It was quiet and she was on her own, this wasn’t unusual for this time of day. Everyone else was out working and she’d turned off the radio. She didn’t like the man in the afternoons, he struck her as a bit of a moron and the other stations well they were worse than the afternoons guy on her station. So the radio was off and no one was around. She was busy kneading bread when it happened. Baking was something she enjoyed rather than something she did out of necessity, it would have been a lot easier to just buy bread but there was something satisfying about making it yourself.
So there was flour over the bench top and her hands were deep in dough when, for whatever reason she looked out of her kitchen window. The house is on the side of a hill with a wide view. At the bottom of that hill is the beach and out as far as the horizon is the sea. It’s a nice kitchen window to glance out of and taking a look at the water and the sky and the blurry line where the two somehow meet, well that was a bit of a habit. A natural routine that she didn’t really notice that she did, she certainly didn’t know why she looked out of the window right at that moment. But she did, just as on countless other days, but this wasn’t any other day.
This was so much of a different sight to all of those other casual thoughtless glances. She left her dough, wiped her hands on her apron most un-thoroughly and rushed down the hill to the beach. The whales were huge, really they were much bigger than she had ever imagined. At this stage there were only about a dozen other people on the beach. There were a couple of men who seemed to have some idea of what to do and were giving directions. One of these men told her to help with the buckets of water, they were trying to keep the whales wet. But they were huge, no one could reach the tops of them, a couple were carrying a ladder over the sand dunes. Feet stuck in the sand she stood watching as they tried to use the ladder to get buckets and wet towels to the top of the giant fish. Mammal. It’s a mammal she corrected herself mumbling a little bit. But no one heard her, she stood there frozen and watching as more and more people arrived but the group remained just as ineffectual. It was like watching a group of ants discovering an entire cake. Even with ladders the people were only halfway up the sides of the whales, they were house sized and the people were still only people sized.
It struck her that these whales were just too big to be saved. It wasn’t like what you see on the TV, there wasn’t going to be any dramatic rescue. None of these giant mammals were going to be turned back towards the water. Her feet picked themselves out of the sand that had seemingly turned to clay around her. The bustle continued all across the beach, there must have been at least ten of them stranded now. She didn’t want to count them, it didn’t matter. They were lost but if they had have died in the sea she would never have seen them, would never have had to know about their demise. She didn’t feel guilty about walking away, it was as clear to her as anything she’d ever understood, those whales were going to die.
The drive back up the hill seemed a lot slower then the descent earlier. She salvaged her dough, it wasn’t going to be her best loaf but it would work out alright. She didn’t look out the window anymore. The habit that had built up over time had disappeared immediately. No regrets about what she’d done but she didn’t want to see. The magic was gone from that seascape. She couldn’t live here anymore; it was time that they moved on anyway. Time to get away from this place.
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