The whale head was visible even on the highest astronomical tides, a persistent wash of foam indicating its peak. It sat royal in the rock reef, daring anyone to challenge its mussel and barnacle and seaweed encrusted rock hide. As the tide dropped and the waves hitting the reef became more hollow whale head rose to its full height, arrogantly cutting this near perfect point wave in two. There were other lesser boulders scattered up and down the line, and you could negotiate a ride with those, but never whale head. Hear then the truth of how whale head split in two.
Forth of July is an exciting time for groms too young to purchase illegal fireworks that various very popular uncles always seemed to show up at the beach barbecues with. Those with the biggest arsenals were invariably large overweight cigar smoking hairy men who would light the fuses of cherry bombs and casually toss them in the bay, creating the same effect used in old Hollywood war movies to sink model submarines. They would sit in their beach chairs drinking beer, ordering all the excited kids to gather wood for the biggest bonfire ever seen. This scene was repeated at house after house strung along the shore of the bay so that a sort of competition developed to see which house could build the most spectacular bonfire. Its an annual event that continues to this day, even though the clear memorable winner in 1961 lost his house in the process, stupidly drunk building his pyre too close to home and all the uncles strewn along the bay too drunk to do anything but cheer the most spectacular fire anyone could remember, especially when the arsenal stored inside gave itself up as well. But among all the groms there was one forward thinking dude who couldn’t wait for the dawn of July 5.
Before first light cracked the horizon, little dude was tucking garbage bags under his belt as he gulped down orange juice and ate the leftover shortcake, fueling up for his assault on the unending stream of gunpowder smelling paper shard strewn along the curve of the bay. The night before had been “average, nothing like ‘61” as expressed up and down the bay by the drunken uncles, almost wishing a city rube would buy into the community and burn his house down. Among this massive mess were duds, short fuse toss offs, forgotten mats of firecrackers, and the grail of them all, M-80’s. Slowly, methodically, little dude’s bags filled, and as he dragged them toward his house he received praise for his efforts toward “cleaning this mess up”. He had a sly smile on his face, and no wonder, he had scored an entire box of M-80’s floating in the water. He pushed his cache under the porch and went back to sleep.
Now in the American lexicon one word stands out as camouflage for all sorts of activity, so when Mom shouts out toward the under porch “What are you doing under there?” the answer is invariably “nothin”, which was heard quite often from under the boards. And if friends happened by asking, “What’s up?” the answer was “nothin” even if the ocean side was six feet and off shore. Little dude surfed often enough, but lets face it, he had a score to settle with whale head, which had knocked one of his glassed on skegs to the bottom, never to be seen again. After the repair with a miss matched skeg the twin fin board was never quite the same, and in the extremely self conscious world of gromhood this was a major source of ridicule, even earning the surf shop that did the repair a drop in business among the very young. Little dude tried to compensate, using a can of black spray paint to graffiti his board, but didn’t have the attitude or skill in the water to back up the word on his board “shaka” nor did he even know what the word meant. He labored on through the summer on his “project “under the porch.
With all the pieces in place it’s not hard to see the final result, but the process is worth some note. Little dude had a penknife in hand, a sheet of creased wax paper in front of him, and one by one, first pulling the fuse, and then unraveling the paper, he would pour the gunpowder from firecracker after firecracker into a pile on the wax paper. When he had finished a session he would pour the result onto a coffee can, and by the end of summer, with the huge contribution from the box of M-80’s, his can was full of loose gunpowder. All summer he had conducted reconnaissance missions to whale head when the surf was small or flat, on the pretext of looking for his skeg. He realized how difficult it would be to keep the powder dry, since the obvious choice for attack, a fissure that was part of a crack that traversed the rock that only revealed itself in extreme low tides. The plan had gelled. Seal the powder in a plastic bag and pack the bag into the fissure, but from there on his mind faltered. He had no idea how to burn a fuse in water. Help came from an unexpected source.
Every aspiring surf star has his hangers on. Little dude had an overweight pal who was hopeless trying to stand on a surfboard, but decent at getting slotted on his dextra bellyboard, a present from one of his fat uncles. As it turned out his uncle also had a trunk full of memorabilia from WWII, captured Nazi flags, a real Lugar, German medals, and a curious box with a crank and wires attached that delivered a helluva jolt to anyone holding the wires when the crank was spun. Little dude envisioned it all. Wire would be laid from the packed in gunpowder across the rock reef to shore where attached to the box “crank and boom!” It became his catch phrase. He said it everywhere, and everyone thought he was imagining some surf move to go with his “shaka”. He figured a test was in order.
Overweight dude got all caught up in Little dude’s project now, cause he was supplying the juice. Little dude, being a forward thinker, figured he would blow the whole can to see if he had enough “bang” to get the job done. He figured this was a good plan because coming off an “average Fourth of July” next year would surely be bigger, maybe the biggest yet since there were rumors a family from the city was buying a house, and with Overweight dude helping he could collect twice as much, maybe two packed cans. They picked out a big rock buried in the sand along the shore of the bay and dug a hole next to it, which promptly filled with fresh tasting water, this stretch of beach having lots of low tide springs. The powder in the coffee can was pressed firm, wires inserted, and sealed with melted paraffin wax like he used to get a base coat on his board. The whole assembly was put in a plastic bag and wrapped tightly with duct tape, the only things protruding being the two wires, which were run away from the rock and over the nearest dune. The level of excitement between the two dudes was unimaginable. Little dude peered over the dune as he told Overweight dude to “crank it hard!” BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
What else can be said? The crater measured twice as wide as deep, and it was 5 feet deep. The rock landed in pieces in the water. And every window facing the Bay for a quarter mile in each direction broke. Little dudes eyes were wide as saucers as his ears rung painful hard, Overweight dude in an air-raid drill crouch, his hands over his neck and his face pressed into the sand, was whimpering. Little dude reeled the remaining wire over the dune as he watched people all along the shore running from their homes, and in the distance the siren at the local fire company could be heard. They beat feet toward home, each entering their respective houses breathing heavy and hard, only to see their respective parents running toward the blast site calling their names. Little dude looked around at the cracked glass and china that fell to the floor and knew he could NEVER own up to this. Overweight dude figured the same thing and wondered if he should finger Little dude to save himself, but in the middle of that thought little dude showed at his door, pulled him out, and ran toward the crater with his friend, telling him to say they were on the ocean side checking the surf when they heard the boom. Lucky for them no one had seen them behind the dune or paid any notice to what they were doing along the shore of the bay. When they arrived to wonder at their handiwork it was all hugs and kisses from their respective Moms, but they pulled away so to listen to what the Fire Marshal, obviously a little hung over, had to say about “The Big Blast” as it came to be remembered. He promised ANYONE who had access to dynamite would be closely scrutinized. Of course this being a sleepy vacation village turned up no one who had access to high explosives, and the case remains a mystery even today, but to those with firsthand knowledge. Little dude never completed his plan to gather up “two cans”, and at 18 joined the armed forces, some say to rise into Special Forces as a demolition expert. And the surfers making out with their girlfriends on the beach on July 4 claimed they saw nothing in the black night but the fireworks exploding overhead when out in the water a series of explosions split whale head in two. Military records placed “shaka” in Asia at the time. And the mystified Fire Marshall investigating the blast couldn’t figure how or why these explosions occurred in a sleepy vacation village, so he just got drunk.
The Whale head
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Man O' War
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