This morning at 8 a.m., four of us from Commonweal went down to Agate Beach in Bolinas. We went to visit an extraordinary whale rib that had washed up with the tide. I estimate the rib is about twelve feet long and as thick as my thigh. Since it is only one side of the whale’s rib cage, the rib cage must have been over twenty-four feet wide.
Whole whales have washed ashore in Bolinas before during my 50 years here. Somehow this whale bone, picked clean by the elements, struck me with a special power.
I don’t know what happened to the whale. Did it die of old age? Was it chemical contaminants that weakened it? Or was it one of the growing number of casualties hit by the immense cargo ships that we see moving in and out of San Francisco Bay every day? Continue reading