went out alone, sat on some rocks near the water, Keiko bobbing alongside, called now. It was just Keiko and Howard together on a Norwegian summer night, a 13-year-old boy and a strangely placid orca who seemed not to want to be alone. Like a scene from the movie that started all this, only quieter, in the ocean, in real
That quiet was about to be interrupted, of course, because even here, in such a remote part of the world, Keiko's fame mattered. For the moment, his presence was a secret. But that couldn't last for long. From serial productions in the New York Times, this is the final episode of The Goodwill. I'm Daniel Alarcon.
A few days before Keiko showed up outside Howard's cabin, his caretakers had gotten a ping telling them their whale was just off the coast of Norway. By that point Keiko had been gone nearly four weeks and they'd been keeping tabs on him via satellite tracker attached to his dorsal fin. A few times a day it sent them a signal, a little blip popping up on a screen moving steadily east. They'd known approximately where he was, but they hadn't known where he was heading or whether he was with a pod. They hadn't known if he was eating, if he was healthy, if he was sick.
Now, with this ping telling them that Keiko was near the coast, Colin and Fernando, two of the main members of the team, flew from Iceland to Norway and chartered a boat to go out and check on Keiko stealthily. We kept a boat a mile away.
And we're just trying to get some pictures of him and video of him again to prove that he was fat and healthy. And we managed to do that. He was out in these little islands off the coast, just rubbing himself in the kelp fronds.
which was a relief. Keiko was alone, which isn't exactly typical for wild whales or because mostly travel in pods, but he seemed totally fine, content, and from all appearances healthy. Colin called Dave Phillips of the Free Willy Keiko Foundation back in California to tell him the news. Well, I was describing his condition and so on and what we were observing. And I remember Dave saying something like, well, what's he doing now? And I said, I don't know. He's on a long dive.
And then he spy up next to the boat just after that. And my knees just buckled and I fell to the deck trying to hide. And I said, today, I said, damn it, I just got busted. And he says, what's he doing now? And I said, well, I don't know, I'm lying on the deck of the boat. Colin was hiding, and he had to, because if Keiko was wild, if he was free, the last thing they wanted to do was interfere.
I was expecting that as soon as he saw Colin, he would just stick around and he would not leave the boat. This is Fernando. But we checked him, we took some photos of him and then we went below the X and he just threw him away. He didn't follow us. I don't remember if he threw him away or away from away, but he didn't follow us.
And just that fact that Keiko didn't follow the boat was reassuring, as was his appearance. It was surprisingly good how good he was looking also. The way he was swimming, it was a good surprise to see that he was not miserable. He was not thin. He was not emunciated. He didn't look like we needed to rescue him right there.
In other words, they'd done it. Keiko had done it. Just think about that. Keiko, who'd spent his formative years in a small pool in a Mexican amusement park, had just swam 1,000 miles on his own. Now here he was, serenely exploring the beautiful coast of Norway, rolling and splashing in the kelp fronds. To call him Fernando, he didn't seem to have lost any weight. So all that training, all that hard work, had paid off.
And then, a few days later, Fernando and Colin get a call. Somebody called us and says, you better turn on the TV. Keiko, star of the free Willy movies, has taken up residence in the waters of Western Norway and is prolicing in the fjords with adoring children. A real treat for his unsuspecting host, but those who know Keiko best worry he's swimming right into trouble.
Sometime after Colin and Fernando saw Keiko, he ended up at Howard's cabin, and someone there had alerted the media. It was no longer the quiet scene in the fjord with Keiko and a few curious kids. Now was everyone, plus is full of tourists coming from all over to see this whale.
What Colin and Fernando describe is basically chaos. Kids banging on the side of boats, trying to get Keiko's attention, calling out to him, Keiko, Keiko, people swimming toward him, wanting to pet him, throwing him fish. And at first, Keiko, always a good boy, tried to keep up, swimming this way and that to whoever was calling him.
But if it seemed like Keiko was basking in the attention, that didn't last long. After a few days of this, to call an infernando at least, Keiko seemed scared. They say he started spending more and more time hiding from people, inactive, floating between boats. It was tragic. I was, I mean, I was beyond pissed off. I was asking people, please stay away. They basically just said, you, you don't have any rights in our country and they just swim right past me.
Topa, who'd worked with the care team in Iceland, flew over to try to help.
There were some days like where I had just, I was just sitting by our little floating dock and literally just keeping Keiko with me because there were boats all over the place where people were trying to either go and swim with him, trying to pat him. I think Keiko was overwhelmed too. Even if he likes the attention, this was too much.
