Sometimes I see great, grey rolling waves. Even whitecaps. Other mornings, rare and lucky ones, there might be jellyfish, tentacles streaming out pale pink amidst the coral reef. When the sky and the sea are mixed up in my mind’s eye, when they have flowed and slipped into one another, when it is all great, forever waters – those are days that I like, with my flights of fancy, setting my seafaring imagination adrift, the sky/land unmoored in this landlocked woman.
No surprise then that a woman such as myself could not resist slipping down into Neptune’s kingdom, navigating my dreamland to search the cold ocean waters, night after night, dreaming and seeking Captain Nemo. I gladly endure this relentless searching, even welcome it, for he was such an early love.
Don’t bother cautioning me that he is only a character from a storybook, what difference does that make? In the face of his marvellous indignation, his prophetic sense of stewardship? His radical love of the ocean? Yes, who could not dream and seek Captain Nemo.
But as I search, I fret. I have failed him, I can see that now, now that I am older and the world is simmering. Just as he said we would, we have ruined everything. Almost beyond repair. He had warned us, warned me, yet still I guzzled while the earth’s surface was drilled and scraped, kept guzzling as the oceans turned tepid and bleached, keep guzzling so much that now we must violate the murky ocean depths to get our minerals, meet our needs. Failed him indeed.
Even this very morning, even as those grey seas roll overhead, the ice is melting under the webbed feet of the charming Emperor Penguins -– the little chicks slipping into the ocean, too young for their waterproof feathers to have come in, thousands upon thousands, drowning. The scientists lost their dispassion, cried words like “grim” and “extraordinarily distressing” to describe the tragedy.
And what is to be done? Hand wringing won’t do, far too late for that, and for my fretting. I would go to the penguins if I could, to hunch over at the edge of that soggy shoreline and twist my gnarled hand into a ladle to drag through the cold waters, scoop out the drowning baby penguins
shiver, shiver
plunging my reddened hand into the cold waters, find the feathers, restore the small bodies to shore. Lay them out in tidy order, save some and count & tag the others, some archive of the grim. This I would do, but there is no Nautilus to ferry me to the shoreline, to take me to the ice.
So what will become of those small bodies? And the other ocean dwellers? The rosy jellyfish, the withering, bleached coral? And the seahorses, how can they find their lost loves when the green waves are muddied and soiled?
So what else can I do but drop to the ground where ever I am, use my hands to dig in the snow, the ice, the soil, the sand, the rock, trace out the words for all of us to see:
STOP HELP
And once I have done that, I might return to my wandering, my searching for Captain Nemo, crying saltwater tears as I go, dreaming still of his beautiful black hair spread out across the pillow in his Botticelli shell. And then I will begin keening as if it is the end of the world.
_______________________
If you, like me, are distressed by climate impacts on the ocean, and if you oppose deep sea mining, if might be good to contact Prime Minister Mark Carney or Julie Dabrusin, Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature:
Email: mark.carney@parl.gc.ca Telephone: 613-825-3422
Email: julie.dabrusin@parl.gc.ca Telephone: 416-405-8914 (Toronto) or 613-992-9381(Ottawa)
Sources & further reading:
Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Annotated edition), Thomas Crowell Company, 1976.
PT Fretwell, “Discovery of Antarctic moulting sites in satellite imagery reveals new threat to Emperor Penguins” Communications Earth & Environment volume 7, Article number: 192 (2026) https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-03231-6
Climate Prediction Centre – April 9, 2026; Neutral through April-June (80%) May-July El Niño is likely to emerge (61% chance) and persist through at least the end of 2026. https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml
https://www.mercator-ocean.eu/bulletin/ocean-temperature-bulletin-january-2026/
If you like my writing and would like to support it, please pick up or order a copy of my new eco-gothic novel, The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien, at your local, independent bookstore or order direct from my publisher, Latitude 46: https://store.latitude46publishing.com/collections/featured-books/products/the-haunting-of-modesto-obrien
You might also be interested in my climate change trilogy The Wintermen also available for order from https://store.latitude46publishing.com/collections/fiction/products/the-winter-men
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