My daughter’s world is one where giant creatures wash ashore like seafoam, where floods erase roads and pandemics send the world into hiding.
1.
The whale washed up on a Friday. Sixty-five thousand pounds and female. She was as cold and gray as the Massachusetts Bay that nudged her out. My husband and I were 150 miles away at the time, driving up the interstate to Vermont for a friend’s wedding. Our seven-year-old had been staying with my parents on the coast so that we could, in my mother’s words, “go on, enjoy yourselves for a bit.” It was my mom who sent the photo. I gasped a little in the car at the sight of it. Even reduced to palm-size, she was the largest creature I’d ever seen on a stretch of rock I could draw with my eyes shut. Her bloated skin still shone with terrible freshness, as if she’d taken her last exhausted breath only moments before. For a second, I was transfixed. I watched the three dots dance after my mother’s text message awaiting her next transmission.
“Dear,” Keith said.
“Hmm?” I responded without looking up from the carcass in my lap.
“Deer,” he repeated, pointing out the windshield.
“Oh!” I stumbled, stretching my neck a moment too late to see it.
I could tell by the angle of his point that the foal was dead too.
The next image buzzed in. A video this time.
“You have to look at this,” I said, lifting the whale from my lap. He took the phone from my hand, gave the required, bemused “Wow,” and handed it back to refocus on the road.
“It’s a humpback,” I informed him.
He’s from Colorado, I rationalized. He may not have known.
Every Massachusetts child learns whale taxonomy before multiplication. They are our dinosaurs. Every New England child declares at one point or another that they plan to be a marine biologist. I knew she was a humpback by the grooves in her inflated belly and the notch in her enormous tail. I examined the flukes to look for injuries. They were stunning. They came to rest there, just above the waterline where the rocks change colors and the flesh of my childhood feet used to get sliced up by barnacles. Studying that humpback, for a moment on my phone, I was that child again.
And then I saw my own child in the foreground of the photo, not six feet away from the carcass. She was wearing her slate blue sneakers, navy leggings, and rust-colored dress under a clashing pink fleece. Her back was to the camera as she stared at the whale’s inflated belly. In this photo, she looks just like I did at seven: messy hair frizzing out in the salt air, hands in her pockets. She could have been me, but she was not. She was mine, and so instinctually in the car, 150 miles away, I felt a stab of fear seeing her so close to something so large. I knew the whale was dead. I knew it, and I still felt that terror in the way that a ledge gives you terror despite knowing you’ll never jump.
“Don’t let her get too close,” I texted my mother. I am not sure if I was protecting her or the whale’s dignity. Both, likely. I felt a wave of regret picturing local sightseers who I knew would take it too far. I could see them climbing up the whale’s tail, poking it with driftwood they found on the beach. It made me sad.
“People are being respectful,” my mom wrote, sensing it.
I played the video again. In it, the waves nudge the whale’s body back and forth against the rocks that have her cradled. She looks for a moment like she is breathing.
“Tell her to wave to Meghan!” my mother says behind the camera. My father, off-camera but seemingly closer to my daughter, shouts, “Wave to May-gan. Wave to ya mothah.” Evelyn turns and waves with her whole arm. She follows that up with a heart made by folding her two hands together and then swings back to the whale.
The shock of seeing a humpback washed ashore is like little else I can name. It is like seeing a stranger in a dream and then realizing in an unconscious click that the stranger bears the face of your father. That is the level of weird you feel when you encounter a humpback on the beach. Your daughter’s silhouette against its slate flesh. Something seems inverted. Has the rapture come? you think unseriously before reminding yourself that death of creatures, even this large, must go somewhere. It must be pulled and tugged to the surface. Lives of giants do not simply disappear.
“What are they going to do?” I asked my mother.
“Ask your sister,” she replied with a smile emoji.
2.
Two years earlier my older sister had run for town government and won. We were all a little surprised. Not because she was undeserving. She was a strong candidate—a family court lawyer and mother of three kids in the town schools. I guess we were a little surprised because in a time when she could have just enjoyed the town, she opted to run it. And, in my case, because I still think of us both as kids. In any event, I imagine that disposing of whale carcasses was not part of her envisioned platform. Neither was being the primary source of town gossip for her kid sister who had chosen the city over the seaside, but you take the job as it comes.
“So… this whale,” I text my sister as though picking up a conversation mid-stream.
“I am not blowing it up,” she wrote back instantly.
