An Untestable Question

by NATALIE TOMLIN

One book pried a whale’s mouth open wide, sawed the pale curve of jaw, gum, and rigid plate in half so I could learn all about the baleen: ragged hair flattened under the flush of a bucket. Afterward, crumbs of krill wriggled in a soused mustache. 

There was another book I was never able to find. I can’t recall much, except miles of wrinkled gray skin wreathed in barnacles, blue-green foam, and a jagged flap for a mouth. The pages were damp and I pressed and flattened near the spine so the whale could grow even longer.

The most popular part of the exhibit invited children to crawl inside a heart. I made the mistake of going in after them, my knees screaming out against the hard plastic until I eventually shared the chamber with my child and two strange toddlers. They were lucky enough to be able to stand or sit on a conveniently located flesh-colored bench. I squatted while we all took in what we had come for: a backlit transparency that placed a whale side by side with a jet, a football field, a series of cars.

Bālaena, phalaina—both mean “whale,” the being and its sieve, mind, and attention. Facebook deactivated, Google alerts on climate change created, filters woven. Cope by narrowing slats to dim the room, sitting tall, catching only the most delicate morsels inside each breath. 

Subtitled interviews with indigenous people played on one side of the exhibit, but I didn’t have time to watch. I went home and read about people who revered whales precisely because they are unknown, because they spend ninety percent of their lives underwater. On Wikipedia, I learned that the Japanese buried whale fetuses with headstones. On YouTube, an oceanographer introduced a whale who had been hit by a boat and was later discovered to be pregnant.

Because I loved whales as a child and was born in a baby blue bedroom that felt like the bottom of the sea, I chose whales as my firstborn son’s theme. I registered for a whale comforter at Target and my husband cut a mother and baby from construction paper for homemade shower invitations. Later, on a July afternoon, I sat sweating and huge, surrounded by a pod of family exclaiming over burp cloths and swaddle blankets covered in whales.

Then, even before my son came, they were suddenly everywhere: studding J.Crew chinos like polka dots, embroidered on throw pillows, dangling from gold chains. My husband, ever the philosopher, stood silent up until this point, but couldn’t help himself as he faced the whale images printed on our thank-you cards: What whale looks like this? 

To think that I had imagined a mammal completely still and alone with its door ajar, water gushing in and down, a basement flooding. It must have been Disney or some other cartoon, but I had assumed that they ate by chance, through sheer volume, the way I could strain a few minnows out of a dozen or so metal buckets of lake water. 

Then, the day after the March for Science, suction-cupped cameras determined that whales scout krill-dense waters at night, plunge with mouths open, linger in large groups. That same day, visiting the museum, I lifted my child to touch the button that plays a recording of their calls. I paraphrased a placard that attempts to translate what they are singing, what they are repeating. Could it be they are making their own music? Ecologist Thomas Eisner calls this “an untestable question.”