Rosen Untold Tragedies of Ethan Morton

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5439-0735-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 246 Seiten

Few have not been jolted by the suicide of someone close. Shock, guilt, regret, and bewilderment churn together in an insoluble swirl. 'the untold tragedies of ethan morton' explores that ambiguous, emotional cyclone through the eyes of those left behind after a teen's horrific act of self-destruction. As Dr. Thad, the novel's conscience, says, 'Trying to find a successful suicide's motives is like chasing a shadow with a flashlight.' This wrenching novel chases just that elusive shadow.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rosen, Jonathan

Leseproben

For sure what hooked me here was the beached whale. Damned thing was so huge close up. Of course, I had seen pictures before of other beachings and back home in Oregon, once off Coos Bay, I tried to help rescue a herd of dolphin washed up on the shore. Thirty or forty of them were pathetic enough, and we did manage to save about half. But nothing like this huge, ponderous, heaving, melancholy flesh, panting and sweating on a narrow strip of beach off the east shore of Mount Desert Island.

I was interviewing for a position at University of Maine, Orono, as a forestry professor early fall a few years ago, thinking that no way was I moving East with all those provincial, uptight rubes and no space, and New York tourists sucking the air out of everyone else’s lungs. But they had solicited me. Wined and dined and paid my way after I had published my article, “Revised Volume and Taper Equations for Six Major Conifer Species.” My name, Patrick Wheeler, printed in sixteen-point Times Roman below, that had pretty much blown away any prior thinking. I was a thirty-year-old, newly minted PhD. I figured why not take advantage of Maine generosity, get some free frequent flyer miles, and sample East Coast lobster and oysters.

But only four minutes into my last interview with the oceanography professor, Jenny Lin (who, I might add, was pretty hot, although later I would find out was also gay and married) got a call on her cell about a beached whale out on Sand Beach. Without missing a beat she said, “Screw the interview. Let’s book.”

We took Park Loop Road east and parked a half-mile away from the beach that had no nearer road access. I was wearing my only sport coat, a beat-up tweed, and a pair of cords and, with an unexpected late summer heat wave in the seventies, I was sweating my balls off by the time we reached the beach. Both of us stopped dead a few hundred yards away, mouths open, when we spotted the huge gray, hump-hulk rising thirty feet above the sand. We could see it was still breathing, with sporadic heaves and occasional spews of mist shooting out its blowhole another fifty feet into the air. A couple of curiosity seekers hung out a ways down the beach, watching, and they waved when they saw us coming. Periodically, the whale fluked its tail in the air like it was also waving to us. I froze in awe.

I had seen pictures of beached whales, even one with a pod of eleven dead ones washed ashore in Oregon. I followed their necropsies on YouTube—gruesome to the max, with supposedly a stench that soaked into your sinuses for weeks—but never had I witnessed a live one or the effort to save him.

“Looks like an Odontocetes, maybe a pilot whale pulled in by the warm water and hunting for food too close to shore,” Jenny said. “It’s a male. See all the dents in its head from fighting off males of other species. They really aren’t all that friendly to each other, despite everyone thinking they’re all so peaceful and sweet. Anyway, we better get some help pronto if we’re going to try to rescue the beast.”

For the next ten hours, I was a rescue team recruit. Jenny called the University of New England Marine Science Center out of Portland, and in three-plus hours a huge crane was trucked to the beach. It had a tarp sling the size of Alabama that they hoped would lift the whale and then be able to transport him out to Thunder Hole where the tides were more favorable to let him swim out. While we waited for the crane, dozens of people from all over the island filtered down. They were dressed in whatever they were wearing that day: car salesmen and nurses and an accountant and a few real estate agents and fishermen and just anyone. And not only to watch or gawk. To a man, they started to haul buckets across the sand and bathe Odon, as Jenny got everyone calling him, until the tide started to cooperate and gave him some natural bathing. We worked for hours soaked and starting to freeze up from ocean water that was colder than my last girlfriend’s shoulder and raising a stink that we didn’t fully appreciate until we went home and had to chuck our clothes because no one else could stand to be within seven hundred yards of them.