Apparently a half dozen people over the course of the morning had already sent her the same YouTube clip, “Exploding Whale 50th Anniversary, Remastered!,” an absurd story of an Oregon town in 1970 that, not knowing what to do with a 40-ton deceased whale, had made the ill-judged decision to line it with a half-ton of dynamite and blow it up. Their thinking was that if they could disintegrate the body with explosives, the seagulls would do the rest. Nearly a hundred spectators came to watch what the news coverage earnestly called, “a whale of a story.” As everything was getting set up to blow, the local news reporter onsite asked George Thorton, the highway engineer in charge of the project, for his final observations:
“Well, I’m confident it’ll work,” old George Thorton replied. “The only thing is we’re not exactly sure just how many explosives it will take.”
A few moments later the blast went off. The cameras filmed and then cut momentarily. When they flicked back on, the scene had an air of disorientation. The reporter’s voice clicked back in, claiming the entire situation had given way to “a run for survival, as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere… and spectators escaped both the falling debris and the overwhelming smell.”
The gulls, which they’d hoped would be the clean-up crew, were nowhere to be found. A half mile away a ten-pound chunk of salted fat crashed through the awning of a beachgoer’s convertible. Mothers sheltered their children’s heads with their bewildered bodies, their eyes darting up every moment or two to the sky. Back on the beach, the highway engineer paced around the large slabs of whale that still remained. He must have realized, I think, that this grand miscalculation which still hailed down all around him would soon cool and become his legacy. I wondered for a moment what that felt like.
“Tell your sister to Google ‘whale and dynamite’,” Keith said as if on cue. I laughed and told him, “Too late.”
Outside of the car the woods of Vermont enveloped us. We were approaching the wedding venue later than expected. Flash floods and landslides the prior year had taken dozens of homes, bridges, and roads off the map, but the GPS hadn’t caught up with them all. At one point traffic uncommon to the rural road we were on came to a standstill as a half dozen men in orange vests dispersed to tell cars to back up and reroute. The road ahead had been washed away. The one they sent us to resembled a snowless ski slope straight up a mountain. “I don’t think this was made for cars,” I said. But we carried on.
3.
As we drove our route, I thought about my daughter and the whale. Twenty years growing up in that town and nothing like that had ever happened to me. As a child, I discovered the enigma of nature in far more subtle ways: cracking open a shell to reveal the mathematically perfect spiral inside, throwing a pebble into the ocean at dusk and watching the bioluminescent plankton erupt like stars. These were mysteries to be noticed gradually and pieced together. The beached whale—she felt like an alarm bell. It was unsettling and disorienting, even miles away.
The alarm bells are sounding with greater and greater regularity these days. Just a few weeks after this whale washed ashore, a wayward flamingo was spotted on the outer coast of Cape Cod. Coverage of it spread quickly across the internet and networks of local news stations.
“What the hell-ahh-you doin, heah?” the voice behind the video had said. Massholes raced to comment with amusement and just the slightest tinge of fear. The first theories were that it was an elaborate prank. In an age of TikTok stardom you can never quite put any jackassery out of the bounds of reasonable conclusion. You could almost picture the aspiring influencers committing the crime: shoving the captured bird into their backseat, driving the 20 hours north. For the lolz. But no, we’ve since learned with some relief, before the dread, that this is more probably the work of climate change. The flamingo was likely caught and transplanted by a hurricane that hooked north. You can see it in the flamingo’s face. They are no longer tropical and cute. They are exhausted. They are beaten down and pissed off. They are New Englanders now.
Our kids are growing up in a very different world than we did. My daughter’s world is one where giant creatures wash ashore like seafoam, where floods erase roads and pandemics send the world into hiding.
New weather terms have emerged. She has learned of bomb cyclones and thunder snow, phrases that sound like Marvel characters to me. Over the last ten years the winds have steadily picked up outside her window. It is not uncommon for the couch on our balcony to slide the full length of the house or for her to drift off to sleep amid the sounds of a tempest.
This is what the earth is to my daughter.
Her world is strange to us. To her, it is normal.
I wonder how different that will make her as an adult. Growing up in this age of peculiarities. I wonder if the whales will survive long enough for her children to know them. Or if she will tell tales of them, like mythical beings, and watch her own child’s eyes go wide when she says, “You know… I saw one once.”
I wonder if growing up in a time of destruction and displacement will change the way she sees things. In England this year, a month’s worth of rain fell in a single day. The region of Somerset, once home to acres of manmade farmlands, has been drowned and drowned again to the point of erasure. They used to try to fight it with seawalls. They failed. They tried other barriers. They were breached. A few years ago, a collection of conservationists, scientists, and lawmakers offered a different approach: give into it.
