The smell of whale hit me the second I opened my car door. Alerted by an early-morning Instagram post that a dead humpback had drifted ashore in front of the Montauk Shores Condominiums, I had run out the door to go get a look before the coffee had even kicked in.
Dead or alive, whales have a distinct odor that, once noticed, is unmistakable. Walking on the ocean beach not that long ago, I impressed the friend I was with, declaring, “I smell whale,” just moments before one breached several hundred yards offshore. Given their preferred diet of bunker and squid, it is no mystery why whales have what we might consider bad breath, or nasal vapors, as the case might be.
The Ditch Plain whale was not nose-holdingly foul but pungent enough that it could have spoiled the Fourth of July weekend for hundreds. A crew hired by the town had to build a sand road to get heavy equipment near enough to the carcass in order to haul it away.
From my perspective, I’d much rather see whales left to decay where they land, but it is obvious why town officials felt they had to spend the money to be rid of it quickly. Years ago, the town buried a dead whale on the beach in Amagansett, only to decide to dig it up after a few days as its oily funk rose to the surface with each tide.
Whale stink is something of a Proustian madeleine for me. There were whalebones around when I was young, fresh enough that I could get a whiff if I leaned in close. The Marine Museum in Amagansett once displayed a Mason jar containing a hunk of blubber, which I could sniff when I passed by. In fact, the entire museum had a pleasing smell as far as I was concerned, of whale, wood, linseed oil, old nets, and tar.
People make fun of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for once chain-sawing the head off a small whale and attaching it to the roof of the family car with rubber cords. Not that I have ever gone quite so far, but I get it. Whale bones have a certain charm. The late Peter Matthiessen kept a whale skull that he had dragged from the beach with a tractor near the front door to his Sagaponack house.
Long ago, the word “rank” was used to describe a particularly tough and leathery whaleman. I suppose there was no small amount of disdain in it, after all, in Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast” whaleships were referred to by members of the merchant marine as “greasers.” Still, it has a rakish ring to it, and I would not be at all put out if one day I was so called myself.