DON’T FALL ON THE DEAD WHALE.  I FORGOT TO TELL YOU THAT.

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The doldrums of the summer are upon us.  Our Midwestern vacation is long gone now, and I didn’t sign up for enough camps and classes and other crap to get the kids out of the house, occupied, and if not away from me, then at least distracted enough to stop fighting with each other.  So when I hear a dead humpback whale has washed up on the beach just down the proverbial street?  Let’s go right now.  If there are such things as these supposed “whales,” of course.  The mythical whales cavorting with the equally mythical mermaids.  Sure, let’s go poke one of those dead myths.

I have, obviously, never seen a mermaid OR a whale, in my 15 years in California.  (Nor in my 3 years in Boston, but neither would ever show up in Beantown for fear of being beaten up by the locals, anyway, so that doesn’t really count in my sample size.)  I have been at beaches and piers countless times, where someone points in glee, “Hey, there’s a whale!  Look, a breaching whale!” with all the joy of someone gazing at a double rainbow, and I turn to see nothing but the unbroken vastness of the Pacific, not so much as a ripple visible to my unbelieving eye.  Watch for another hour and nothing ever appears.  I call bullshit.

“Sure, a whale!  Wow I missed it!”  I reply anymore.  I’m not believing any of this crap.  I already fell for the snipe hunt a couple times back in Boy Scouts, but I’m a full-grown man now and know it’s just a ploy for the bored to play on the mentally weak.  Pick someone else to press your man-on-the-moon stories on.  I know stuff, and it’s all stuff I have seen.

Who knew a rotting mass of blubber would be such a tourist attraction?  Nearly a hundred cars were lining the road where only a few surfers and tide pool junkies would normally be.  Apparently it made the news and everything, judging by the bloated masses laboring the hike through the Eucalyptus forest and up the long stretch of beach.

And there it was.  No sasquatch or mermaid, but a 35 foot juvenile whale.  We’re supposed to just believe that anyway, as it was upside down and you couldn’t REALLY tell it was a whale without a whale face visible.

There was a big chunk ripped from the base of the tail.  Our fault in some way, I’m sure.  Trapped in a net or grazed by a ship or some such doom enacted by the furious, banal activities we are constantly barraging the planet with.  Dozens of people right next to it, even as the tide came in.  People touching it for pictures, leaning on it like they were trying to put their arm around it.  Touching it!  What the hell, why?  You’re never gonna get that smell out!

Which I swore I wasn’t going to do.  That is one smell I do not need in my olfactory bank.  Rotten whale.  I am keeping my nose plugged while I traipse across the leeward side, where everyone seemed to be standing.  The waves weren’t that close yet, no way am I ingesting the wind-borne essence of Pacific death.

I walked all the way around it, past the well-tattooed crowd on hiatus from their Pismo Beach invasion.  Took it all in, even with just its belly up and the tail mangled.  It could be anything really, some other fantastic creature washed up from the graven depths, a monster scrawled on the edge of a map reduced to being tossed on our shore and poked by the likes of us.  Just as dinosaur skeletons were proof to the Chinese of dragons, this could be some…. awww dammit!

I took an accidental half whiff on the leeward side!  Some part of me had to know, the gross, curious monkey side, I guess.  I retched and almost threw up, then trotted a good long way towards the spit in disgust to watch our kids run down the giant hill and let the nausea pass.

Definitely a dead whale.  No mistaking that new smell.  Sweet and acrid and pungent and completely awful.  And not completely new, now that I kept re-smelling it.  It was that tiny bit of funkiness in the far background of the otherwise clean smell of the ocean.  Except magnified thousands of times.  Like all the biomatter in that giant salty lake concentrated in one rotting being.  The essence of watery death.  And I can’t stop smelling it.  So I put my back to it and lit a cigar.

“It smells like something familiar.  A bit like watermelon,” an acquaintance hurled at me as he walked by, smiling.  Thanks, that makes it all well up again.  Wrong but totally disgusting.  What do you have against watermelon?  What a horrible thought!

The tide was really coming up now and the girls had left the death-defying game of running down the tall spit at impossible speeds to have another look at the swollen leviathan.

“Aren’t they supposed to explode at some stage of their rot?”  I asked.

“I heard that.  It may be a myth though,” my good friend sitting next to me said, and turned towards his girls, who were also at the whale now.  “Lilah’s standing on the whale, if you care.”

“Oh, shit!  Really?”

Really.  Standing on the slippery end, walking it like a balance beam at gymnastics.  Until a wave washed over it, slapping her onto the back of the beast even as it spilled rotten whale-infused ocean water on everyone standing around it.  She got up, shook her head, and climbed back up on the goddamn tail!

“Lilah!  LILAH!!!”  I yelled in my loudest voice.  Lost to the ocean, ignored, irrelevant.   All three.

I kept yelling as I ran over to them all, standing in the tide pool of ancient rot.  You never realize how loud the ocean is until you’re trying to get someone’s attention.  It took me forever to get there and they never heard me and I could not figure out how I could ever get her clean.  I may have to get a new one.

“Get off the whale!  Get out of the whale water!!” I yelled again when they could finally hear me, five feet away.  They all looked surprised, especially Lilah.  Why? Her sweet, shrugging face asked.  The other girls crept away from it in sudden shame.

“Because it smells like rotting whale horror!  We’ll never be able to wash it out!”

They smelled, as if for the first time, and all of them screamed and ran away.  Were they holding their breath this whole time?  Did they truly not notice?  Why is “Don’t stand on the dead whale?” something I should have actually told these little idiots!?   Add that to the long list of things I never imagined I would have to say.

“We’re leaving.  Good God.  Oh and wait.  Stand by the whale, I want to get a picture.”  Let’s commemorate your latest adventure, cute moron-geniuses.  Snap.

Lilah held her nose in comic irony for the photo.  Yeah, sure, NOW you care, you adorable little menace.  And now my van smells like rotten whale.  More and more in the background as time goes by, but it’s still there.  C. wouldn’t let me leave her or bungy cord her to the top of the van.  A double shower and a bath later, Lilah just smells like the beach.  The dead whale is way in the back of the ocean of Lilah, but it’s still in there.  Another myth debunked by the horrible smell of its death.  If I smell a dead mermaid I’m moving back to Iowa.