Remember, though, these are wild animals. They go where they please, and they do not show up on cue. They are unpredictable. One of my great joys in whale watching has been, ironically enough, not seeing whales. It adds to their mystery and majesty, and it makes the moment when one does surface all the more special. //

Peter Wayne Moe is a professor at Seattle Pacific University. 

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Seattle Pacific University is hoping to hang a whale skeleton of its own. So last summer, when a gray whale washed ashore on Washington’s coast, I led a crew to extract its bones. With the necessary permits in hand, we were advised by Rus Higley, who’s built three whales. Because the beach had swallowed two-thirds of the whale, we weren’t able to retrieve the full skeleton. This whale became a test run so that Rus could teach us the process of retrieving and cleaning bones in anticipation of working on a full whale in the near future.

Alongside Higley, I take a knife to the nine-inch thick blubber, cutting out a square-foot block of flesh, heaving it to the sand. We remove these blocks, one after another, until we reach the bones. Poet Kathleen Jamie writes, “Unless you have a professional interest, it’s possible that the only bodies you’ve been intimate with, have scrutinized, have been the bodies of lovers or children.” My hands, my arms, are inside this animal I’ve previously only watched from afar, its blood and fat and oil now smeared across my skin as I kneel inside its mouth, my thigh leaning against its tongue. It’s a strangely intimate, even tender, moment. Working at the beach, new words enter my vocabulary—flense, carcass, carrion, rot, putrid, rancid—words I rarely, if ever, say. I do not get to choose these words. A long history of whaling and the present circumstances give them to me.

After we leave the beach, the next step is to remove the oil from the bones. It drips everywhere. I talk to other people who have built whales. Some soak the bones, others boil them. Higley recommends burial. The enzymes in the soil will leech out all the oil in a year. Only once the bones are clean can we begin articulating them. So, we bury our bones. The land where they’re now laid to rest has sprouted the most verdant grass I’ve ever seen.

Humans have been slaughtering whales for hundreds of years. At the beach that day, we too were flensing a whale, but it was hopeful: an act of preservation, of conservation, of education. Historian Philip Hoare writes that building a whale skeleton is a way “to give it life after death.” That’s true, but we hope this life isn’t for that one whale alone: when visitors someday soon stand beneath a whale’s sun-bleached bones suspended in SPU’s science building, may its death prompt us to save others. //

Peter Wayne Moe is a professor at Seattle Pacific University. If you’d like to support this project, he can be reached at moep@spu.edu.

[Feature photo by Peter Wayne Moe.]

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As the year advanced, so did that quarter mile. I began to see my running ability, my health, and my weight loss in direct relationship to how far I could run from my house. The radius grew. By the end of the year, I had a four-mile radius, and I could run that distance out and back in an hour. Out and backs have a certain appeal because they measure, with the unflinching coldness of a clock’s second hand, whether I can get home as quickly, or quicker, than I’d reached the outer edge of my radius.

When I began training for a half marathon, and, later, a marathon, the radius moved from four miles to eight to ten. Then Ironman entered my world, and due to the biking, my radius grew to 40, 50, even 60 miles. There was a 125-mile bike ride with my uncle that pushed my radius as large as it will ever be.

This radius often fluctuates depending on my fitness and what I’m trying to do as an athlete. When I turned my attention to focus on the 5k, the cycling stopped and the long run shrank from 20 miles to 10, so my radius reduced to five miles. When I stopped racing and began running recreationally, the radius shrank again, down to about three miles.

Wherever I drive, I always consider whether my destination is within my current radius. I think, “This is nine miles from my house. It’s within my radius. I could have run here.” There is a unique liberty in this knowledge, a bold freedom, a heightened sense that my legs can carry me anywhere I please within my radius.

Last summer, my radius dropped dramatically over the span of a week. I hadn’t been feeling well. I was taking two-hour naps during the day and waking in the night covered in a sweat with soaked sheets. I’d drench my shirts during the day and need to change clothes. I was dizzy, at times delirious, often so weak that I couldn’t walk to the restroom on my own. My wife would lift me up (she’s 120 pounds; I’m 210) and guide me there. I found it ironic that this Ironman triathlete who once had a 60-mile radius could not make it eight feet to the toilet. When she came home from work to find me on the couch with a 104 degree temperature and a lump three inches wide on my neck, it was time to see a doctor.

After bloodwork and some scans, the doctor gave us a diagnosis: lymphoma. Pushed along in a wheelchair, too weak to walk on my own, my radius now zero feet, I returned to the hospital the next day. I had a core taken from my hip to test the bone marrow. After I collapsed and passed out on the way to the next appointment, I was admitted. Preparations began to initiate chemo. My liver was shutting down. My intestines were telescoping in on themselves. The doctor told us that if I had white poop, and if left untreated, I could be dead within 24 hours.

