The Thing About the Cold

Ashleigh Scully

       For several weeks, the Chugach Range became the entire shape of my world, a place so immense and so magnificently indifferent to ordinary human concerns that everything I left behind seemed to evaporate almost immediately. We helicoptered onto the glacier carrying everything required to live, climb, sleep, eat and endure, including two hundred and seventy pounds of food, which sounds like an impressive quantity until you hit week three and all that remains are hashbrowns and the dust of chai tea powder. When the helicopter finally lifted away, its blades tearing at the air before the machine shrank into the distance, there was a finality to it—as though the last thread connecting us to civilization had been severed. There were no roads, no schedules in the ordinary sense, no opportunity to change your mind and prefer to be somewhere with central heating. There was only ice, rock, snow, sky, wind and a small collection of people who had voluntarily come to live on a glacier and had apparently considered this was an excellent idea. 

       The peaks rose around us in every direction, enormous walls of white, blue and gray whose faces changed constantly with the light. Sometimes they glowed beneath the sun, sometimes they vanished entirely into cloud and howling snow, and sometimes they projected dark shadows onto the ice that forced us to retreat into our tents. 

       Each morning we stepped outside, clipped into our rope teams, and began again. The rhythm was wonderfully primitive. Put one foot in front of the other. Watch the person ahead. Feel the rope. Test the snow. Keep moving. The usual machinery of life—the unfinished conversations, minor anxieties, emails, obligations and other invented emergencies—had nowhere to go. There was no room for them when the snow beneath your feet might conceal a crevasse and the weather could change its mind faster than you could. The future became a distant abstraction, the past an equally necessary luxury, and the entire universe contracted to the few feet of snow directly in front of my boots. 

       We dug out kitchens out of the snow, carved places to cook and eat into the glacier, and constructed the small infrastructure of civilization one shovel stroke at a time. Snow became walls, floors, insulation, shelter, furniture, and, eventually, an almost unreasonable amount of work. We built enormous wind walls around the tents because the wind in the Chugach was not weather so much as an opinion, and it expressed that opinion loudly. I developed a particular enthusiasm for building these walls, partly because they were useful and partly because they gave me a legitimate reason to avoid other responsibilities. Ice blocks had to be cut, carried, stacked, adjusted, rebuilt, and occasionally stared at with grave concentration. I became unexpectedly skilled at digging them out of the glacier, which was convenient because the glacier had provided an infinite supply and because almost any task involving a shovel could be made to look important. 

       Cooking, meanwhile, presented a more complicated problem. I seemed to possess an inadvertent inability to cook, although in retrospect the word “inadvertent” may be granting me more innocence than the situation deserves—the reality was, I developed an intense desire not to. There were always other things that urgently needed doing. The wind wall could be taller. The kitchen could be deeper. Gear could be reorganized. Snow could be moved from one location to another for reasons that, if questioned, became increasingly difficult to articulate. If all else failed, I could simply walk away carrying a shovel with the solemn expression of a person engaged in essential alpine infrastructure. Somehow, the prospect of preparing dinner never acquired the same heroic appeal. 

       The wind itself could dominate an entire night. I remember lying inside the tent while it roared overhead—a deep, continuous sound that seemed less like weather than an enormous animal moving across the glacier, screaming. The fabric shuddered and snapped beneath it, every gust reminding us how thin the distinction was between our little shelter and the forces outside. Sleep became a negotiation some days. The cold pressed through every layer, the tent strained against its anchors, and above my head hung a collection of foul-smelling socks, drying—or perhaps merely existing—in the warmest air available. They were suspended there with the quiet confidence of objects that had long since ceased to care whether they were pleasant to be around. I would lie beneath them, listening to the wind batter the tent and wondering whether the walls would hold, while also contemplating the rather more immediate question of whether my tentmate’s socks might eventually fall directly onto my face. 

       Occasionally, the wind stopped. 

       The silence that followed could be almost more overwhelming. Snow absorbs the sound until the world seems suspended, as though the air itself has softened. Walking through that landscape, our rope teams stretched quietly across the glacier, each person separated by distance but connected by the line between us. The mountains were never truly silent. Somewhere across the range an avalanche might begin with a distant crack or rumble before gathering itself into a tremendous roar, snow and ice breaking loose from slopes we could barely see. The sound traveled across the valley and then disappeared again into the vastness. They looked still, but they were constantly moving. They did not require our presence to make them dramatic. 

