The mammoth carcass that had washed up from the sea was pearly gray and larger than anything I had ever seen. Not even my school bus would compare. A glimmer of sun glistened over it like the sea’s shedding skin, leaving what remained bound to the beach, wet, bloated, damaged and stranded. It was hard to tell. A small crowd had gathered on the South Shore, mostly curiosity seekers, I couldn’t tell. Front loaders were on hand hard at work after the necropsy group had completed examination, I heard the expert voices tell on many sides. I had never seen a whole whale beached before, nor buried in the sand. The backdrop of noisily thrashing sea looked ominous, was distracting. A flock of noisy gulls passed screaming, settling like rubber stamps in larger numbers. The crew was tight-lipped.
My sister and I stood in a group a little apart. We fell silent, listening to the hum of voices around us relate stories of sharks, squid, sea serpents and beached dolphins, some gruesome, others heart-warming tales of old. Whales stranding on area beaches, once a bigger thing of the past, at the lowest point since, in recent times, although less known occurrences were becoming a frequent hazard in the past quarter century, far too many to record. It was raising concern, growing suspicions, troubling the authorities.
“Sharks make for tasty meals, mostly fish cutlets, told you didn’t I, as do their fins, for soup,” voiced my sister in an aside, like a group leader, as if I didn’t know. She had been telling me of Peking food specialties and shark fin soups as a diet for eternity.
Half her family lived in remote Henan province. She had traveled there once, a whole different circumstance, before her divorce. The elder of us two by several years she bore that delicate expression on her countenance when absorbed in the contemplation of an object. I knew the signs. I pictured a large meaty fish soaked in oil sizzling in a giant wok, sputtering with spicy seasoning. It was so large its wide tail grew larger, wider, then flopped right out of the cooking pot, as did its smiling face with neat serrated teeth in rows, bulging eyes crackling out of their sockets in disbelief, and it was clear something else, something beneath that crusting surface wanting to spontaneously burst out of that glazed sheath.
Death of something so unimaginably large was stimulating to my eleven-year-old clinical precision. The largest animal I had ever seen in death was two months ago at our homemade pet cemetery. Our neighbor’s canine belonging to the Doberman pedigree whom we had grown to befriend as our own when we moved was given his last rites. I had helped place the stump for a gravestone. It was the least I could do, while giving me something to do to help quell the bubbling static that arises after a final flight. The suddenness of the passing was amplifying. This dead leviathan was dissimilar in ways that I could see. The workers were digging what looked to me like a measureless thousand-foot hole, which could reach the center of the earth. The hill of dugout sand soon revealed itself as a mountain to me.
In the space of several hours spent watching the whale the sea had changed. High tide had brought in the waves lashing the shoreline with such strength of purpose and aim the surf had reached the tail fluke of the gray shape soaking it aggressively in white foam. The whole expanse of sea line looked blubbery. I sensed more than saw the rising energy of the waves breaking, the strong seaward return of salty waters away from shore, the powerful undertow, as if the sea with the parallel shore was reluctant to give up part of its own. Our whale! For a moment on the beach that day I felt torn—for the sea, for the shore, for the lot of us, for the seagulls rising and dipping, for the stranded whale lost and alone. It looked like the roiling seas may have their way, may carry the whale away. Where did dead whales go?
How long I stood lost, rooted to the spot I don’t know.
“We’ve seen enough. Let’s go,” said my sister at last for the tenth time, impatiently tugging at my arms. I couldn’t leave. Not then. Not ever. Not till this lonesome creature had had a proper burial. I couldn’t salvage what I couldn’t leave. The insides of me felt disjointed. The whale looked so devastated and forlorn on that vast stretch of wet sand and spread of knotted sea, with only a small straggling crowd for company. “Just a little longer” I begged, distraught, wildly searching the sea for some sign, I didn’t know what.
“No! You know what they say. Something sudden, something tumultuous is about to happen. The sea has its ways. We must away.” My dear know-it-all sister, the key to all things sinister, refracted, as usual on tap with the last word. I knew my sister, twenty years apart from me. I knew her beliefs only too well. She had left one day into Henan province married a soya bean farmer before I was born only to reappear just as suddenly. Maybe, just maybe it was just as well for an inexplicable moment longer I could turn a deaf ear.
The sea had once more started to churn convulsively, as if in agreement, stirring up matted seaweed, cracked shells, colored glass and broken pebbles in a vigorous agitation of turbulent sediment. It was high tide. On every side I looked a violent rage was going on. It was painful to watch. In its unpretentious way the fraught sea was striking, weeping, visibly.
“But why did the sea strand the whale, just once more, sis?” I demanded to know, stubbornly standing my ground, resisting my sister’s overtures to pull me apart, refusing to depart and leave the exhausted working crew of volunteers to their task, or the whale to the peace it deserved.
