They Tried to Move a Whale
One afternoon in November, just north of the small Oregon coastal town of Yachats, a juvenile humpback whale tumbled ashore. A few hours earlier, local residents had spotted it thrashing in distress half a mile out at sea, entangled in crabbing gear, with a rope bound around its pectoral fin and woven through its baleen. One resident had swum out and cut the whale free, but it didn’t turn itself around and was now lodged on sand in shallow surf. A few people gathered on the beach and called for help. It finally arrived, in the form of two representatives from the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, a collection of volunteer scientists and advocates based some 20 miles up the coast in Newport. The experts said that given the impending darkness, incoming tide, rough surf, and heavy fog, they couldn’t even assess the whale’s condition until morning.
The onlookers scattered—all but one, a local named Amy Parker. She stayed long after sunset, listening to the whale’s haunting, high-pitched cry, a sound so plaintive and elemental that it cut through the roaring surf. The whale wanted help; you didn’t need a degree to interpret those sounds. And Parker, a longtime coast dweller, figured that the night’s high tide offered the whale its best—and possibly only—chance of escape. She took out her phone and snapped some grainy images of the 26-foot-long animal that appeared to rise, ghostlike, out of the misty sea, and posted them to a Facebook community page. “He’s alive he’s crying out and if nobody comes to help him, he’s not gonna survive the night,” she wrote.
My father has a house in Yachats, so I watched on social media as Parker’s plea took on a life of its own. Locals joined her on the beach and started posting their own photos, updates, and requests for more assistance. Then people started driving in from cities near and far: Eugene, Salem, Corvallis, Redmond. Soon my Facebook feed was awash in whale posts, whale videos, and whale-related news reports. Hundreds of ideas poured in through the comments, some from people in Australia and Japan. Could the rescuers get some kind of inflatable under the whale that might, when filled, hoist it off the sand? Could they dig a channel in the sand for it to swim through? One local contractor later told me that a woman from Washington had called his business, urging him to get down to the scene with his excavator.
The story had natural and obvious suspense: Would the young whale make it to the morning, and beyond? But this alone didn’t account for the intensity of the response. As I scrolled through updates on the situation, unable to look away myself, I could see that people wanted more than just plot resolution.
The past several years had been rough for Rob Heater, a retired contractor of 62 with graying brown hair that falls almost to his waist. His sister had been diagnosed with cancer, he’d lost a beloved dog, and he worried a lot about the fate of the country. He spent hours every day staring at political posts and memes on Facebook, feeling like he should do something. So he reposted and reposted, sometimes 30 times a day, as if it were his job. But Parker’s plea felt different from what he usually saw. Here was a problem that he could do something about.
Heater didn’t own a wet suit, but he had grown up near the Pacific and served in the U.S. Navy. He closed up the escape room that he co-owns with his brother, loaded his German shepherd into his pickup, and made the 20-mile drive from Newport past lumber yards and thrift stores down to Yachats.
You could walk for miles on the sand there—wading through creeks, stepping over tangled kelp beds—and barely see a soul. But that night, Heater found a dozen cars parked on the highway near the posted mile marker, their hazard lights muted by the fog. When he got down to the ocean, he could see the whale, somehow darker than the darkness, its skin peppered with barnacles.
Heater wasted no time. He joined about six people in the waist-high water as they pushed the whale in tandem with the waves. For hours, Heater moved in rhythm with the sea and in concert with the other people. When he put his hands against the whale, he told me later, the whale seemed to touch him back—a sense of connection like nothing he’d ever experienced. Inch by inch, swell by swell, he and the other rescuers seemed to move the whale toward the deep. But the rip was strong and their feet were moving in the wet sand too. It wasn’t ultimately clear whether they’d moved the whale, or only themselves.
As the night progressed, the crew of rescuers became more organized. They formed a bucket brigade to keep the whale wet until the morning’s high tide. Someone built a fire. Another watched over people’s valuables. And still others tried to intervene in more subtle ways. Makalea Napoleon, a former surfer who’d been raised in a basement apartment carved into the basalt rock of nearby Depoe Bay, told me that she had no desire to push or pull the stranded whale and try to force it back into the sea. Instead, she sat quietly nearby, observing. She could see that when someone dumped a bucket of water into the whale’s blowhole, it became agitated, bellowing and flicking its tail. But if they poured the water gently, it calmed down, uttering what sounded to her—and to everyone gathered that night—like a deep, vibrating purr. “I interpreted it as a thank you,” Heater said.
[Read: How first contact with whale civilization could unfold]
Despite these efforts, high tide came and went, and the whale remained beached. It was bleeding from its fluke now, and the rescuers worried for its fate. But early that morning, as the tide began to come in again, the group noticed that the whale had become much more alert and active, as if it still wanted to escape. Maybe it had another shot. The stars shone brightly in the dark sky. Pleiades hung above them. To Napoleon, the orange sliver of moon looked like a smile.
When Jim Rice, the program manager of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, heard about the scene on the Yachats beach, he felt a sense of foreboding. He’d just traveled down to Berkeley, California, to visit his son, and now, suddenly, he was fielding calls about the stranded humpback. That was bad enough. Then he learned that a group of citizens was trying to rescue it themselves—in the middle of the night, between two oceanic King Tide events, when the waves were cresting well above people’s heads.
