I’m going to start by telling the story of a movie I used to watch religiously as a kid. It was a poorly translated Norwegian animation from the late 80s about a pod of whales constantly on the run from the terrors of man. In this pod there was a young whale that went by the name of Samson, who wants only to help his pod, and his female attraction, Sally; consequently, the movie is called Samson & Sally. He makes the decision to leave, searching for help in the form of Moby Dick, the whale that supposedly could solve all their whale troubles. In his search he runs into chaos, gripped with the seemingly futile quest to find one whale in all the oceans of the world. However, with his last hope, he comes upon the city of Atlantis (believe me, I have no idea how this place found its way into the movie, but I didn’t question it at the time) and there dwelt Moby Dick, now an aged, decrepit, dying white whale.
Moby’s advice: “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.” Then he dies.
Samson somehow manages to find his way back to his pod, facing the imminent threat of humanity destroying their simple way of whale life.
I don’t remember a more hopeless movie scenario, but it stuck with me for some reason, and times of similar consequence – that is, facing the inevitable – I would find that I would fall back to the thought of that movie.
I hadn’t thought of it for some time until I invited an ex-girlfriend of mine to spend the weekend with me in Boston.
This would be the first of a series of mistakes I would make, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, from the moment I picked her up at the station that Friday, there was an unsure tension between us.
“I got you a sunflower,” I said after a long hug upon meeting her in Copley. I handed her the flower, a slim, healthy sunflower, its stem ripe, leaves yellow, and seeds as dark as her hair. They were her favorite; you don’t forget something like that. However, I had bought it a minute before on a whim at the street vendor. It was only three dollars.
"Thanks."
We exchanged pleasantries and smiled, but while we held hands on the subway, pretending to ourselves that, for these few minutes, we were happy, there was clearly aggravation between us.
On Saturday we went to the aquarium, I didn’t pay for her, and at the whale skeleton, we paused. She looked at it, then at the bronze statue of the tortoise underneath. I brought her here for her birthday only months before, and we had sat on the tortoise’s shell for a while taking intriguing looks at the skeleton. She was a very emotional, poetic, girl, and was easily overwhelmed when she read of the similarities between the human skeleton and that of the whale. When she read that the heart of a blue whale can be the size of a small car, she asked me half-heartedly if I thought whales suffered that much more heartbreak. I felt a little guilty for bringing her here, what with the whale skeleton and the tortoise and all. I felt worse that I had forgotten about these things.
We got drunk after dinner on tequila, my staple drink of choice, with a stolen salt shaker from the dining hall and a lime I nicked from the grocery store. With salt on our tongues and lime juice sticky on our hands, we found ourselves in a terrible argument. I slept on the floor that night.
And that Sunday she left, leaving her sunflower wilting on my desk, barely any words were said.
I found myself thinking about that animated Norwegian movie, Samson & Sally.
“Fuck it,” I said to myself after a few minutes’ debate on the floor. I still had tequila, and there were plenty of girls to get with to patch over this little scab. My friends would agree with me on that one.
“This weekend we’re gonna’ get our dicks wet! Ow!” proclaimed my drinking buddy Rivers that Friday as we made another dent in my bottle of tequila. We sat in my room doing shots with salt and lime, listening to Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time.” “What a song, man! What a song!” he kept repeating
That night we tried to get into three frat parties, and got denied by them all. On our way back I bummed a cigarette off someone and felt like shit as I inhaled the fumes. Back in the room I drank more tequila, then passed out
Saturday was more of the same; same rejection, different parties.
“Next time, man, next time. I’ll get us a connection into some killa’ parties.” Rivers said over dinner that Sunday, perhaps just trying to nurse his ego, maybe just mine.
The next weekend brought the same unsatisfied urge to drink and forget oneself, as did the next, and the proceeding weekend as well; until, I imagine, a full month had gone by, when one Friday meant something to me.
I drank by myself then called on another friend to get me into a party.
Completely soused I strode between sweating bodies moving in chilling unison on the dance floor - really just a glorified grimy basement with Christmas lights strung up. I would liken the experience to being a ghost; no one notices you, but you’re definitely aware of your own presence, but I’ve never been a ghost, so I wouldn’t know. It was only slightly amusing until someone, a police officer I suppose, pointed a flashlight in my face and stated:
“You’ve got to leave, sir, this way.”
That night ended in me rethinking the same mistakes I’d been making.
Back in my dorm I sat on my bed glaring at the salt shaker and the lime and the bottle of tequila that had always been present in my lifestyle. Already drunk, I refused to compromise on procedure. I sloppily licked my palm, dipped it in salt, and poured a shot. I stood up groggily to properly down the shot, wobbled, and jabbed my hand down on the rough, exposed metal edge of my bed, cutting it.
