Whalebone Courtship
By Katy Spindler

"A whale’s washed up into a farmer’s field somewhere around here," my husband mentioned idly as he flipped through the paper. This might have been an extraordinary statement if we were in my hometown of Chicago. At the current moment, we were living in Stavanger, Norway and this was my first brush with gigantic mammals outside of McDonald's.

Needless to say, I was excited. Knut, my husband, was not so enthusiastic since getting excited about a beached whale in Norway would be a lot like someone in Chicago trying to convince you that there is the coolest piece of roadkill on I-90. A raccoon the size of your head! With Porsche tire treads! The poor beached creature in the news report was a minke whale, one of the most common whales in the North Sea. It is on the small side (though whales do tend to be rather large) and is commonly hunted for food. They sell it in supermarkets in Norway: Ziploc bags full of red bloody flesh. I figured it must be a lot niftier looking while the meat was still on the whale.

I had heard a few tales from Norwegians who were willing to humor my peculiar interest. Not too long before this, a dead sperm whale washed ashore on a local beach. That one was so big and so magnificently putrid that they had to blow it up with dynamite so they could cart the pieces away. The biggest news story of 2003 was that the orca whale from "Free Willy", after years of frolicking in the ocean, had finally passed away in a Norwegian fjord. The papers listed his name, Keiko, and the experiences he must have had both in captivity and in the North Sea up until his death of pneumonia. There was no mention of dynamite in that report, but I suspect the worst.

After a few minutes of pleading and threatening, Knut agreed to join me and the next weekend we were off to find my great grayish white whale. We managed to pick one of the coldest days in January for this excursion. We wrapped ourselves in four layers of woolies and rain repellant nylon, loaded the car with the Norwegian equivalent of Kit Kat bars and drove forty minutes to the site mentioned in the paper. This happened to be in a picturesque part of Rogaland county. It’s a funny little peninsula home to a charming red lighthouse, a former priest’s home which is now an art gallery, and a former compound for the insane. Most of the places where I have traveled in Norway have convenient insane asylums. One wonders if it’s a direct result of reading so many Ibsen plays in high school.

We pulled into a deserted gravel parking lot and then it was only a matter of walking across an extremely muddy windswept field that threatened to suck our boots off with every step while the fierce wind stuck talons through our heavy coats. Knut and I shivering and muddy, finally dragged our galoshes-clad feet to the farmhouse. We looked everywhere ready to be astounded and nauseated. It should have been easy to spot. After all, how well could a dead whale hide? Pretty well as it turned out; the whale had been loaded up on a flatbed truck and carried away the night before. We squelched back home without a single amusing photo of ourselves posing by a rotted Free Willy.

However, my enthusiasm for the matter has not faltered! All that I have learned from this occasion is that the minute we hear about a dead whale anywhere in town, we have to strike. Now that we live in Chicago this will be a rarer occurrence, but if a humpback washes ashore on Oak Street beach, I will be the first to know! I was an English major in college; I ought to have known that hunting for whales, dead or alive, breeds obsession.

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Katy Spindler knows what you want to know. It tastes like fish-beef.
See her blog at http://thoughtfulrabbit.blogspot.com.

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