The Harvard Advocate

A panicked wail comes across the water, shaking the seafloor. A young sperm whale, caught in the North Pacific Gyre, is separated from her pod. The speed of the current carries her cries far away from their source. The calf’s father chases a trail of barnacles that had been ripped off of the child’s underside by the current. It isn’t long before the father is lost. An infernal din coming from far above the water grows louder and louder. On the surface, the rasp of John Fogerty busts through the gaps in the radio static as about two thousand people miss the point of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s anti-war anthem “Fortunate Son.” In the throes of the Nixon era, the children of Florence, Oregon pledge their allegiance to a country in the midst of a war that is older than them. Fathers and brothers they’ve never met lay dead on Saigon streets, sent to wage senseless battles for a nation who bought their caskets before they ever boarded the plane out. The war seems to literally weigh on the townspeople, as if the elephant in the room climbed on their backs and perched on their shoulders. The sidewalks are spotless; the icy November wind came over the Siuslaw River through the Willamette Valley and froze the close-to-falling leaves to their branches. The water near the shore sits still as if fastened to the seafloor. It’s half past eleven, yet the moon hangs in the sky in defiance of the sun, a conscientious objector to service in the armed forces of nature. It will be at least an hour until the moon dies behind the line where sea meets sky. Then, out of the stillness, a noise. A low cry pierces the air as the sea spits out a swollen mass. The schoolboys were the first to find the body. Fresh off of lunch they took to poking the carcass with sticks. With each stab, a foul belch emerged from the mass. The boys didn’t know what to make of it. The local news had run a story about biological warfare in Hanoi, where corpses, bloated with chemicals, were lobbed across enemy…