This Offbeat Life
New Economy Cooking
Backpacking by Bus

Searching for Whale Bones,
Extra-legal Pursuits on a Summer Night

Manic reminiscence by Leslie Strom

So we're doing this story on fish-cleaning and it's approaching deadline and no one has sent me their final stories and they're giving me improbable excuses about jobs and families and sucking chest wounds and nights in the county lock-up. I figure I'll add a segment on really big fish cleaning, and I'll go visit a project that Susan Berta is coordinating up on Whidbey Island, Washington, assembling a Grey whale skeleton from a real dead whale that washed up on the shore in December of 1998. The Whidbey Beach Watchers group gathers every Tuesday evening at the Naval Air station to work on the bones.

A trip this epic begs for company, but who else would be interested in driving two hours north to see a whale carcass festering in varying states of ragged stenchiness? Dave McBee, Get Lost Magazine's Resident Unnaturalist likes the idea, Rosie Freeman who is visiting from San Francisco wants to see the project and say hi to Susan again (we all met at the Miami Seaquarium demonstration in May) and biologist Martha Jordan, who's just... well, weird for bones, wants to view the fabulous Atlas Axis of the Grey whale skull. So we get our like-minded group assembled.

Tuesday evening rolls around, I'm carrying my camera that doesn't have a flash. Rosie has the flu and keeps falling asleep from some Chinese Herbalist remedy. She gets into my truck, Dave climbs into the back of the camper for what is probably an illegal ride to Martha's house, peacefully sleeping on the platform like his life isn't in peril. We get to Martha's house and transfer to her new mini-van with reclining seats (which Rosie immediately takes advantage of). Tucker and Ki, the Border Collies, pile in, and old Tucker curls up in the back of the van next to Rosie so that in short order we hear two snoring souls as we drive through the Skagit Valley debating in whispers about what might be noteworthy enough to wake her up to see.

We drive into the sunset talking about no end of disgusting biological subjects, always a favorite. We make Rosie look at Deception Pass, which she's glad to do, then she sleeps some more. We get to Coupeville and I realize that I only have a vague idea where the bones are being worked on... they are supposed to be at the sea plane base, so we go there. It's a big place. We figure that the fire department might know of the project so I go in to ask if anyone knows where the bones are.

The Whidbey Naval Air Station's fire department guys, like the gate sentries, are hearty healthy young men in their 20s. I talk to them at some length as they go to heroic lengths to help me find our whale bone party. I finally use my cell phone to call Susan who has forgotten that we were coming. She gives me directions to the radar station on the hill where the others should be. ("Stand in front of the fire station. Look up at that thing with the dome on it. That's it.")

So I get back in the van, which is now a-jangle with the hostile vibrations of three people who believe they've been steered grievously wrong by someone with no navigational skills and the suspiciously literal motto of "get lost." They accuse me of taking far too much time talking with the handsome young firemen. "We were all having sex under the fire truck," I tell them. They don't buy it and laugh cruelly. We drive up to the radar station and the gate is locked. A clipboard has a note on it saying that the military people forgot to let them in the building that night so they were off to work on other bones that are being biologically scoured in a couple locations, the lagoon and the sewage treatment plant. By now we're actually starting to think it's all funny. It's getting dark, I have forgotten the handsome fireman's warning that the base is closed to non-military persons after dark, and so with Susan's guidance, we head out to the sewage treatment plant. We turn the car lights off the road and off in the shrubbery there is a chicken-wire covered skull of a grey whale. Martha wisely has brought a couple flashlights, I foolishly am wearing sandals, and thus we stumble over to the Fiat-sized skull through sticker bushes, where I bloody my toes.

"We have about three minutes of car headlight," Martha tells us. I run to get my camera, the one without a flash. I employ Dave and Martha as lighting crew with the flashlights to try unsuccessfully to take a picture of the Atlas axis, a different-colored formation where the spine connects to the skull as Martha marvels at it. She's happy to have seen it, but disappointed that she didn't get to see the giant scapular bones, her other favorite bone. (like most afficianados, she has favorite bits. I personally think the floating pubic bones in whales are interesting... they're tiny and detached vestiges of their land-dwelling ancestors.)

My cell phone finally goes dead and our fun with Susan is over. We get in the car, stinking - STINKING - of oxidated whale oil. I think we actually manage to offend the dogs, both who look at us sidelong a few times. We're laughing our heads off over our stench and my bloody feet and our stumbling in the dark around a whale skull like a bunch of idiots, when we see flashing police car lights. Martha pulls over to let it pass. It's for us. A young MP gets out of his police car. We can't stop giggling. Martha mumbles something about how the stink of whale is the only evidence we need to convince him of what we were doing. Dave makes some comment about how I should be happy there's another good-looking twenty-year-old soldier to not have sex with. We give him our story, and we look so feckless that he wearily tells us that the base is closed after dark and to remember this so that "I don't have to pull you over again." Like we've interrupted his dinner with a wrong number. As we leave, Martha accuses me of getting us pulled over on purpose so I can look at still more handsome young soldiers. I told her it was a lie; if I'd wanted to do that I'd have set the car on fire so we'd get the guys from the fire department instead.

We head home, my companions brewing up some kind of revenge on me (to be seen, I'm sure, in the near future), stop for ice cream to share with the dogs, and catch the ferry two minutes before it leaves. (I note later that if we had missed the boat, the next one wouldn't have been along for another hour which would have capped the whole evening and they'd have killed me for sure.) Rosie sleeps on the ferry, too, and comments after the drive home from Martha's that she felt much better, considerably rested, and enjoyed our trip. I on the other hand, am relieved that I hadn't been murdered or abandoned at the sewage treatment plant pinned under a whale skull with chicken wire decking my carcass like a framework for weird topiary. I am also relieved (and frankly agog) that Dave and Martha expressed a desire to go up and see the bones again soon. Musta been the whale oil fumes.

Author Leslie Strom thinks it would be perfection to meet a military fireman in a kilt.