Excerpt of "Anna's Whale"

 

“Dream tonight of peacock tales,

 diamond fields and spouter whales.

Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.”

 – Herman Melville

 

A June morning bit cold like January as Anna crouched on her knees to touch the whale’s upside-down mouth. Cold water lapped her Levis as she tried to get close. The giant rested on its side among the black beach stones. 

Twelve-year-old Anna stretched bare hands. She felt for she didn’t know what. Toothy barnacles bigger than her fists clung to the whale’s dark blue forehead in big yellow patches. Since the height of its head was taller than her, she ran her hands down the side exposed. 

She could not feel any sign to measure a bit of life. It did not dawn on her to run for help.

The whale was hers. In this moment, the whale belonged to her. She found it while running to the post office. 

What’s that saying? Whatever is cast up is yours. 

Waves washed her as she labored to get to the other side of the whale’s head, surf spray wetting her long brown hair. Curtains of tan baleen swished back and forth from its mouth open to the surf, slimy like dead seaweed. Anna unintentionally stuck her hand in there to hold herself up. The flaccid tongue felt not unlike her own.

The whale’s one visible eye remained wide open. A plate-size blue eye, so cobalt it looked like a planet, Anna thought. She stared a moment at the eye considering if this were a sign of life. 

Within a short time, most of the village showed up to look at the whale, to poke it and climb it. Even Anna’s grandmother, Matrona, hobbled on rickety legs from her home perched on the hill. Dressed in brown Xtra-Tuffs, gray puffy coat for summer and winter, and a miss-matched blue flower-printed scarf tied beneath her chin, she walked around his head twice.  

She told the kids and adults milling around: he’s not our kind of whale. 

Later, they’d realize what kind he was, a “she” and where she belonged – not in these waters. That this North Pacific right whale might have starved to death, that she came from the far away Bering Sea. More people would come. Anna feared they’d cut her stomach open to find her last meals. They’d haul into her giant lungs, kidneys. Even claim her cobalt eyes. But for now, it was Anna who took possession.

Anna lingered protectively close to her whale.

“Get off!” she hollered at her cousin Sam, who’d already climbed to the whale’s highest point and straddled her. 

Sam laughed his hoarse teenage laugh, a half-man’s voice. “Just want to look. Hey, it’s like bouncy plastic!” His bent knees flexed as if ready to hop. His crossed eyes, an affliction from birth, made him look like a monster on it. 

“Get down!” Anna called again, tears leaking from her deep brown eyes.

 Sam’s hunting dog, a white lab named Bingo, yapped loudly, applauding Sam’s catch. 

“Shoo!” Matrona told the children and the dog. She continued her inspection. The aqua sky lit by bright sun caused Anna’s grandmother to squint as she observed the whale in its parts, its long paddle fins, one pointed skyward, one pinned under. 

“Eye wa thuk! Poor thing,” Matrona clucked. “A victim of something.”

The overwhelming smell of whale didn’t yet dominate the beach. Not like it would later. She smelled like sea creatures, of minute fish she ate, an oxygenated hidden world, a planet plunged to its deepest parts. She smelled of secret places and profound thoughts – places and thoughts Anna could only imagine.

Anna got the idea to get a tent and set up a guard station. 

 

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Sunavik sat on a narrow peninsula, the leeward side cuddled by shallow waters. Nineteenth century mappers incorrectly surmised it was a separate island, but it joined a mainland landmass undersea. The peninsula failed to grow trees on the lowlands dominated by spired mountains. Freshly retreated glacier tracks raked the raw peaks, which were streaked iron orange and peat black in a lack of vegetation, a lack of geologic time for grasses to take root. Moose did not roam here, nor caribou, nor wolves. Those animals never settled here. To find food for survival, people turned to the sea. Though, a species of brown bear found unchallenged dominance and grew fat and tall feasting on salmon in all their runs, fatter and taller than its mainland kin. Wiley red and gray foxes ate bear leavings and bird eggs, and they too stood taller than their mainland cousins. Even rabbits prospered. Millions of birds migrated here, drawn by the isolation for nesting young. The people grew taller too. 

Tribal stories told of an ancient family argument that caused members to huff away from the mainland and set off in boats seeking a new home. They found the peninsula accessible only by rough seas. It suited them fine. 

Matrona saw truth to the story handed down when she met people speaking a dialect of Sunavuut across the water. These people supplied caribou antlers for carved tools and moose meat in exchange for dried salmon during long ago trading times. They forgot what caused the feud. 

 She’d been everywhere with her husband George in younger days working salmon lines alongside him. Their kids grew up that way, Gus, Basil, Selma and Helen. Waters were your friend in those days, so much food in sea ducks, sea lions, seals, fish and yes, the whales. People never starved so long as they could catch them. Waters and storms could be a foe too, yet not the same as now. Not an enemy of increasing storms known as climate change.

The closest neighboring village was a three-hour boat ride away, not that Matrona went anymore.  She remembered the look of Sunavik from the water as she and George finally made their way home to comfort after rough days and nights on the water. It struck her as a miniature village after the bigger settlements yonder that she’d seen. Dwarfed in the low hills against a high mountain range craggy with hanging dusty-blue glacier remnants, its little houses rimmed the beach and climbed steadily higher. The golden domes of the Russian Orthodox Church flourished a fairy-tale polish, a blockish white school, the highest roof around, the small red post office and its American flag.  A simple harbor lined up the fishing vessels two-by-two, plenty of elbow room for engine work or staging catch and supplies on the docks.

Summer brought wild purple iris, the chocolate lily, fragile wild pink orchids whose scent lingered on your shoes after hiking. Green grasses so tall they hid the children and the bears and three kinds of berries, a combination that caused constant worry. 

Today the village did not look ideal like that, not the houses. Battered government-issue HUD homes, the buildings seemed rusted upon sinking pilings like so many junk vehicles.  Especially those closer to the beach held ponds close by, fake ponds where flood waters rested and did not quickly recede. Odd ducks, swans and geese made these swamps their nurseries, rearing their strange species in a place they’d never settled before. Strangers, in the same way as the Pacific right whale. 

The women of Sunavik proved peculiarly fertile in recent generations. Nearly every village home was inhabited by numerous children. HUD homes designed for the American family of four crammed seven to fourteen people in each. People were always trying to build on, so hammers and saws blasted all summer. Skills weren’t so great though, so the houses grew all moss wigged and happenstance. 

Children couldn’t be persuaded to stop playing in the muddy ponds. The swamps assured endless work for the mothers in a constant load of dirty laundry. This hung on broad lines strung behind homes. Every day was laundry day now. Flapping towels and stained coats blew like flags on dry days, then if forgotten earned an extra washing on the rainy ones. 

Matrona and George Ooliiq built their house on the hill, not easy walking in the days before roads, before ATVs and pickups were purchased for barging to the peninsula. But it meant safety from floods long before the current problems. Her home’s main flaw was a faint listing, as if it were a boat too heavily loaded at one end. A sign of melting permafrost beneath her pilings. 

A home that now sheltered her granddaughter, Anna, and usually Sadie, a cousin of the same age. Twins in all but looks: one tall and fair, the other golden brown and round. The girls found that if you rolled a ball from one end, it wouldn’t stop until it came to the other end of the house. A crooked, lop-sided home that looked normal enough in a village speckled by a hundred fake ponds and appendaged houses.