Loitering: New and Collected Essays (6 page)

Whaling Out West

The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between you and reality . . .

—GEORGE ORWELL

Four in the morning and I crawl out of the tent, thinking, what’s my penis for, anyway, other than pissing? Actually, as a man I’ve never been all that roosterly or priapic, so what I’m likely thinking about is not my penis but late itchy procreant urges and babies. Or maybe deep down what I’m really considering isn’t babies but the worthless legacy of my carcass
in toto
and the way the Makah once used whale for drains, combs, toys, tools, oil, etc., for all
that artifactual stuff in their fine, fine museum, and how flattered I’d be if my bones, my hair, my eyeballs, my skull and hide, if all my remains, now and at the hour of my death and the day after, meant the world to someone. What high praise to have your sacrum worked and whittled into scrimshaw and bric-a-brac or to have your occipital carved into a comb and drawn down through some lovely woman’s long brown hair! Or merely to be remembered, to have told three pretty good jokes or made a funny face or cooked up a batch of pancakes in some kind of special way or done anything at all of lasting anecdotal quality. But none of that’s likely in my case, when I go. Unless the gravedigger whistles a hymn as he works, probably no one’ll even say a prayer.

I touch a stove-match to the mantle of my lantern and open the jet way up to full blast so its greenish light will beacon my way back to the tent, and then I dance on tiptoes through the fog and over the cold packed sand toward the sea. I’ve got to piss but have decided I want to stand in the Pacific Ocean, about up to my knees. The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it’s almost like not being alone.
That morning our hero skipped in his skivvies down to the shore of the sea . . . it was dark . . . the fog . . .

Storytelling!

In fact the fog’s so dense and obliterating, this pre-dawn offers a prospect as hopeless and unappealing as waking in heaven would after about the third day into eternity. And it is dark out, but kind of white-dark, like a chalkboard poorly erased. There’s gooey sea lettuce and other kinds of kelp underfoot, and I can’t really see. A wave washing around my ankles or perhaps a crease of white foam curling over in the sand will have to indicate a cautionary line where it’s wise to stop or maybe not, maybe not, maybe walk on into the ocean, trust that the handful of people I haven’t failed will remember me fondly, round things off right now and call it a life, make a biography out of this otherwise open aimless business.

Find closure!

One of Freud’s disciples, Ferenczi I believe, developed what was known as the thalassal theory, in which a man, in coitus, is supposedly trying via vigorous humping to shake loose or snap off his penis and send it forth in a sort of ambassadorial role, northward into the woman’s womb, thus returning anadromously to his natal home.

Science!

Back inland my tent’s a bright illumined bubble such as good witches might live in. Next to the Constitution and Baseball and the Roadside Billboard (loneliness in
space) and the All-Night Diner (loneliness in time), I’d have to say the Coleman Lantern probably occupies fifth place on my list of great American contributions to civilization. No other lantern will do. The whisper and hiss and cranky dyspeptic sputter of a Coleman is as distinct and holy a music as the rev of a Harley. I like the celestial quality of the light, Venusian and green, the rounded simplicity of the mantle, the paint job, of course, and the way one sounds when swung by the bail. I’ve hauled the extra pounds of a Coleman up into the mountains when it might have been more commonsensical to sit in the dark or scratch in my journal by candlelight or bag words altogether and mindlessly stare at the stars. And while I enjoy solitude I like as much the convivial feeling of encampment in crowded parks where families chatter and rehash fables and legends of the comical father while Coleman lanterns light up and start the shadows of all the lovely mothers jitterbugging against the walls of trailers as they stow away the hot dog buns.

This time out I’m alone, it’s dark, but I haven’t worried about the boogeyman in years; too often, though, I’ve brought a case of troubled love out to this uncaring coast. Dating way back, I can recall a catalog of poignancies. What’s remained constant over the years is a sense that when you’re alone you’re prey, or feel at least
it’s potentially your fate to be stalked and eaten. Of course the benefits of being on your own include a certain vital spunk and a dexterity that comes to life when you’re unencumbered, a spring in the step that keeps you ahead of the pack. Player and pep rally both, you cheer yourself on. Go! Yet everywhere beyond yourself is a bigness, a forest, a vault of stars, the surface of the sea, or the city at midday, ready to give you a drubbing. You vs. just about everything else. Alone, you’re vastly outnumbered; but in the company of another, by some weird miracle of human math, the odds seem wonderfully improved in your favor.

