"God bless ‘Big Stinky’"

I tried to deny my nature but I gave in at the end. I had to go see the dead whale at Ocean Beach.

People forget that San Francisco is really just a big beach town sometimes. Hundreds of people gathered on Monday while City Park officials dug a huge hole and buried a 45 foot dead whale with two tractors and a backhoe. Dude, you just don’t see stuff like that everyday.

It was actually one of the most diverse and kid-friendly events I’d ever been to in SF. All of San Francisco was represented along the yellow and billowing police lines and in the dunes. Even better was that it wasn’t an "event". Certainly it was free, but what I mean is that, despite an annoying (and thankfully ignored)* hippie website trying to promote a drum-circle funeral, people just showed up. There was no ceremony or planned gathering. Willie Brown didn’t keep people waiting as the tide rolled in so he could toss a few one-liners at the carcass before it was buried.** We didn’t have to hear about the dead whale as a metaphor for the environmental destruction of the planet. There were no "Goodbye Obie" t-shirts for sale. There were no forced tears or pious spirituality

No. Just everyone with kids who could skip work and get down to the beach, did. Kids like the beach. Kids like tractors. Kids like smelly old dead whales. How could this not be fun? The Great Highway had illegally parked cars stretching a quarter mile from Lawton Street in each direction. The stench of death seemed exaggerated, but then again, the whale was mostly buried by the time I got there. Close to the burial mound, the ocean breezes kept things manageable, but it did kind of hang in at the edge of the sand dunes.

People came for many reasons I’m sure, but I think mostly because a five-ton, dead whale on the beach is cool. You can only hope to see one every decade or two in a beach town like SF if you’re lucky. I can only imagine how the deprived Midwesters must feel. I just had to make it down to Ocean Beach. Not to pay my respects to the whale, but to appreciate San Francisco and all it has to offer. The cawing of gulls, the salty sea breeze, the crunchy non-native iceplant that those annoying park people are always trying to kill, the smell of rotting cetacean: it all just felt like home.

And proudly, some SF locals sent the whale off in their own way. They tagged it. Park officials were upset. When the graffiti was discovered, National Parks Service spokesman Mike Feinstein was even quoted as saying, "It was obviously somebody who has no respect for marine mammals." But really, we all know those kids were just saying, "Hey sure, we’re a beach town, but we’re an urban beach town!". And let’s not forget that the tags were done after "biologists" skinned large parts of the whale, stole its head and flippers, and were interviewed while "knee deep in whale".

All in all, a wonderful San Francisco event.



*This use of a parenthetical ellipses is dedicated to spoonfeeding

**If The Mayor had been there I would have suggested, "Hey Whale, you smell worse than the Biotic Baking Brigade!"