       The sun brought its own form of violence. When it emerged, it could feel almost aggressive in its brightness, reflecting upward from the snow until there was nowhere left to hide. The light came from above and below, sunglasses became essential, and even through them the landscape seemed determined to burn itself into your eyes. Skin burned, lips cracked, and exposed cheeks and noses could feel as though they were being baked while the rest of the body remained wrapped in layers against the cold. Alaska seemed to operate according to extremes, as I always knew it had, and every summit came with the understanding that it was only halfway. 

       That lesson became one of the clearest truths of the entire experience. Reaching the top of the peak was not the conclusion—it was the midpoint of the responsibility. The summit could be beautiful, and sometimes breathtakingly so, with the entire range unfolding around us in every direction, but standing there did not mean the mountain was finished with us. We still had to descend. We still had to cross the terrain we had climbed, navigate the glacier, manage the ropes, assess the snow and return safely to camp. The summit was a moment. The mountain doesn’t recognize accomplishment. It simply continues to exist, and you have to find your way back through it. 

       Over the course of those few weeks, we climbed different peaks surrounding our camp, each one revealing a different version of the landscape and a different challenge. Some days began with long approaches across the glacier while others demanded steeper climbing and more deliberate movement. The mountains seemed impossibly large when we first arrived, but slowly they became familiar. We learned the shapes of the surrounding peaks, the ridges, crevasses, the slopes that caught the wind, the places where snow accumulated. The range began to feel like less of an unknown landscape and more like a living map we were gradually learning to read. 

       I also made it my personal mission to document this education for posterity, which meant becoming, without consulting the group, the official photographer. I carried my camera everywhere and developed an admirable determination to produce it at the least appropriate moment. While everyone else was concentrating on route-finding, managing ropes, dealing with weather, or trying not to fall into a hole, my glove slowly let go of my ice axe and reached for my camera dangling from my backpack. There was always something that was worth documenting: a dramatic ridge, a sunset, someone halfway through a crevasse rescue, a person emerging from a tent looking as though they had just been exhumed. The camera became another piece of equipment I was apparently incapable of leaving alone. 

       The group made the experience, more than anything else.  We were all around the same age, which gave the expedition a particular energy, and despite the seriousness of the environment, there was so much laughter. We shared stories while cooking, poked fun after long days, sat together in the snow and huddled in the cold. It was remarkable how quickly we connected when stripped of the distractions of ordinary life. We had no restaurants to go to, no bars, no phones demanding our attention, no easy entertainment waiting at the end of the day. We couldn’t even play cards. The glacier soaked them up and the wind attempted to steal an ace every time we broke out the deck. We only had stories. 

       Those evenings were some of my favorite moments. After the climbing and training and constant concentration of the day, we sat together in camp, tired and hungry, taking shifts cooking and cleaning bowls, laughing while the sun made its way behind the peaks. Each night, the shadow of the disappearing sun would cast a sudden, eternal cold over the glacier, as though someone had switched off a furnace. Morale alone would determine the few who decided to spend a few extra minutes outside watching the sky turn pink. Oftentimes, it involved running laps around the perimeter or digging ice blocks to build up the wind wall until our bodies were warm—and then diving headfirst into our tents and sleeping tentmates. 

       Boredom, however, eventually became its own mountain to climb. On one particular occasion, I began digging a hole straight down into the glacier. At first it was merely something to do. Then it became a project. Then, it became an increasingly ambitious subterranean enterprise. I kept digging until it was deep enough that I was no longer visible from the surface. Somewhere above me were the peaks, the tents, the wind walls, the entire grand spectacle of Alaska. Below, there was me, enthusiastically excavating a personal glacier bunker. Mountaineering, I discovered, contains a surprisingly thin line between exploration and becoming a mildly determined subterranean rodent. 

       Despite being completely off the grid, I felt more connected than I often do in ordinary life. There was no need to manufacture an experience because the experience was already there. The simple things became enough: a warm meal, dry socks, a conversation, a joke, the relief of getting back to camp, and the slight sting of a boiling hot water bottle at the end of your sleeping bag. The absence of convenience made everything feel more meaningful. 

