2/14/24
we spot the fin whale from a mile down the beach, the white belly an anomaly against the shining plate of wet sand that reflects back the grey-blue winter sky. it is instantly recognizable in the same way as the distant bald eagle who stands in the same vast mirror of low tide, dark shoulders distinctly not-rock, white head distinctly not-foam. this is one of the beaches that people are permitted to drive cars on, and evidently not everyone finds this appalling, because a few trucks pass us and stall near the mass as our slow legs bring us closer.
a few people stand around already, taking irreverent photos. i stop at a small distance from the body, taking it in, understanding myself in the presence of a god and its nonbelievers, a victim and its unwitting killers, myself not excluded. i shut out the loud comments of disgust and allow the spectacle of the young whale who starved to death wash over me, and my disposition palpably shifts something in the air around us. “you know, it’s actually kind of sad,” remarks a woman with a lit cigarette to no one in particular. her friends don’t respond, but their pacing around the body takes on a different tone, something in defiance of, but adjacent to, shame.
the tail fin arcs gracefully in the air, bearing a rectangular void from which blood still gurgles and drips into a shallow pool of red seawater. larger rectangles — that ugly shape characteristic of human work, as sapsuckers bore circles in bark and rivers carve undulations through land— have been cut from back and stomach, hellish caverns ringed with shaggy curtains of flesh, allowing shiny pillows of intestine to spill innocently onto the sand in shades that echo the blush of morning clouds over the sea. more cubes of flesh are strewn on the beach nearby, apparently of no further scientific merit. these remnants hold an attitude of cold contempt that is harder for me to come to terms with than the sneering of onlookers; cruel work done to generate statistics on the self-evident hateful negligence of our species, in an appeal to a machine that runs on the desecration of all matter. as if more data will open its eyes at last, as if it will suffer a change of the heart that it does not have. there is a deflated pink shape at my feet, translucent tissue streaked with purple veins; possibly this is the heart of the whale itself. it has the look of an enormous tongue, emerging from the earth to taste the land that wrought its fate.
i keep my distance as the hungry gulls do, waiting for my turn to contain the scene within the manageable space of a rectangle, to make it a document of the past. two cars depart and i take my chance, stooping to place my bare hand on the whale’s dark face. something unnameable passes through me when my palm rests against the smooth skin, holding me there. i glance up and see a sliver of clouded eye that i had overlooked from a distance, and i gaze back into it, overcome by my own version of something-like-shame. a wet streak spans the short distance from the crease of his eye to his open mouth, lined with orderly shafts of baleen, which people once used to construct corsets and fishing rods, before plastics made this organic material obsolete. it looks as if he has been crying. conscious of the fresh eyes of my own foolish species on me, i step away to give newcomers their turn. i have nothing to offer him, but he is not yet done giving to us.
