Whale Bones

    Last weekend I fell to my knees before the bones of a gray whale. They were white and clean and hard, laid out in categories: here were the ribs, here the enormous skull, here the finger-like bones of the flippers, here the pelvis bones which, having long ago lost their purpose, now float unattached in the body of the whale, evolutionary left-overs from the whale's ancestors who roamed the earth instead of the ocean. 

    I embraced the bones. It is not too much to say I was in a state of worship.

    The whale has been named Singer. He died of starvation, which is one of the saddest comments on the state of the world I have ever heard. Some of his bones showed the effects of osteoporosis. 

    The bones were in the studio of my son, Ela Lamblin, a metal sculptor who lives on Vashon Island, in the Puget Sound. It is his job now—his commission as an artist—to create a metal framework of curving tubes and twining rods to cradle the whale's bones, shaping a 40-foot-long whale sculpture that will hang from the ceiling in the atrium of the Vashon Center for the Arts. 

3-D computer rendering of the actual bones, correctly articulated

    Singer's body was found on a beach on Vashon in April 2024. Since gray whales are protected by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Vashon Nature Center applied for and received permission from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to let the body decompose naturally and to then collect the bones. They consulted with local tribes so they could understand and honor indigenous relationships with whales. The following spring they returned with community volunteers and students from the high school to gather the bones and transport them to the school, where the students drew, 3D-scanned, and documented the skeleton, weighing, identifying, and labeling each bone.

Some of the bones in the high school lab.  Some green labels are visible.
                                                                        photo by Roketkar Studios

    Then the bones were transported to Ela's studio. 

Three students carry one of the bones out of the lab.
                                            photo by Roketkar Studios

    When they were assembled there, Ela sprayed them with the scientifically appropriate substance to prevent further deterioration. 

Ela spraying the skull.
                                                            photo by Roketkar Studios

    I have always liked bones. I have a small collection I have found while hiking—a bear's jaw and claws, a goat's horn, a mountain sheep's vertebra, a tiny bird's skull, among others.

A part of my collection of bones.

I'm not sure why I want these bones around me. Maybe because bones are the archetypal symbol of the indestructible soul-spirit. Maybe because they remind me of the life-death cycle. Maybe I'm following the advice of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, who said, "You want psychoanalytic advice? Go gather bones." 

    Or maybe because singing over the bones brings the wild creature alive again.

    That's what it was like to sit among Singer's bones, to stroke the long ribs, to lay my hand on the huge skull and look into the concave roundness where the eyes would have been—it was to sing the life back into the bones. How much more so it will be, then, when the skeleton sits inside a sculpted metal framework that outlines the body, when the whale can move through the air, via a crank turned by a visitor, as it once moved through the water.  

    Singer once sent his echoing song through the deep, once broke through the surface of the sea to grab a lungful of air, once cavorted with friends and family. Now his bones lie white and beautiful in careful groupings, ready to take on a new life and inspire awe and, perhaps, a sense of worship, too, in those who will sense in them the spirit of the living whale. In this new incarnation, Singer will sing again. 

    I'm sure of it. I've seen the bones.