So long, Voyagers

Lauren Fuge


I woke to the breaths of a whale as it made its barnacle-weighted passage through the islands. The huff drifted through my tent; in seconds I shed my sleeping bag cocoon and sloshed down through salal bushes to the beach, where the water was painted in dawn pastels. A mammoth silhouette broke the surface and arched over, exposing its finned back to the sky. The rush of air into its great lungs filled the morning.

It was headed south, past the end of the bay.

I ran, dodging oysters and skittish crabs dumped by last night’s high tide, feeling every seaweed-dressed rock through my worn sneakers. As I clambered around the point, the humpback surfaced again just offshore. Its breath was a mist of droplets against the mountains; the air fled from my own lungs. Its tail unfurled—a shape of impossible perfection against the sky-filled water—and it dove.

I was perched on the west coast of Canada, in an archipelago sandwiched between British Columbia’s Coast Mountain Range and Vancouver Island. Here, the glacially-carved channels sink hundreds of metres below the surface: a submarine match for the mountainous maze of islands climbing out of the ocean.

This place is new, geologically speaking. Sometimes I imagined I could feel the reel of the Earth beneath me, the shudders through pebbled beaches as the Pacific ocean plate drove deeper and deeper under the continent. Mountains are being built in real-time; my life is just passing through too quickly to notice them.

A small boat puttered through the channel on the far side, its white flanks glinting against the rainforested slope. A bird warbled; a seal bobbed up, a sleek hunter at the boundary of two worlds. Above me, the dawn light rolled over the slopes and set the arbutus trees aglow. Their burnished bronze bark was just beginning to peel off in curls, revealing peachy skin that reminded me of the gum trees on the street where I grew up—but I felt anything but homesick.

Three months previously, my body had been charged with anxiety. I’d come home from years of wandering to a restlessness that wouldn’t let me sleep. My eyes would snap open at three, four, five am, my heart thrumming like a baby bird’s and my feet desperate to walk—somewhere, anywhere. It wasn’t a new feeling; I’d long lived with a relentless pull towards the horizon, a compulsion to disappear into a vast unknown. But as the world expanded beneath my feet—Montreal to Munich, Ibaraki to Inverness, bullet trains to Buddhist temples—I’d grown increasingly frustrated. What, I wondered, was I seeking? What mechanisms were working inside of me to drive my roaming feet? I went home to Australia to try and still them, but soon found myself across the Pacific.

On this rocky point, my eyes filled with islands, the compulsion had quietened. Sunlight warmed my back and I watched as it shimmered off the humpback’s dorsal fin when it slid up for another breath, now a hundred metres further out into the channel. I found myself exhaling as it did. For now we shared this August world: clouds glinting on the mirror ocean, empty stomachs grumbling in the dawn. But summer was fading. Eventually, the whale would meander out of the islands and back into the Strait of Georgia, on the first leg of its mammoth journey south.

We were both born far from this coast, under sunlight that poured like gold from southern skies, and we both roamed north with hunger hollowing out our bones, guided by nothing but a half-memory of something we think we loved. We were both at home and a long way from it.

The currents of my life converged to deposit me here and the islands seeped under my skin. But on that morning in my first summer, I didn’t yet know that I’d return, drawn back by the forest and the endless sky, to paddle the intricate waterways as a guide.

The whale knew it would be back. All humpbacks know their well-worn sea roads. Each year, from their winter calving grounds at the Baja California peninsula in Mexico, they follow the contours of the North American coastline for thousands of kilometres. Some don’t stop until the water dips below freezing, and they spend the summer under the limitless Arctic sun. Others end their journeys earlier in the fragmented islands and fjords of British Columbia and Alaska. For six glorious months they feed, sifting two tonnes of krill per day—until it’s time to turn tail southbound once again.

There and back again. A purpose ingrained into each season of their lives, filled with both familiar places and a rhythmic forward motion.

During my island summers, I spent so much time among the humpbacks that I could hear their breaths a mile off, could spot bursting clouds of exhalations across glaring channels. I spent long afternoons watching them breach and play from the sun-warmed fibreglass of my kayak; at night, as I stargazed from my tent pitched a handspan above the high tide line, I’d hear their primal songs roll up along the ocean floor. The ethereal melodies seeped through my shivering skin, like a relic of an ancient time. I felt as if I was eavesdropping across millennia, the sound stirring some faint genetic memory deep inside me.

Come home.

*

Three hundred and sixty million years ago, the common ancestor of whales and humans crawled out of the lush waters of early Earth and set foot on dry ground for the first time. One of its descendants dove back into the dark embrace of the ocean 300 million years later, and eventually writhed and flowed into the form of whales and dolphins. Humans remained on land and we’ve been restless ever since. Homo sapiens reigned across Africa by 150,000 years ago before beginning our peopling of the world. Relentlessly we spread, ever-widening our horizons, first to Asia and Europe, then Australia, the Americas, and finally—in an incredible feat of innovation and imagination—across the Pacific.