       The nights were their own kind of education. Sometimes I would lie awake listening to the wind batter the tent, aware of how little separated me from the immense forces outside. The walls we had built from snow were temporary, our camp was temporary, and even our presence was temporary. The glacier had existed long before us and would continue changing long after we left. The peaks did not need us. They did not become more beautiful because we were there or less beautiful when we were gone. We were simply passing through. So much of ordinary life revolves around the illusion that our concerns are enormous and permanent. On the glacier, permanence belonged to the landscape, not to us. 

       That realization has stayed with me because ordinary life is so often organized around the opposite assumption. We behave as though our concerns are permanent, as though every inconvenience deserves immediate attention, as though every small problem is an emergency and every achievement ought to announce itself loudly. The glacier had no interest in any of this. It did not care who reached the summit first, who took the best photo, who built the biggest wind wall, or who forgot their sleeping pad. The mountain did not award points for any of it. 

       During the days, that perspective translated into movement. When I was tired, when my legs were heavy, when the altitude or cold or wind made everything feel harder, there was nothing to do except keep moving. The mind became quiet because the body demanded everything. I began to understand that endurance is not always some dramatic act of courage. Sometimes it is simply continuing. Sometimes it is accepting that the only way through something immense is to make yourself small enough to deal with it one step at a time. 

       And then there was the completely unglamorous reality of actually living there, which had a way of puncturing whatever grand mountaineering narrative we might have been tempted to construct about ourselves. Yet our daily concerns could still be wonderfully ridiculous. We could spend hours navigating glaciers and climbing peaks, then return to camp and have a serious dispute about whose socks were responsible for the smell in the tent. We could build elaborate defenses against hurricane-force wind and then argue who had moved the stove. I could photograph a breathtaking mountain sunrise and then spend the afternoon digging myself underground because I was bored. 

       We had four tents spread across the glacier, three of them holding three people and ours holding four, which meant that our particular corner of the expedition was less an alpine shelter than a long-term social experiment in proximity. Every piece of gear had to occupy the exact amount of space available to it, and every person had to learn the choreography of getting dressed, getting out, retrieving something, or turning over without inadvertently taking out three other people in the process. Privacy became theoretical, personal space became a historical concept, and the phrase “I just need to grab something” could trigger a sequence of movements that involved half the tent. Yet there was a comfort to it at night when the wind was roaring and the tent fabric was snapping under its force, because the same cramped little space that made everything inconvenient also became the place where we laughed the hardest, traded stories, invented jokes, and eventually developed the kind of inside language that requires almost no explanation because everyone already knows exactly what happened. 

       The humor became its own form of camp infrastructure. We had recurring jokes that became progressively less funny to anyone who had not been there and progressively funnier to us. A phrase overheard during a long day could become a punchline for the next week—someone’s particular way of doing something could be quietly imitated until everyone was trying not to laugh in the kitchen. A minor inconvenience could acquire an elaborate mythology entirely disproportionate to the event itself. We would be sitting around our snow kitchen, exhausted from a day out on the ropes, discussing the weather, the route, or whether conditions were good enough for the next objective, and one person would make a single reference to something that had happened three days earlier and suddenly the whole group would be losing it. 

       I also managed to contribute a memorable piece of material by forgetting my sleeping pad, which is the sort of mistake that becomes much funnier once you realize you are going to be living with the people who witnessed it for the next three weeks. The sleeping pad had one fairly straightforward job: create a small layer of insulation between my body and the glacier. Mine was not there. There was no heroic explanation, no intentional sacrifice, just the deeply unimpressive realization that I had somehow managed to leave behind one of the things specifically designed to prevent me from sleeping directly on the snow in Alaska. That first night, I discovered that a sleeping bag, while excellent at many things, is not actually a substitute for several inches of insulation beneath your body. The cold came straight through the tiny fabric of the tent, and sometime during the night, in what I can only assume was an entirely subconscious act of resource acquisition, I migrated across the tent and woke up with half my body resting on one of my tentmate’s sleeping pads. 

       This was not an arrangement we had discussed. 

       There was no formal agreement regarding the redistribution of sleeping surfaces, and yet sometime in the night I had apparently decided that the glacier belonged to me only in principle and that the warmer section of the tent was where I would be spending the remainder of my unconscious hours. Morning brought the discovery, followed by the inevitable laughter, and from that point forward my sleeping pad situation became part of the group’s unofficial folklore. In ordinary life, forgetting a sleeping pad would only be an annoying packing error. On a glacier, it felt like the end of my life. I could have spent the next three weeks accomplishing something genuinely impressive and I suspect I still would be remembered, at least in part, as the person who responded to inadequate insulation by slowly invading someone else’s sleeping bag territory. 

