Beached Whale
I have this childhood memory of a beached blue whale. I remember Its silhouette looming over the horizon as I walked down the boardwalk of Seven Presidents beach with my mother, the fog kissing our faces as the pungent smell of cyclical life erupted from the high-tide line. The whale had been caught in a nor’easter while swimming too close to shore, dragged in by the turbulent surf of a rising tide. A monstrous figure the size of a school bus, its color a mixture of steel-gray and blue contrasted by a cream-white belly. It sat among common storm debris: sun-bleached driftwood and plastic, giant styrofoam blocks rounded by surf, a mass of broken phragmite reeds, skate eggs and dried rockweed: this community of fragments and weathered refugees drowned out by the immensity of their largest denizen. The sand had been dug out on one side and heaped, mimicking the dunes nearby but bald of grass or beach plum. The whale was so large that they couldn’t return its body to the sea, so they were burying it here, where the ocean had deposited it.
Later, I remember seeing local news articles of the beaching, my fingers touching the newsprint, surprised to see experience manifested in ink and pressed pulp. I remember a lot of things that might not be true. The location, weather, my hand in my mother’s as we treaded through soft sand toward the whale.
More than two decades later, this is one of those memories which persists, startling me by where and when it shows up in the fore of my consciousness. I don’t remember many things from that period of my life; I had a happy, uneventful childhood.
I have asked my mother about the whale. She holds no recollection, but seeing a beached whale as long as our house is wide is not something she could have forgotten. Still it remains in me, part of my experience, interrogated but no less real. I’ve asked my father too, in case I went with him.
He remembers nothing. My brothers, nothing. My friends, nothing. I’ve searched the internet for any remnant article or picture, scanning archives for the picture I distinctly remember, hoping to see it preserved in pixels: no dice.
I saw the second beached whale, which might have been the first, when I was 17. I was three years in, working at Mon- mouth Beach Bath and Tennis Club, arrogantly nicknamed ‘Big Monmouth’ as it was larger than the municipal bathing
pavilion to the south (pejoratively called Little Monmouth). A private beach club with a country club mentality, Big Mon- mouth was an upper-class co-op to which all beachgoers held a share, rendering each member a boss of the employees expected to cater to every one of their needs. There were over 200 members, plus three official managers. I was the lowest on the totem pole: a beach boy. My job was to do everything no one else wanted to do: trash, recycling, setting up chairs and umbrellas for members. Maintenance.
Every morning at six someone had to use a leaf blower to blow gallons of sand off the ‘boardwalk,’ actually a concrete pathway which stretched a half-mile down the coast. This sisyphean task involved a daily gasoline-fume high accom- panied by the enduring reverberating pace of the two-cycle engine sputtering throughout my body. On slow days, when we had finished our work and beach attendance was low due to clouds or late summer distraction, we were told to keep out of sight, on occasion ordered to sit behind the dumpsters in the August heat because seeing us idle irritated the club members.
I was told by one of the managers that I was the best beach boy they ever had, a designation I still bear mixed feelings toward. But I took the pay raises and scheduling privileges along with the burden of occasionally doing a job that others hesitated, or flatly refused, to do.
One day, I got a call over the radio to bring a large trash can down to the beach. I retrieved one and walked along the boardwalk surveying the crowded beach under the June sun. What few swimmers (most people preferred the clean, chlorinated pool) had been in the surf had been called in, and a crowd stood at the shore’s edge. In the slackwater waves a dead humpback whale bobbed, turning in slow, 180-degree arcs, nose to tail, north to south, as if it wasn’t sure which direction was best to lie in the rising tide.
I found the manager who had summoned me. He liked, but didn’t trust, me because I worked harder than necessary for such a shit job. He informed me that the whale’s rotting body had lost its lower lip, and I was just the guy to pick it up. I walked diagonally toward the water, travelling up the beach until I came upon a five or six-foot span of blubber and baleen. It smelled better than I expected, more fisherman’s wharf than bait shop dumpster, and I picked it up and crammed it into the trash can. Looking north, I saw the larger carcass migrating with the current 30 yards away, a body battered by wake-waves and sand. It seemed to resist the land, pushing back into the sea for one last chance.
