Beached

Of course the first thing you do when arriving at the beach is to put on all your layers and go walking. We immediately saw a madman, his madness evident by the fact that he was driving a motorized vehicle on the beautiful sand. But then we saw another one, and another, and noticed that the sand was covered in tire tracks. Apparently this is legal in the state of Washington. I have no idea why it was decided that was ok up there while it’s unheard of in Oregon. I don’t know about you, but to me a car on the beach looks EVIL.

The next day we drove a few miles south of where we were staying, in search of an Internet café we’d heard about. This was partly a business trip for Lindi, and she needed the Internet for an hour or so. By the time it was my turn, though, we were ready to be out of the coffee shop. That’s why I only posted two sentences that day, and we didn’t want to think about hunting down the Internet for the rest of our vacation, sorry.

We headed back north, and suddenly Lindi pulled into a side street much sooner than I expected, not the side street where the cabin was. I asked where we were going and she said “I want to show you something. It's a surprise.”

After parking the car, we walked several blocks till we hit the sand, then turned south. Other people were also walking south, and cars were driving south too, on the sand, more of them than the previous day. Everyone was headed the same direction, and the people all walked with a sense of purpose, not in the strolling way that people normally do on the beach. So I knew this weren't no walk on the beach. Far up ahead people and cars seemed to be clumping together.

By now you’ve guessed it, because no doubt you heard about it on the news. Linda had seen it in a newspaper in the coffee shop, and being a person of directional fortitude, knew exactly how to find it. We stood and stared at it for a long time, taking in the immensity of it. My mother’s voice rang in my ears, accusing my father of “lying there like a beached whale” while she did the housework. So this was what she meant, I thought, a thin layer of salt water pulling out around the soles of my shoes.

I’ll take a few minutes now and choose the best photo and post it here momentarily, if Blogger is behaving this morning. Otherwise I’ll have to work on it more at around midday. By the time we arrived on the scene, an autopsy had been done, so you can sort of see there where they’d cut into the back of the whale to take various samples. Also there was some sort of big balloonish thing rising up out of the far side of it and blowing around in the wind, and if anybody knows what on earth that might have been, do write in. It looked like it was made of whale tissue and was some part of the whale gone bad.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about another whale, on that same beach, and how this all ties in to riding your bike. (I know you're thinking I'm going to say the whale beached itself in protest of the cars, but this was evidently not a whale suicide. They say it died at sea and floated in..)