       The four person tent also created a peculiar kind of intimacy that I doubt could be replicated anywhere else. There was no such thing as disappearing for a while, because there was nowhere to disappear to. If you wanted solitude, your options were essentially to walk several feet into the snow and stand there by yourself, which was less relaxing than it sounds, or to stare silently at the tent wall while three other people continued existing inches away from you. Another method, one my fellow tentmate adopted, was simply to pretend to be asleep—to cover your entire face with the exception of your mustache, and open your eyes only when the conversation took a particular direction of interest. 

       We learned each other’s rhythms, the sounds people made when they were waking up, the particular rituals of getting ready, who took forever to pack and who seemed capable of being ready in seconds, who could make a joke at the exact moment everyone was exhausted enough to need one. The tent became its own little universe, and the absurdity of four people occupying a space meant for three somehow made it feel more like a home than any of us expected. 

       Looking back, I remember the peaks, of course. I remember the blue shadows on the snow, the avalanches rolling across distant valleys, the extraordinary light, the silence after the wind, and the feeling of standing on a summit surrounded by a landscape that seemed to have no edge. But I also remember the things that should, by comparison, have been insignificant—laughing until we could barely breathe, sharing stories inside a freezing tent, digging ice blocks, building walls, stealing warmth, and pulling out my camera at exactly the moment everyone wished I wouldn’t. 

       The mountains reminded me that achievement is temporary, discomfort is survivable, and the summit is never the end of the story. You still have to come down. You still have to keep moving. You still have to depend on the people around you. Somewhere in between the summits and the storms, the silence and the laughter, the endless shoveling and ridiculous business of simply staying warm, the mountains stripped life down to its barest truths: keep moving when the way ahead is hard, trust the people on the rope beside you, be grateful for warmth, for food, for laughter, for the small comforts that become enormous when they are scarce. The peaks never cared whether we succeeded, and the glacier never asked us to prove anything. It simply endured, as it had always done, immense and indifferent beneath the sky. We were temporary—the footsteps fading in the snow, the wind walls slowly collapsing, the laughter disappearing into the cold. Perhaps that was the lesson. That life is not made meaningful by conquering the landscape, but by being aware enough to notice it while we are passing through. 

