But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.)
-George Orwell
A dead whale washed up on Ocean Beach a few blocks from where we live, so yesterday Truckstop and I went to check it out. I had never seen a whale before, not so much as a fin above the water. I had some idea that we would stroll by, the way we stroll by dead cormorants and gulls, pelicans, harbor seals, sea lions, crabs, jelly fish, a small shark, a small porpoise, even, after heavy rains, the occasional river-swept deer. But this death was an event. At least two dozen people were circling the body when we arrived. There were couples snapping photos, parents with little kids, parents with older kids they’d apparently pulled out of school to see the whale. I overheard a girl of 10 or 12 complaining to her mother that someone had left a footprint on the body.
“Well,” her mother said, “some people are just mean.”
“It’s so sad,” the girl said. “It makes me really sad. Also it really smells.”
Both those things were true. The whale was very dead. One whole side was in white tatters, chewed by sharks and beginning to decompose. But the other side, the side facing shore that you saw as you approached, was intact from flukes to jaws. The baleen were intact. The eye was cloudy but intact. The great lower lip stuck out, and you could see the thick white grooves on the throat.
Local scientists think the whale is either a fin whale or a sei whale, both endangered species that live only in the deep ocean. They don’t know how it died, except that it was dead when it washed up, and had at some point been struck by a boat. I don’t know if it was these same scientists who decided to bury the whale on the beach, but there were rangers milling around and workmen in neon vests and tractors parked on either side of a giant pit. Like everyone else, I ignored the yellow caution tape and walked to the edge of the pit and looked in. It was full of green seawater. It seemed like the right grave for a whale, though I have seen how much sand the ocean moves around from month to month and I have my doubts the whale will stay buried.
Since it washed up Monday, someone had found the time and motivation to tag the body with spray paint, but paint must not adhere well to whale skin and the message was already illegible. I felt this was a victory for the whale. Aside from that and the footprint, everyone I saw seemed infected by the same mix of intense curiosity, awe, and melancholy. The size of the animal — 47 feet — its rarity, the distinctness of its features, its irrefutable whale-ness, all made it seem as though we were witnessing the burial of a king, but a king from a strange land, a strange planet, on whom our rituals were wasted.
Sometimes I feel very sad.
Sometimes I feel very sad.
Sometimes I feel very sad.
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.
-The Beach Boys
