That's a heart you could crawl through

I almost didn’t open the email. For starters, it arrived in my inbox at 3:46 a.m. – well within the working hours of poor displaced members of the Nigerian royal family. This particular royal called herself “Fran Morales,” and the portion of her message I could read with the email app’s preview mode sounded hokey.

“Hello I am contacting you from Guinness World Records in London, a…”

I didn’t like “Fran’s” punctuation. I'm certainly not a punctuation expert, but the absence of a comma following a greeting seemed like a sure sign of duplicity perpetrated by a non-native English speaker.

I opened the message anyway.

“Hello

“I am contacting you from Guinness World Records in London, and I am currently researching images for the 2016 edition of our book.

“We are interested in possibly using your image of the whales heart on your blog http://www.compasswhistle.com/2013/02/middle-earth-or-at-least-the-middle-of-new-zealand/whale-heart_6286/

“Could you let me know if you would be happy for us to use it?

“I look forward to hearing from you.

“Kind regards

Fran

“Fran Morales
Deputy Picture Editor
Guinness World Records Ltd.
184-192 Drummond Street
London NW1 3HP”

I recognized the link “Fran” had included as one I created two years ago for my website, CompassWhistle.com, It directed to a picture of me. Climbing through a replica of a blue whale’s heart. With a dopey look of (feigned) wonderment plastered across my face. (GROAN).

My husband, Matt, snapped this embarrassing photograph during a visit to Te Papa, the Wellington-based national museum and art gallery of New Zealand. We were within the children’s section of the museum, and the exhibit invited young visitors to tunnel through blood vessels of the life-sized plastic model. So I did too. Matt and I shared a good laugh, he took the picture, we posted it on our travel blog and then promptly forgot about it.

Despite Matt and I’s best efforts, CompassWhistle.com never made it big within the blogosphere; At most, the site received 50 unique visits a day. So we were floored a few months ago when Jetpack indicated a sudden spike of several hundred unique visits a day. What was going on? The referral log indicated much of the traffic welled from a MetaFilter feed. About whale vaginas.

CompassWhistle.com traffic referral stats

The 30-comment MetaFilter feed began in August 2014 when an astute user named “viggorlijah” posted a link titled “...the big baleen whales can be over 100 feet in length, so their reproductive tracts likely wind for several feet. That’s a vagina you could walk through. (SFW),” a quote he borrowed from a June 2014 Scientific America blog post baring the auspicious headline “Getting to KnowWhale Vaginas in 7 Steps.”

Interesting, but what does any of this have to do with Matt’s whale heart picture? Well, some idiot named “maryr” joined the feed by posting a link she titled “Oh god I can’t unsee it.” It directs to Matt’s whale picture.

Props to "maryr" for all the traffic (I believe it helped make Matt’s picture the top Google Images result for the query “whale heart”) but I am gravely offended by the implication I’ve crawled through a whale’s lady parts, by being labeled as something unsightly someone would wish to “unsee” and by yet another comma infraction, this particular assault against the vocative case.

I Googled Fran Morales. She seems legit. And those goofy Brits add all kinds of unnecessary letters to words (e.g. colour, flavour, behaviour, harbour, honour, humour...). Perhaps they make up for it by ditching commas. If Guinness World Records wants to set the record straight about my whale heart encounter, I’m “happy” for it; Matt and I give the reference book our blessing. The 2016 edition hits bookstands in September. I encourage you to purchase one.

Death of a friend

A fawn pictured in Winslow's backyard

The sight dumbfounded me: Here was a creature I knew as living and breathing now on its side, bloated and glassy-eyed with flies circling its muzzle. I cried out, and pulled hard on my bicycle’s brakes.

I stumbled across the fawn’s body today by accident; I had planned to ride my bike on another, steeper route, but opted for Ralston Avenue at the last moment. Flying down the hill on South Road felt marvelous, a cooling breeze rushing past my sweaty hairline as I sang along to Paul Simon playing on my iPod. I was reminded of how Roald Dahl, in his autobiography, “Boy,” described a memory of watching another youth experience a similar exuberance of freedom.

Yes, today is a good day, I told myself.

And then, just as I was losing momentum from the steep decline and starting to pedal, I spotted the body in the grass between the sidewalk and the Notre Dame de Namur University tennis courts. I yanked the headphones from my ears. I felt sick. 

Was it really, truly dead? Perhaps the animal was simply stunned. The body looked intact. There was no blood. I used the tips of my trainers to inch myself and the bike closer. I looked down and stared at the ribs, willing them to gently rise with a breath. Instead, they bulged unnaturally outward in a sickening bloat. The adorably dappled back I had seen so many times from afar was now at my feet, but the white spots no longer radiated with life. It appeared someone had struck the fawn with a vehicle and then moved the body to the side of the road. I was grateful the driver hadn’t left the beautiful body to be destroyed by traffic.

This was one of two black-tailed fawns that, along with their mother, had paid daily visits to my yard for months in order to eat whatever they could find.  As much as I bellyached about their systematic destruction of my garden, I delighted at seeing and greeting these graceful creatures each day. I often snapped pictures of them to text to my 80-year-old friend because she becomes so excited when I do so.

“If I lived there, I would go out and hug them,” she liked to say.

Drivers in my neighborhood frequently speed, so part of me knew it was only a matter of time before someone killed a deer. Over time, I developed this inexplicable “Catcher in the Rye” -like feeling of responsibility for the two fawns; somehow, I had to be there to protect them from the “cliff.” Whenever I noticed the two leaving my yard and moving toward the road, I became agitated. Sometimes I even motioned up the hill so approaching drivers would know the family was hovering just beyond the trees.   

So finding the body was a shock. I stared at it for several minutes to reconcile the sight. I whipped my head around to locate other bicyclists and pedestrians to share my horror, but no one seemed to notice the dead deer. The tennis players continued playing. A man walking past failed to acknowledge me or the deer. I was alone. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. I debated riding back to my house to get a shovel so I could bury the fawn myself. I felt like I at least owed the animal this small dignity.

Frantic, I called my husband, and he urged me to notify Animal Control in case the deer was infected with Lyme disease. Based on my experience with the Peninsula Humane Society Wildlife Department, I believe Animal Control will cremate the remains. That seemed preferable to simply letting the body rot. 

Arriving home, I used cardboard and a Sharpie to make a sign asking my neighbors to please drive slowly. I fastened it to my garbage can with some duct tape, the whole set-up looking just about as shoddy as it sounds. But it was the only action I could think of to fix a situation that couldn’t be fixed. Somewhere out there, the dead fawn’s sibling still lives.

*Please drive slowly in wildlife-populated areas.