Save the whales!

I have to confess I came out to this last, far corner of the country hoping to eat some whale. I came with the idea of getting a mathematically insignificant chunk of meat off a gray whale that washed ashore several years ago and was flensed on the beach and supposedly doled out by the Makah to every member of the tribe. It was like a roadkill whale, half of it necrosed and putrid and bound for the Neah Bay dump, half of it salvaged and stowed in freezers. This particular stranded whale maybe weighed twenty tons or forty thousand pounds (while the estimated number of extant grays currently stands at twenty-three thousand total, or by my loose estimates a
whopping 1,702,000,000 pounds), and what I wanted was hardly more than a pork chop’s worth of whale, maybe a pound, so that I might sample a tiny piece of the controversial behemoth myself. I just wanted to eat some. The Catholic in me thought eating a little leviathan—which I prayed would not in any way remind me of chicken, and which I suspected would taste like a petroleum product, say a bike tire or Vaseline—might bring me sacramental or at least alimentary insight. Foolishly I thought I’d just breeze into Neah Bay, pick up some whale, and flame-broil it for breakfast. I wasn’t sure if whale was traditionally a breakfast food, but I’m not a Makah nor a student of indigenous peoples or aboriginal lifestyles, and I’m generally not inclined to go native, so anthropologic fidelity wasn’t a big concern of mine. All I knew was I hoped to skewer and roast a piece of gray whale and feed the first honorary tidbit off this sort of cetacean shish kebab to my dog, experimentally, after which I thought I might even try it myself.

I packed in some stomach remedies in case I got lucky.

The supposed cuddly quality of cetaceans I just don’t get. Between barnacles and sea lice, the few whales I’ve seen up close were hideously, hoarily disfigured or at least blemished and tactilely repellent the way certain so-called—not by me—pizza-faced teenagers are. I’ve
seen stray grays in the Sound, come to shore to scratch their backs in Saratoga Passage, and they’ve all had a mottled gray pocked aspect, like poured cement. Their souls may be infinitely sweet and poetic, possessed of an earnestness and bonhomie I can only envy, but their bodies, in terms of color and surface texture, resemble bridge abutments. Not that these monsters shouldn’t show a little wear and tear after making a yearly migration of 14,000 miles round-trip, so that, by the time the average gray is twenty, it’s traveled 280,000 miles, or swum, basically, to the moon—which is truly awesome. It probably also explains that corroded cruddedup look. Gray whales get used roughly, making their migratory haul through Siberia, the Gulf of Alaska, etc., on their way south to the warm buoyant waters and calving grounds of Baja California. That’s no frolic. That’s a hell of a lot of use for any kind of carcass.

An encounter with a gray whale is bizarre, and if your first sighting happens unticketed and outside the enervated sanction of a tour, it’ll seem contextually spooky and saurian. Gray whales don’t look especially dirigible. You’d hate to have to park one. They have a lumpy crudeness of design, a banged-up body and a crimped ugly mouth and a dented snout, a color that seems to come from a supply of government surplus paint, and all around they have an unrefined and ancient and also
untrustworthy aspect; they look like a mock-up of the kind of practice mammals God was making in the early days, before he hit his artistic stride and started turning out wolves and apes and chipmunks; and they’ve got that useless megaton bigness, a gigantism that’s pretty dramatic in a circus-freak way or like other types of colossi or prodigies, the sheer extravagant enormity of which inspire sublime fascination or wonder or fear, but don’t register much at the refined and fragile end of the emotional spectrum that includes the various colors of love or tender or chummy feelings of any sort. I myself can’t square forty tons of whale flesh or even the word
blubber
with what I know about sweetness and intimacy; they’re not ducklings or kittens or puppies or little lambs or fawns or piglets. In fact their very bulk seems inimical to closeness, to holding and embracing, but maybe, baby-freak that I’ve lately become, I can now conceive of love only in liftable forms, as something you put your arms around.

