“Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a frozen dead whale in the Safeway parking lot?”
Perfectly normal, average conversation opener with one’s spouse, followed immediately by, “I could have swore this would have come up at least once before now, we’ve been together 16 years!”
In all honesty the memory was prompted by a completely separate incident. Though you might not know about the dead whale truck, you might remember an incident from about a decade ago which contained exciting talking points like:
and, my favorite:
Not to be confused with the whale that was blown up with 20 cases of dynamite in Florence, Oregon in 1970, this was more of an unintentional exploding whale.
Some facts remain the same across multiple reports. The whale that washed up in Taiwan was a male sperm whale. It weighed between 50 and 60 tons, and was being transported through Tainan on a flatbed truck.
It had a prodigious penis, as one would expect for a 56-foot-long animal.
What it was doing on the truck seems to be up for debate. This site claims it was being driven around the city so men could embrace its penis for virility. Not implausible, but also has faint notes of racist trappings concerning eastern medicine and beliefs.
Meanwhile, NBC news reports it was being transported for a necropsy by researchers and the penile admiration was incidental to its journey.
Whatever it was truly doing on that truck doesn’t change what happened: the dead 50-ton whale bloated, filled with gas, and exploded. Blood. Guts. Fermenting stomach contents. Organs.
One big wash of whale viscera in the middle of the street, closing down traffic for hours.
But it reminded me of the perfectly un-exploded whale I’d seen as a child. In the parking lot of a grocery store in a town with all of 6000 people. Where you normally see whales. (?)
Honestly I can’t remember if we’d had dinner in the Mexican restaurant close to the grocery store, or we just happened to walk out of the grocery store and there it was: A refrigerator semitruck advertising that it had a whale in side. The specifics escape me, but I do know it was one of those magical times where both child and parent wonder & curiosity are perfectly aligned, and what were we to do except buy tickets to see a frozen whale?
So we did. It was cold, I remember that. It smelled like freezer burn with a hint of barely-staved-off decay, a tinge of that dead things/saltwater ocean scent. And it was…a frozen whale. Actual, factual, dead whale.
My memory for detail is generally piss-poor and asking me to recall a dead animal from decades ago is just cruel, so stop putting that pressure on me. I didn’t know, at ten or whatever, that there’d be a god damn test on this.
Besides, it’s not about what I remember, it’s about what I googled.
And lo and behold, I found my frozen whale.
This piece is from 1995 so it’s likely I saw Little Irvy right before or after this was written. Given that it’s been 26 years since this article, it almost raises more questions than the answers it provides.
If you can’t access the article, the gist of it is that, right before commercial whaling was banned, Jerry Malone bought a harpooned whale, dropped its temperature, stuck it in a truck and started driving around the country, charging people to step inside and stare at its arrested-decay body.
Now, however, I wonder what you do with a 60-year-old frozen whale? What became of Jerry Malone? Is he still barking people down in small town parking lots to charge them for corpse voyeurism?
I’m too exhausted from moving to find these answers now, but maybe tomorrow. (Seriously, I fell asleep at my desk for 20 minutes in the middle of typing this)
But if that’s not enough for you, enjoy whales in giant bins of formaldehyde.
