Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

The Arctic tern has the longest migration of any animal. It flies from the Arctic all the way to the Antarctic, and then back again within a year. This is an extraordinarily long flight for a bird its size. And because the terns live to be thirty or so, the distance they will travel over the course of their lives is the equivalent of flying to the moon and back three times.”

Nobody needs to be told of the extinction of the animals; for years now we’ve been watching news bulletins about habitat destruction and species after species being declared first endangered and then officially extinct.

There is hardly anything wild left, and this is a fate we are, all of us, intimately aware of.

Mam used to tell me to look for the clues. “The clues to what?” I asked the first time. “To life. They’re hidden everywhere.” I’ve been looking for them ever since, and they have led me here, to the boat I will spend the rest of my life aboard. Because one way or another, when I reach Antarctica and my migration is finished, I have decided to die.

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar.”

There are very few people, in my understanding of the world, who offer tenderness so freely.

Without my permission, something in me seems to have turned itself toward him.

We’re the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we’re the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot and not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe. It’s a miracle we’re here at all, when you think about it like that.”

A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.

she owns this place and it owns her,

“How do you expect to live sustainably if you can’t garden properly?”

Next we spend time in the chicken coop, a great big maze of a space, with wooden houses in which the birds sleep and patches of grass for them to scratch around in. There are twenty-three in total, and they’re so used to people that they let us hold and stroke them. Their speckled feathers feel silky to the touch, their soft clucking is almost motherly, and I love it here.

“Did we upset her?” and Anik’s voice replying, “Something darker did that,” and I’m walking for the hills and shore and sea. I take off all my clothes and wade out into the icy water and the pain is immense and also nothing nothing nothing.

He said he’s fascinated by the simplicity with which I live, and envious, and I thought it curious because I’ve never thought of it that way. When he asked me what I really want, deep down, all I could think of was to walk and swim, so I guess he’s right.

He doesn’t know this ocean and yet I think some ancient heart of him knows all oceans, the way some ancient heart of me does.

He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.

I can’t help but think no animal, ever, should live in a cage.

But I need take nothing from you, Niall, my love. I’d rather give you something. The nature of me. The wilderness inside. They are yours.

I think I dreamed this, once.

There’s still the wild. Quiet. And then, Could you wait for me? Just a little longer? Always.