I cursed and grabbed it with my salty palm, furthering the pain. Somehow some lime had gotten in there as well. I was a mess.
“Fuck.” I mumbled to myself. The pain certainly registered, but it was subdued and distant. I passed out on my bed and woke up to the timeless hang over, having made the same mistakes too many times.
There is a second story I’d like to include, also involving whales but in a completely unrelated circumstance, and it is my obligation as narrator to comment that coincidences like these just don’t happen. Yet they did happened.
A few weeks prior to classes starting, when summer was still real and we had time on our hands to waste, my friend Jonah forwarded a video to me. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was a news segment from the 80s about a beached whale in Florence, Oregon, and how it was to be gotten rid of. Those who knew of such matters agreed that the best way to remove a beached whale from the shore was to use dynamite. Blowing it up, generally towards the sea, scattering the remains for animals in the ecosystem to utilize seemed logical at the time.
They plant the dynamite, but not knowing how much to use, decide on some arbitrary value.
“Two cases,” says the man with the helmet and detonator in the video. When they blow it up, however, they don’t realize what exactly they’ve accomplished. The beach head is quite as the red sand slowly settles, but seconds later, in a twisted and ironic turn of events, chunks of whale begin to rain down on those gathered to watch the spectacle. While no one was injured, a car roof was crushed in the resulting rain of whale.
The reporting newsman jokingly alliterated that “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.” But what’s more, the defiant carcass hadn’t budged. All of this from one whale.
I laughed it off as nothing more than a human mistake, but a gem among viral Internet videos. “How could something like that be repeated?” I posed to Jonah, “How could anyone make the same mistake twice and risk such ironic humiliation in the face of nature?”
Of course I thought that.
But a few days later we sat in my basement, scouring the T.V. for something to watch when we stumbled on a documentary titled “The Whale That Exploded.” Curious to say the least, our intrigue was furthered by the tagline: “Taiwan unknowingly had a ticking time bomb on its hands.” It sounded like the tagline of a B action movie to say the least, but we hunkered down to watch it.
Apparently a sperm whale had been beached in Taiwan in 2004, and the Taiwanese, obviously having learned from the Florence, Oregon incident, decided to handle their whale of a problem a little differently. In an attempt to perform an autopsy on it, they hauled it through Taiwan City via flatbed truck to an aquarium on the other side of the island. This seemed logical. But half way through the city – in a greatly dramatized, and greatly comedic, reenactment - this whale explodes, gushing whale guts all over a street and soaking everyone in the area in blood. Again, even a car was damaged by a stray piece of blubber. All this from one whale. Zachary and I were in stitches. Scientists were perplexed, ultimately concluding with the hypothesis that this explosion was a bizarre buildup of gasses inside the whale that amounted to this once in a lifetime reaction. Clearly, it was a mistake never to be made again.
Out of boredom, then, and with time to spare, I found myself voraciously searching the Internet for categorized procedure on the removal of beached whales– and no, there is no disgusting obsession here, strictly curiosity– and soon I stumbled upon one last video, a diamond in the rough; icing on the cake; the crown jewel of Cetacean situations. Something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark, where another whale had wound up. Not to repeat any of the mistakes made previously, or to kick a dead whale, the Danes’ response was not to send a demolitions crew, nor scientists, but rather those who would really have a clue on the subject of whales and their uses post mortem – whalers.
Now I’d love to say they solved the problem without any violent explosions, and that there was no sense of humiliation dealt by a defiant natural consequence, but that isn’t the case, and it wouldn’t relate to my original story if it were. Instead, as soon as these whalers begin harvesting the leviathan, they are greeted with a rancid explosion of whale guts. The simple, graphic, footage shows the unsuspecting Danes approach the whale with their boarding knives, and begin hacking away at it, only seconds later to be met with whale guts, endlessly flying out of the carcass, raining down on them as they stand there in shock. While indeed gruesome, it’s nonetheless thoroughly funny. And all this from one whale.
As hilarious as it was, however, I just couldn’t understand why a seemingly educated body of people – experts, no doubt – would continue making the same mistakes over and over and over again. I approached Jonah, equally baffled, and we agreed, there simply had to be better methods to deal with it.
“How could anyone be so foolish as to never learn from their mistakes?” Jonah concluded.
Now in Boston, I recalled that conversation, then I realized my situation, and how I’d been making the same mistakes over and over again every weekend.
And I thought about what Moby Dick had said: “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.”
And I thought about my ex girlfriend, and how terribly I’d been trying to replace her with each drink.
But I still went out the next weekend.
I suppose whether it’s whale problems or girl problems, some people never learn.