The Forgiveness of Leviathans

    I was served whale once. Minke whale. To be fair, I was at the top of the globe during that time—the summer of 2023, in Svalbard’s Arctic Ocean, two degrees shy of the North Pole and far north of the modern-feared North Sea that hugs the coastline Norway steals from Sweden. It felt like the edge of the world, the kind of place where maps blur and the imagination takes over, where the water stretches endlessly and the sky feels closer than it should.
     I didn’t eat the whale, all charred and black on a flimsy paper plate. Pieces of meat were husked onto other flimsy paper plates of the unfamiliar group in line behind me. Most were from Scandinavia. I met a few girls from Estonia. The rest I exchanged quick glances with, picking up on conversations in languages I tried to learn over the years. Russian was a little out of my league, but I did my best. The only thing I picked up on was that everyone seemed to be enjoying the whale but me.
     I gave the whale to my dad because I couldn’t fathom wasting it just because I couldn’t stomach it. I watched him carefully cut and bite each piece until all that remained was grease, char, and remnants of his salad that accompanied the great fish (mammal) that once roamed the seas below the ship we ate on. I knew he would eat it because he isn’t wasteful. It was better off in his stomach than in the trash. I had a hard time accepting that if I looked out the window, people stood smiling and photographing pods as they surfaced calmly through the water—yet those same people came inside to eat the very thing they came here to see. My dad didn’t eat the whale because he wanted to. He ate it because that’s what people do. The whales are—and have been—the prize, and the water our game.
     In the United States it’s not popular to eat whale. Perhaps we are shaken with the abominations our ancestors committed—slaughtering and nearly wiping out major whale species to light the cities of our nineteenth century homes, ripping baleen from bowheads so ladies could have hoop skirts by the time the yearly ball came around. Yet little of this is taught. Every time I zoom into the whaling industry I am disgusted by the violence, stench and grit, and every time I zoom out I see how necessary it was for people of that time. Today I flip on my bedroom light without a thought. Back then, fathers left their families for months to years, chasing creatures across violent seas to light homes not only their own, but across the world. The alternatives were inadequate, dim, unreliable. The promise of light—steady, bright, dependable—was enough to send men into the unknown.
     I began researching because I thought I’d prove killing whales wasn’t vital—but it was to the people and economies of the time. I think about the echoes minke whales sing underwater, low and haunting, traveling distances we can barely comprehend. I think of their smooth skin glistening at the surface, catching the light in ways that feel almost deliberate, almost performative. Perhaps if I invoke this picture, those Scandinavians, those girls from Estonia, maybe they’d turn down their whale meat too. Maybe my dad would have a dozen flimsy paper plates before him. Even still, I refused to eat the meat of a whale whose existence was doomed anyway. Must be bad luck, I thought, or maybe just bad timing—to love something so deeply that you arrive only after its near destruction.
     There is an old photograph in my bedroom of a wooden whaleship stuck in ice. Somewhat capsized, somewhat intact, somehow surviving. I look at it every night. It reminds me of sailing that far north, where our ship pushed through pack ice and the sound of the frozen ocean splitting sent a thunder rippling forward. I wondered about the creatures below us, moving silently through dark water untouched by sunlight. I wondered how far their songs traveled, how long they could swim beneath the ice before needing air, before needing to return to the surface where we waited. Our ship left a path in the ice in the wake. I liked to think we were guiding them north, off the edge of the world.
     The first time I saw a whale was in 2010, when I was eight years old, aboard the National Geographic SeaBird from Sitka to Juneau. I had never known trees so tall or water so cold to the touch. I had never known rain like it poured out there, or how yellow the beak of a bald eagle looked as it flew by. I also had never known time change. I woke the entire ship at five in the morning. The midnight sun crept through my cabin window and I saw a fluke make its way to the depths. A pod of humpbacks surrounded us—breaching, spouting, playing. I woke everyone. I pounded on doors, shouted down hallways, unable to contain it. After breakfast, the captain called me up to his cabin and went over the rulebook with me. Apparently some people signed up to sleep in and not to see whales. So I woke at five every morning for the rest of the trip, scanning the vast horizon of flickering light in hopes for another fluke. Only those times, I kept the whales to myself.
     The abundance of nature captivated me out in the last frontier, a place so vastly different from my home in New Jersey. Eleven years later I returned. The water was placid and mirrored the Alaskan range and the bits of snow that still collected at the top. The fisherman set out for their daily catch and I scanned the horizon of flickering light and waves in hopes of seeing another fluke. And their blood that once stained the water and the oil that strangled the waves had stopped long before ships like the SeaBird toured us through the last frontier. But now oil comes from deep within the Earth, and the blood stays below, tangled in nets and lines that snare the gentle giants. That oil once boiled from blubber was revolutionary in the 1850s. I promised the mountains, the water, the light that I would do something about it. And it’s led me to the corners of the world, places far more north than a calm shoreline in the early, southern Alaskan sun. Where the dinosaurs of their kind roam in the uncharted swells of the Arctic Ocean, where the ice used to capsize the grand wooden ships of the whalers that navigated the seas searching to light the cities of the globe. For it was necessary, I admit now, in our advances at the time, and yet they’ve returned. They still venture out into coves filled with ships, swimming slowly with silent breaths, forgiving to the horrors of the past, sending their flukes out into the deep and stretching across the horizons of the world.
     America, for more than a century, was raised on Herman Melville’s fiction of associating whales with violence—and pinning man and whale against one another. The success of whaling overshadowed the power of the ocean itself. Nations massacred the seas to establish dominance, and for a young United States, we were eager to prove something to old England. When whaleships left Nantucket, the entire town gathered. Wives hid tears. Owners prayed for oil and safe return. Ships creaked, sails snapped, gulls dove. Men sailed into the unknown for light. Millions of whales were killed, and greed united oceans in silent witness.