While we were baling and soaking and shivering, Jenny gave us a running lecture on the theories about whale strandings. “Nobody really knows what causes whales to wash up onto shore. We do know beachings have been going on throughout history, even a recorded one during Aristotle’s time. The Puritans used to celebrate and make a barbecue out of the event. Not like us, who look at it like a humanitarian disaster, instead of part of the natural life cycle. Though I have to admit, the number of beachings is climbing scarily and the environment is getting so fucked who knows what’s natural and not anymore?

“There are likely multiple different reasons for stranding. About half the time no one can figure out why a stranding occurs. Most often they are solitary whales, maybe from being sick or injured, or dead ones who just float onto the shore. At times, like with Odon who seems healthy, we think the whale just wandered too close in, chasing dolphin or seals. Sometimes we find a group or mass beaching and believe, since they’re such social creatures, others may have followed a sick whale onto the shore. Or maybe one on shore has called out to the rest, inadvertently dooming them all.

“Then, there are theories that Navy sonar has damaged the whale’s delicate honing mechanism and sent them off course.

“Last of all, there has cropped up the odd but unprovable theory that these isolated whales have beached themselves knowingly in a suicide attempt. That they get depressed just like humans. Maybe they’re grieving a lost loved one or child or have just fallen into a grand, psychic, unexplainable funk.”

I nodded, not pretending to understand sea creatures, much less humans.

After what seemed days, we finally spotted the crane heading down to the beach. You had to see this effort to believe it. First they laid the cloth tarp out flat on the sand next to Odon. When the tide came in to let him float up some, the eighty-odd of us tried to gently push the fifteen-ton mass of him onto the edge of the tarp. His skin that seemed so tough was actually kind of fragile, maybe from being dehydrated for this long, especially his underbelly that started to split if we pushed too hard. But amazingly, we were able to rolling pin him over twice, the second time landing him about ten feet past the edge of the tarp, ending right side up. He remained totally docile the entire time, no fluking or even twitching, like he knew we were his only chance.

I stood at Odon’s head, maybe three feet from his right eye that stared into me like he realized I was trying to help but wasn’t too sure about my competence. He had this huge red-brown orb bigger than my head with a pupil the size of a fist that reflected my face right back at me. Jenny said he was maybe two years old, but looking into his eye felt like staring into the soul of some ancient sage being who had answers to questions I had never even thought of. He had a mournful, teary expression that suggested he lacked confidence in our entire venture. But more than that his stare made me wonder not just what I was doing for that day, but also what I was doing for my lifetime and, over and above that, what my entire species was doing with and to our planet lo these many years. The whole day was making my brain sizzle much more than I needed.

Within minutes of getting him onto the tarp, the crew hooked up the tarp to the joists on the crane, cocooning Odon. Slowly, gently, the crane operator hoisted Odon in his coveralls up, up, up into the air till he hovered fifteen feet above the ground suspended like he was being stork-borne into life. The image of huge Odon floating above us with a full moon hanging low over the water lighting him up incandescent, like some asymmetric space vehicle, shocked us into an awed silence. Then, in unison, eighty cheers rang out. We hugged each other with tears flowing as if we had just birthed twins in the back of a taxi.

It took maybe a half hour for the crane to work its way down the road to Thunder Hole with a caravan of us trailing behind, unable to resist seeing the climax to this opera. Pitch-black road, headlights of crane leading, followed by thirty more pairs of headlights—a funeral procession or a parade, who knew? The crane worked its way off the road onto a rocky outcropping above Thunder Bay, Odon hovering maybe thirty feet over the ocean. We all exited our cars, lining up along the cliff, dead silent. Odon hadn’t moved as far as we could tell during the ride down, and I guess we all wondered without saying so whether he had already died.

At maybe a foot per minute the crane lowered Odon down till he touched the surface of the water washing over him. The crane operator waited a while to let Odon re-accustom himself to the surf, then released the joists holding the tarp. Odon laid on the surface, unmoving, floating with the waves. For what seemed an interminable time, while we held our collective breaths, Odon was dead still. Then, we spotted a ripple of movement dance up and down his back. His tail fluked up into the air. And he was off. Skidding along the ocean. The full moon lit up the sea and reflected off Odon’s silken glide like a bioluminescent bay. A dive, then resurfacing, and then he was gone. Only hugs of joy and open weeping broke the silence.

I was...