I ran six miles through the forest. A troupe of fallow and axis deer stood amongst gloomy ferns and fallen timber on the side of the trail, watching me pace by. The sun broke over the hills, glared through morning’s fog, and there was the beach. The waves clawed at it. I walked north. A flock of pelicans flew in combat formation out over the water, dipping and rising inches above the waves that reached out for them. There were dead pelicans and dead gulls scattered across the beach in crumpled piles of feathers, bones, sticks and sand. There were plastic doo-dads and hastate sea fauna and the pyogenic scum deposited on the shore by the wave’s maw. Farther ahead the waves crashed against the cliff-side, sending up a white plume that obscured the northern-most end of the beach from view and obstructed my intended passage. I walked a lazy barefoot mile, and lying there before me, beneath the gaze of brooding vultures, was a whale.
***
I grew up in the purlieu of one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world, but the Great Salt Lake’s prolific salinity is inhospitable to little more than sea-monkeys: The lake sustains a thriving brine shrimp industry. The fetid stink of the lake blows into Salt Lake when the right winds blow in from the west, imparting a vaguely maritime aroma to the city. Utah’s state bird is the sea gull, a point of mixed pride; New York has its pigeons, Salt Lake has its sea gulls. All of this can project a vivid mirage of coastal life on the land-locked desert. I was never deceived by this illusion, and so I grew up without so much as a mistaken relationship to the ocean. Friends on the east-coast regarded this as a deficiency, though often they pitched their criticisms from the shores of Lake Champlain.
Despite or rather because of my distant relationship with the ocean I grew-up fascinated with whales. They were mythically intriguing. The blue whale, the largest animal in history. Sperm whales diving to benthal depths, tangled in mortal battle with giant squids. Whales with tusks growing out of their heads, beaked whales, white whales, whales that “sing” rather than talk. And dolphins. The military precision of orcas. Spinner dolphins erupting from the water in acrobatic pinwheels. Dolphins in the rivers of China (sadly, no more), in the Amazon River, in the Indus and Ganges Rivers, silently passing unwitting bathers in Kolkata. To a child, whales were unimaginably titanic. But their physical immensity was counterbalanced by their immense grace, gliding through the water like smoke through the air, oneirically drifting through a world I knew nothing about.
And though we occupy wholly separate environments – and degrees of grandeur – whales and I do share one admittedly dull thing in common; we belong to the same taxonomic class, Mammalia. This was a peculiar and romantic fact for a hyperactive young boy to learn: Whales and I weren’t so different after all. When at the pool, or particularly the ocean, I was a whale. I mimicked their underwater arias as I had learned them from my whale-song cassette tapes. I breached like a grey whale, and jubilantly crashed back into my own wake. I rose to the surface, expelling then taking a breath as I slowly submerged, exposing my imaginary dorsal fin. And the last you would see of me before I dove to the deep-end of the pool would be my splayed feet pressed together, my pale, idiosyncratic and admittedly poor excuse for a tailfin disappearing into the water.
But that wasn’t enough. When I was 8, my family and I took a summer vacation to visit our large extended family in Massachusetts, and I insisted we go whale watching. I vigilantly scanned the water, leaning out over the boat’s railing. There! I spotted the dorsal fin of a northern minke whale off the port side. I mistakenly though proudly observed to my mom that the minke is the smallest of the baleen whales. And then, there! A pod of humpback whales cruised out of sight on the starboard bow. I stared at them as long as I could. Soon, the sheen of their backs blended into the waves’ topography and they were gone. Headed back to land, the Dramamine kicked in and I fell asleep slumped over the forward pulpit. That was the closest I have ever been to whales, the closest I have come to sharing more than biology with them, to sharing intimate physical space. But now, I would have that chance. My whale was waiting patiently on Wildcat Beach.
***
Lodged in the sand, tugged at by the waves, lay the giant skull of an unknown whale. That was all. A venue of vultures, perched on the sandy cliffs above the bones, leered at me. My disappointment brooded, but when I approached the skull that emotion gave way to childlike wonder. Jutting out of the sand, it looked like the broken wings of a profane angel or the throne of an ill-tempered sea-god. The structure was complex but orderly. There were tunnels and plains. Here the bone was convex. And here it was concave. Here were two protrusions that looked like cane handles. The bone was the color of buttermilk and tendrils of ghost-white flesh dangled from it. There were so many questions. Where did the whale come from? How did it die? How long had it been here? What kind of whale was it? Had it visited the Arctic? Hawaii? Australia? I wanted to ask it how vast the Pacific Ocean truly is, how deep, how populous, how can I help? But there were no answers. I stood on the skull. I watched the waves wrap around and submerge it, wondering what would happen to it when I left. I found a sandy chunk of blubber, as long and thick as my thigh, a few yards from the skull. I poked at it with my pocket-knife, and then tossed it down for the vultures. I looked up at them and they shifted uncomfortably. I set my backpack down at the bottom of the cliff, at least a dozen feet from the lip of the tide. I picked up a rock, went down on my knees in the water and banged on the bone to test its strength. The rock crumbled. I stood up, backed away, and threw the rock at a thin flat portion of the bone, and the rock glanced off of it. I tried again. This time, the bone broke away, and a shard the size and shape of a book of poetry fell into the waves, from which I plucked it. As I walked back to pick up my bag, the tide suddenly rose, and the waves, cold and furry and black, seemed to reach for my backpack. I cannot say why I felt the need to take a piece of the whale with me, but that is what I did, waves be damned.
***
I had been told that the bloated carcass of a 40-foot female humpback whale was beached on the north shore of Wildcat Beach more than a week ago. This whale was struck by the fierce blades of a giant shipping tanker, fracturing its skull. It was gnawed at by sharks as it floated past the Golden Gate Bridge, past the cliffs that palisade the beaches, thirty-plus miles along the coast of Point Reyes National Seashore. It was deposited on the graveyard beach to rot unless the waves saw fit to retrieve it. My intention was to see this whale, to touch it, to commune with it. I didn’t find it, and I don’t know where it is.
I ran twelve miles through the forest, over and down a mountain both ways. My shirt was soaked through with sweat, and, having foolishly brought no water, my mouth was parched in the noonday heat. My legs burned, my hips ached, and my calves were strung like violin strings, but I never stopped running. To ignore and validate the pain, I gave it meaning, I constructed a narrative that explained how visiting the whale flooded a trough that had been empty within me from an early at age, at least as far back as my days spent breaching out of the shallow end of the pool and into the sunlight. Having earned it, I can now say that I have a relationship with the ocean, and, as far as I see it, a piece of a childhood dream.