I hauled the lip a quarter mile or so down the beach and across the gravel parking lot before depositing it into a rusty, July-enhanced dumpster. It was possibly a felony to dispose of a whale in this way, but I followed orders. Regarding it for one last moment, a thought occured. My best friend’s birthday was two weeks away, and I hadn’t gotten him anything yet. Realizing the singularity of the moment, I looked around covertly before grabbing a handful of baleen, which departed from the decomposing lip with surprising ease, and pocketed it in my grimy cargo shorts.
I remember more: my friend’s expression of confusion as questions bottlenecked in his throat, staring at what would likely be the strangest birthday gift he’d ever receive. I remember how the whale got stuck on the north side of the jetty at the end of the beach club, and how some idiot, a guest of a member, decided to jump in the water to free the snagged carcass to float away and stink up the free beaches to the north.
Everyone advised against this and still he jumped in the water between a jetty and a dead whale; we pulled him out before he was crushed. Indignant and drunk, he yelled at us while my manager persuaded the cops to leave without arresting him. I remember all these things as fact. Unlike my earlier memory, I can prove them through friends and newspaper accounts. I don’t remember it as a humpback though; rather as a juvenile blue whale. A picture in an online news article occuring about the same time in the same town shows black baleen; I distinctly remember it being white. Still, the depictions of the whale’s stomach hanging out its mouth triggered images I wish I couldn’t recall. It must have been the same whale.
I have to admit, when I searched for proof of the second whale I hoped to return empty handed, as if lack of evidence for either event would make them equally credible. My memory of the first beached whale I ever saw remains unconfirmed, except in the corner of my mind that rejects doubt. My relationship with truth and memory is built of ever-widening tolerances. I can hold both remembrance and doubt of the whale, and rest unburdened by the discrepancy. I don’t expect corroboration, yet the memory remains a tonic. Far more disconcerting are the endless conspiracy theorists born by an untethering from the physical world: flat-Earthers, free energy enthusiasts, those who believe the Queen of England is a cannibal. I may believe in something that isn’t real, but I keep the whale to myself.
I’ve seen other whales. But they were alive, and far off in the ocean. A beached whale is different. To see something so large and dead captivates, is evidence that size, like strength or wealth, does little to prolong our collective fate. Besides, whales aren’t supposed to die on land. They are supposed to fall to deep sea floors and become the seed that begins an ecosystem. A beached whale is an albatross, adorning our beaches instead of our shoulders, a harbinger of a ghastly fate not for an individual, but an entire civilization.
Later, I remember seeing local news articles of the beaching, my fingers touching the newsprint, surprised to see experience manifested in ink and pressed pulp. I remember a lot of things that might not be true. The location, weather, my hand in my mother’s as we treaded through soft sand toward the whale.
More than two decades later, this is one of those memories which persists, startling me by where and when it shows up in the fore of my consciousness. I don’t remember many things from that period of my life; I had a happy, uneventful childhood.
I have asked my mother about the whale. She holds no recollection, but seeing a beached whale as long as our house is wide is not something she could have forgotten. Still it remains in me, part of my experience, interrogated but no less real. I’ve asked my father too, in case I went with him.
He remembers nothing. My brothers, nothing. My friends, nothing. I’ve searched the internet for any remnant article or picture, scanning archives for the picture I distinctly remember, hoping to see it preserved in pixels: no dice.
I saw the second beached whale, which might have been the first, when I was 17. I was three years in, working at Mon- mouth Beach Bath and Tennis Club, arrogantly nicknamed ‘Big Monmouth’ as it was larger than the municipal bathing
pavilion to the south (pejoratively called Little Monmouth). A private beach club with a country club mentality, Big Mon- mouth was an upper-class co-op to which all beachgoers held a share, rendering each member a boss of the employees expected to cater to every one of their needs. There were over 200 members, plus three official managers. I was the lowest on the totem pole: a beach boy. My job was to do everything no one else wanted to do: trash, recycling, setting up chairs and umbrellas for members. Maintenance.
Every morning at six someone had to use a leaf blower to blow gallons of sand off the ‘boardwalk,’ actually a concrete pathway which stretched a half-mile down the coast. This sisyphean task involved a daily gasoline-fume high accom- panied by the enduring reverberating pace of the two-cycle engine sputtering throughout my body. On slow days, when we had finished our work and beach attendance was low due to clouds or late summer distraction, we were told to keep out of sight, on occasion ordered to sit behind the dumpsters in the August heat because seeing us idle irritated the club members.