Instead of resisting the pummeling force of climate change with traditional tools, they decided to lean into the change and see what could grow out of it. So, they bought the land back from the farmers for ￡5,000 an acre. They carved routes into the mud for the flooding to be channeled, and they transformed the former farmland into a salt marsh. It wasn’t all that popular initially. A conservative lawmaker referred to it as “an extravagant, ridiculous scheme.” But the salt marshes proved to be a more effective buffer against the rising tide than concrete seawalls ever were.
When I was growing up there was an unspoken sense that humans had conquered nature, tamed it by being intellectually superior somehow. We cured and packaged it into neatly trimmed parks. We parted the seas to create enormous canals for the efficiency of our commerce. Things are different now. My daughter is growing up in a world where every flood and wildfire teaches us: we were never the masters we imagined.
And maybe, from that humbled spot, she will be better somehow. Maybe seeing yourself as an integral cog in a grand machine rather than the foreman operating it will lend her perspective, a level of discernment we don’t otherwise have.
4.
When we finally arrived in Grafton, my sister sent a screenshot of a text she had sent to the town board: “Does anyone know any Wampanoags?” A few years prior, a humpback had washed ashore in Aquinnah, Massachusetts and the descendants of the tribe arrived and held a traditional whale burying ceremony.
Alas, no one knew anyone from the Wampanoag Nation.
“We’re going to have to sea-tow it,” she later told me after consulting with NOAA and the New England Aquarium which, as they informed her, only deal with live marine life.
NOAA has a name for occurrences like these: unusual mortality event, or UME. And there’s a special squad of part-time experts hired to investigate them. Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, an unusual mortality event is defined as “a stranding that is unexpected; involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population; and demands immediate response.”
Our female whale was added to the case file of a humpback whale unusual mortality event transpiring along the Atlantic Coast that was first opened in 2016. She was death number 45 in Massachusetts, number 229 of all humpback deaths along the Eastern Seaboard in the last nine years. Enough to spark an investigation.
When an unusual mortality event is resolved it typically comes down to one of just a few culprits: climate change, human interactions such as a vessel strike or fishing net entanglementm infectious disease, or biotoxins. Along the coast of Maine in 2022, 181 gray and harbor seals were stranded and killed in the span of one month due to what the UME team later determined was an outbreak of the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus from infected wild birds. But just as often, these unusual mortality events remain unsolved. Of the 70 closed UMEs, 27 remain undetermined.
5.
Throughout the wedding reception, I kept checking on the status of the whale. Between updates from my sister, I would shove my phone in the faces of unknowing wedding guests.
“You have to see this,” I’d say with a swell of anticipation.
Many of my viewers crinkled their noses and squinted. Some took the phone from my hand with a satisfying little gasp to reverse pinch and zoom.
“Can they save it?!” they’d ask.
“No, she’s gone,” I’d explain.
There was something electric about sharing this image. I felt like a Cassandra—the gift of prophecy in the palm of my hand. In seconds I’d take them through the stages of processing it. I’d shock then comfort them. I’d tell them my sister is on the case. I’d leave them with the fuzzy and unnerving sense that something is happening here which they couldn’t fully grasp. Finally, I stopped pulling out the phone. After the allure wore off, after I’d seen the expressions drain from too many faces, I realized, too late, that I’d brought a funeral to a wedding.
My friend, the groom, was a few yards away, jumping around the dancefloor with his children and his new wife’s children—“a modern Brady bunch,” as so many wedding guests had chimed in. Five years back, my friend had experienced his own unusual mortality event as his wife, the mother of their five children, had been diagnosed with cancer and, within the span of a few short months, died. It was a stunner of a season and the last time I’d seen him in person. Two years after that he met the woman who would become his new wife and her two daughters.
Today their collection of amalgamated youth are whipping each other around the dance floor with remnants of dessert ground into their shoes. Life goes on, as they say, but it’s different somehow. Grief brings unexpected outcomes. We want those outcomes to extinguish the grief (“this too shall pass,” we say) but they don’t. On the contrary, whatever comes next is entwined with grief, inextricable from it. Something new always emerges after everything crumbles, but it’s different than we think.
6.
The final transmission I get about the humpback comes in the morning. I roll over in the clean, white sheets of the four-post bed. The room of the inn comes into focus. On the floor are the only pair of heels I own; their outsoles have come loose. I reach over for my phone, which is tethered to the outlet in the wall, and pull up the message with a squint. There’s no text, just a picture of a rust-colored barge pulling the body out to sea. I feel the grief rush in like water.
