To Steal a Whale Bone

Devon Fredericksen introduces us to the beauty and violence of the Long Beach Peninsula, located along the southern coast of the state of Washington. There, she encounters the carcass of a humpback whale along the peninsula’s north flank. Exposed to hungry birds, swarming flies, and the weather, she watches it slowly decompose over several months. As she hatches a detailed plan to steal a bone as a souvenir, Fredericksen considers what it means to take something that doesn’t belong to us. “We all wanted something from the whale,” she writes. “I had come because I was trying to understand what, from the experience, I hoped to take.”

Eventually, one of the whale’s vertebrae was exposed, big as an adult human’s ribcage. It was magnificent, and I imagined how such a beautiful object might look on my mantle. I wondered: Could I take such a thing? I worried that if I didn’t, someone else would pry it, without ceremony, from the corpse. Someone who hadn’t come to know the whale like I had.

I would later learn that in the U.S., a cetacean’s “hard parts”—bones, teeth, ivory—from a marine mammal not listed as endangered can be collected but must be reported to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), but it’s illegal to gather whale parts still clinging with soft tissue, which was the case with the vertebra I wanted to take. By law, because of a deceased cetacean’s ecologically significant role in the intertidal food chain, bones must first be picked clean by scavengers before they can be collected by covetous humans. These statutes are only lightly enforced, though, which leaves the public to self-regulate, especially in rarely surveilled places like the Long Beach Peninsula.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. This meant the only thing standing between me and the whale bone was the story I believed about myself: that I would never take anything of real value that didn’t belong to me.