BURBANK : Curator Gives Whale’s Tale a New Twist

Call him Ishmael.

John Heyning, the Natural History Museum’s marine mammals curator, regularly “hunts” whales. Most of them, however, are already dead--Heyning tracks down beached animals and then carts the giant creatures back to the museum for study and model casting, garnering some strange looks along the way from other freeway motorists.

Wednesday’s task had a twist.

Instead of trucking a real creature through Los Angeles, Heyning transported a 16-foot, 250-pound fiberglass model of a young female killer whale from the main county museum in Los Angeles to its satellite facility in Burbank.

And instead of a journey on the freeway, where the high speed could have dislodged the model from its wooden pedestal/frame, this trip was on surface streets, through residential neighborhoods and back roads, Elysian Park and downtown Burbank.

That Heyning and another museum worker had trouble finding their way to and through Griffith Park only meant more puzzled glances from folks unaccustomed to seeing a killer whale riding along their streets.

“On the freeway, people come racing by because we’re going slowly in the right lane, then they realize they saw something unusual and drift back,” Heyning said as he took a wrong turn and to the amazement of passersby, headed into the hills above Dodger Stadium. “But I bet this is the first time a killer whale has been in this neighborhood.”

Once settled into its new home, the unnamed teen-age orca with traditional black and white markings will star in a traveling exhibit called “Masters of the Ocean Realm: Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises.” The display opens Oct. 1 and runs through Jan. 8 before beginning a six-year tour.

But first the model had to get to Burbank.

After carefully mounting it on a foam-covered wooden frame, securing the frame to the bed of the truck and the orca to the frame, Heyning and exhibit designer Cyrena Nouzille were off. Unlike the protagonist in “Moby Dick,” Heyning travels not by the ship Pequod, but by a flatbed truck that is outfitted with extra thick tires for beach traveling and a tilting bed and winch for loading whales. All those extras, however, do not make for easy three-point turns when one gets lost, as the two-person crew soon discovered.

As the Whalemobile lumbered on its circuitous route over the hills and into the San Fernando Valley, the response varied depending on the part of town through which the behemoth rode.

Late morning traffic along Figueroa Street through the heart of Downtown was downright blase.

One wrong turn near Dodger Stadium, however, sent the Whalemobile on small, condominium-lined streets. Residents might have smelled it before it came into sight: Although the whale was fake, the truck carried the very real dead animal bouquet of Whalemobile trips gone by.

“Real whales navigate better than this,” said Heyning, a Torrance native who earned his Ph.D. in marine biology from UCLA.

The few folks out for a jog or sitting on porches just stared, silently, at the lost cetacean.

Once into Burbank, past amazed golfers and the city sanitation worker who drove by shouting “Free Willy!” it was the children who took the most delight in the whale ferry.

“Because they’re so popular, we’re using it as a hook to teach about science,” Heyning said. “We are using it to say research is fun.”