4-10-2026

I have been preparing for this Saturday’s Wonder Whale event at the Elkhorn Agility Center (aka High School).

The event is sponsored by Prairie Lake Library System and facilitated by all the libraries. This is the third of six appearances with two taking place in each PLLS county. In February, before the first program, PLLS held a Name the Whale competition. The 60-foot inflatable grey whale was given the name Clara The Whale by seven year-old Harper from Edgerton. One of her prizes was to be the first of the 338 people there that day to walk through.

Wonder Whale is a drop-in program running 11:00-4:00 so not everyone will be there at once. I will be there for set up and the first two hours. One of my goals is to learn why Harper choose Clara.

I am also interested in the fossils and real whale bones on exhibit. To prepare for the experience, I finished Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the nonfiction At the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. Okay, I finished MD as part of the PBS Great American Reads Miss Lisa and I are working through. She’d been listening to it for months. I started a few weeks ago to see why it was taking her so long. I got a little competitive and pushed through in order to say I finished before she did. I did: find out why it was taking so long and finished first.

Melville includes so very much specific information on all types of whales and the whaling industry of the 19^th century, that I researched him to discover if he was ever a whaler. The answer was briefly. Whale ships were often out for three years before returning their home port with very few stops. Melville’s ship set sail in January 1841. He jumped ship (basically deserted) the summer of 1842 when the ship docked at Nuku Hiva Bay. Melville spent some time ship/island hopping and used those experiences in his writing. 

Philbrick’s book tells the story of the Essex and its crew. In 1920, the Essex was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. The crew spent ever ninety days at sea in three different boats. Of the 20 crew members, only eight survived. It was a much shorter book than Moby Dick.

Between the two books, I learned a lot about whaling. I’ll leave you with only one piece of trivia before the Wonder Whale program. Whale skeletons, whose weight is around 60% oil, can secret oil for over 100 years. 

Reading Now: Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (For April book club. Excellent historical fiction)

Listening to Now: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (also excellent)