I was told by one of the managers that I was the best beach boy they ever had, a designation I still bear mixed feelings toward. But I took the pay raises and scheduling privileges along with the burden of occasionally doing a job that others hesitated, or flatly refused, to do.
One day, I got a call over the radio to bring a large trash can down to the beach. I retrieved one and walked along the boardwalk surveying the crowded beach under the June sun. What few swimmers (most people preferred the clean, chlorinated pool) had been in the surf had been called in, and a crowd stood at the shore’s edge. In the slackwater waves a dead humpback whale bobbed, turning in slow, 180-degree arcs, nose to tail, north to south, as if it wasn’t sure which direction was best to lie in the rising tide.
I found the manager who had summoned me. He liked, but didn’t trust, me because I worked harder than necessary for such a shit job. He informed me that the whale’s rotting body had lost its lower lip, and I was just the guy to pick it up. I walked diagonally toward the water, travelling up the beach until I came upon a five or six-foot span of blubber and baleen. It smelled better than I expected, more fisherman’s wharf than bait shop dumpster, and I picked it up and crammed it into the trash can. Looking north, I saw the larger carcass migrating with the current 30 yards away, a body battered by wake-waves and sand. It seemed to resist the land, pushing back into the sea for one last chance.
I hauled the lip a quarter mile or so down the beach and across the gravel parking lot before depositing it into a rusty, July-enhanced dumpster. It was possibly a felony to dispose of a whale in this way, but I followed orders. Regarding it for one last moment, a thought occured. My best friend’s birthday was two weeks away, and I hadn’t gotten him anything yet. Realizing the singularity of the moment, I looked around covertly before grabbing a handful of baleen, which departed from the decomposing lip with surprising ease, and pocketed it in my grimy cargo shorts.
I remember more: my friend’s expression of confusion as questions bottlenecked in his throat, staring at what would likely be the strangest birthday gift he’d ever receive. I remember how the whale got stuck on the north side of the jetty at the end of the beach club, and how some idiot, a guest of a member, decided to jump in the water to free the snagged carcass to float away and stink up the free beaches to the north.
Everyone advised against this and still he jumped in the water between a jetty and a dead whale; we pulled him out before he was crushed. Indignant and drunk, he yelled at us while my manager persuaded the cops to leave without arresting him. I remember all these things as fact. Unlike my earlier memory, I can prove them through friends and newspaper accounts. I don’t remember it as a humpback though; rather as a juvenile blue whale. A picture in an online news article occuring about the same time in the same town shows black baleen; I distinctly remember it being white. Still, the depictions of the whale’s stomach hanging out its mouth triggered images I wish I couldn’t recall. It must have been the same whale.
I have to admit, when I searched for proof of the second whale I hoped to return empty handed, as if lack of evidence for either event would make them equally credible. My memory of the first beached whale I ever saw remains unconfirmed, except in the corner of my mind that rejects doubt. My relationship with truth and memory is built of ever-widening tolerances. I can hold both remembrance and doubt of the whale, and rest unburdened by the discrepancy. I don’t expect corroboration, yet the memory remains a tonic. Far more disconcerting are the endless conspiracy theorists born by an untethering from the physical world: flat-Earthers, free energy enthusiasts, those who believe the Queen of England is a cannibal. I may believe in something that isn’t real, but I keep the whale to myself.
I’ve seen other whales. But they were alive, and far off in the ocean. A beached whale is different. To see something so large and dead captivates, is evidence that size, like strength or wealth, does little to prolong our collective fate. Besides, whales aren’t supposed to die on land. They are supposed to fall to deep sea floors and become the seed that begins an ecosystem. A beached whale is an albatross, adorning our beaches instead of our shoulders, a harbinger of a ghastly fate not for an individual, but an entire civilization.
Tate Hewitt is a generalist, currently splitting his attention between myriad distractions, including woodworking, foraging, fermenting, and hiking. Grown and raised in New Jersey, he seeks to interrogate commonly held assumptions through childlike curiosity and sober realism. He is a non-traditional student currently pursuing his undergraduate degree.