Song For A Whale

1

 

Until last summer I thought the only thing I had in common

with that whale on the beach was a name.

I sat with Grandpa after collecting shells and drift-

wood scattered along the shore, and wildflowers from

the dunes.  The shells and driftwood were for Grandma,

and flowers were for the whale.  Grandpa had asked

how school was going, and I told him it was the same,

which wasn’t good.  I’d been at that school for two years

and still felt like the new kid.

Grandpa patted the sand next to him.  “Did you know 

she was probably deaf too? he signed.

I didn’t have to ask who he meant.  The whale had

been buried there for eleven years, and my parents had

told me enough times about what happened that day.

I shook my head.  I hadn’t known that, and I didn’t

know why Grandpa was changing the subject.  Maybe

he didn’t know what to tell me anymore about school.

The whale had beached herself the same day I was

born.  When she was spotted in the shallow waters of

the Gulf, some people stood on the shore and watched

her approach.  My grandma ran into the cold Febru-

ary water and tried to push her away from land, as if

she could make a forty-ton animal change her mind

about where she wanted to go.  That was really dan-

gerous.  Even though the whale was weak by then, one

good whack with a tail or flipper could have knocked

Grandma out.  I don’t know what I would’ve done–

jumped in like she did or just stood there.

“She wasn’t born deaf like we were,”   Grandpa contin-

ued.  “The scientists who studied her said it had just hap-

pened.  Maybe she’d been swimming near an explosion from

an oil rig or a bomb test.”  302

When Grandpa told a story.  I saw it as clearly as if it

were happening right there in front of me.  His signing

hands showed me the whale in an ocean that suddenly

went quiet, swimming over there, over there, over there,

trying to find the sounds again.  Maybe that was why

she’d been there on our Gulf of Mexico beach instead of

in deep ocean waters where she belonged.  Sei whales

didn’t swim so close to shore.  Only her, on that day.

“A whale can’t find it’s way through a world without

sound,”  Grandpa added.  “The ocean is dark, and it covers

most of the earth, and whales live in all of it.  The sounds

guide them through that, and they talk to one another across

oceans.”   

With the familiar sounds of the ocean gone, the

whale was lost in her new silent world.  a rescue group

came to the beach and tried to save the whale, and

they called her Iris.  Grandma asked my parents to give

the name to me, too, since I’d entered the world as the

whale was leaving it.