       Once the ship left port the masts creaked and ropes danced across the sky. Sails lowered and flapped aggressively in the wind, encouraging the dark sea to creep up the sides of the ship with each clash. The gulls dove and screeched amongst the edges where the ships cutthroat path disturbed the small fish the gulls swept down with a gulp. Whale pins clicked together, swaying and twirling on the experienced whaler’s lapels. The stars and the stripes waved in the wind and the men on the ships sailed off to the horizon. The island, a cult of greed and trade, prepared to use oil to quench their first for light. For aside from New Bedford, no one dared to challenge the little island that could, and no one dared to challenge the heart and spirit of a Nantucket whaleman out at sea. In the distance, the town of Nantucket stood in silence, hoping for wealth and oil while dark clouds gathered within a commercial sky.
     The first time I saw a whale underwater was in Tonga in 2025. Slipping into glassy water, hearing their songs travel through me—it was unlike anything I expected. I spent a week photographing humpbacks, but I felt grief each time I stepped onto a boat, scanning for breath like the whalers once did. For days we experienced storms and bad luck. Then a pod swam below me—massive, slow, impossibly calm. How could we see a creature like that and drive a harpoon through it? A leviathan slept fifteen feet below me. From beneath her came her calf, turning toward me. She bumped my camera. I cried. She twirled, and I did the same. Together we spun in warm water, her singing, me crying. I felt forgiveness—something unspoken, something overwhelming. I will never understand the trust that baby had in me, nor her mother, who passed beneath me and called her away. The calf circled me once more before they disappeared into the blue. When I surfaced, my snorkel carried more salt than the ocean.
     When oil was discovered in the ground, and global industries shifted, the whaling empire was an empire no longer. Wooden ships were sent to California to guide men to the gold rush, Nantucket rebuilt their economy and their scorched island and turned to tourism. Rather than tracking down the whales who sang songs in the deep, men pushed drills into Earth’s roots and extracted the blood that runs our world. It replaced whale oil as a cheaper kerosene and later fueled steam ships and propelled industrial growth across the country by train and gasoline. A new threat began to weave its way through the world. Rather than great fires spewing from boiling blubber and harvesting the contents of the sperm whale, men sent emissions into the air, warming our earth’s atmosphere and in turn, melting the ice that once trapped their ships up in the cold. Over time, leading into the twenty-first century, ice formations have dwindled to less than half of what they used to be, and the sovereign nations all turned their heads back to the water that suddenly opened free. So, they took their modern ships, now advanced and equipped to endure the north, and headed for their new claim. The melting Arctic opened accessibility to maritime territory never navigated before, and the oil grounds that lay underneath the deep dark water sit waiting, untouched. The great nations have come together once again in their watery face, sailing far up to the edges of our world to play their favorite game. 

       I found myself struggling greatly upon researching the industry on the ethics behind it all. The alternatives for light in the early nineteenth century aside from the use of whale oil were less than innovative, and the smallest flicker of promising light sent men to the vast corners of the world and adventure along the brink of death. I do believe the idea of associating whales with violence has been overcome, largely due to conservation efforts and the fact that no angry sperm whales have rammed any of our industrial ships. Instead (unless you are Japan, Norway or Iceland), whales are preserved, protected, photographed and studied, often sleeping vertically in large pods off the coast of Dominica or raising their young in the shallow waters of Tonga and the Dominican Republic—humming, playing and swimming curiously among those who dove under the surface to see them. 

       Imperialism over oceanic space has lessened in ways with stricter laws on international waters and limited loopholes, but we always have a way of repeating our past abominations in one way or another, massacring whatever we think we can hold dominance over. I wake up every morning and turn on my bedroom light and I don’t think, not even for a second, about whales, or oil, or oceans. I don’t think about light in that way because it wasn’t the era in which I was raised, and I don’t know how to appreciate it any more than I do. But my understanding, and empathy, rather, has only come from learning of it. And unlike the whalemen of that time, I dream of sharing the ocean with such creatures, diving under the waves with a camera in hopes to hear their songs as they sing them out to me. And they’ll stare at me with their small eyes and dinosaur bodies and there’ll be a moment where I hold my hand out, floating in an eternal abyss of blue, and maybe just for a second we’ll understand each other. That I come from a species of destruction and innovation and for that I am sorry. I think they know we aren’t all that way. I wonder if they knew they lit our homes, and I wonder if they felt relief when Pennsylvania found oil in the ground. I wonder if Moby found it good fun to wreck the Essex and influence early American fiction and I wonder how the Quakers felt when the white whale turned the tables on their business. An industry of oil and fire—fire and water—meticulously fashioned for the blood that keeps the hearts of the great nations bleeding. I like to think I’ll never be like them, the sloppy whalemen who drove harpoons through crying whales. But I’m wrong, you see, because I write from my computer with a flame lit next to me, and I turn on the lights of my home from the oil we pumped from the ground, looking out my window and scanning the vast horizons of shimmering light in hopes of seeing another fluke. 