My numinous boyhood belief was that whales rose to the surface because they were lonely, tired of the depths. Their ancient bulk seemed to body forth exactly what it meant to be solitary, but breaching and spouting a sigh of relief through the blowhole in their head they lost some of their august self-sufficiency and were always depicted in familial groups, rather
frolicsome and sweet, desirous of good company, of community. Obviously I was equating depth with darkness and darkness with cold and cold with silence and all of the above with a nearly insane state of isolation—OK, with my father—whereas things on the sunny maternal surface of
la mer
seemed to enjoy the sort of warm lapping buoyancy necessary for cultivating friendship and love. The story of Jonah reinforced this spatial arrangement, as did
Moby-Dick
later, where Pip sinks a fathom too far into the sea’s immensity and comes up mad and/or mantic. But things have changed. Nowadays it’s just as likely the surface of life is what puzzles Pip and finally sends him around the bend, and today’s cabin boy must go alone into the quiet depths to escape and find peace and recover for himself a measure of sanity. It’s civilization that’s raw and wild and full of scary monsters and grotesques and deformities crowding every bus and park bench and court of law, and we now believe our wilderness exhibits the high sweet harmony we hope for from life as well as offering the refuge and sanative balm we desire when our energies flag and the botch of civilization gets us down.

Paul Watson’s floating around somewhere out there in the very same fog as I am, Captain Paul Watson of
the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He seems to have commandeered the environmentalist argument—and there’s a creepy uncritical parroted quality to what everybody else in the pro-whale (or is it anti-Indian?) camp is saying—and his main, openly stated fear (as opposed to his real agenda, of which, more later) seems to be the precedent the Makah hunt will set for other whaling nations. But if the problem really is the recrudescence of commercial whaling and wide-scale industrial slaughter, then the Japanese ought to be taken to task for their rapine, or the Norwegians, or whomever, but it’s a pretty specious argument that can make the corruptions and failures of these people somehow the direct fault of the Makahs. It’s a sophistic argument, in fact, but Paul Watson’s not much of a logician; he’s mostly a misanthrope and a sentimentalist (how often those things go together!), sweet on whales and sick about what he calls “base-virtued” humans, and his rock-ribbed stance re: the hunt is all about the lone whale, soulful and solitary, perhaps a poet, singing songs, echolocating down the coast, intelligent, gentle, sentient, loving, unfairly ambuscaded (by heathens!) while going about its business—pretty much the otherworldly and animistic whale of my boyhood.

There’s not now nor was there probably ever a shortage of love for Indians in the noble and rhetorical
abstract, but even more abundant and pressing has been a heap-big annoyance at the nuisance created by Injuns who are actually alive and walking around and scratching their bellies and grumbling about what’s for dinner or listening to the radio or reading books or arguing over the rules of Monopoly and especially those who are rather clamorous (uppity) about their needs. It all gets so queer and drifty and hard to track these days. Eco-Elements on First Ave. downtown has been instrumental in gathering signatures for a petition against the Makah, and it’s one of those New Age emporiums with a syncretic, boutiquey approach to spirituality, a sort of travel agency specializing in tourism for the soul, emphasizing past lives, future lives, every kind of life but the really incompliant and unruly present, where tarot, runes, goddess-stuff, astrology, Native American spiritual resources, healing soaps and oils and aromas, candles that calm you down and bells that strike a special, particularly resonant and congenial note—where all this totally creeps out the stodgy Pauline Catholic in me, and yet—yet!—this reaching out to the arcane holy world, this Luddism of the soul, however fey and preposterous and apostatic and pagan it might seem in my eyes—you’d think this grab bag of atavistic practices would put the New Ageists in deep and direct sympathy with the Makah.

But it doesn’t. And not so weirdly, a lot of the attacks on the Makah seem to gut and hollow out the “Indian” and take that rhetorical material and use it as stuffing, which in turn is packed into whales. The clichés about Indians transfer easily into clichés about whales, similar in substance and similarly hackneyed, yet housed in different vessels. The noble savage qua noble mammal. This can’t be flattering to the Makah, while I imagine metaphor in general is probably a matter of oceanic indifference to even the most poetic gray whale. And the rhetorical violence—the stealing of language, the silencing—shouldn’t surprise anyone even remotely versant with white/Indian history. Captain Watson likes to footnote his superior credentials as an Indian enthusiast from way back—Wounded Knee!—and yet somehow without tearing his brain in half he’s able to plunge ahead with low, vicious, even paranoid attacks on the Makah as people. A small measured dose of irony should prevent this kind of mental sloppiness, but doesn’t, probably because people in the environmental movement, like holy folks everywhere, don’t make real keen ironists. I can pretty well guess that these sort of merit-badge Indians aren’t entirely or enthusiastically embraced by your average enrolled tribal member, especially as they listen to Watson float pseudo-arguments that asperse the character of the Makah and accuse them of being liars,
frauds, cheats, racketeers, colluders, and, of all things, fake Indians.