To Steal a Whale Bone
Essay by Devon Fredericksen
Photographs by Josué Rivas
Illustrations by Lily Qian
Few places command the democratization of discovery quite like the intertidal zone. On the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state, there’s an unspoken understanding that any found detritus is fair game. Everyone looks for treasure. Across the wrack line of high tide, people comb the scattered ephemera, swing metal detectors, gather flotsam, hold sea glass up to the sun. Over the last three decades, I’ve returned to the peninsula hundreds of times, though I never discovered any real riches until I met the whale.
Between November 2021 and February 2023, I observed the slow decay of a humpback whale on the north flank of the peninsula. When I first found it, the carcass had the deflated look of a hot air balloon lying in a heap, like it had been dead for weeks. I’d never seen a beached whale before, and I was surprised by its size, thinking it should have been bigger—the length of a school bus, at least. Instead, it was no longer than a sedan, and I wondered whether this meant it was a calf.
On my first encounter, the beach was empty of other humans, so I knelt, pressed my hand against the body, which had more give than I was expecting, like a waterbed mattress wrapped in supple leather. Startled by how animate it felt, I began to cry. The body seemed too exposed here, swarming with flies and pecking gulls, ringed with tire tracks. I almost wanted to lean my weight against it, heave it toward the privacy of its blue home.
In the months that followed, I returned to the whale again and again, each time noticing how the carcass was more tattered and bronzed, how the tides shoved the lifeless tail into unnatural positions.
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.
• • • •
Long Beach is a place more familiar to me than any other. It contoured my childhood the way water carves stone.
The peninsula frames the mouth of the Columbia River, the confluence of the world’s largest ocean and the West Coast’s most massive waterway, making it one of the most dangerous stretches of coastline in the world. Nicknamed “The Graveyard of the Pacific” on account of the hundreds of shipwrecks caused by this treacherous convergence, it’s this mixing of waters that creates such a rich ecosystem. Harbor seals bob in the surf like dark buoys. Tessellations of sanderlings pinwheel through the air at dusk. Species with sharp or shadowy names—razor clam, sword fern, ghost shrimp—thrive here.
For humans, the peninsula’s 28-mile stretch of coastline is lawless country. You can get away with a lot. Poaching those clams. Lighting a mattress on fire. Driving a truck at high speeds along the shoreline. Detonating fireworks in such unchecked profusion that the uninitiated fear the start of a war.
There’s a violence to this tract of ocean that provokes more violence.
Once, I saw how the sea’s teeth had ripped apart a 30-foot boat, coughed one half onto the peninsula, then spat the other half a quarter of a mile down shore. Within weeks, humans had torn apart and purloined the boat’s remains.
This helix of beauty and violence is what makes Long Beach so dynamic, defined by polarities. Like a blade or a cliff, the edge of the sea shows the flimsy line separating life from death. On one side: sandcastles, seashells, long walks. On the other: rip tides, hypothermia, drowning.
It’s a place that incites both awe and fear. Growing up, whenever I looked toward the Pacific Ocean—that seemingly endless, roiling expanse—the sensation in my body was equal parts wonderment and terror.
When I was eight years old, my parents started building a second home on the north end of the peninsula, and while they hammered and hoisted, I explored the dunes, the shore, the coastal pine forest. An only child, I spent countless hours wandering the beach alone, learning the way scavengers—gulls, crabs, humans—made quick work of any meat, wood, or gleaming objects lying prone at low tide.
When I encountered the dead whale in my mid-thirties, it was notable, in part, because it lingered longer than anything I’d seen cast ashore.
• • • •
The deathspan of a beached whale is a study in endurance. For coastal ecosystems, such a massive carcass is a long-lasting reservoir of nutrient-rich tissue, blood, and bone, sustaining the appetites of local wildlife for several years. Often, though, coastal communities remove cetacean corpses from public beaches because of the staggering stench, the smell so conspicuous that the Dutch Republic nicknamed whale processing houses “stinkeries.”
Despite the odor, a 2022 review of cetacean carcass management makes the case for letting dead whales decompose in situ so they can fulfill their role as ecological treasure troves, feeding everything from bears and wolves to condors and gulls. With multiple studies showing cetacean populations making a comeback in the years since the 1986 ban on commercial whaling, the authors of the 2022 review speculate we may see a swell in strandings, which, if the in-situ decomposition approach is more widely adopted, could result in a greater number of whales left to decay on coastlines. A byproduct of this could mean an increased cache of valuable parts—bones, teeth, and ambergris—lying around for the taking.
“There’s something about the thrill of discovery that can make a person believe what they’ve found is theirs now—to claim, to guard, to name.”
Certainly, there is monetary incentive to claim such objects. On 1stdibs.com, whale vertebrae start at around $350 and sell for as much as $2,800. The going rate on the site for an antique scrimshawed sperm whale tooth is $4,500. In 2021, a group of Yemeni fishermen cut into the gut of a dead whale and found $1.5 million in ambergris, which accumulates in a sperm whale’s intestinal lining and is a prized fixative in the perfume industry.
