The whaling captain’s wife gave me a beer, which came in a small can and a piece of whale heart to eat. The meat was chewy, did not easily shred or disintegrate into fibres. It was clearly part of a whole, carried a message about entirety. After I swallowed it, I sat still and quiet. It took me down into the ocean, sounding, down below the light where benign goliaths swam by.
Adding to the trend of memoir through scientific investigation, environmental journalist Doreen Cunningham, at the lowest point in her life — unemployed single mother, living in a women’s hostel on the island of Jersey, with no prospect for improvement — made the rash decision to take out a large loan and bring along her two year old son on a loosely-planned adventure: to follow a pod of grey whales, from their birthing grounds off the Mexico coast, to their feeding grounds in the Aleutian Islands. Although she had no prior interest in grey whales specifically, Cunningham was entranced when she learned that theirs was about the longest annual migration of any mammal. And she had a secondary motive: to make her way back to the small Alaskan village of Utqiagvik and the man she had met and fallen in love with there, seven years earlier. Soundings is the narrative of these two adventures — with frequent interspersals of the story of Cunningham’s childhood on the island of Jersey, up to the challenging relationship with her son’s father and subsequent custody battle — and I found the whole thing to be charming. I liked Cunningham’s voice, I admired her chutzpah, and although her connection to whales felt a little bit tenuous, as an environmental journalist, I appreciated her explanation that whales are signal species, and their fate is our fate. I loved everything about this.
From there everything happened quickly. A string was pulling me, out of the window, into the sky, across the sea. The next day I left the hostel and moved into a friend’s attic room. I got a loan, organised visas. We would follow the mothers and babies from Mexico to the top of the world, I told Max. They would swim, and we would take the bus, the train, and the boat alongside them. I told myself I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live. Beneath the surface, secretly, I longed to get back to northernmost Alaska, to the community who kept me safe in the harsh beauty of the Arctic and to Billy, the whale hunter who’d loved me.
In Cunningham’s narrative “now”, we tag along as she attempts to wrangle an energetic toddler onto buses, trains, and charter boats along the western coast of North America; forever just making connections, cursing foggy views, and always just a day or two behind the migrating whales. This narrative is thoroughly human and relatable. In her intermittent story of seven years prior, she was on sabbatical from the BBC, with a bursary to help her study anything she liked, and initially, she intended to travel across the top of Alaska and Canada, asking the Indigenous peoples along the way about their lived experience with climate change. But when she arrived at her first stop of Utqiagvik and was invited by its Iñupiaq people to witness an upcoming bowhead whale hunt, Cunningham decided to stay put, soon finding a warmth and acceptance from these people that she had never before known. This narrative thread is engaging and exciting, with gorgeous nature writing of the frozen north, as well as a blossoming love story. The third thread — with stories from an unhappy family life and the fractious pony that was her only childhood balm — we learn something of what made Cunningham the woman she would become. Along the way, she shares facts about whales and climate change — although this really isn’t a science-forward book — and for me, this sort of adventure-as-memoir really works.
Here comes the grey whale from the beginning of time, say the fossils. They pose a question too: All this you know, now what? Human thought and intention are part of the global ecosystem, the most powerful driver of change, the most powerful obstacle that both we and the whales have encountered through millennia. We are writing the next chapter of the story of all life on earth.
This is more lyrical than one might expect from an “environmental journalist” (Cunningham is working at the BBC once more, encouraged that there’s no longer a policy in place to give time to a sceptic every time an actual climate scientist talks), and if the following doesn’t turn you off, you might enjoy this as much as I did (I’ll admit it’s a bit precious, but I like her):
I am woman, human, animal. I bore my child in water. We sang to the whales. We listened to them breathing. We listened to the sea. This book is what I heard.
Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery
Because Doreen and Billy watched the Inuit film The Fast Runner while they were together, I decided to enrich this experience by following the book with that movie. And what a great idea that was: maybe not set in Alaska among the Iñupiaq people, but this story set in the high Arctic -- with authentic costumes and English subtitles -- gave me a real sense of the wonder that Noreen must have felt on both of her whale-hunting adventures.