A full-grown humpback whale can weigh up to 80,000 pounds. And although humpbacks may be gentle, playful creatures, their size alone can make them deadly. In 2017, a whale that had become entangled in fishing lines in the North Atlantic was freed by an experienced whale rescuer, then promptly killed the man with a flick of its fluke. Rice knew well that if the Yachats whale rolled in that rough water, it could easily pin someone beneath it. He also knew that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the federal agencies in charge of implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the agency to which Rice reported his stranding data, generally prohibits the public from getting within 100 yards of a humpback whale, and forbids citizens from attempting rescues. And Rice understood that these well-meaning people—the escape-room owners, military veterans, and whale shamans—had almost no shot at refloating a creature the size of an RV, but they had a very high chance of harming themselves.
Rice couldn’t make it back to Oregon by morning, so the two scientists from the mammal-stranding network who’d gone out to the beach the day before went back for another look. They didn’t seem that interested in what the group had done throughout the night, and quickly erected a perimeter with cones and tape. Then, according to the locals, they stood around and talked. “We fought all night to give [the whale] a chance,” Jack Weber, one of the citizen rescuers, told me later. “When the whale people did show up, they brought their testing gear. There was no gear brought to actually save this whale.”
The two scientists would soon be joined by park rangers, other scientists, and the director of the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Any next move would require time-intensive coordination with various affiliates and agencies, including NOAA. Frustration began to ripple through the crowd of nighttime rescuers. Eventually, their sense of urgency grew so great that several people tore through the perimeter tape and threw themselves against the whale. One woman, apparently drunk, ran into the sea and promptly collapsed. Would-be influencers held up their phones, narrating the situation for their livestreams.
Certainly Rice and the other members of the network could understand that people felt emotional about the whale. But as they saw it, all of this yelling, in person and online, was misguided. Whales don’t beach unless they’re in serious trouble; this one might be sick. Whale bodies are meant to float, and once ashore, the weight of their blubber can crush their internal organs. A humpback that suffers such an injury would die even if it were returned to deep water. And besides, the experts didn’t yet have access to the kind of heavy machinery that they would need to pull the whale past three sandbars to the wider ocean.
Finally, later that afternoon, better help arrived. John Calambokidis, a whale researcher from Olympia, Washington, who was certified for rescue operations by NOAA, had been part of a team that, in 2017, successfully refloated a stranded gray whale off the coast of Washington using a system of ropes, pulleys, and buried anchors. Now he’d secured the agency’s permission to set up the same equipment on the beach near Yachats and attempt a rescue.
The Calambokidis plan quickly hit some snags. Several of the ropes he needed had gone missing in the years since his last rescue, and then the tide began to come in again, covering the areas where Calambokidis’s crew needed to place the anchors. By the next morning, strong waves had rolled the whale farther onto land; then, as they were setting up the pulley system, the release mechanism broke. They finally got the anchors down and placed a sling below the whale, but when they pulled on the rope, that broke too. Calambokidis wondered aloud to me later whether, had they had a few more chances, they might have been able to do it. But the whale had been out of the water now for two full days. It would have to be euthanized.
This was not the ending the people on the beach or across the internet had waited for. Online, the responses turned vitriolic. One Facebook user wrote, “Citizens have a right to be upset and disappointed because the ‘Experts’ they called to help, killed the whale in the end. I praise the citizens and wipe my ass with your degree.”
Oregon had recently begun reaching out to native tribes in situations such as this one. The Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians, which comprises more than two dozen groups indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, had not had an opportunity to harvest meat, blubber, or bones in at least a generation. Not a single member of the tribes had ever done it.
Heater returned the next day and watched as the scientists, technocrats, and tribal members joined together on the beach. Veterinary technicians took out their tackle boxes of medications and sedated the whale, and then the tribe prayed, drummed, and offered thanks to the whale and to the people who tried to help it. After the prayers, the vet techs went behind the whale and injected it with a long syringe.
Heater said he took some comfort from the presence of the tribes. At least the whale wouldn’t be blown up with half a ton of dynamite, like the sperm whale that had beached more than half a century earlier, just 30 miles south of Yachats. (That one, and the rain of blubber it produced upon detonation, has since become a meme.) Blubber from the whale he’d tried to save might instead be used for making soap, and its bones would be buried in a secret spot until they were clean enough for other uses. But still, he felt a deep sorrow and sense of failure. Two nights earlier, he’d been standing in the rumbling surf, pushing on the whale, sure that he was moving it. That hope had been intoxicating, and now it, too, was gone.
Heater returned to his day-to-day life at the escape room. A month after his encounter with the whale, he still woke up in the night, thinking not just about the beaching, but about the experience he’d shared with the other rescuers that night, strangers who have since become closer to him than people he’s known for 40 years. They all still text, he said. Recently, a few of them gathered on the same stretch of beach for a vigil.
The whale had given him a new sense of community. He told me that he no longer feels inclined to post on Facebook. “It just gave me a reset,” he said. The whale, its fate, the inscrutable sea—they jolted him into remembering that nothing compares to the potency and possibility of the real, unmediated world. This, he could keep alive.