What did all this mean? Four weeks at sea and at the first opportunity Keiko had swam right toward humans. Did this mean the experiment had failed? Was it a sign that Keiko didn't want to or couldn't live on his own in the ocean?
A lot of his former trainers said they didn't believe Keiko had hunted for food on his journey. To them, Keiko was probably hungry, scared, and ultimately happy to be reunited with humans. Dave Phillips rejects that interpretation. He believes Keiko did eat while he was alone. Shortly after Keiko arrived in Norway, Dave spoke to the press and his positive outlook was clear. Sure, maybe Keiko had swam 1,000 miles only to end up back with humans, but damn it, he'd swam 1,000 miles and survived.
Oh, I'm very excited to see him looking so good. He looks big. He's been on a big journey. I never thought I'd see him in Norway. It's an incredible voyage for an incredible animal.
But for Dave, Keiko showing up in Norway was not the result of some binary choice between humans or the ocean. Dave thinks it's totally unsurprising that as Keiko neared the shore, a shore where people lived, that he would be drawn to that. Of course he would. He had a lifetime of memories with humans swirling around his giant orca brain. And a lot of them were nice memories.
It's certainly not a surprise that an orc whale that spent all that time is going to have some reaction, right? So does that mean that he's so acculturated that he's just impossible for him to live in the wild? Not at all. As far as the foundation was concerned, Kiko showing up in Norway was just another step in the larger project for Kiko to be ultimately truly free. They just needed to figure out what to do next.
It took a few weeks to make a plan for Keiko. Iceland was a thousand miles away, too far to return, especially with winter approaching. So the care team decided to keep Keiko in Norway for a while. Moving up to a more isolated bay on the coast, away from the hordes of people and tourists and boats, basically babysit him until the winter was over. Then they could take him back out into the ocean to meet more wild whales.
Fernando left the project for another job, but Colin and Topa both volunteered to stay. The two of them moved up the coast to a new bay, along with Keiko of course, who swam alongside the boat, following his human friends to yet another home.
The way Colin and Topa described this new life, it's almost like a fairy tale. They moved into a cute red cottage up on a hill, farms on either side, apple trees. They were so excited that when they first arrived, Topa literally picked Colin up and carried him over the threshold of the house. And just down the hill, a friendly orca swam in what was basically their front yard, a Norwegian bay called taknes.
Even as winter came and the cold blew in and the endless days of summer became the endless nights of winter, the place maintained and otherworldly beauty. I remember when the winter, when pitch black and all the phosphorescence were lighting up and you could see this glowing outline of an orca. Every time he'd move a fin or his body would just light up in green. So you're just seeing the silhouette of a green orca.
And there was quiet, so much quiet. Once in a while, there was a car passing or a couple of cows mooing. But beyond that, there was nothing, just the sound of a whale out in the bay, breathing. I mean, I remember I woke up at night just to listen, OK, can I hear him? Yes, he's down there. It's OK.
Their location, Tacnus Bay, was chosen in large part because wild orchopods tend to swim by in the spring. The thinking was, the next time Keiko's wild brethren were in the area, Colin and Topa could coax him out to sea. And while the goal for this time was still to rewild Keiko, get him in shape for when the next pod of orcas visited, the actual vibe of the place was more laid back.
I mean, if life in Oregon was a workout with a personal trainer and Iceland was bootcamp, Norway was a meditation retreat. The Free Willy Keiko Project, unplugged.
The daily routine looked something like this. Colin and Topo would take turns making breakfast for one another and then take the boat out for a walk with Keiko. Every couple of weeks Colin would drive the 60 miles or so along the Atlantic Road to pick up food for Keiko, herring from a fish processing plant. Morning walks were sometimes followed by late night hangouts on the dock.
I loved going down late in the evenings, go down to the floating dock, and Keiko was there and just give him a good body scratch.
Just there in the moon like me laying on the dog scratching a killer whale. That was really, really moments that I trashed her because then it was just me and him. And he was just moving back and forth where he would like to get the scratch. And I was just scratching and just clearing my mind. It was wonderful.
It wasn't like Keiko was completely domesticated. It was more like a midway point between freedom and captivity, where he could be wild at his own pace.
And I remember one day it was when I was speeding Keiko. And there was this seagull and he got the herring and Keiko came just underneath, just on full force and just grabbed the seagull and the herring and then went down again. And I was like, oh my God, did he just eat a seagull? Like Keiko is starting to be wild. And then after a little while, it was just like a cartoon. He just came up and just spit the seagull out.
