[FATHOM] 1. Anachronism: a six-foot quantification of depth or breadth, originally indexed to a fingertip-to-fingertip measurement (or “arm-span”) and accounting for spools of cordage, cables, cloth, or other materials; commonly used to demarcate the extent of a water column; 2. An attempt to understand: a metaphor for reaching out to make sense of the unknown.
I learned about the sorts of whales we never see and why that might be so: I learned of the whale that has no name, the whale with two voices, whales with two pupils in each eye, and whales puppeted by storms on the sun. I discovered that whales have been the subjects of cuisines and conspiracies, that they have housed monsters and do still. I learned that we change the sounds of whales even where we do not make a noise, that humpbacks have pop songs, and that beluga have tried to speak human tongues. I learned about whale vision, bisonar, and memory: human grief, human love, and interspecies recognition. I set out to draw a few lines between myself, the stories I knew about whales, and the science of our changing seas. By the time I came to the end, I understood that these connections were far from esoteric concerns. Whales, I saw, can magnify the better urgings of our nature and renew those parts of us that are drawn, by wonder, to revise our place and our power in the natural world.
As author Rebecca Giggs tells it, seeing a juvenile humpback whale beached near her Sydney, Australia home — and waiting around with a crowd of others, helpless, as the massive creature died over the course of several days — caused her to question the mystery behind such beachings of seemingly healthy animals. And as she researched that question, Giggs was drawn further into the magnificence of whales, the history of their relationship with humans, the near extinction and incredible recovery of several species, and the more serious challenges they face today, even as most of the world has banned whale-hunting; Fathoms:The World in the Whale is the result of her whale-related research, memories, and travels. Written as equal parts memoir and science book, Giggs’ own thoughts and feelings about what she learns are always at the forefront — which, looking at others’ reviews, can be off-putting to those just looking for the science — and I appreciated everything that she shared in this book, even if some of the writing went over-the-top.
Fathoms is filled with fascinating information about our relationship with whales; from the Stone Age to the Space Age, they have literally loomed larger than life in our conscioussness. A smattering of facts:
• The clinks made by sperm whales last mere microseconds but are among the loudest single-source noises on Earth — louder than a Saturn V rocket — and can be heard over a distance of 1600 miles (from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland).
• Parts of whales used by humans have ranged from the baleen used in corsets and discipline sticks (from where the term “whaling on someone” comes) to the spermaceti (a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales) that lubricated both the looms of the Industrial Revolution and mechanisms inside ICBMs during the Cold War.
• A natural carbon sink, when a large (forty ton) whale dies at sea, two tons of carbon will eventually settle on the seafloor (an amount that would otherwise take two thousand years to accrue).
As for the over-the-top writing: Giggs often waxes poetical (there is more alliteration in the prose than could be accidental; each dusky sky is “empurpled”; our existence “embiggened” by the existence of whales) and she uses arcane vocabulary that sometimes enchanted me (the use of “ensorcelled” or "numen") but often rankled (“apotropaic” or “telluric”). My overall reading experience was positive, but passages like the following would stop me as I wondered if I liked them or not:
What environment was ever more shielded from our collective imagination than the underside of the sea surrounding Antarctica? Unlit omnisphere, far-fetched. White noise; ice shifting, krill krilling. Trundled by see-through salps, orbital sponges, and other questionably animate organisms, the seabed shilly-shallies into murk, lacking all tactility and aspect. No writer, in good conscience, could reach for a word like “terrain” to detail it. A void. The Southern Ocean is galactically dark. A mirror for the Vantablack of the cosmos.
Questions of style aside, Giggs had much to teach me about the pressures that modern-day whales face: their numbers may be rebounding in the decades since the (nearly) global moratorium on their hunting was put into place, but new threats come from the supercarriers that transport our goods over the oceans that disrupt migration pathways (I did not know that the fifteen largest ships annually emit as much carbon as all of the cars on the planet); the sonic air guns that are used for seismic mapping of the ocean floor to find oil deposits disrupt underwater whale calls, affecting mating and the sonar-location of prey; the warming and acidification of the oceans are melting the ice caps and impacting the various species at the base of the food chain; but maybe most impactfully, beached whales are being discovered with their bellies filled with our plastic goods, from countless shopping bags and nylon fishing nets to one whale that had swallowed an entire greenhouse. A ban on single use plastics might make us feel like we’re fixing the world, but I don’t know how to defend whales against swallowing something as large as a greenhouse when it gets blown out to sea from an Almerían hydroponics farm.
Though we may believe in the reality of being materially connected to many, many far-off things, it is only when we hear of these connections breaking, we can confirm that it’s true. Which might be the ultimate value of all these stories: to underline how large our lives are, when they can sometimes feel small and short, slotted into ever narrower silos and categories. The sea is not eternal and unchanging as once we imagined. But neither are we condemned to be changeless. After all, to say that our impacts are global coaxes us toward seeing that our powers to affect positive change are too.
Ultimately, I was charmed by this book because I was happy to learn what Giggs had learned, presented through the lens of her experience; otherwise, I could have just spent the afternoon Googling “whales”. The writing may have tipped towards excess at times, but that, too, was a part of the experience of one human being reaching out with enthusiasm and another — me — willing to be reached. Much to recommend in this; more effort is needed to save the whales.
The following weird passage struck me as something I definitely did like, and as it found no place in my review for Goodreads, I'll put it here:
Do you also recall hearing this? —that sand isn’t what’s recognized as a substance. It’s a scale. Any matter can become a sand if it’s ground right down. Glass, stone, bone, silicon. When every object is forced to self-same size, nothing retains the capacity to be divisibly miraculous. The numen loosens from the particles, particular on a fingerprint, then identical in a dune, and what magic persists drifts into our perception of supranatural forces. Which is to say, that magic resides in a feeling of duration; the haul of a future that’s already set to work decomposing us, scattering our knuckles, our ankles, our littler nodes of cartilage, out to the wind.