My desire for the whale bone, though, wasn’t financial. The vertebra, a piece of something I had come to love, felt too valuable to sell.
• • • •
To execute my plan, I decided I would wait until midnight, dress in black clothing, and leave my headlamp behind. Cloud cover would spare me from casting long shadows. Though I didn’t know if there were legal consequences for robbing a whale corpse, I was still paranoid about getting caught.
The body lay about a mile down the beach. I resolved to take two pairs of shoes. Wearing one pair, I would walk to the wet sand, then travel north along the wet lip of shoreline so waves would erase my path. Near the body, I would change into my second pair of shoes before heading in the direction of the foredune. I hoped the different sets of footprints would make my trail untraceable to law enforcement.
Then what? Would I need a knife? A hatchet?
As midnight drew near, I sharpened the details of my plan until they glinted in my mind.
• • • •
Before construction, my parents made room for the beach house’s footprint. This meant chopping down shore pines on the 0.14-acre lot. Fresh in my young mind was The Lorax, Dr. Seuss’s controversial anti-logging children’s book. After my parents cut down the trees, I scanned the denuded landscape, heartbroken. I was similarly troubled when the owners of the adjacent northern lot laid a gravel driveway, ripping up the stand of prickly gorse that had cradled hummingbird hatchlings. I watched as the landscape transformed. Ocean-view vacation homes sprang up along the crest of the foredune where nesting grouses took refuge. A family built a house in the clearing where I’d watched a doe nurse two spotted fawns.
My young mind somersaulted trying to understand how the owners of these properties, my parents included, could show such destructive disregard for the non-human inhabitants of this place. A question gnawed at my conscience: Are they thieves?
That I did not include myself in this moral inquiry only complicates the question.
• • • •
The idea of ownership has dominated the history of whaling. In places like Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom, stranded whales were dubbed “royal fish,” or the property of the dukes and monarchs. In the mid nineteenth century, the showman of a traveling exhibition carted around a rearticulated 95-foot blue whale that had stranded in the Netherlands. He’d agreed to return the whale to the Dutch king when the tour ended, but when Belgium and the Netherlands split, the showman worried the kings would quarrel over the skeleton, so he gave it to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.
Prior to WWII, the open ocean was considered a space of aqua nullius, belonging to no one, but after the war ended, whaling nations met to decide how countries could lay claim to the ocean’s quarry.
For centuries, humans have turned whales into a veritable buffet to feed our appetite, industry, and wonder. We’ve devoured the meat, boiled the entrails for soup, and rendered the waxy components for candles, cosmetics, and lubrication for space race machinery. Out of baleen and whale bone, we’ve fashioned tongue scrapers, corsets, skirt hoops, fishing rods, riding whips, and shoehorns. We’ve stretched the heart membranes taut for drums and crushed the bones for fertilizer. We’ve dried and pulverized massive whale penises for performance-enhancing tonic and rearticulated entire skeletons to suspend titanic silhouettes in museums.
One could argue that, within the context of human ingenuity, our use of whales is resourceful, even responsible—especially when all the parts of a whale are used, which has long been the ethic of Indigenous whaling cultures. But that argument doesn’t hold water when the number of hunted whales far surpasses a whale population’s ability to sustain itself, which became the case when industrial whaling turned these captivating creatures into one of history’s most exploited resources.
By commercial whaling’s peak in the 1960s, humans hauled more than 80,000 whales from the oceans each year. Made gluttonous by such unfettered harvest, we nearly emptied the seas of the world’s largest mammals.
• • • •
My dad, keen to acquaint us with our second home, carted me around to every museum, cemetery, and interpretive kiosk along the peninsula. Peering into glass cases, I learned about the Chinook, people of the sea and cedar.
I was mesmerized by the artifacts on display—antler chisels, blades shaped from glass-like rocks, sweetgrass baskets dyed with bear grass and bog mud—how these objects seemed to demonstrate a different way of being human, one often romanticized or disparaged, but that operated within an ethic of endurance.
The tools made me think of the fishing sinker sitting in front of my grandmother’s fireplace. It was a stone bead a foot in diameter, the hole through it wide enough to pass a thick rope. The thing weighed at least 40 pounds. On visits, I would run my fingers over the sinker’s polished curves, rest my hand against the cool stone. My dad told me the sinker had likely been made by a Northern Straits Coast Salish fisherman. My great-grandfather had found it on his property on Lopez Island (called Sx’wálech by its original Lummi inhabitants). Sometimes, I wondered why the sinker wasn’t in a museum. As if a glass case was where it belonged.
On one of our Long Beach historical excursions, my dad and I stood atop the ancient basalt promontory near the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark had arrived in 1805. A place once home to condors. A place the Chinook people called Kah’eese but was renamed Cape Disappointment by a British trader.
After spending a miserable winter in unrelenting rain near the mouth of the Columbia, by March 1806 Lewis and Clark began preparing for their return journey east, but they discovered that they would need an additional canoe. They could not, however, find a Chinookan member who would sell them one. To the Chinook, canoes weren’t inanimate objects, but sacred, living members of the community.
