The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was reading in the fake newspaper we get every morning how a dead grey whale had washed up on the shores of Everett’s industrially pristine waterfront, so to minimize the rotting smells of blubber decomposing in the unseasonable sunshine, the DNR folks were going to tow it to ‘an undisclosed location on Camano Island’. For those of you not versed in the topography of our fair island, let me explain that the only place remote enough for cetacean disposal is the South End, an eight mile stretch of shoreline with high bluffs from our place to the opposite side where houses end and a desolate stretch of beach forms the Head where few humans interrupt the gulls and eagles.

So me and the mizzus grabbed a camera and went in search of the carcass before decomposition would make it unapproachable even by telephoto if the wind were blowing the stench in our direction. The tide was minus 2, making the circumnavigation possible without being caught half way and forced to hunker down up in the driftwood logs against the eroding bluffs to wait for hours before proceeding further. We had fair winds and a warm sun in our face. We were on a mission: to find the great grey whale.

We walked to the Head, photographing eagles and Mt. Rainier, but no whale sightings. Plenty of whale holes where the beasts had plowed the sandbars for ghost shrimp, but not the bloated body of Moby. We plunged ahead, turning north past the Tulalip tribes’ tidelands at the southernmost point of the island, the true South End, where a century back their people had been killed in the dozens by a landslide while encamped in the very place we now walked. Ahead lay 3 or 4 isolated coves, perfect for the dumping of giant marine carcasses far from human habitation. I figured one of those would be the burial ground.

A fever not unlike that of Ahab took possession of me, an obsessed quest for the great mammal, dead or alive, it no longer mattered. We stumbled across rough cobbles, past shipwrecks, below eagles’ nests, around landslides, over sandflats soft with the cavities of a million clams, all the while expecting the whale, always the whale, around the next bend, behind the fallen boulders, but no, there was no whale by the time we reached Tyee and its ghetto of beach houses jammed relentlessly together between the base of the bluffs and the rising sea levels.

The whale, we learned later, hadn’t yet been towed. It was arriving that night. This morning I’m debating whether to walk the Head again. The fever has yet to abate. The great fish is out there. Dead as last night’s fevered nightmare. Dead, but not gone. Somewhere on the remote stretches of the South End, she rises, thar, thar she rises! You know and I do too, I will have to return as well.

And when the bloodlust diminishes, when the great grey beast has bleached white its bones in the relentless sun of the South End, we will, all us inhabitants down here, collect our refuse, our trash, our composting detritus and hopefully barge it down to ‘an undisclosed location’ in that pristine city to the south, a fair exchange, the very least we could do to return the favor.

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