Posted by jessmil on 08/04/2006 11:14 am

The following posting is from Carroll, who is onboard in the Bering Sea...

It’s six a.m. on August 3, and I’m on bridge watch again as we travel the last few hours to Dutch Harbor and the end of the expedition. It’s dark out, and quiet, leaving me some time to reflect on the last 35 days and 3000 miles in the Bering. 3155 miles to be exact.

When I came out here, I naively expected days of high adventure, racing through the waves in a RIB to get fluke photos of whale after whale. What I found was something slower, quieter, and far grander than I’d imagined. Looking at maps, and flying between continents in hours, it’s easy to believe Walt Disney that it’s a small world. But the world is only small until you get out into it. Spend some time moving at a natural pace, or something approaching one, and you find that the world is truly immense. And in this immensity there still remain some vast expanses where human presence is the rare exception, rather than the
rule, where wildness still holds sway. The Bering Sea is one of those precious, blessed places. And in it, you begin to understand that it is we who are small, not the world around us.

Even with years of experience seeking out wildlife on five continents, I still expected nature to be when and where I wanted it to be, instead of all around me. I expected fireworks, instead of starlight. But nature moves at her own pace and to her own rhythms, and to survive and be content in the Bering Sea you must succumb to those rhythms, become a part of them. I can’t say this was my own discovery. I learned it from the Unangan people of the Pribilof Islands, and the Yup’ik of St. Lawrence—people who, unlike so many of us, still live at nature’s pace, know her faces and her moods, and add their own small, humble voices to her eternal song.

I also learned it from Dave, our onboard scientist for the second leg, who knew the places where we could most reliably find whales because he has spent years, not weeks or days, patiently waiting in those places for the whales to come in their own time, rather than his. I’m sure he didn’t mean to impart any life lessons with his stories, but there you go. The best scientists have, like the islanders we met, accepted the unpredictable comings and goings of their subjects, and adapted their work to allow for that. Working to understand nature on her own terms, rather than their own.

And I think this acceptance and this understanding lies at the heart of what we learned here, and of what we accomplished. We called this expedition “The Bering Sea: A Look from Within” (George’s name. Nice work, George). We set out with the goal, not of confronting villains or righting imminent wrongs, but of developing a deeper understanding of the forces that are changing the Bering, and building bridges to the people who can help enrich that understanding—the scientific community through data and analysis, the local communities through human experience. In our collaborations with Dave and Craig and other scientists, in our community meetings in St George and Savoonga, I think we achieved that. I know we achieved that. And it’s something to be proud of.

We also set out to document the threats to the Bering, and to share what we found with the rest of the world. With you. We certainly saw plenty of trawlers. And we gathered powerful stories about the effects of trawling and of global warming on the local peoples here. But for me, the most powerful evidence of threats, and of the changes going on here, came slowly and quietly, as I compared the names on maps—Otter Island, Seal Island, Sea Lion Rocks—to the empty beaches before my eyes, and the stories of how those beaches used to be. There are still thousands of sea lions and walruses, tens of thousands of fur seals. But once, not so very long ago, there were so very many more. In too many places, the names on empty beaches have become epitaphs to populations that were. I could never have truly understood that without coming here.

But more than proving that there are threats, this expedition showed us again and again just how much remains that is worth protecting. The Bering Sea is home to 80% of our country’s seabirds. And I think we saw all of them. In numbers that would boggle the mind. Northern fur seals in numbers that could survive and thrive if we’d only protect their food supply. Gray whales, and humpbacks, and killer whales and walruses. Stellar sea lions. And right whales that maybe, just maybe, if we’re very careful, could find their way back from the brink of extinction. And human beings, who I now understand are as much a part of this ecosystem, and as dependent on its health, as every other form of life we encountered.

This is what the Bering Sea had to teach us. It was a lesson worth learning.

As we headed into Dutch, much more tired and a little bit wiser than when we began, we were suddenly surrounded by birds. Shearwaters. Hundreds of thousands of them, flocked so close they covered the sea like a carpet, and filled the sky like storm clouds. Not for moments, but for miles. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen, or expect ever to see again. Until I return to the Bering. Happens here all the time, apparently.

As we sailed through the bird storm, a pod of Dall’s porpoises began bow-riding the ship. Beautiful, frenetic little animals darting back and forth under the bowsprit at lightning speed, then breaking the surface just long enough to send rooster tails of spray into the air. They stayed with us for a minutes that felt like hours, then vanished as quickly as they’d come. Leaving no sign of where they’d gone.

And as we entered the harbor and the promise of home, there, at last were our humpback whales. Blowing and diving and fluking in the waves. Nature’s fireworks. At her own pace; and in her own time.

It was a beautiful send off. A fitting end. And a nice way to start my next journey. Three days and four thousand miles to home.

I’ll be home soon, Kate.

Love, Daddy.