I am sorry for all of it. For the vessel scars on her back, the ones that didn’t kill her, and for whatever it was that did kill her. I am sorry for turning her exhausted, extinguished body into a conversation starter. I am sorry, deeply so, that my daughter will grow up with alarm bells instead of soft enigmatic whispers. I regret our role in all of it.
When we were growing up I always thought there would be a moment when we saved the climate. I have this memory of drawing a picture of a slightly tipped earth dripping into a red bucket. The headline, in box letters, reads, Save water. It’s not just a drop in the bucket. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense upon reflection, but there was a contest in my second-grade class for the best posterboard call-to-action on the environment and I felt, with conviction, that I had it. I can’t remember who won, but I was proud that I had done my part. Those were the days of individual empowerment when it came to our planet. Only you could prevent forest fires. Reduce, reuse, recycle—that last beat got all the emphasis as we each got our first plastic blue bins to fill and drag to the curb every Tuesday.
Climate change felt like a threat, but a straightforward one. Like if we just all did our part, we could dismantle it. “By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!” chimed the 1990s cartoon which tackled and resolved a new climate threat in every 30 minute episode. Verminous Skumm was destroying the city with a giant cloud of acid rain? Summon Captain Planet to neutralize it with baking soda. Ironically, in that series the eco-villains were almost never purely human. They were mutant rat-humanoids or chunks of rock that came to life in the form of a man. At the end of every episode, the Planeteers would return victorious to Hope Island. It feels a bit absurd now when I rewatch it, but I loved that show as a child. In those days, climate change felt like something that was still ahead of us, a cautionary tale, not a foregone conclusion.
When we pick our daughter up from her grandparents she is unfazed.
“Tell me about the whale!” I ask immediately.
“It was big.” she says, climbing into the backseat.
She describes the scene as I saw it in digital format but without the same sense of foreboding. She is laying it out like directions to a familiar place. She is not shocked. This is a kid who was born into climate change. It’s not an academic concept to her. In fact, the very phrase “climate change” feels oddly future-tense when the change arrived before she did. To her, this is just the climate. She had a different starting point than I did. To us it is all loss. To her, it is existence.
And maybe that means my daughter’s generation will navigate this altered world with an intuitive grace we lack. They won’t spend time mourning the stable climate we once knew or trying to rebuild what was lost in the exact same way. They will function differently because of it.
Does that make it any better? I reprimand my own thinking. No. There is no happy ending to our grand miscalculation. No “this too shall pass” to our climate grief. The whale is still dead. Shorelines and livelihoods are still vanishing. These losses can’t be reversed, only carried. But they’re my losses. I mourn for the world that was because I knew it. Because I watched us let it go. Her world is what she sees today. And it’s worse, in so many ways. But it’s hers and theirs to define. She will build her life in a world where giants can be displaced, where nothing is too big or smart to be vulnerable, where we survive by thinking in a different way than we have for generations. It’s not going to be okay, but it is going to be something.
7.
Two weeks after hauled out to sea, the whale returns. We thought we had buried her properly, miles out to sea where the currents would pull her down as food for a hungry ecosystem. It felt right. Like we had done our part, played our role as orchestrators to set the inverted world right again. They didn’t just ask the local townies to tow it out; they had consulted oceanographers and naval experts familiar with the tides and seafloor to choose the precise resting spot. They had treated it with human ingenuity.
Despite all that, the whale came back. We always think we know what’s best. This time her body washed ashore in Swampscott, Massachusetts, about 50 yards down from where she first came to rest in our town. Her remains were a distant semblance of their former mass. They were flattened, deflated and stiff. She looked grotesque on her second surfacing. “Over the town line!” my sister messaged. Swampscott would have to figure it out.
“We did get multiple reports indicating that it was coming in,” said Ainsley Smith, regional marine stranding coordinator for NOAA Fisheries in the whale-side interview. “[We] found out this morning that it beat us to the punch.”
One more miscalculation in a string of trial and error. Coincidentally, this time my cousins were among the first beachgoers to rediscover her. They were out walking on the rocky shoreline., trying to get some steps in, as we say. They came across the carcass just as the Channel 5 News crew was setting up. My cousin looks genuinely despondent in the interview. She is saddened and confused.
“I just want to know why. Why did it happen?” she tells Channel 5. “I feel sad that they couldn’t drag it back out and let it be a part of where it should be. It shouldn’t be here,” she concludes after a pause.
It shouldn’t. But here we are.
Meghan Keaney Anderson works in sustainability and writes about climate, technology, and ordinary moments of joy. She lives just outside of Boston with her husband, daughter, and dog, Otto. More of her writing can be found at meghankeaneyanderson.com.
Header photo by TravelPhotoBloggers, courtesy Shutterstock.
