Today, November 12, 2008, we celebrate the 38^th anniversary of arguably the most significant event to rock the Pacific Northwest: Whale Blowing Day. The atom bomb – terrible as it was – was detonated TWICE on enemy soil. Yet 38 years later, no one has again attempted to dispose of a beached whale via half a ton of dynamite. That very uniqueness in itself makes this moment in history special, and a somewhat appropriate symbol for this region we share.

For me, the now famous video inspired a full year of independent research that ultimately culminated and congealed into my college thesis: Rendered, Redeemed & Transformed: The Social History of Whale Carcass Disposal on Northwest Shores. I encourage you all to read it but assuming few actually will (it’s 31 single-spaced pages), I’ll just post my conclusion below.

FROM

Rendered, Redeemed & Transformed: The Social History of Whale Carcass Disposal on Northwest Shores.

If someone had asked a Clatsop Indian 200 years-ago to write a thesis analyzing Man’s relationship with nature through the lens of whale carcass disposal, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to comprehend the question. After all – nature was a whale and the Earth a whale carcass. Today, science and popular wisdom suggest otherwise, though whale carcasses now serve as popular environmental indicators of severe disruptions in the “natural order” that supposedly drives our daily lives. Too often a beached whale gives people reason to pause and reexamine both their behavior and their relationship to the natural world around them. In some circles the fear that human activity could be responsible for a premature demise carries with it tremendous guilt, and ultimately a need for redemption (undeserved though it usually is).

Yet despite centuries of shared history and experience, in the final assessment, beached whale carcasses continue to confound coastal communities across the Cascade region. To this day, there remains no standard protocol for rendering, disposing or claiming dead whales. Nor has whale carcass disposal become any less news-worthy or more predictable in recent years. While local governments seem to be drifting toward establishing barriers between beached whales and civilians in the form of roped-off police/demolition lines, for some people the allure of dead whales remains too powerful.

In July of 2005 the body of a 22 foot gray whale that had washed ashore near University Place Washington became the subject of a minor investigation when parts of the skeleton – including the skull – which had formally been claimed by several Pierce County officials as the property of an unfinished environmental education center, were stolen by an unidentified person with “opportunistic purposes.” One article published in the Tacoma News Tribune warned that Pierce County public works would “like to have the skull back, no questions asked” if the person in question were to voluntarily surrender the bones. To date, the unidentified culprit remains at large and presumably in possession of the skull.

In May of 2007 the body of another gray whale – 40 feet long – washed ashore near Newport Oregon on Memorial Day weekend. Unable to dispose of it for 5 days, police fought an unsuccessful battle to dissuade tourists from scavenging for souvenirs. Despite all efforts, several pieces of the whale were cut away, some of which later appeared for sale on Craigslist. Even the force of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and the threat of a $10,000 fine proved not enough to stop Oregon’s most determined vacationers.

For better or worse, whales that die on Northwest shores will probably continue to inspire a complex mixture of concern and curiosity for years to come. The process of disposal, meanwhile, will similarly continue to be shaped by economic factors as well as notions of regionalism and our ever shifting environmental mentality. Encounters with beached whales will probably continue to provoke feelings of redemption and transformation, though, considering that this is a theme that has repeated itself for the past 200 years, arguably nothing really is redeemed or transformed. Or perhaps the real disruption that inspires these themes is not rooted in the nature of the Pacific Northwest, but in the nature of Man.

This, however, is mere conjecture. All that is certain is that – just as beached whales have played a tremendous role in shaping our past – so too are they bound to shape our future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Environment, Health & Living, Local News, Ripe!, Seattle, Spit-Seeds, Tacoma, Washington State. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.