For a while, Keiko's new bay had no net, which meant he could come and go as he pleased, and he did. There was a salmon farm nearby where Keiko was definitely not welcome, though of course he'd go anyway. So Colin and Topo would have to get in the boat and go fetch Keiko, sometimes in the middle of the night, lead him back to their bay.
It's hard to say, of course, how Keiko felt about this time. Did he seem happy? Colin and Toba thought so, for the most part. From time to time, Keiko would have these thrashing spells, tantrums really, and sometimes was in such a bad mood that Colin felt it was dangerous to get in the water with him. But this was only occasionally, and on the whole, Keiko seemed fine, seemed to enjoy being there. And in any case, this arrangement was only supposed to be temporary.
When spring came, the hope was that Keiko would swim off with wild orcas, but they didn't come. Local said this hadn't happened in recent memory, with no whales for Keiko to swim off with, one winter in Tacnus became two. And Colin says it started to feel like maybe this was it. I thought that was probably our lot in life was just to hang out there with him now. And how did you feel about that? I was okay with that. You know,
It's a pristine environment. He had us. We had him. You know, if that was going to be his so-called retirement, then well, great. What if this version of the movie didn't end with Keiko swimming off into the sunset? What if instead he simply faded from view was freed not from humans altogether, but at least from their expectations? Could we maybe live with that?
A few years earlier, Warner Bros. had made a free Willy sequel, Free Willy 2, The Adventure Home. In it, Willy is reunited with his family, with his mom and siblings. There's an exploding librarian oil tanker, a visit from his old friend Jesse, lots of action. I'll spare you the details.
But maybe a more realistic sequel could be this. Willie jumps over the barrier, swims for a while. Maybe even a thousand miles. He finds himself all alone in the vastness of the ocean, and then, miraculously, he sees the faces of the people who loved him. He returns to them.
The orphan whale gets a mom, a dad, a surrogate human family. Sure, he swims off now and then to steal salmon from the farm up the coast. But mostly, it's a quiet kind of life, filled with love and affection and sustenance. The true ending to his story. In December 2003, 15 months after arriving in Norway, Colin went on vacation.
The thing about living at work is that you never really have time off. Topa had already taken her hard-earned break, and now it was Colin's turn. His first vacation since joining the project nearly two years before. You know, I'm not a sit-on-the-beach kind of guy, but that's what I needed. I needed a vacation. I wanted to go and sit on a beach under a tree and do nothing, you know? And so I went to a, which I would never do again, but an all-inclusive resort in Mexico, and I just sat myself under a palm tree, basically.
He'd planned for a month off, including 10 days at a Mexican resort, no interruptions, no cell service, and then one day. I come back to the room and there's a little light blinking on my telephone and voice message said, you better phone your office. When he was finally able to get hold of someone, they told him the news. Keiko was dead. We'll be right back.
Keiko's death and the illness that precipitated it took his care team by surprise. Topo was there, along with a couple of others, including a local Norwegian farmer named Frank, who joined the team as a kind of de facto translator and was now one of Keiko's main caretakers.
This is how it happened. A few days after Colin left for vacation, Frank took Keiko out on one of his boat walks and he noticed Keiko seemed slow. He was not keeping up with the boat and we got a little bit like, okay, there is something wrong. A day passed and then another and Frank and Topa could clearly see that not only was Keiko not improving, he was getting worse. He was kind of starting to distant himself a little bit
which is a clear sign that there was something that was not right. And then he just got sick very, very fast. His breath was starting to smell. And then like he was, when he was swimming, he just started to tilt. Well, he was just, how should I say, he was not swimming straight. He was just leaning
By this point, they knew Keiko had an infection. One of the trainers we spoke to told us Keiko was prone to these episodes, a seasonal sort of thing. But an infection didn't necessarily have to be a death sentence, so long as Keiko got antibiotics. Normally they'd give him these meds by mixing them in with his frozen herring. But Frank said this time Keiko had no interest in eating. He picked up the herring and he was swimming with the herring in his mouth.
for hours, just swimming with the meringue and around the bay and slowly. And then he just dropped it and we was not able to feed him. So then we started to, I wouldn't say panic, but we started to realize that, okay, if we can't get him medicine, there's just one option.
an injection. If Keiko would just swim close enough, they could inject him with antibiotics. Unfortunately, he was not willing to get close to us. This is just speculation. But if you ask me, I have a feeling that he was tired. Like, I'm done.
