Issue 24: Close Encounters
Fathoms, by Rebecca Giggs
Dear Reader,
The ocean here is still warm enough for swimming. Rains are frequent, which has been the pattern this summer. Here’s Whitman pausing to appreciate the morning glories along the fence line of the wash stalls at the barn. Now I want to plant them next to my bath tub.
Review
Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Rebecca Giggs
Simon & Schuster, 2021
352 pages
$17.00
About twenty years ago, my husband and I were making an overnight passage in our forty-foot sailboat, from the North Shore of Massachusetts to Monhegan Island, Maine. It was around the time of the summer solstice, and it would only be fully dark for four or five hours. With any luck, we’d be able to steer our course to the northeast visually as well as by compass, pointing our bow toward the powerful beam of Monhegan Island Light. We had chosen a clear night, and were favored with a fresh southwest breeze on the port quarter. In a wide open ocean without obstructions, the major challenge (besides staying awake and keeping on course) would be monitoring overnight vessel traffic, and making sure we did not get into collision situations with the fishing boats and larger cargo ships that ply these offshore waters. Mariners often use VHF radios to negotiate close-quarter crossings, though in the absence of communication there are rules of the road that govern which vessel must give way. The plan was for Jay to take a nap from 7 to 10 PM, so that he would be fresh to handle the heart of the overnight watch on deck.
At around 7:30, I saw the large whale in the distance, a mile or more away on our starboard side. My first thought was that it was too bad that Jay would miss seeing it. After another few minutes, I began to have other thoughts.
The easiest way to tell if an oncoming vessel is on a converging course with yours is to confirm visually that it appears to be static against the land behind it. If it is progressing against the land, it will cross in front of your boat. If it appears to be falling back, it is on track to cross behind you. Mariners must continue to monitor any such situation until the crossing has been safely completed, or until one of the vessels bears decisively away on a new course.
In the open ocean, assessing collision risk is a bit trickier. By making use of radar, or in its absence proceeding visually, you must track the angle of the approaching boat, assess its configuration of navigation lights, and attempt if possible to gauge its apparent size. If the angle remains the same, collision is a possibility. If the other vessel appears to be growing smaller, it is getting farther away and the risk of collision is diminishing. In addition to radar, we use binoculars that incorporate a compass, and with these we can track over time the relative angle of an approaching vessel—or this case, a whale.
The whale surfaced and submerged a few times. Each time it surfaced, its angle off the bow of our boat remained steady. Each time, it appeared larger to me. It soon became clear to me that the whale was just as large if not larger than the hull of our ten-ton sailboat. I woke Jay up.
He took the helm and we observed the whale, perhaps 50 yards and 45 degrees off the starboard bow. It was dark, huge, alive, and moving. A giant mass of muscle not as large as a school bus, but definitely the size of a serious truck. The whale disappeared.
What was the feeling? The feeling for me was fear—and consuming awe. Our lives were suddenly and absolutely subject to the movements of this gigantic, wild, unknown animal. There was no way to communicate. There were no rules of the road. All we could do was observe the water and our depth instrument. We watched in both alarm and wonderment as the sounder display went from 200 feet of depth to 25 feet. Jay gripped the tiller. The whale was directly beneath our boat. The water moved around the boat.
Then the whale surfaced; its body was parallel to the hull. The great head came up, nubbly, scratched, and primeval. We looked into its huge, dark, unblinking eye. I said, “Hello.” The whale paused for a few seconds, then sank into the sea and swam away.
My life has been in danger a few times over the years, but this experience mingled fright and wonder into a kind of elixir. I taste that memory liquor every single time I recall our meeting with that humpback whale, far out in the Gulf of Maine. And I will always wonder why the whale decided to cross paths with us, and what it thought of us. Did it approach us out of some sort of curiosity? Am I wrong to believe that it came to say: “Hello”?
Rebecca Giggs had two encounters with humpback whales that helped inspire her to write her first book, Fathoms, which just last week was awarded a special commendation by the Wainwright Prize jury. The first was the beaching and death of a juvenile humpback near her home in Perth, Australia. Two things happen to beached whales. First, without the cooling action of the ocean’s waters, their blubber covered with dark skin becomes a kettle, and their organs begin to cook and melt. Second, the skeleton that stretches along the top of the body begins to crush the body parts beneath it. The crowd of well-wishing onlookers could do little but stand by, restrain their dogs and children, and bear witness. Giggs, like me, had an impulse to speak.
I started talking to the whale, saying soothing, hackneyed things . . . But what did the whale understand by my voice? A germane sound, inlaid with comfort, or just noise, background babble; as the wind speaks in the trees . . . Do human voices sound as ethereal to the whale as whale voices sound to us? Or do we scratch and irritate the whale, a pin in the ear?
Later, as her interest in whales grew, she went on a whale-watching tour, and a great female humpback swam right up to the boat. Like me, Giggs experienced utter and visceral fear, the prey instincts of one animal facing danger from another.
. . . there comes a moment when looking at animals triggers in people, a recognition of all the familiar ways humans persist in being fauna. Our shared zoology gets released from the padlocked storehouse of the unconscious—and, in that instant, it’s scary. Being, in essence, flesh and raw instinct . . . [w]e are not drawn out into the world as we might have expected; we dive back into ourselves, trembling.
