The carcass rolled in on a Tuesday morning, all barnacles and bloat, and by noon the beach parking lot was full.
A mother lifted her phone over the yellow tape.
She said yes, because what else do you say to a seven-year-old standing thirty feet from something that used to sing.
This is the sixth humpback to wash ashore along the Mid-Atlantic in a matter of weeks.
Federal officials have labeled the spike an "unusual mortality event," which is the bureaucratic way of saying: we don't know, and that should scare you more than a number.
The whales are showing up bruised, with broken bones and twisted spines — injuries consistent with being struck by something enormous and moving fast.
The Atlantic seaboard is currently crisscrossed with cargo ships, dredges, and survey vessels racing to build offshore wind farms.
Scientists have been careful not to draw a straight line.
Careful is also what people say when they're afraid of a lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the ocean they swim through has become a hot tub.
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any body of water on Earth, which pushes the whales' food — menhaden, sand lance, herring — into new shipping lanes and new shallows.
And because this is America, the response has split neatly along the lines of everything else.
One cable segment says it's the wind turbines.
A third says it's a natural cycle and everyone should calm down.
All three can be partially true, which is the loneliest kind of truth, because partial truth doesn't stop a propeller.
What gets lost is the sheer strangeness of it.
Humpbacks are the showboats of the sea — forty tons of animal that breaches for no reason we can measure, sings songs that change every few years like pop charts, and migrates past our coastline every season like clockwork.
We spent a century hunting them nearly to nothing, then passed laws, then felt good about it.
Now we're building in their highway and heating their pantry and acting surprised when they die.
They just swim where the food is, and the food is where the ships are, and the ships are where the money is, and the money is going somewhere that isn't here.
Somewhere out past the horizon, a humpback breached, and no one saw it.
We are a country that manages to care deeply about an animal right up until caring costs something.
The humpback is now a test case: can we slow down, reroute, and spend money on something that will never send us a thank-you note?
Final Thoughts
The answer so far is a shrug and a dead whale on the evening news.