Later, some of Keiko's former trainers would accuse this crew of being out of their depth, of not recognizing the warning signs soon enough, and not knowing how to handle the infection once they had. And it's true, Frank had never worked with Orca's before. Topa, while close to Keiko, wasn't trained to be in the water with him, and wasn't an Orca trainer or specialist either. Colin was the one who knew the most about Orca's, and maybe he could have done something, but he was unreachable. His cell wasn't working in Mexico.
Topo remembers being desperate to reach him, leaving him increasingly panicked voicemails. I called him a million times because I really needed to talk to him and I just hoped that he would end up being getting signals somewhere so he could kind of reach. So I was just giving him
I was just describing in details how Keiko was reacting and if he could give me some feedback, if he knew some tricks that I could do to kind of get medicine into him and just I needed someone to reflect on what I was observing and seeing. What she was seeing was frightening. A suddenly weak killer whale who appeared to be deteriorating.
Topa called Lenny Cornell, Keiko's vet, who was based in California, and he was blunt. Prepare for the worst, she remembers him saying. So they did. It was Friday evening, around five o'clock. We were listening to him all the time. It was like pitch dark so we couldn't see anything. But from the house, which was very close to the bay, we always could hear that he was breathing.
But at this time, we haven't heard his breathing for 10, 15 minutes. Either he has passed or he has been gone. He is gone. When we came down, he had beached himself. He has been, well, he's warm up to the shore and...
like lay down because it's not very unusual because he was drowning. So he was trying to avoid drowning. I remember that I picked on his eye because usually that is something that he reacts if you purchase eye, but he didn't react. So we realized that it's over.
The decade-long science experiment that had captivated millions, this moon shot of an idea to rewild a captive whale, was finished. The press release about Keiko's passing went out at four in the morning, Norwegian time. My dinner time stateside, it was all over the news.
It was a grand experiment. The release of a captive killer whale. Tonight, the beloved Keiko Hollywood's free willy is gone. Officials in Norway say Keiko the killer whale made famous by the free willy movies has died at the age of 27.
In the few hours before the press were sure to descend on their little bay, Frank and Topa hung tarps around Keiko's body, so there could be no pictures of the dead celebrity. Something Frank says, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation wanted them to prevent at all costs. We wanted to have an image of him as like a free Willy movie, like a way in that was full of life and an icon in a way.
The crew could only hide the whale for so long, though. Something had to be done with Keiko's body. Ocean burial was out of the question. His body might bloat and float back to shore, or they'd have to cut him open and sink him, which wouldn't be great for optics. They felt like they had to bury him on land. Which wasn't exactly an easy thing to pull off, not with journalists on site, not if your goal was to preserve Keiko's privacy.
But with the international media camped out waiting to take pictures of Keiko's lifeless body, the weather intervened. A snowstorm blew in. So the journalist left for the night seeking shelter, and that's when Frank sprang into action. He called a local guy he knew who owned an excavator. And in two hours, he was there with a tractor and starting to dig the hole.
It was really, really weird, I mean, making this huge hole, and it was snowing, it was cold, and then dragging Keiko around the dock and up to the grave. It was very surreal and sad moment. And I even get emotional talking about it now.
The grave was huge just down by the coastline, but seven meters long and of course very deep. And it weft as beautifully as possible actually. So he just swooped into his grave and there he is sleeping.
They all stood by the side of the grave for a moment in silence, each of them saying goodbye in their own way. No speeches, just quiet.
The next morning, when the sun came up and the storm had passed, the journalist returned to the beach only to find that Keiko had vanished. Gone were the tarps in the tracks, nothing left to prove that Keiko had been there at all, just a few inches of unblemished snow covering everything. His last act then, orchestrated by humans, was to disappear, to exit the stage in darkness.
Now that it was over, there was suddenly so much to do. The house had to be closed up, their lives packed away, equipment, everything from tracking gear to fish buckets had to be sold or donated. Topa and Collins' happy Norwegian Idol had come to an end because Keiko, who'd held them all together, was gone.
Colin told us it was all so sad and grim and sudden an emptiness. It was the end of the project. It was the end of Keiko. It was the end of our time pinning our way together. It was the end of our jobs. It was the end. It was just the end.
He'd spent nearly two years of his life with Keiko, watched this orca get stronger and wilder and more daring, 1,000 miles on his own. And now it was all over, which was devastating of course, but in an odd way, it was also almost a relief. All these injustices he'd faced since being captured in Iceland when he was two,
You know, at least everything, whether we were doing the right thing by him or not, you know, I could only imagine we were, but never being able to fully answer the question, what is best for Keiko? Truly best for him, given what his life has been like up to this point. There was always be that question, are we doing the right thing? And now that he had passed away, at least everything was over and you didn't have to ask that question anymore.
