Whale

Summer is always my favourite time to read and this is also the season for our family vacation. 

A useful guide for book choice is the theme of our trip. An essential read after a sea turtle island stay, as what we experienced last month, would be a book written by marine biologist. 

This week, we traveled to Andenes located in the Vesterålen in Northern Norway. Long a popular whale safaris excursion destination, Andenes is the prime location for meeting humpbacks and sperm whales. Once you have seen them, it's impossible to forget, just as if you never saw them, it would be impossible to describe.

To go with the whale watching experience, my book of choice is Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Rebecca Giggs wrote this book, the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, after pushing a beached humpback whale back out into the sea. For the three days that humpback eventually expired off the coast of Perth, Rebecca Giggs experienced a very personal reflection on our relationship with sea creatures. Her narrative on whalefall is scientific and romantic at the same time. Whalefall, in case you haven't heard of this term, is what happened after whales died in mid-ocean without being washed into the shallows. Their massive bodies sink and decompose on the descent. The journey of being pecked at by seabirds, fish, swimming crabs, and sharks, lasts for weeks or months. 

The bones and the decomposing blubber of the dead whale turn out to be untold stories of our ecosystem, embedded into the mysterious basement floor of the Earth. A deep story: deeper than I could have fathomed.