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Blue whales in the pink of things
RACHEL PEARSON
 | | Rachel Pearson of Port Aransas is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Portland, Ore. She may be reached via e-mail at rachelmpearson@gmail.com. |
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Well, gentle readers, the weather has brightened up. Last week it was sunny for almost two days, and the flowering cherry trees took advantage of the good weather to drop blossoms all over the street.
At one point, I rode my bicycle through a cloud of blowing pink cherry blossoms. It made me feel like a flippin' princess.
Spring, however, is not kind to everyone. I heard a young man saying into his cell phone, "Man, I wrecked hard-core on my bike yesterday. Yeah, I came around this corner kind of fast, and there were all these freaking cherry blossoms…"
The cherry blossoms do pile up, so thick in some places that you can kick up little clouds of them as you pass. City workers are sent out with leaf-blowers to eradicate the cherry blossoms, and small dogs are sometimes lost in piles of flowers for days at a time.
Also in good news, I saw an otter!
Every day on my bike ride downtown, I cross over the Hawthorne Bridge, one of many bridges in Portland that spans the Willamette River, a hefty, slow-moving, dammed-up river that bears barges of grit back and forth across the state.
The Willamette is not the kind of river you want to swim in, but it's frequently beautiful, and the other morning I looked over the rail and saw an otter.
He was swimming with his head out of the water, and he would swim along for a while, then submerge, then re-emerge, still swimming in the same direction. He was headed toward the shore, probably to meet up with some other otters and play Categories under the bridge.
The otter was clearly a noble and intelligent wild creature, and I was pleased to have him join me on my commute. I've seen him once more since then, and I have also told almost everyone I know about him.
Unfortunately, nobody in Portland has been impressed by the otter sightings. These callous notherners act like they see otters every day, like they're constantly making lunch dates with otters and then breaking them at the last minute for no good reason because, hey, what's special about otters? This is why I have to write about it for you guys.
My brother has seen a lot of otters in Alaska. He often tells the story of the gut-barge otter, which liked to roll in fish guts. The other Alaska story Matt is most likely to tell is the one about the time he saw a whale take a dump.
I will have to leave that one for Matt to tell you himself, but here is an awesome fact on the same subject: Blue whales, the largest animals in the history of the world, eat tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called krill. And krill are pinkish, of course. And because of that, the feces of blue whales are pink.
Just ponder that. I learned this from a woman who saw it all first-hand, on a whale-watching cruise off the coast of California. She said it was really incredible to see such a huge, noble animal in action.
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