Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Psalm 42:7 (King James Version)
The fingernail beach that welcomes the Sea of Cortez into Cantu Cove is about a mile long. During the final days of the old year I stood in the center of its arc and looked seaward. I sometimes get the startling sensation that I’m peeking out through the lens of a great blue eye. I drew a very deep breath and remarked to myself that it’s a big world out there. I didn’t need enhanced vision to see the dead whale on the beach. If your worldview includes a vista of the ocean you could see any number of different whales steaming by—or on your shore. If you don’t see them you probably aren’t really looking. On a recent visit to Hawaii I saw whales often when I stood among crowds of oblivious ground gazers. One man who saw whales with me told me he was from Alaska and modestly mentioned his private gold mine. He then unwrapped a chamois to expose a gleaming slightly flattened hemisphere of buttery gold as full as a young woman’s breast. “It’s a life-sized model of a humpback whale’s eye.” He grinned. “Want to hold it?” It must have weighed 10 pounds.
The dead juvenile female humpback whale arrived on the beach at Cantu Cove on Christmas day, preceding our return by a few days. I’m not sure if she rode the waves into my little corner of paradise or if a civic-minded fisherman towed her carcass around the point and away from the downtown public beaches. There’s an old country expression: “big as a dead horse.” I’ve experienced that certainty on the farm and a dead horse is bigger than life. This didn’t prepare me for a dead whale, however. At 40 feet and maybe 35 tons, the presence of the whale begged comparisons. The grooved throat and belly flowed into the broad flat head and the thin wings of the forward fins seemed ephemeral by comparison. The long body tapered abruptly into a strong spreading tail. The skin was the density and color of rubberized canvas. It was beginning to give off a distinct odor. This whale had no eyes. A great convocation of zopilotes waddled up to the body, tucked in their dusty wings and leaned into the work at hand. Coyotes by night, and gulls and vultures by day tunneled through feet-deep blubber to the dark muscle underneath. A strong onshore breeze blew a funky mist of decay and salt air through our windows and doorway, leaving a greasy film on everything.
The urge to make this problem go away was overpowering. Our pleas to La Profepa, the Mexican Fish and Game, were deflected to the Navy and then on to the town of San Felipe. Ultimately the animal control office picked up the gauntlet and sent out a crack team that piled sand on top of the corpse where it lay well below high tide line. The high tide that night rinsed away the sand, leaving the long rounded form exposed again.
Salvation appeared in the guise of an expert in the area of historical whaling in the Pacific Northwest. He wanted the skeleton and he would completely remove all the body if allowed to dismember it into manageable pieces. With kitchen knives, machetes, a bum leg and a paid assistant he attacked the mountain of flesh. It did not yield easily to his onslaught. After days of hacking he freed the jaw bones and the feathered wing fins. A passing Navy boat informed him that he could not proceed without the proper permit. He sought the halls of the city for the proper permit in vain, but no one could enlighten him. He was not doing well with his infected leg and he left the whale and Mexico for a U.S. hospital.
We asked the land owner to use her dual citizenship and mastery of the Spanish language to address the elephant in the room. She was optimistic and predicted nature would sort things out between the flocks of zopilotes and coyotes and the powerful wave action. Alas the elephant in the room was a whale bigger than many elephants piled up in a celebration of festering decay. The scale of things is hard to grasp. The heart of a great blue may weigh 4,000 pounds and be the size of a VW bug. A nursing mother may produce 100 gallons of super-rich cream each day, which allows a calf to gain 250 pounds per day! After dining, an adult whale may have one ton of food in its stomach at a time.
We were encouraged when animal control officers returned and dusted the deceased with powdered lye. The logic was that the thick layers of blubber would break down from the reaction with the lye and flow away. However the next high tide rinsed the white powder and our hopes away. The process was repeated with similar results a few days later. There was universal wailing and gnashing of teeth over our prospects. Each new voice added to the conversation followed the same cycle of questions: Why don’t they tow it out to sea? Why don’t they bury it? Why don’t they blow it up? Indeed, why don’t they …?
Today the city sent out a Transformer version of a backhoe—a massive, muscular carnivore painted Tonka Toy yellow. The operator braced it and began digging a hole beside the remains. Much is gone but much remains. The skin has taken on the sheen of old dry vinyl. It is sooty black streaked with dirty white and brown stains. A lot of the remaining skeleton is revealed amidst the wreckage that looks like a collision between El Dia de los Muertos and an abandoned water bed. The machine operator is making short work of digging deeply into the wet sand. Soon a grave 8 feet by 20 feet opens its mouth to the sky. With a deft hook of the bucket he pulls the carcass headfirst into the grave. In a slow motion collapse the sinuous spine follows and the tail taps a shave and a haircut as it disappears from view.
