The Only Whale in the Great Lakes

"i've been staring at the edge of the water as long as I can remember" - lin-manuel miranda, moana

This is another image piece I wrote for my long thing about the Midwest that I’m no longer writing, along with Land Acknowledgement / Arborescence and Nike’s Landing. I really like sharing these with you all. They meant a lot to me when I was writing them. Sharing this one was inspired by this Paul Skallas tweet.

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A fishing boat is out the Illinois River near downtown Peoria. Father and son quality time. All is quiet and calm until a moaning song can be heard beneath the water. A humpback whale breaks the surface. The largest fish this river has seen is airborne in the center of the waterway just a hundred feet from them, until it reenters the water with a splash. The last they see of him is his fluked tail striking downwards into the water, leaving their boat swaying in his wake. 

The whale has come from the Atlantic Ocean. Swimming his way through the warm Gulf of Mexico, he entered the Mississippi River near its mouth at New Orleans. He doesn’t rest. He was bound north on a mission, a mission never spoken in human words, only known in songs sung deep beneath the ocean. Last night he surfaced near St. Louis and saw the Gateway Arch lit up against the black sky. Shortly after St. Louis, he left the Mississippi and took the calmer waters of the Illinois River, bound northeast. By the next morning he was in Peoria. Sometimes the water is shallow, but the whale sticks to the middle of the river and pushes forward. At times, there are locks and dams that make the riverway impassable without human intervention. The wily whale snuck through these gateways alongside passing barges. 

At a certain point the directions get confusing, like when you pull into a subdivision built after Reagan’s second term and have to decipher incoherently curved streets to find your friend's house. The Illinois River ends at the confluence of the Kankakee and the Des Plaines rivers, so the whale takes the Des Plaines north. Hundreds of years ago, there was no natural waterway between the Des Plaines River and Lake Michigan. Native Americans would get out of their canoes and carry them six miles to the nearby Chicago River. But six miles could be terraformed by twentieth-century man. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal was built, the Chicago River’s flow was reversed, and a continuous path to the Great Lakes was revealed. These human edits are known in the map the whale follows. He heads through the canal towards the Great Lakes. 

To keep invasive fish that run wild on the Illinois River from reaching the pristine Great Lakes, man shoots electricity through a few hundred feet of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The current runs strong enough to stun a fish upon upstream entry, but commercial barges can pass without event. The voltage gets stronger through the electrified zone. At its peak the electric barrier has enough power to kill humans. The whale knew it would be there but it still takes courage now that the time has come. He pushed through the electrified water with all he had, knowing that it was never built to stop him. Electrical shocks raged against his thick blubbered skin while his brain seized with primal visions of his saltwater home. He’s alive but covered in electric burns when he reaches the unenergized water. 

The injured whale rolled through the final waterway of the journey, the Chicago River, in the early hours of the morning. He rounds the corner through River North, spewing water out of his nose to the delight and terror of early morning joggers. For a few minutes, the whale feels free in the ocean-sized waters of Lake Michigan. Then he stops to rest, and doesn’t wake up. Whatever his mission, it will not be completed. The weak waves of the lake wash him to the cement beaches off Lakeshore Drive. With America’s tallest constructions of the twentieth century looming behind, the hulking corpse buzzes with flies that have never known this particular oily flesh.