It had to be said, the Oregon State Highway Division not only had a whale of a problem on its hands, it had a stinking whale of a problem: what to do with one forty-five foot, eight ton whale dead on arrival on a beach near Florence? It had been so long since a whale had washed up in Lane County nobody could remember how to get rid of one. In selecting its battle plan the Highway Division decided the carcass couldn't be buried because it might soon be uncovered; it couldn't be cut up and then buried because nobody wanted to cut it up, and it couldn't be burned, so dynamite it was, some twenty cases or a half-ton of it. The hope was that the long dead whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast, and that any small pieces still around after the explosion would be taken care of by seagulls and other scavengers. Indeed, the seagulls had been standing by all day.

The dynamite was buried primarily on the leeward side of the big mammal, so as most of the remains would be blown toward the sea. About seventy-five bystanders, most of them residents who had first found the whale to be an object of curiosity before they tired of its smell, were moved back a quarter of a mile away. The sand dunes there were covered with spectators and landlubber newsmen, soon to be landBLUBBER newsmen, for the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.

Our cameras stopped rolling immediately after the blast, the humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber flew everywhere. Pieces of meat flew high over our heads while others fell at our feet and the dunes were rapidly evacuated as the spectators escaped both the falling debris and the overwhelming smell. A parked car over a quarter of a mile from the blast site was the target of one large chunk, the passenger compartment literally smashed. Fortunately no human was hit as badly as the car, however everyone on the scene was covered with small particles of dead whale. As for the success of the effort, well, the seagulls who were supposed to clean things up were nowhere in sight, either scared away by the explosion or kept away by the smell. That didn't really matter; the remaining chunks were of such a size that no self-respectable seagull would attempt to tackle anyway. As darkness set in the highway crews were back on the beach, burying the remains, including a large piece of the carcass which never left the blast site. It might be concluded that should a whale ever wash ashore in Lane County again, those in charge will not only remember what to do, they'll certainly remember what not to do.