One Week, Four Corners, 2,500 People

Last week was a lot.

A new zipper on Clara. Four libraries. Four different corners of Wisconsin. Over 2,500 people. More than 1,100 miles and about 20 hours behind the wheel. I came home tired in the best possible way.

I've been doing this long enough to know that no two stops are the same. But last week felt like something worth writing down.

People waited in line for an hour at the Houser YMCA in Onalaska

We started in Rio, a town of just over a thousand people on the edge of Columbia County. Three hundred and thirty people showed up. Do the math. On a weekday afternoon, roughly one out of every three people in that town walked through Clara's door. I don't know what else to call that except a community showing up for itself.

Clara was in Onalaska on Wednesday, hosted by the La Crosse County Library at the Houser YMCA. Over 1,200 people came through over the course of the afternoon, the biggest crowd we've ever had. The wait to get inside Clara stretched to about an hour. Nobody left.

Inside the whale, the questions were good. They're always good when people have been waiting and thinking. One topic that keeps stopping people cold: sperm whales almost certainly have language. Not human language, something that is theirs. They communicate in patterns called codas, and researchers have found that different clans use different dialects. They recognize each other across distance.

When I tell people that sperm whales name their babies, the inside of the whale, where we are all standing, gets very quiet. Then someone says "what?" and I know we're right where we need to be.

It's the same feeling I get when I talk about the bowhead whale. In 2007, Alaskan hunters harvested a bowhead and found an old harpoon tip embedded in its neck, the kind that stopped being made in the late 1800s. The animal had been swimming around with that harpoon in its body for more than a century. Best estimate is that the whale was around 200 years old when it died.

Two hundred years old. It was alive before the Civil War.

People go quiet for that one too.

Clara the whale under the dome of the original Oshkosh library

Forest Whales was set up in the shade in Shullsburg

Clara was in Rio, Wisconsin, where a third of the population showed up

From there we went to Shullsburg, tucked into the far southwest corner of the state, one of those small Wisconsin towns that feels like it hasn't been in a hurry since about 1955. Two hundred people came through, which is a big number for a place that size. But the moment I keep thinking about is one little girl. She came through early in the day with her mom. Then she came back with her mom again. Then, after her dad finished work, she came back a third time.

That third time I told her she was giving the tour. She looked at me like I'd asked her to fly the plane. But she did it. She walked her dad through the whale and told him everything. She knew it cold. I just stood there and watched, which is exactly where I was supposed to be.

Saturday took us to Oshkosh, where 700 to 800 people came through across the day. By that point in the week, Clara had been through a lot. So had I.

None of these events happen alone. Sean Sullivan, The Mammoth Hunter, helped at one stop, and Chris Grall, Prehistoric Facts with Dino Chris, helped with the other three. Both of them bring something I can't replicate, their own knowledge, their own way of connecting with people, their genuine love for this stuff. I am not the only person out there doing science education for kids, and I want to be clear about that. Sean and Chris are exceptional at what they do, and I'm grateful they're in my corner.

I drove home on Saturday, chatting with Sean about life and sharing stories about our kids with the kind of tired that comes from something that mattered. Clara has now met over 14,000 people in 2026. She's been in gyms, libraries, community centers, and parking lots. She's been in small towns where a third of the population came out to see her, and cities where the line stretched out the door.

Every time someone steps inside Clara and looks up, something happens. I've watched it happen thousands of times now, and I still haven't gotten tired of it.

If you'd like to bring Clara to your library or school, reach out at forestwhales.com