Blogs » The nature of things » An imbalance in the world: Is the death of a gray whale a sign of the times?

Subscribe


 
An imbalance in the world: Is the death of a gray whale a sign of the times?
By dwray in The nature of things
August 18, 2011

Image

Early Tuesday morning, a gray whale died on the shore of the Klamath River in California.

According to the AP story, the whale swam up the river from the Pacific in late June. The 45-foot whale and her calf swam in the waters for the next month, stopping traffic and attracting attention and admirers. Then the calf left. Then the whale beached herself. No one knows why, but a local tribal legend may provide the answer.

According to a story told by late tribal member Fannie Flounder, a whale in the river means the world is out of balance, that things aren't the way they should be. You can read the whole story here, but the part about the world being off-kilter is what grabbed my attention.

I believe in signs. I'm superstitious as a Frankenstein villager, and that comes out in all of the usual ways. Not everything means something, but there are some things chock full of meaning. A whale swimming up a river and then committing whale suicide, falls into the "meaningful" category for me.

The world has always been a strange and mysterious place, full of unexpected happenings and creatures, like whales, dwelling in far away places and living lives unfathomable to the humans on shore. Whales appeared in the Bible as Leviathans. A certain white whale took the starring role in Herman Melville's quintessential whale of a novel, "Moby Dick". They have been painted as monsters, they have been cast as "devil fish", and now one whale is cast as a sign.

No matter what age we live in, things are moving forward, changing and disintegrating fast enough that change almost always feels bad. Living in the times we live in, I can't help but think it's always been this way. But maybe the old tribeswoman is right. The tribal remedy was to dance and sing and stomp the ground to sort of shake the world back into line.

Maybe a whale dying on a shore does have some personal message to all of us about the balance of things. Maybe we should all start dancing and singing and stomping to try to knock things back into place. Maybe the whale is trying to show us we're moving toward a world where miraculous, monstrous wonderful creatures like whales won't be able to exist. Or maybe not.

Of course, that doesn't make this whale's death matter any less.

"Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?" -- Herman Melville