Curiosity and Understanding: Face to Face with Tiger Sharks

       I grew up hunting for fossilized shark teeth along the beaches of Vero Beach, Florida, with my dad. After a strong swell, the ocean would churn up shells from the seabed and scatter them across the shoreline in dense, treasure-filled drifts that stretched for miles. To most people, they were just piles of shells. But every now and then, if you were lucky, a fossilized shark tooth would reveal itself. And with a trained eye, "lucky" became dozens—or even hundreds—in a single afternoon. 

       The teeth came in every shade imaginable. Some were deep black, others copper-red, grey, even blue. Their colors, preserved over anywhere from two million to hundreds of millions of years, depended on the minerals in the surrounding sediment. Iron stained them rich reds, while phosphate turned them jet black. Conveniently for an aspiring shark nerd, Florida also happens to be one of the best places on Earth to hunt for fossilized shark teeth.

       Collecting quickly became an obsession with the animals themselves. I devoured books, documentaries, research papers, and was an avid shark week watcher. I spent countless hours staring at underwater photographs, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be there in real life. There are more than five hundred species of sharks, each adapted to its own corner of the ocean, yet they all seemed to carry the same reputation. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became. 

       Photographing one underwater became less of a goal and more of an inevitability. 

       But I never wanted that first encounter to be driven by adrenaline. I wanted to experience sharks on their terms, with enough confidence underwater that the animal—not nerves—became the focus. 

       So I learned to dive. 

       One certification became another. Open water turned into advanced, then rescue. Dozens of dives followed, each one building experience until I finally felt ready for the place I had been dreaming about for years: Fuvamulah. 

       Sitting alone in the southern Maldives, closer to the equator than the country’s famous resort atolls, Fuvahmulah has become one of the world’s premier destinations for tiger sharks. Unlike many shark hotspots where sightings depend on luck or seasonal migrations, encounters here are remarkably consistent. More than three hundred individual tiger sharks have been identified around the island, many of them pregnant females that return throughout the year. 

       The reasons are uniquely tied to both geography and people. 

       Unlike most Maldivian islands, Fuvahmulah has no protective lagoon. The reef drops almost immediately into the deep Indian Ocean, creating easy access for large pelagic species. For generations, fishermen also cleaned their catch near the harbor, where discarded fish scraps provided an additional food source. Together, these factors created conditions that tiger sharks learned to exploit, turning the island into one of the most reliable places on Earth to observe them.

       Each morning began before the heat settled in. The water was almost impossibly calm, its surface so smooth it reflected the morning sky like polished glass. From the boat I could already see the reef fading from brilliant turquoise into endless cobalt that seemed to have no bottom. Even before entering the water, dark silhouettes occasionally drifted over the white sand near the jetty—subtle reminders that we were visitors in someone else’s world. 

       Our guide, Lonu, had been diving in these waters before anyone. He knew many of the sharks by sight and seemed to read the ocean with an instinct that only comes from thousands of fives. There was no dramatic briefing or exaggerated build-up. Just quiet confidence. 

       Most days started with deep dives, going as far as one hundred and ten feet, looking for the elusive thresher shark—one of the world’s most distinctive and elegant predators. Growing up to twenty feet in length, they are instantly recognizable by its extraordinarily long upper tail fin, which can be as long as the rest of its body. Threshers use their powerful tail like a whip to stun schools of fish before turning to feed. Despite their impressive size, they are generally shy, preferring deep offshore waters where they hunt squid and small pelagic fish. Their graceful movements, large eyes, and unique hunting behavior make them a favorite among locals, especially our guide Lonu. Their vulnerability to overfishing highlights the importance of continued conservation efforts around the island. 

       For days, luck wasn’t on our side. We descended into the blue morning after morning, watching schools of jacks sweep past while the threshers remained somewhere beyond visibility. The threshers remained elusive until my last day, where Lonu began enthusiastically exhaling more bubbles than normal, and pointing excitedly into the deep, where I could just make out the slow movement of a thresher tail disappearing into the dark. 