But lots of people were and still are asking that question or a version of it. What was best for Keiko? I've been struggling with that too, trying to understand if the motivation behind all this was the welfare of Keiko, the individual orca, or the success of Keiko, the symbol. I asked Dave Phillips and he reframed it like this. If we didn't do the right thing, then tell me, where would you have stopped? We wanted to see how far he could go. We wanted to see how far he could go.
So would you have stopped in Mexico, Dave asked me, where Keiko was putting on three shows a day in a warmish pool he'd long since outgrown? That one's easy. No, definitely not. Or in Oregon, we moved him to Oregon. He gained weight. He got his health back. He started echo locating. Would you just leave him there in a concrete tank in Oregon?
I wouldn't have, I don't think, but there are reasonable people who might claim that wouldn't have been so bad. You could argue he served an educational purpose there, capturing the imagination of countless children in a pool specially designed for him. Again, I wouldn't have left him there, but I can see the argument.
Well, that's a choice. We made the choice to bring him to a net pan area in Iceland in this home waters. We could have left him there. Would you have left him there in a sea pan? To be honest, yeah, I think I might have. He was safe. He was strong. He'd come such a long way by that point, and he was in the ocean. Why wasn't that enough? Because you can always go further, I know.
The original value proposition of this project was that Keiko would be an ambassador for the sea. A character you could point to and love who would in turn make you care about the ocean and all its wild creatures. That was the idea that convinced Dave to take a chance on Keiko. To take a chance on an orca, everyone agreed was a terrible candidate for rewilding.
And in a way, that worked. A generation of kids learn to think of the ocean differently. We know a lot more about orcas in the Atlantic because Keiko's team studied local pods, searching for one he might be able to join. That wouldn't have happened if he'd stayed in Oregon, if he'd never left his bay pen and never gone free.
In any case, they didn't stop at the sea pen, Dave says, because Keiko didn't stop. He never stopped, kept learning, getting stronger, becoming more acclimated to the ocean, being curious about the wild orcas he encountered, even if they may have scared him a little.
If he'd stayed in Oregon, they might have caught his infection more quickly, and he might have lived longer. But would Keiko have traded the life he had, those four weeks of freedom, and the richness of those years in the Atlantic, feeling the currents and listening to the sea, for a longer, safer, but more sterile life in a tank under human care?
I think the answer to that question might depend on how much Keiko valued the company of humans. The one consistent presence in his life from the moment he was captured at around age 2 until he died at around age 27. And all the evidence seems to suggest he did value it. A lot. Which was maybe why it was so easy to love him. And why it was so hard for him. To go free.
The Good Whale is written by me, Danyan Alarcon, and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Ship. Jen Guera is our editor, additional editing from Julie Snyder and Ira Glass. Sound Design, Music, Supervision, and Mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for The Good Whale comes from La Chica and Osmond. Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley and Daniel Hart.
Research, in fact, checking by Jane Ackermann with help from Ben Phalen, tracking direction by Elna Baker. Susan Wesley is our standards editor, legal review from Al Amine Sumar and Simone Prokos. Carlos Lopez Estrada is a contributing editor on the series. The supervising producer for serial productions is in De Chubu. Mac Miller is the executive assistant for serial. Liz Davis Moore is a senior operations manager. So many talented people helped us put this series together and for them, a huge thanks.
Thank you to Anna Marceable-Clausen, a huge thank you to the staff at Round Boulante, especially Pablo Argueis, Camila Segura, Luis Fernando Vargas, as well as Natalia Sanchez-Loisa and Sara Silva. The art for our show comes from Denise Nester, art direction from Pablo Delcan.
And at the New York Times, a special thanks to Nina Lassum, Brian Rideout, Susan Beachy, Kiri Bennett, Alan De La Carrier, Sheila McNeil, Jack Begg, Jeffrey Miranda, Peter Rents, Jordan Cohen, Mahima Chablani, Jessica Anderson, Carl De Los Santos, Kelly Doe, Sue Janzi, Victoria Kim, Brad Fisher, Maddie Massiello, Tug Wilson, and Sam Dolnick, who's the Deputy Managing Editor of The New York Times. The Good Whale is from serial productions and The New York Times.
For a limited time, you can listen to all episodes of The Good Whale right here, right now. But it won't be free forever. So if you want full access to this show and to all serial shows, you got to be a New York Times subscriber. Learn more about the New York Times audio subscription at nytimes.com slash podcasts.