Our explorations have historically yielded great rewards: new land, resources, food and knowledge, as well as the development of the complex tools and technology it took to get us there. But exploration can also be absurd and all-consuming, often in the pursuit of constructed glory; consider the golden age of polar discovery, when explorers raced to reach a patch of ice otherwise indistinguishable from every other patch around it. Of course, not everyone is driven to unknown places—while some are willing to risk their lives in the Antarctic or on Mars, others simply enjoy travelling or prefer to stay at home. You can line humans up on a spectrum, from the contentedly settled to those forever seeking the edges of the known.

Whales seek such edges, but by necessity; their lungs are evolution-bound to the surface. When whales fly skyward, spinning flanks dragging against gravity, I like to think they understand the urge to cross unknown boundaries—the pull from the depths up to the light. Humans, on the other hand, have been longing so acutely for the depths again that we have flung ourselves into interplanetary space.

The year I first crossed the Pacific, a speck of a spacecraft sailed out of the solar system. Voyager 2 was launched in the 1970s with its sibling, Voyager 1. For over a decade they danced through Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, revealing undreamed of secrets about these worlds, before casting themselves out of the solar system. Both Voyager 1 and 2 are now just beyond the grasp of the Sun, having passed through cosmic purgatory to enter the deep unknown.

Twenty billion kilometres from home, these machines are the first manmade objects to step outside the warm sphere of light that has guided all our days. Through them, we are literally on the frontier of interstellar space, pushing not only our physical edges but the limits of our knowledge.

Sometimes, travelling feels like launching myself into space, tipping over the edge to seek where the solar winds end. The Voyagers will never return from their missions and there will be no true return for me, just as there was none for our wandering ancestors as they spread across the planet. On voyages we change in ways we can’t anticipate. We mend, and fracture, and mend again, until we cannot return the same. Each step our ancestors took must have changed them, too, shaping how we evolved, how we built culture and society, how we formed and reformed our relationship with the Earth.

I wonder: is our longing to journey beyond the pale somehow genetically inbuilt? Is it a relic of our primal past, like the lungs of a whale remind it that it once had feet grounded in the dirt? Will this compulsion ever drive us one step too far over the edge?

Since our brains grew bigger and our hands grew cleverer, humans have become a force of change. Though the scale and tempo of the problem have accelerated since we pried coal from the Earth’s crust, we have been dramatically altering the land for tens of thousands of years. Our Palaeolithic ancestors were proficient hunters, capable of bringing down creatures much bigger than themselves. By depleting ecosystems of these ecological bankers—from Australia’s giant marsupials to America’s sabre-tooths—we diminished the productivity of the soils and plants that depended on them, before roaming onwards, seeking ever more bountiful lands.

At first, the Earth could maintain the delicate balance of its ecosystems. But now our surging population and insatiable industrial metabolism are outgunning the planet’s own forces, and we—hairless primates, just barely swung down from the trees—have become the dominant influence on the climate and environment, casting aside the Holocene and driving ourselves into the Anthropocene.

It’s no small thing to redefine a geological era, but the rocks tell us it’s true. Humans have scattered radioactive elements across the planet and stirred in concrete, soot from power stations, inconceivable mounds of plastic, and excess nitrous and phosphorous slewing from the soil. The Earth is diligently attempting to mend our mess and keep us within the bounds of a stable planetary system. But humans are relentless. The climate is warming and destabilising; the sea is sucking at our doorsteps; the forests fall too quick for us to hear. Thousands of species have been scythed down by our reckless hand, including some most of us have never heard of and even more we hadn’t discovered yet. And still, we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new land to develop.

Perhaps our constant desire to explore is the exact force propelling us into the Anthropocene.

Following our current compass bearing, the sedimentary layers of the Anthropocene will soon be filled with micro-pearls of plastics in the fossilised bodies of zooplankton and the glacially-paced atomic pings of buried nuclear waste, decaying over tens of thousands of years. Surely we don’t want the legacy of human exploration to be destruction. Surely we can reroute, using our incredible capacity for curiosity and discovery to reimagine our future on this planet.

Billions of kilometres from home, both Voyager spacecraft carry golden records spun with sounds from Earth—bottled messages alight on vast celestial seas. They represent a fraction of what it means to live on our blue planet, featuring greetings in dozens of languages and musical offerings from around the world. And on disk one, track four, are the songs of a humpback whale.

Hundreds or thousands or millions of years into the future, an interstellar traveller may detect a hunk of space junk drifting through the void. If they happen to bring it aboard, and happen to discover the record, and happen to translate the sound, then they won’t know of our destruction. Maybe they will hear those spine-tingling sequences of howls, moans, and cries, and for a moment—as I did on a starlit beach—they will feel strangely at home.