The Long Migration

My family is obsessed with whales. Well, all wildlife really. But whales hold a particular kind of magic for us.

It starts with my Nana, born in England but spent the first twenty years of her life longing for warm water and the kind of sun that soaks into your bones. She is the kind of person who will not pass a tide pool without stopping. Who knows every bird at the feeder and which ones come back every year. Who believes, without any uncertainty, that the animals we share this world with deserve our attention and our wonder. 

My dad spent half of his adolescent years on the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, where the ocean and its inhabitants are central to tradition and culture. There, you learn early on to respect what lives beneath the surface. He carried that reverence into a career with the United States Coast Guard, spending years protecting the waters that had shaped him. 

For me, that same love was inevitable.

I'm not saying every family vacation is deliberately planned around whale sightings, but somehow, they find their way in. 

The first time I ever saw one I was 7, standing in my home waters of Virginia Beach. I remember the stillness before it. The way the water held its breath, and then the slow, impossible rise of something ancient breaking the surface. At 7 years old, I was almost offended. The world was far bigger and stranger and more wonderful than anyone had bothered to tell me yet.

The next whale I saw was a humpback off the shores of Maui. There's something about watching a humpback breach in Hawaiian waters that feels almost ceremonial. The spray catches the light, the surface churns. You're just a person, small and stunned and grateful.

That trip was one year before my family moved from Virginia to San Diego, California. We packed everything we owned into boxes and drove across the country to start a new life on the other coast. San Diego became home, and the Pacific became our new backyard. Over 8 years there, every time family flew in from the East Coast, it was a familiar conversation. Are we going whale watching? We went a handful of times. Gray whales mostly, making their slow and steady way along the California coastline. Each trip felt like a reunion.

But the last time I saw a whale was the best one yet. Juneau, Alaska!

If you know anything about whales, you know they are extraordinary travelers. Every year, they make one of the longest migrations of any mammal on Earth. They feed in the cold waters of Alaska and the Arctic through the summer, then turn south and swim thousands and thousands of miles to warmer waters. 

Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean. They do it instinctually. By hunger, and by something written so deeply into them that no amount of ocean between them and their destination can talk them out of it.

Standing on that boat in Juneau, watching a humpback surface, its spout rising, I caught myself wondering: is it possible? Could this be the same whale I watched off Maui all those years ago? The math makes it almost laughable. And yet… They swim those same routes, season after season. Alaska to Hawaii, the Arctic to Mexico, and back again. The ocean is enormous, but the overlap felt worth wondering about.

I think about that migration often. How these creatures spend their lives between places chasing warmth, then returning north when it's time, and somehow carrying all of it with them. I understand that more than I expected to.

I have lived on the Atlantic and the Pacific. I have called Virginia Beach and San Diego home, and stood on the shores of Hawaii where my dad grew up. On the coldest winter days, I catch myself longing for the particular quality of Hawaiian light, or the way a San Diego afternoon smells and feels surrounded by friends. The people who shaped me are scattered across coastlines. The places that made me, me, don't share a zip code.

For a long time, I thought that meant something was missing. Like I was supposed to feel more settled than I do. But standing on that boat in Juneau, watching that humpback disappear back into the water, I understood. The whale doesn't grieve the distance. It just swims it, season after season, carrying everything it needs.

You can spend your whole life looking for home. Or, like whales, you can carry it with you.

-Alyssa