Eating whales
Dear friends,
Last week I filmed with a former lobsterman who had sold his boat and decided to focus on apples. The waters along the coast of Maine are warming fast, and he’d gotten the sense that things were shifting north, the lobsters shuffling up to colder waters. Technology, he said, had also made it possible for anybody to become a lobsterman; you don’t need to know the shoals and shelves the way you used to. We didn’t talk about whales. The apples were bumbling along towards the grinder, and then to the press where they were crushed for cider.
Two hundred years ago, if you felt the pull of the sea you might have left your apple orchard to ship out on a whaler from New Bedford or Nantucket. You would have killed right whales. The oil was used for light. Eventually Edison’s light bulb came to the rescue, but the right whales have never quite rebounded, and today they encounter ship strikes, lobster fishing lines, and an increasingly noisy sea. Many lobstermen resent and resist the idea that they pose a threat to the whales. Others are seeing the writing on the wall and shifting to other harvests - oysters, kelp, eels, apples.
Twice I’ve eaten whale. The first time was maybe a decade ago, in a small outpost in western Greenland called Kangerlussuaq. I was there filming with a scientist I’ve much admired, Dr. Robin Bell, who was pioneering some new ways of using sensors to peer beneath the ice sheet and see the melt. We flew all over the ice in a big cargo plane, and the meltwater atop the glacier resembled elegant blue necklaces. We’d eat dinner late, under the midnight sun, after landing back at base, and one night we wandered up to a small and improbable restaurant, I think the only restaurant outside the research station, where a man served us lingonberries, lamb, and whale. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember what type of whale it was, and we certainly didn’t eat much of it, but I do recall it was the polite thing to do. Frankly the whole week up there passed in something of a dream, including a snow landing atop the interminable and rather oceanic ice sheet, where I tried to remember that I was standing atop a colossus of ice atop an unseen landmass and was not, indeed, at sea.
The second time was last summer, when I returned to a different part of Greenland to film with a marvelous poet named Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We spent several days exploring a small town and nearby settlements, motoring among the thousands of icebergs calving off the glaciers nearby. Our guide, an Inuit man named Jan, said the ice in some of the bergs was 60,000 years old. One afternoon Jan took us back to his apartment, where we met his wife and he offered up some fat from a fin whale he’d harvested. He put a sort of Krazy Salt on it, and we had a nibble. He said his daughter has begun insisting on eating Greenlandic food - whale, halibut, seal, narwhal. We watched her compete in a kayak competition out among the icebergs, in a vessel she’d built with her dad.
Aimee and I spoke of many things (we were filming for our forthcoming film Observer) as she explored the land- and seascapes, but I remember in particular our conversation about the names of plants and animals. Out on the boat one day, I was incoherently musing on the human penchant for knowing the names of species, even when we know that sometimes these names have been somewhat arbitrarily assigned by some previous human, more often than not a white man of yore. (Many local & scientific names, of course, do contain a lot of information, including cultural information that has been passed down.) Aimee shared that her parents had spent a lot of time learning the names of birds and plants in the towns they moved to, and that it was perhaps a way of feeling at home as immigrants to a new land. By learning the names of their new neighbors in the natural world, they felt a sense of place. I loved this idea, and I love the way it echoes the way we might think of our human neighbors: we show respect by learning a new friend’s name. And the more friends we have, the more we feel at home.
A friend of mine named Mike Day made a film a few years back about the Faroe Islanders and their habit of eating whales. It was a beautiful and thoughtfully complicated film, called The Islands and the Whales, and one of the more haunting points it underscored was this: here are a people who have been eating a certain way for some hundreds of years, but increasingly - because the ocean is all interconnected - their food was full of bioaccumulated mercury. Even if Greenpeace decided to leave them be, their local diet would be full of global toxins. Mike’s film was empathetic; you came away wondering what it was like to be a Faroe Islander.
The other whale the New Englanders used to hunt for its oil, of course, was the sperm whale. I’ve never seen one, and I wonder if I ever will. I don’t know if whalers ate the flesh of sperm whales after they’d flensed it of blubber and hauled out the spermaceti.
This weekend I had dinner with my siblings, my older brother Colin and my younger sister Claire, at her house on the coast. (We had cod.) Claire wanted to know where we thought one could find ambergris in the wild. It’s a waxy substance generated in the bellies of sperm whales and then regurgitated into the sea, where it might eventually find its way to a beach. It’s used in cosmetics and things, it’s wildly rare and special. Who is to say we haven’t walked past it - grey, unassuming, blobby - on the beach one day? A reminder of the odd wonders the ocean throws up. (I guess it’s literally whale throw-up.) I liked thinking about ambergris, even though I had zero to contribute to the conversation about its geographic predilections. It would be like finding a meteorite. Neither my brother nor I thought to ask our sister why she wanted to find ambergris, but I think we can assume that it’s the mirror instinct of our desire to know the names of things: even as the world becomes more familiar, we seek out reminders that it’s still wild and new.
A very interesting tale about Greenland. Thanks for the picture of the town from your window, we usually only see the melting ice.