“If I tell you again, only once more, just this once, can we go?”
“Yes! Oh yes!”
“Promise! Cross my heart and hope to die promise!”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, Sis! I promise!”
“Stretching back over two millennia opens up all sorts of unknown possibilities for stranding,” replied my encyclopedic sister fuming inwardly “of bipedal creatures roaming the sea bed, establishing territoriality, strange underwater mammoth growths including monster-humans with breathing fins who are known to move in the depths like Cyclopes. The whales don’t stand a chance. Neither do sharks. The ocean is a vast unknown abyss. It’s in all the medieval text books. One day you’ll learn.” I believed her! Oh, how I believed her. The underwater depths were a weighted mystery breakdown that plumbed my senses numb. Caught up in oceanic squabbles, so that was it! She was angrier than me at the death of this once radiant gargantuan creature. I knew the look on her face. The whale’s grin was distressing enough, grisly and funnel-like. Its jagged eye sockets anemone worked was worse, teetering on the verge of collapse. There was a grim inevitability to its once blooming beauty. In its harrowing quest for food among the unlikely, sponges and small fish and lobsters and seals, and not being able to withstand hunger, it had swum too close to our dangerous waters, and a ghost shell remained. A sad reminder of mortality, a sobering residue of a destroyed flower of the sea. It was not complicated. I wondered what the volunteer necropsy team who had peeled apart those thick layers of blubber and baleen had found two feet or so beneath as they dug with their bare fingers for parasites, plastics, mollusks and other detritus that the sea regularly threw up on the shoreline. Overfishing, I heard many angry voices yell in consternation, reducing food supplies for this once over-hunted species. Everyday counted for continuity. In the ocean structure the threat of extinction remained was the general complaint. Their safety lay in deeper waters, not the long coastal shores of our land.
My bewitchment of the sea creature temporarily stayed although incomplete I returned with a few others the next day and the next to the very same spot I now stood. My sister never returned. I understood. I wanted to return, for the whale and the sea, for the rest of my life. In a sense I have, never giving up my chosen section of the beach to hover, and wait, and contemplate, and watch. A fragile connection. I can never forget that whale, that’s for sure. Reality is, the whale.
On this day I look out to sea. The waters are drifting and quivering. There is a quiet struggle in the movement. The sea is silent, the sense of the deep haunting and overpowering. Around me there is some measure of a poignant presence in the briny air. Someone in the space of days has placed a gravestone like a dead skull on the wet sand, beneath which the whale is interred. No inscription, just a simple marking of departure of a gigantic living creature “Aged 122 years.” How does one gauge a whale’s age, I wonder. I wish my sister is with me. Is it by markings on its fin, like the rings on a tree’s trunk? My sister isn’t around, to know, to tell me.
One day this coastline will bring us all closer, will sweep in further, waves rolling in gusts to where a mangled heap of whale carcass lies. I know the spot, the trail, because I was there. Windswept and stormy skies will cover the bone-tinted dunes with moisture even on days the sea is slow. A once rocky sea passage both eerie and profound will reemerge where humongous sea creatures once freely roamed, drawn to these shores. Through rip tides and kelp a whale’s ghost will journey the world’s aquatic universe.
Oh how I would like to accompany the world’s most powerful sea animal’s ghost on its long spectral journey. Its taxidermied colossal frame may not exist, not even in museums. Its soul does. As the world keeps moving, its hulking shape does. In the very far distance almost at the horizon I see what I am waiting for—a sign. Too faint at first to discern clearly, a water spout emerges at last, which I catch, almost missing the outburst in my haste, the spirit of the coasting mammal in its streaking ascent to the starry skies. It takes me by surprise. It shouldn’t. My eyes well up. In my head is my sister’s voice pounding “Something sudden, something tumultuous is about to happen…” Sis, look! It is! Traveling the seas in a flotilla of amphibious creatures who have met similar fates as its own, pale fluid forms connect in the leaping waves to form reflecting pools, to populate the glowing skies.
Kicking off my sandals I race to the water’s edge. I am breathless. The sea is cold, a mantle of blue undulating in ropes of purple. I feel like an intruder walking into a death scene. I see a flurry of sharp shapes forming on the choppy waters. I glance upward to the shroud of clear sky visible above. A small white cloud floating nearer attracts my attention. Suddenly the cloud starts changing shape, changing direction, heading straight at me. It takes on the outline of a leaping spouting whale, distinct from other fluffy clouds. I can’t contain my shout of excitement. I wish my sister were near. This creature may perpetuate grandiose myths and legends, and in my thoughts it does, but for now it is at rest. It has simply returned to its candid home, to its loving pod, to its starkly glowing melting feral sea.
