Reporters on the Job

from the September 5, 2008 edition

• A Whale Graveyard: Correspondent Colin Woodard reported the story about Canada's whale rescuer from Campobello Island. But on a neighboring island, Grand Manan, Colin has seen whales that didn't make it: the near-skeletal remains of a fin whale and a right whale that were struck and killed by passing ships.

The whales were towed and trucked to a quiet seaside provincial park and placed in a basketball-court-sized boneyard surrounded by a chain-link fence and a grassy meadow.

"When I visited, the whole area was blanketed in pea-soup fog, which blew over the terrain in waves," says Colin. "These huge skeletons kept appearing and disappearing behind a grey veil and all you could hear were the waves crashing on the unseen beach and the wind whistling through a bank of ghostly spruce trees. The effect was truly otherworldly."

When nature is finished taking its course, the bleached skeletons will be reassembled to become museum displays.

• Urban Oasis: Sara Miller Llana took a cab to visit one of 21 community gardens set up in Mexico City this summer. The taxi driver had told her that the neighborhood of Iztapalapa was huge and far away, but Sara thought he was exaggerating. He wasn't.

"It took an hour and a half to get there – and 45 minutes of it was just driving through Iztapalapa itself. It was a bleak landscape of factories, gray sidewalks, and absolutely no trees. So I got a good sense of how this garden is such an oasis," says Sara. "It's become a community center of sorts. It was so refreshing. I was sad to leave and was not looking forward to the long drive home through the metropolis of Mexico City," she says.

– David Clark Scott

World editor

Cultural snapshot

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