TRAVEL | ARTIST JOURNAL | LOVE LETTERS  | JUNEAU, ALASKA

This is a love letter

by Mighty.Beautiful Art Studio

Not the first love letter I have written, and it won’t be the last, but a love letter to one of the greatest loves of my life nonetheless, a love I’ve traveled across the globe just for a chance to see a glimpse of one in person, a love I’ve dreamed about night after night and day after day, a love that calms me in times of chaos and a love that inspires me in times of despair.

It’s a love far more elusive than the mountains, far more precarious than the beach. It’s a love of mystery, of faith, of spirituality.

This is a love letter to the whales.

Whales have always held this wild kind of power in my imagination. So hidden. So foreign. So peaceful. So deadly. So… majestic. Whale song travels across the ocean, vibrations that become echoes across the universe. They have the power of celestial beings, taking care of the planet in ways most of us will never see, never understand, but they are there keeping watch over the ocean, making our air breathable and our land habitable. They are the closest evidence I have of what I’d imagine to be a truly godlike creature - something that can fly through the sea and leap through the air and sing love songs to each other and just seem to know things in their eyes.

I went whale watching in August in Juneau. It was freezing cold, one of the slow points in the pandemic, 50 of us on a boat in the mountain-lined bay, loud thunderous claps of brown and green and blue flashing by as the boat sped it’s way three hours up Tracy Arms Fjord to get to a glacier, ice-cold rain pelting the boat in all directions. I’d come to Juneau for a lot of reasons, but it was mostly, firstly, primarily, for this moment, all these moments out here in the bay, hoping to just see a whale in person that I had come here for. Of course, in my dreams, it’s warm and sunny outside and the sunset is beautiful and there aren’t two Trumpers sitting next to me talking to each other and so much rain you can’t see out the window. Here, in Juneau, it’s an actual adventure — at least, for me. My excitement must be palpable. My cameras are both armed and ready. I’m double-masked despite the humidity in the cabin; people mill about eating and drinking. I despise the cold and the snow, but I’ve never actually seen an iceberg, and I really wanted to see one before they are gone. I go back and forth between the cabin and the deck, scanning the ocean as much as possible, looking for signs of what’s under it’s mysterious liquid mirror ceiling.

I spend a lot of time in Texas thinking about icebergs and what the world is going to be like once they melt, and while some would say it’s way too much time, others would argue there is no limit to the amount of time we should be thinking about the climate crisis. I can honestly say that, although I’m not an expert, I lean toward the latter. It really seems to sound like the planet is getting screwed and we’re all going down on a sinking ship because we can’t come up with an economic system that rewards people for doing good and helping the environment instead of making a profit and pushing unsustainable industries and

… you don’t want a speech. You’re not here for that.

You’re here for a love letter to the whales, those celestial beings that seem to hold the eyes of gods and your ancestors and every living thing and all the stars in the sky together so tightly.

Or maybe that’s just what I see, not with my eyes, but with my soul.

I just really wanted to see them with me eyes, my own eyes, in person, and I … did not. I saw glimpses of them, an older humpback whale and a young one that kept coming up to the surface, my eyes tracing water skirts across the horizon as my body fought the bitter icy wind, shivering in sacrifice. See what I will do for you? I whispered out to the universe. Come out! Come out! Come out!

But they did not breach, did not really allow themselves to be seen, not where I was looking. They remained something I have only seen through the amazingly robust lenses of Planet Earth and National Geographic.

But I did see some icebergs. Massive, massive mountains of snow and ice that came crashing down in entire sheets, 10-story, 20-story, 40-story buildings crashing to the ground in seconds, every few minutes, waves rocking the ship, hitting the water like the embodiment of thunder. How old must all that ice have been, to stand so high just to die in a single moment in August 2021? Will it form back again somehow from icy winter winds, or is this the end?

I associate whales with wonder because they cause so much wonder within me. I close my eyes and imagine whales weaving in in out of the waves as easily as needles weave in of fabric, and that those waves are fabric, the fabric of space and time and somewhere close but impossible to get to, and imagine the ease with which those whales move between those waves, those worlds, those paradoxal upside-down worlds of air and sea. I wish I could just go there, be at one among them, but they are not like me. They are wild, free, greater, bigger, more in every single way than me. (I tried to swim with a whale shark once and nearly drowned, but it would have been a worthy end. ) I’m but a speck in the ocean to them, a land that I imagine, and science has begun to show, that they rule with grace, balance, intelligence, and fairness.

I want to live in that world, that world I imagine them in, under attack by opposing forces though it may be. I want to live in a world of the commongood, in a world of cycles and balances that make sense, steady as the tides as the moon rises.