Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio Read Free Book Online

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 awhopping 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’veseen 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 alsountrustworthy 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