You are unique and spectacular beings, sentinels of the sea, ecosystem engineers, harbingers of the climate change that will affect us all. But where the fuck are you? How could you let me down?

I feel like I’ve read quite a few books about whales* – not by default because I read lots of books about swimming, no… I am drawn to whale stories. I think it’s something to do with a sense of awe, like how can something so enormous also appear to be so gentle and languid?

In her sciencey-memoir, Soundings, Doreen Cunningham tracks the journey of the grey whales that migrate up the Pacific coast, from the warm water lagoons of Mexico’s Baja California Sur to the northernmost Alaskan town of Utqiagvik.

It was more than ten thousand miles’ round trip, like swimming around the moon twice…. The mothers fought off predators, parented, breastfed, while swimming halfway across the planet. They were endurance incarnate.

Cunningham follows a dual narrative – the story of her first experience in the Arctic, when she visited Utqiagvik as a young journalist, keen to understand more about what she saw as the ‘front-line of climate change’.

She was fortunate to be taken under the wing of an Iñupiat elder, Julia, and given permission to join their seasonal whale hunt. Although deeply conflicted by the hunt, Cunningham realised that it was critical in understanding the cultural significance of whales to indigenous people living in the Arctic.

‘No one can catch a whale on their own,’ said Jeslie. Sharing was the glue that had kept the Iñupiat together throughout centuries of change.

The chapters set in Utqiagvik also explore the ethnocide experienced by indigenous people (in many countries) – the introduction of disease and alcohol, the removal of children, the loss of language and traditions, inter-generational trauma and the bureaucracy associated with securing access and ownership to what is rightfully theirs.

In alternate chapters, she tells of her journey with two-year old son, Max, as they follow the migration of the grey wales along the North Pacific coast. In these chapters, Cunningham describes the difficult circumstances by which she became a single mother, specifically the custody battle with Max’s father that left her financially and emotionally drained.

I told myself I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live.

‘Journey’ perhaps misrepresents this memoir – it has all the hallmarks of a quest, particularly in the part of the story where Cunningham and Max are following the whales. At the beginning of their trip, they see the greys, and the expectation is that tracking them along the coast will be relatively straightforward. However, they have multiple ‘almost sightings’, in some cases missing the whales by just days, and in some cases missing their opportunity because of transport mix-ups. As time runs out, the tension builds and I was desperately hoping for their quest to finish as it should – greeting the greys in Utqiagvik.

I’m always a sucker for eloquent writing, especially when it involves things I love, like the sea. Cunningham didn’t let me down, and her descriptions of all things whale related were superb –

It’s called a whale fall. The final dive. The sand opens in a haze of slow awe as the body settles in the abyssal zone, meets the sea floor thousands of metres down. It is not alone for long.

I heard them before I saw them, their breath hissing through the air. Punctuating the silence. The sound was so startling, so alien, it broke the world open… They appeared in the lead, belugas, each breath a triumph of endurance, of stealth, of intelligence, of community, of evolution, of luck. Rhythmic wheels rolling through the water. The mothers huge and white, moving along the lead like ghosts. The babies small grey cogs next to them.

Cunningham’s insights, albeit brief, on the early journalistic challenges associated with communicating climate change, were really interesting (incidentally, I wrote my honours thesis on the role of language used in a public relations context within the environmental movement). A colleague of Cunningham’s at the BBC noted that part of the issue was the fact that so few senior editors were science graduates and therefore, were simply ‘not interested’ in stories about climate change. At the same time, the media would ultimately determine what people understood about climate change. Reflecting on the way it was initially reported, she says –

“Environmentalists’ was lazy shorthand for scientists, economists, diplomats and political leaders, I complained. ‘It sounds so dismissive, so, so…’ Alex finished his mouthful and then my sentence.
‘It’s just one up from bunny-hugger.’

Lastly, there are loads of facts and figures in this book about whales and their importance in our ecosystem. I won’t quote any of this stuff (even though the bit about whales as biological carbon dumps was mind-blowing) – instead, I’ll remind everyone of bioacoustician, Dr. Roger Payne’s recordings of whale songs in the seventies.

3.5/5

There were many unusual foods mentioned in this book, including caribou stew and pickled maktak. I went with something simpler –

‘Whales love chowder,’ I say, seizing on the chance to feed Max something other than chips, porridge and peanut butter. ‘Sometimes, when they’ve eaten their chowder,’ I tell Clyde emphatically, ‘they get a brownie.’
Max looks suspicious. Clyde insists that yes, the whales that frequent his café always have chowder first and brownie second.

*for example here, here, here and here.