It was a gentle-sounding crash, as gentle as the giant who had made it. Fifty feet of humpback whale breached the quiet, calm ocean; forty tons of living flesh and sentience crashed onto the water’s surface with an explosion of spray and foam unlike anything I could ever have imagined. In its wake, another awesome mammal gracefully silhouetted the horizon, effortlessly twisting against blue sky, an infinite pause as if still-life, and then it smashed the perfect crystal sea into fragments of sunlit beads.

From the bow upon which I was standing, leviathan had reawakened my soul to the self within me. The moment felt like an eternity. In the silence of the whales’ disappearance, I was spellbound.

And awed.

And sorry.

Not just for whales, not just for the tragedy of their murderous destruction; human greed over yielding grace, profit over power, death over what is alive, what is unique, what is necessary and indescribably beautiful. Nor was I merely sorry for the discoveries we have not yet found: what is the meaning of their eerie, soul-reaching, inexplicable songs? Mostly I was sorry for our alienation from them, our misfortune for having taken form—in a natural sense—so far below them. Unlike many of us, unlike most of us, whales are free.

Those were the only words I could find that day to describe how I felt in the presence of leviathan. Earlier that morning, I rested my gaze on the first whale I had encountered. I was leaning over the bow of that drifting boat, listening to the ocean slap the hull with a hollowness that reminded me just how far from the nearest shore we all were. It was a long way for me, from the emptiness of my alienated existence to the fullness of that moment, wishing the boat would tip just enough so I could reach down and touch the cool water with my fingers. And grasp home again.

And the Little River Band song in the back of my mind:

“Well, I was born in the sign of water / and it’s there that I feel my best / the albatross and the whales / they are my brothers…”

We had seen her earlier, sounding with calf, her flukes more graceful and flexible than I had imagined a whale’s could be; the sun reflected the essence of this-is-all-there-is-ness from the curve of her tail. And then she was gone. Now I waited, without time, for her reappearance, for the opportunity to see her once more; just a glimpse, just a flash of a moment to feel in touch with home again was all I wanted. All I had ever wanted.

Below me the water was a murky bluish-green, seeming to move only on the surface, as if the great sea was merely solid earth beneath the boat. Suddenly, the ocean turned a grayish-black—breaking all thought processes inside my head, leaving me only with image, with now-ness—as if a sea of algae drifted past, holding the sunlight at bay, as if the bottom of the ocean had lifted to the surface. Alongside the boat, the water had turned a bluish-white, a moving mirage of nothingness, elongated and jagged, like the eleven-foot fin of a humpback whale…

It took a moment for my brain to compute…

…like the eleven-foot fin of a humpback whale!

I choked on an indescribable emotion when leviathan broke the surface, drifting on the open ocean alongside our boat. She exhaled a fine mist skyward, its warmth and aliveness tickling my skin; a gift—and a memory—I would never forget. Life had never been grander, never been fuller or richer or more complete, than it was at that moment; to use another cliché, home is where the heart is.

And so it is to her, and to her kind—the giants and the pygmies, the breachers and the spy-hoppers, the dancers and the singers—that an issue of The Animals Voice Magazine was dedicated.

For them—and all those others like them—keep fighting the good fight.