Dolphin Legend – The Rainbow Bridge
There are as many tales, legends and stories about dolphins as there are about any other animal. Why is that? I feel like it’s because the dolphins seem to be just as curious about us as we are about them. I think if we ever finally crack their code and really learn how to communicate with dolphins, we’ll hear a lot of stories and legends they have about us, weird creatures that live on land and put on weird looking fins and gills so we can swim. side of them. But until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with the stories we have about dolphins.
One of my favorite stories comes from the Chumash people of the island of Santa Cruz, off the coast of California. Legend has it that they were created when the Earth Goddess planted seeds to nurture them. Her husband, Sky Snake, could spit lightning and decided to give the Chumash people the gift of fire by spitting lightning on the island.
They were very happy because now they could get warm and cook their food. In fact, life became so easy that its population grew and continued to grow. But soon the island was filled with people and the Earth Goddess began to notice the noise. She became so discordant that she couldn’t sleep and she decided that they had to move to the mainland more than 20 miles away.
All the people asked him how they were going to get to the mainland. After much thought, he decided to make a bridge out of a rainbow. It would stretch from the highest point of the island to the mountains of the great expanse.
The people were worried and scared, but the Earth Goddess assured them that they would be fine. She told them to go to the other side and populate the world. So they climbed to the top of the rainbow on their island and began to cross. Many of them managed to arrive safely, but others got dizzy from being so high up. They looked at the ocean so far below them and they were scared. Then a mist came in and confused them more. While most made it across the bridge without issue, these others fell off and fell long and hard into the ocean. The Earth Goddess saw this and felt terrible because the bridge had been her idea and she had assured them that everything would be fine.
She wanted to show them that they hadn’t been wrong to trust her, so she turned everything that fell into dolphins. So even today, the Chumash people say that the dolphins are his brothers who fell off the rainbow bridge. Some even say they were the lucky ones.