There was little for me to do at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum. I counted the fives in our cashbox and sold colored pencils. I typed blurbs for the blog, “This Week in Sag Harbor History.” I read a lot. Blue Nights, Catcher in the Rye, Flowers of Evil, A Long Petal of the Sea, The Idiot, Dracula. Covid restrictions were just beginning to lift, and I suppose visiting the museum had not been high on anyone’s post-pandemic list of priorities. Customers were so few and far between, I struggled to remember my welcome spiel. Our only regulars were the group of Masons who congregated on the second floor. I stole coffee from them every day. 

Richard, my 70-year-old boss and the sole other person who worked in the museum, was my best friend that summer. I taught him how to use Instagram and he gave me sandwich shop recommendations. Talking to him was like drinking water. Every morning, he greeted me the same: “Ahoy!” This was also how he began his emails. 

It was the summer of 2021 and I had just graduated high school. In its abundance, time unrolled long before me like a horizonless path. Initially, I had sought employment at the thin-crust pizza place on Main Street, the one with sunny side-up egg pies and the photograph of Sophia Loren on the back wall, signed, “Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti.” But the Amalfi-expat manager never called me back.

The museum job ended up being a better option, anyway. There was zero risk that I would run into people I knew and I got to touch all this fun stuff, bones and lances and harpoons and one million fresh-smelling copies of Sag Harbor. The museum loved Colson Whitehead. Years later, when I met him at the Vassar William Gifford lecture, I told him this. “That’s great,” he said.

Each day I walked through a pair of jawbones, which framed the front door. I liked to imagine I was entering the body of a whale, myself a teeny floating brainless body of krill. Spatially, anatomically, this meant my desk would be the heart, but according to scale, it was way too small. A whale’s heart grows to be the size of a car. Four people should be able to sit inside of it. I knew this fact not from the rapid-fire list of bullet points I had memorized my first day on the job for customers that did not come, but from a poet named Joshua Bennett.

Maybe, if you asked me to, 

I would crawl through the veins of a blue whale on my hands and knees, 

And photograph that Volkswagen-sized heart of hers 

And place the picture on your pillow before you went to sleep. 

And when you ask me about it, I’ll probably just laugh, 

Giggling like I’ve got a handful of diamonds in my throat and say 

See, I told you. 

The biggest heartbeat God ever made and now it’s all yours. 

He uploaded a performance of this poem, “Balaenoptera,” to YouTube in 2012. I watch it every now and then. I liked him a lot when I saw him perform in person; he knew how to talk about love without embarrassing himself.

After work I usually changed into a swimsuit and rode my bike to the bay. When I was little, this was the location of clam bakes. Now everyone was older and there were no clams left to catch. There was a swing set that faced the water. The black, rubber seats were sun-sponges, hot to the touch. My routine was this: sit on the swings until my legs felt like they were about to catch on fire; cool down in the waves until my fingers pruned; repeat. I was so bored, I would have died, just for something to do. 

“Do whales get bored” I googled at work, one day. The first result to pop up was from the Whale & Dolphin Conservation USA website, about the effects of tanks on the aquatic psyche. “We can’t know what it feels like to be a whale or dolphin, but the individuals who have spent years in captivity display behaviors which demonstrate frustration and boredom, and even show physiological signs of stress.” I changed my question. “Do whales get bored in the ocean.” The results were inconclusive. 

Obviously, imprisonment in a glass rectangle smaller than a bowling lane is torture. But if whales have demonstrated boredom in captivity, then they are capable of boredom generally. I wanted to know what free whales did with their time. Did they ever get tired of the ocean? Did they ever look around and think, I have everything, and I don’t know what to do with myself? 

Without the structure of school, I was confused. Like hats, I tried on several hobbies. Rollerskating, jogging. I practiced painting my nails with my left hand and wrote a lot of melodramatic diary entries. I collected items for my dorm room. My randomly-assigned roommate had emailed me, she’d bring a vacuum if I bought a mini fridge. This exchange did not seem equal, but I agreed. 

And I learned about whales. I barely slept those days, always exhausted but never drowsy, so I passed the hours scrolling through articles and online field guides and videos about whales. I learned the difference between breaching—wherein a whale exposes at least 40 percent of their body leaping out of the ocean—and spyhopping—wherein a whale exposes less than 40 percent of their body leaping out of the ocean. I learned that whales are voluntary breathers and unihemispheric sleepers; one half of their brain is always “awake,” so that they do not drown. I did not have difficulty imagining the sensation. I also learned that most of the things that whales do, besides foraging, hunting and migrating, are done to attract mates. Even their songs. This fact depressed me. 

Prior to this passive, late-night research, my whale education came from the exhibit at AMNH. I used to refer to the model as the “big blue whale,” and as I was not corrected, I thought that was the animal’s government name for much of my life. Measuring 94 feet long and weighing 21,000 pounds, the foam-fiberglass whale hangs suspended from the ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life from a concealed steel pipe. It was first constructed in the 1960s and renovated in 2001, to fix the size and shape of the blowhole and eyeballs and to carve a belly button into its pleated stomach. It is advertised as the largest animal on earth, but that’s not really true. It is the largest animal we know of. 

On my final day at the museum, Richard gifted me a tiny stuffed whale that could not be sold in the gift shop, as it was missing an eye. I was touched. He has since retired. His new online biography, under the title Director Emeritus, explains that he worked in television for 20 years before pivoting to nonprofit historical work. Whether or not he neglected to tell me about producing a handful of sitcoms in the 90s on purpose, I am unsure. I wish I had a way of thanking him for the company he provided me that summer. I wish I had a picture of him. 

The last time I checked their website, the museum was hosting a holiday party. A copy of the invitation was posted to the public. It’s title: “Ahoy, ahoy, ahoy.”