when we met, you were reading a book about whales
Along the coastline, clear and cold, the river runs in place of the ocean. White capped water rushes along the rocky shore. My dad and I are driving south on the highway in the town where I grew up. I watch from the passenger seat as we drive by the boat launch, and the southern tip of the rocky island across the passage. On the horizon, fishing boats flock to watch the migration of whales. My dad says: “What are all these dead fish doing upstream. They normally die downstream.” Out the window, carcasses fill the river. Urchins, sand dollars, fish bones. Further along, the river dries up. The coastline becomes a parking lot. We get out of the car and walk towards a hollow whale carcass splayed out on cement. Inside the skeletal architecture my dad falls to his knees in horror.
When I shared this dream with my analysis group, one of the interpreters suggested that these images came from the collective; that this dream is an admonition of ecological atrocity, a child watching her parent admit he is unable to hold the horror. I’m always moved when someone suggests a dream comes from the collective, as if slumber connects us through our unconscious minds. Are we witness to each other’s fears in our dreams? Do we see the world as we want it to be?
Dear Dick, when we met last fall, you were reading a book about whales. I tucked your hair behind your ears and let you read the spines on my bookshelf. A whale calf is stranded in a lagoon just off the coast of our hometown. Does that concern you? The pregnant mother beached on a sandbank, the calf too afraid to cross back to the ocean. Dick, what if the calf doesn’t know how to get home?
We grew up on the same dark island. Two beings shaped by the same ecologies, the same cultures, the same landscapes. In the backseat, as our parents drove through relentless rain along a highway recessed by logging trucks, we watched the ditch for bovine. And from the kitchen window, we saw the migration of geese, fishing boats navigate the narrow corridor of the archipelago, whales mother their young. We watched glaciers melt into ice caps, forests burn and die of pine beetle or root rot. We watched as the mountains went bare and the caribou died.
Dear Dick, what was it like for you to grow up on that dark island? Boys your age dropped out of math class to work the oil sands. They bought Toyota Tacomas and cocaine with their money. At the only strip club in town, men burned dimes with their lighters to throw at the dancers. What was it like for you Dick, longing to grow your hair? Was there a way for you to be beautiful? Your dad taught you to shoot a rifle, fix up trucks, portage a canoe. You had the loggers, fishermen, and miners to idolize. Dick, you let your hands grow calloused.
In my dream interpretation group, the whale carcass was read as the fear of acknowledging our cyclical place in this life. The interpreters reminded me that the mother whale trapped off the coast where I grew up (where we grew up, Dick), was unable to return to the ocean. Beached on the sandbank, she didn’t even get to die in the water.
This architecture of bones, the linseed oil, the baleen brush, the ooligan pit from the Bill Reid poem, the postcard I mailed you with a painting of a sailboat, the utility bills made out to you, rendered delicately in oil, the story of the girls breathing into each other’s mouths, like I did to you, breath after breath, river water and sand. Dick, wouldn’t you like to grow your hair long, pumice the callouses, trade your rifle for skin?
This is what it was like for me on that dark island: Through my entire childhood, the same billboard of a missing girl stood on the side of the highway, pelted with rain.