With the blessing of both Lewis and Clark, four members of the expedition stole a canoe from a nearby Chinook village.
• • • •
There’s something about the thrill of discovery that can make a person believe what they’ve found is theirs now—to claim, to guard, to name.
As a child, I found the perfect hiding place in the dunes, a knoll just north of the access road to the beach. There, I buried seashells, coins, feathers, bones. I named the place My Hill, the possessive pronoun deliberate, a way to signal my intent to protect such a special place from development and trash and parents.
• • • •
Though cetaceans inspire collective awe, their parts often filter into private possession. When forty-one whales beached on the Oregon coast in 1979, author and nature writer Barry Lopez wrote in his essay “A Presentation of Whales,” that, “police arrested a man in a camouflage suit caught breaking teeth out of a whale’s jaw with a hammer and chisel.”
To be in the presence of such a prize teases the impulse to take, whether, as Lopez writes, it’s “a Polaroid of oneself standing over a whale, a plug of flesh removed with a penknife, [or] a souvenir squid beak plucked deftly from an exposed intestine by a scientist.”
On public beaches in Washington—a state where private beach ownership can extend to the low water mark—scientists often get first dibs when whales wash ashore. Jessie Huggins, the stranding coordinator at Cascadia Research in Washington state, told me that when beachgoers encounter her team carving into a deceased whale, the response is mixed, with reactions ranging from horrified looks to people asking, “Can I have a piece?’”
U.S. officials sometimes remove the more coveted parts of carcasses to deter the public from performing surgery. In the case of a 40-foot sperm whale that beached on the Oregon Coast in January 2023, scientists extracted the jawbone, an impressive and sought-after piece of a sperm whale’s skeleton. However, the jawbone’s removal prompted deliberation over which entity would become the appropriate custodian. The parks department wanted to display it at a visitor’s center. However, a local tribe also expressed interest. (To date, ownership of the jawbone remains suspended in limbo).
I visited the Oregon sperm whale one week after it washed ashore, and I wasn’t the only one who made the pilgrimage. Though that section of beach is already home to the rusted remains of a shipwreck, a popular tourist destination, the appearance of the whale ushered a new tide of visitors. By the time I arrived on a winter afternoon, a clot of cars had filled the site. Couples and families posed for photos upwind of the carcass to avoid the overpowering stink on the lee side. Children trotted around the mound. Some people snapped selfies while others stood in contemplative silence or bent toward the body, peering at the stringy flesh, the blood pooling beneath. We all wanted something from the whale. I had come because I was trying to understand what, from the experience, I hoped to take.
• • • •
The ticking clock above the cabin’s kitchen window alerted me to each passing second as the evening crept closer to midnight. I sat on the purple IKEA couch waiting, unable to focus on the novel in my lap. I worried that looking up regulatory barriers would weaken my resolve, yet I also fretted about law enforcement saddling me with a sizeable fine.
I reached for my phone. Reception was poor, though, and the page wouldn’t load. This seemed like a sign.
I pictured the vertebra gleaming on my mantel, nestled among the deer antlers, petrified driftwood, rodent skulls, and other objects I’d removed from the natural world. I imagined houseguests asking about the whale bone. Then I tried to imagine the story I would tell—the one that would explain how it came into my possession.
• • • •
Whenever I tell people about my family’s cabin, I hear the defensiveness in my voice. I launch into unsolicited explanation, intent to make clear we aren’t that kind of family—the kind with a glut of funds and a fancy summer house. We’re hardworking people of modest means who built a 1,280-square-foot house on a slim budget with our bare hands, only 130 square feet larger than the house I grew up in. Each time, I hear myself stumbling over my words, unsure what I’m trying to get at, except maybe to convince myself we’re separate from a larger issue.
Only in recent years have I learned about the darker plot points of my white family’s history and about the ripple effect, over many generations, that positioned us to own multiple properties.
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” goes Honoré de Balzac’s paraphrased line from Le Pèret Goriot.
Though my family doesn’t have a fortune, we have been quite fortunate. It has taken me a long time to see the beach house for what it is: a clear marker of generational wealth tied to the most violent act of theft in American history.
• • • •
In 2022, my parents visited North Carolina to learn more about my father’s lineage. When they returned, they presented me with a musty, clothbound copy of Jules Verne’s Dick Sand, an adventure novel about a boy working on a whaling vessel. My parents had taken the book, with permission, from the personal library of George Washington Hayes, my great-great-great-grandfather. Though his colonial-style mansion is no longer property of the Hayes family, the couple who lives there now have made themselves stewards of the house as an unofficial museum.
From hundreds of pages of preserved records, I learned that George Washington Hayes was born in Jackson County, North Carolina in 1804. His Scotch-Irish parents died when he was young, so he went to Swain County to live with relatives in the heart of Cherokee lands. It was there that he made Cherokee friends and learned to speak the language fluently.
“ A connection to place is how we make sense of the world. A focus on space is how we divvy up the world—mapping, allotting, and managing—upending deep, ancient relationships to land.”