Our pastor was on his way with bread and wine when the doctor came to our room. “I don’t normally give people in the cancer ward good news,” she said, “but the good news is that you have mono.” It was the most severe case of mono the doctors had ever seen.

Upon hearing my new diagnosis, I wanted to get out of the hospital bed and go for a walk. I’d been bedridden three days, worrying about what the future would hold, but I now had an urge to move, however feebly. My wife again got under my arms, hoisted me up, and we shuffled to the end of the hallway, looked out the window, and then returned to my bed. I treasured the moment my radius increased to 20 feet.

Looking in the rearview mirror, I often think about how to tell this story. One way suggests the doctors are a bunch of incompetent fools who misdiagnosed me. I see this narrative when people tell me I should sue the doctors. But that version of the story is not generous enough. They are, after all, doctors with extensive training. They’re not stupid. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the body is complicated, and that doctors do the best they can. This version recognizes the complexities of medicine and the good efforts of the doctors.

Or, perhaps the story is best told through one of my friend’s reaction to the news. He exclaimed, “Peter, that’s a fucking miracle.” //

Peter Wayne Moe’s last piece for OTM, “How to Write about Bikes and Cars,” was back in June 2015.

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First, this is the passive voice. Rather than, “An SUV hit a man in his 60s riding a bicycle,” the word order is swapped so that we read that the cyclist was hit by an SUV. And second, isn’t it strange that a cyclist was hit by an SUV? Not strange in that it is out of the ordinary, but strange for the word choice – a cyclist is a person, the SUV is an inanimate object. These two words are not on equal terms with each other. One is a human, flesh and blood; the other a machine, a mass of metal and plastic.

To avoid singling out the Spokesman, here are a few more examples. (They are everywhere once you start looking for them.) From the Oregonian: “Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue said a cyclist was struck by a car in Tigard and taken to the hospital with some bleeding from his head, around 3 p.m.,” (July 2, 2013). From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Seattle Police say a woman on a bicycle died Friday morning after being hit by a large truck in downtown Seattle,” (August 29, 2014). From the Bellingham Herald: “Tim Johnson, 47, was riding in the bike lane in the 3400 block on Northwest Avenue just before 5 p.m., when he was hit by a turning truck,” (March 14, 2014).

I do not want to make any claims as to whether cyclists have a right to the road, or whether cyclists or motorists cause more accidents, or who was at fault in the examples I’ve cited. I want to set those issues aside for a moment and think about language. Whenever we write or speak a sentence, we make decisions about how to represent the world we see. In the names we use for things, in the words we use to describe those things, we write a version of the world. Language represents, shapes, and even constructs reality.

And the reality – the world – these sentences write is a troubling one. It is a world where a human is struck by a car rather than a human struck by another human or a bicycle struck by a car. It is a world of un-parallel terms, the terms perhaps a reflection of the un-parallel size and strength of car and bicycle, of machine and human. It is a world where the car drives itself, its operator absent because of grammar and word choice. It is a world of a passive voice that moves the cyclist to the fore of the sentence while lessening the presence and agency of the vehicle and its driver. And it’s a world where that passive voice feeds road rage, it being all the more easy to blame the cyclist when the cyclist is the subject of the sentence (“Those Damn Cyclists!”).

These accounts we’ve all read numerous times have a grammar that absolves the motorist of responsibility. Indeed, the motorist is not even present in the sentence, replaced by a driverless SUV that goes about hitting cyclists. What if these stories were rewritten in the active voice and with parallel terms for cyclist and motorist – what if we saw the headline, “Motorist hit cyclist” instead of the all-too-familiar “Cyclist hit by SUV”?

Consider the following, from the Associated Press reporting on an event in Anaheim: “A bicyclist was struck and killed by a car moving so fast that his friends didn’t know what happened, and his body apparently was carried on the car for 13 miles,” (August 24, 1999). This story, like the others I’ve cited, is tragic. Here’s a rewrite: “A motorist struck and killed a bicyclist. The motorist carried the bicyclist’s body on the car for 13 miles. The motorist was driving so fast witnesses didn’t know what happened.” There’s a very different story told in that rewrite than in the original. My revision, clearly, has its problems, but in rewriting the sentence, we can see the shared difficulty both the original and the rewrite face: that of trying to figure out how to tell a story. I am not a journalist, and it could very well be that there is some house style that governs how these stories are written up. Still, I wonder if there might be a better way.