       Some wildlife encounters stay memorable precisely because they remain incomplete. The ocean doesn’t owe us perfect sightings, and there was something satisfying about leaving with the feeling that the thresher had chosen exactly how much of itself to reveal. 

       The tiger sharks were different. 

       On my first tiger shark dive, I slipped into the warm water and followed Lonu down to roughly fifty feet. We stayed close to the reef wall until it opened into the harbor. Then I looked up.

       A massive pregnant female was already there. She wasn’t charging or circling. She was simply passing overhead with slow, deliberate movements, every bit as calm as the reef beneath us. As sunlight filtered through the surface, her stripes gradually appeared against her gray body. 

       My first thought surprised me. It’s just a giant striped fish.

       Years of documentaries, headlines and Hollywood films had quietly built an image of tiger sharks as intimidating predators. Yet seeing one in person dissolved that image almost instantly. There was no fear, no racing heartbeat. Just the steady rhythm of my own breathing through a regulator and the quiet awareness that I was sharing the water with a dinosaur perfectly adapted to its environment. She drifted closer, tilted slightly as if inspecting us, then continued on her way. 

       Each individual carried its own identity. Missing fins, distinctive scars, faded stripes and subtle differences in body shape gradually became more recognizable. They stopped being “tiger sharks” and became individuals. Perhaps that’s the greatest gift wildlife encounters can offer. It’s much harder to fear—or disregard—an individual than an abstract idea. 

       Not long ago, the island's economy depended largely on fishing. Today, divers, underwater photographers, filmmakers and marine researchers travel across the world for the chance to spend an hour beneath the surface with these sharks. Guesthouses, restaurants, boat crews, dive centres and local families all benefit from an economy built around living wildlife rather than harvested wildlife. 

       The Maldives strengthened that future in 2010 by declaring its waters a shark sanctuary, prohibiting commercial shark fishing nationwide. Around Fuvahmulah, researchers have since catalogued hundreds of individual tiger sharks using their unique stripe patterns, allowing them to monitor movement, behaviour and population trends without disturbing the animals. The island has also become an important place for studying pregnant females, offering scientists rare opportunities to better understand a species whose reproductive biology remains surprisingly mysterious. 

       Conservation here doesn't feel separate from tourism. The two depend on each other. 

       Healthy shark populations support local livelihoods, while responsible tourism provides economic reasons to continue protecting them. It's an imperfect balance that requires constant management, but standing on the boat after another dive, watching tiger sharks patrol beneath the surface, it's difficult not to see the value of that relationship. 

       Looking back, I often think about those fossilized shark teeth I collected as a kid.

       Millions of years separated them from the living animals swimming beneath me in Fuvahmulah, yet they told the same story. Sharks have survived mass extinctions, changing oceans and unimaginable stretches of geological time. Their future, however, now depends less on natural forces than on the choices people make. 

       It’s easy to think of conservation as something that happens in government offices or scientific journals, but places like Fuvahmulah show that it can begin with local communities, responsible tourism, and a willingness to see wildlife as something worth protecting rather than exploiting. Every diver who enters the water with respect, every researcher who documents an individual shark, and every local guide who shares their knowledge contributes to that effort. No single action is enough on its own, but together they create a future where people and predators can coexist in ways that benefit both. 

       Fuvamulah offers a hopeful example of what those choices can look like. Here, sharks aren't feared simply because they're predators, nor protected because they're charismatic. They're valued because they're part of a living ecosystem and a thriving community. The same animals that once supported local fisheries now support local livelihoods in a different way—through research, responsible tourism, underwater photography, and a shared commitment to keeping them in the water. 

       As divers, it's a privilege to enter environments like this, even if only for an hour at a time. The experience comes with a responsibility to leave those places as we found them and to support the people working to protect them. Encounters with wildlife are at their most meaningful when they foster appreciation rather than possession, reminding us that the ocean is not ours to control, but ours to care for. 

       For me, diving with tiger sharks wasn't the culmination of a childhood obsession. It was the beginning of a different relationship with these animals. Seeing them in photographs had sparked curiosity. Seeing them in person replaced curiosity with understanding. And understanding, more than fear, is what gives conservation its strongest foundation.