These encounters drew Giggs into a deep research project on the status of whales and whale research. Like last week’s book After Cooling, Fathoms reflects on a great success story of the global environmental movement: the Save the Whales campaigns of the 1970s, which resulted in a nearly complete global ban on whaling. Since the moratorium took effect in 1986, whale species have rebounded significantly, especially the humpback— which may be close to pre-whaling population levels. Others are doing very poorly, especially the Northern Right which is more vulnerable to fishing and marine traffic and is down to 300 some individuals. Meanwhile, the International Whaling Commission estimates that 300,000 cetaceans (this includes dolphins and porpoises) per year are killed by entanglement with fishing year. Nonetheless, as defaunation and extinction rates of other species are accelerating, the fact that humans agreed to stop deliberately killing whales still provides a case study for successful action.
Yet the story Giggs tells is far more complicated. While humans have mostly stopped harpooning and shooting at whales, humans continue to affect cetaceans profoundly, often from the inside out. One sperm whale washed up on the shores of Spain with most of a greenhouse and its contents in its belly, including a container of pesticide. Contaminants like PCBs and other industrial toxins that have entered the oceans through runoff continue to accrete in whale blubber decades after these compounds have been banned, such that dead whales on beaches must be tested and their bodies often treated as hazardous waste. And the cycle continues: Inuit women who eat whale meat were told in the early 2000s to stop nursing their babies. Tests showed that their breast milk had become so contaminated that if put into a container it would be illegal to transport it across state lines.
We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, the past. Inside the whale, the world.
In Fathoms Giggs takes us on her own kind of whale watch. She surveys the whale body, whale ecology, and the history of the human-whale relationship, from whaling to museums to social media and even military installations. Almost every page has a “wait, what?” revelation. Did you know that the sea makes its own music alongside the whales, including an A-flat whistle in the Caribbean and something called the Western Pacific Biotwang? That 15 of the world’s largest cargo ships emit as much pollution as 760 million cars, not to mention noise pollution that creates “aversion zones” for whales? That there is a spacecraft cemetery in the ocean between Australia and New Zealand? That CO2 emissions from a century of whaling were equivalent to the burning of 70 million acres of forest? That whales have measurably reduced atmospheric carbon by feeding at depth and then releasing fecal matter in shallower waters, kickstarting plankton populations that fix carbon through photosynthesis?
But Fathoms does more than relay fascinating information; the book poses a series of serious questions about perception and communication, about the sensory experiences that move both whales and humans to action, about the moral power of wonder and emotion. If coral reefs gave off a stinking odor as they died, would we care more? If we could see phytoplankton fixing carbon the way trees do, would we fight for better ocean policy? What makes a creature charismatic and therefore worth saving? Does it need to be Instagrammable?
Giggs has said that she wanted to explore “textures of the uncanny” in our experience of whales, and she does this beautifully. Her writing is often poetic, a high-wire act that almost always succeeds. Indeed, the book’s Prologue contains the description of a whalefall (the descent of a whale corpse to the ocean floor, bringing a moment of harvest bounty to the creatures of its extreme depths) that on its own is an instant classic of nature writing, originally published in Granta. Here’s a sample.
Opportunistic octopuses bunt between ribs. Sightless, whiskered troglodytes, like ginger tubers, burrow into the surrounding sediment, which is blackened with fat and whale oil. From the dark come red streamer creatures that flutter all over. Colorless crabs: their gluttony. Life pops. It is as though the whale were a piñata cracked open, flinging bright treasures.
This book is a bright treasure and a real contribution. I remember a radio interview years ago with E. O. Wilson, in which I was stung by his straightforward remark that humans have made large mammals locally extinct in the wild almost everywhere humans live—which is to say almost everywhere. We destroy their habitat, we kill them, or we drive them away. Giggs reminds us that when Carl Sagan included whale songs on the engraved records that were sent into space in the 1970s, there was a greeting to potential extraterrestrial beings from Jimmy Carter: We are attempting to survive our time, so we may live into yours. I can’t help wondering if the whales we encounter want to say more than “hello” to us. Maybe, as they look at us with a great unblinking eye, they want to say, We are attempting to survive your time, so that we may live into ours.
Other Voices, Other Forms
In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs writes about the work of photographer Bryant Austin. By dint of extraordinary effort and artistry, Austin has created life-size photographic portraits of whales. Here is one miraculous image,
Poem of the Week
In 2012, the Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik published her first book, Corpse Whale, which won the National Book Award. Here are some lines from her poem, “Necklaced Whalebone.”
For Your Reading Radar
Jackie Morris is an illustrator working in the UK. She collaborated with Robert Macfarlane on The Lost Words, a gorgeous book for children that celebrated words about the natural world like acorn and newt were being dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Her new book called The Unwinding: And Other Dreamings is being published by the UK crowdsourcing publishing house Unbound. The Unwinding is a book of paintings that she made to serve as balm for the soul in the times between waking and sleeping.
For Your Calendar
Author of The Overstory, Richard Powers has a new novel out: Bewilderment. Diesel bookstore in LA is co-hosting a reading and talk with Power on September, 23rd at 6 PM Pacific. Details here.
Bookstore of the Week
I would love to visit Muir Books in Perth if ever get there. A place to get lost in and spend a quiet hour.
Have a good weekend. xo Nicie