Department Of Is It Possible To Write An Entire Blog Post
Centered Around Exploding Whales? [1]
Behold, Exhibit A. [2]
Meanwhile, Oregonians ready their supply of dynamite… [3]
It’s a state tradition.
Oregon has a proud history of exploding whales, including a lesser-known incident which occurred 33 years earlier, in Warrenton, on Sept. 1, 1937. Unfortunately, no news footage has been found of that particular event.
“A large dead whale floated onto a tidal flat beach on August 18 (1937). …At first this whale was a big hit. Many flocked to check it out, and Warrenton was digging its new tourism draw. But that slacked off rather quickly as the creature began rotting in the summer sun. Soon, the entire burgh of Warrenton was getting hit with the stench and by the last few days of August it was a nasty, pervasive odor.
According to various newspaper reports, Warrenton sought the help of the State Highway Department in removing the smelly carcass…state officials said no (the highway department only had jurisdiction over the ocean shores and not the tide flats where the whale ended up). So Warrenton turned to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Locals hoped the CCC boys would burn the carcass, ‘but they balked after the Clatsop County court decided the highway department first must give its permission.’
Warrenton official G. Clifford Barlow was practically livid at this point. ‘Something has to be done to destroy the whale because of the increasing stench,’ he wrote in a letter to the highway department.
So locals turned to dynamite. You can guess where this is heading. They snagged a ‘powderman’ as news reports called him, a man named A. W. Foster from Portland. He volunteered, actually.
A large crowd had gathered, and as The Eugene Guard (later Register-Guard) put it ‘Like the crowds that rush to a fire, a lot of people stuck their noses into something that didn’t concern them at Warrenton last night, much to their own chagrin.’
The 53-foot whale sat stinking to high heaven as Foster placed some 500 pounds of dynamite around it, hit the button and….
Boom.
Blubber did indeed blast into the air. The Guard’s headline was ‘Whale Splatters … Crowd Scatters.’ The explosion ‘scattered Warrenton’s dead whale all over the landscape of Clatsop Beach.’ The next day the paper ran another blurb and proclaimed it was a ‘noisy funeral.’
The Oregonian notes ‘tourists arrived and departed hurriedly’ [4] because of the smell and the raining chunks. he day after the big boom locals flooded Astoria’s ‘cleaning and dyeing shops’ and ‘automobiles were lined up waiting for their chance at auto steam-cleaning laundries.’
In other words, towns folk were soaked in whale guts and goo, as were their cars. Still, locals considered the explosion a success, with tons of pieces scattering in all the right places, into bite-sized morsels perfect for local meat-eaters like gulls and such. At least a ‘success’ is how regional papers described it.”
( excerpts, Exploding Whale history, beachconnection.net news )
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [5]
( Artist and conservationist Robert Wyland ) [6]
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Parting Shot: I love it when/I hate it when…
I love it when I have the chance to visit Florence, Oregon, home of The Exploding Whale Memorial Park.
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May you have (or make) the opportunity to visit Florence, OR;
May you never have a reason to be one of those tourists
who “arrived and departed hurriedly;”
May you appreciate the fact that the American classic novel, Moby Dick,
was about chasing a whale and not trying to blow it up;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Don’t make moiself answer that challenge. Oops, too late.
[2] Yes, it’s possible, and likely welcome, after the verbosity of last week’s post.
[3] As of this writing, there have been no plans announced for the whale carcass’s disposal.
[4] Sometimes, words are worth a thousand pictures.
[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[6] Important to remember: listen for the heartbeat of the planet *before* the whale explodes, not after.