I think we are, here, touching upon the limitations of language. Grammar requires a sentence to have a subject that does something or has something done to it. So, in writing these sentences, these stories, our choices are limited. Our subject is either the cyclist or the motorist/car. If we pick the cyclist, the cyclist must – by the demands of grammar – get hit by the motorist/car. And if we pick the motorist/car, the motorist/car must – again, by the demands of grammar – hit the cyclist. This is how language works; verbs require subjects and objects; it is how we’ve all been making sentences since we began speaking; there’s no way around it.

But if we hope to improve cyclist-motorist relations, if we hope to make our sidewalks and roads safer, if we hope to better our communities by bettering our commutes, one place to begin could be revising our sentences, finding a way to work within both the confines of our grammar and the confines of our streets to tell a new (perhaps even a happy) story about bikes and cars. //

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Take running events for example. We have names connected to the calendar: Spring Dashes, Turkey Trots, Jingle Bell Runs. And we have names descriptive of the event itself, like the Sundae Sunday (a ten miler with ice cream at the finish) or the Pi Day Run I did as an undergrad on March 14 at 3:14 p.m., the champion winning a pie. In these names – names like the Bare Buns Fun Run – we both tell and hear a story. This storytelling happens through metaphor. A metaphor takes something we know and pairs it with something else, so that by joining two seemingly disparate items we learn a little about the object at hand. For example, with the St. Paddy’s Day Five Miler, we take two things we know well – a holiday and a distance – and pair them together, the mind finding a connection between the two. So when we refer to the Boston Marathon, we construct a metaphor and then by that metaphor tell a story, a story of a running community. The name itself becomes a shorthand narrative of its namesake.

Being outside necessitates we travel on roads, and these names also tell a story. My favorites are the roads that connect two places. I hear an agricultural history in Skagit County’s Farm-to-Market Road, a narrative of commerce between towns in Cheney-Plaza Road, Tekoa-Oaksdale Road, Tekoa-Farmington Road, Waverly-Spangle Road, and Waverly-Plaza Road. The names tell of the past economies of these communities, their residents carrying wares from town to town. (Curious that these place-to-place names are never inverted. It’s always the Cheney-Spokane Road, never the Spokane-Cheney Road. Might there be a narrative here too?) Some road names make a lot of sense, like Spokane’s High Drive or Cliff Drive or Valley Chapel Road, the names telling of geography and landmarks. Some make little sense. Near my parents’ house is a Bayview Street, the road atop what used to be farmland, the geography making clear there has never been a body of water, let alone a bay, anywhere on it. I’ve seen an Osprey Heights Drive in a housing development where no ospreys fly. But these road names have a story to tell too, one of yearning to connect to nature, to land untouched by developers, to wildlife that once navigated the area.

These event names, these road names – they all tell stories about places. My cyclist friends speak – often in a tone of bravado – of an area of the Palouse they call The Land of a Thousand Dogs. In Spokane, I run through Vinegar Flats (where a vinegar distillery once stood a hundred years ago) to Felony Flats (a rough part of town near the Courthouse), returning home by the Fish Ladder (a zigzagging series of streets that makes the climb up the South Hill bearable). There is a story, a history, in all these places, in all these names.

Then there’s Latah, renamed Hangman Valley for the September 1858 massacre of several Native Americans and Chief Qualchan at the hands of General George Wright. When I travel Fort George Wright Drive and pass the Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute on the grounds of what used to be Fort Wright College, I begin to think our city sees Wright as a hero, and I lament that Hangman Valley­­ – the name and its narrative – might be celebrating, rather than condemning, the slaughter. With Latah and Hangman Valley, I hear a narrative of tension, an unease about which story to tell. I think of Latah Presbyterian’s use of the name. I’m not sure if the church is intentionally pushing against the narrative told by Hangman Valley, but by identifying the area by its Native American name, those Presbyterians are – whether knowingly or not – telling a different narrative than the current, dominant one.

Names so often and so easily become monolithic, unquestioned, authoritative. When General George Vancouver names Mt. Baker in honor of 3^rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker, he erases its original name Kulshan (which translates to “white sentinel”). And when General Vancouver names Mt. Rainier to honor Rear Admiral Peter Rainier, the narratives wrapped up in Tahoma (which translates to “larger than Kulshan”) are erased too, a narrative of conquest taking the place of the stories once told about, and in, the land.

The obvious critique here would be to say that names are imperialistic, that they superimpose a culture over the native ones. But that’s too easy. Names do more than that. When we use a name, we enter into a conversation about the land, its people, its practices, its traditions. When a homesteader names an area after his family, he begins to write a history, one that necessarily presses against the histories already being told there. And that’s the most fascinating, and troubling, part of onomastics – which narratives we tell by the names we use and which narratives slip away. //

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