Every child remembers his or her first encounter with a dead animal. Often it was a bird, a baby fallen from its nest or a squirrel hit by a car. The animal was a source of macabre wonder, something to be poked with a stick. Sometimes it was given a funeral and buried beneath flowers. But death in its horrifying form could be found by flipping the creature over to view its wriggling underbelly or watching as spotted burying beetles struggled to cover the corpse with dirt.
Later, curiosity is satisfied and death sanitized. Pets are euthanized, their ashes scattered in the yard or buried in a plot. Deceased creatures are lifted with a shovel, tossed into the shrubbery or put in the trash. The shivering wonder at death in childhood is replaced by the desire to avoid unnecessary reminders of our own mortality, but that can’t be done when the dead animal is a whale.
Last month, a 50-ton humpback whale washed ashore in Rye Harbor State Park. It quickly became a tourist attraction.
Whales are rarely if ever seen up close. To see one is to marvel that such creatures share the planet with us, pass beneath us as we bob atop the ocean. They are enormous. A humpback whale’s weight is equal to that of a small New Hampshire town. A blue whale, which can reach a length of 90 feet, by weight would have its own representative in the State House.
To see a whale breach and pirouette as humpbacks do is thrilling. To see one dead is to feel sorrow. Most people know that the world’s whale population is a fraction of what it once was, thanks largely to past whaling and present encounters with ships, fishing nets and other gear. Most people also know that whales are mammals that suckle their young, that some species travel in family groups or pods, cooperate when hunting, herd schools of fish by blowing curtains of bubbles and migrate thousands of miles per year. They know that they sing underwater, a haunting song that can be heard by other whales hundreds of miles away, a song that’s become the stuff of jazz, a song available as a cell phone ring.
The Rye whale, an 18-year-old female called Snow Plow by cetologists, the scientists who study whales, was in the prime of life. Her death is akin to the sudden and mysterious loss of a woman in her 20s. Why she died remains a mystery.
When a whale dies, crowds gather, gawk and more than a few mourn. We are among them. Whales are intelligent. They have been filmed showing what can only be seen as gratitude toward the divers and boaters who free them when entangled in nets and crab pots. They are also, in these post-whaling days of climate change, threatened and vulnerable.
We don’t know why Snow Plow died, but we do know that a dead whale’s bell tolls for us, too.