Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Thank God there’s someone to speak for us,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Another woman in the office looked up and nodded. “She’s got that, you know, charisma? That’s what we need in this fight.”

  What could I say? If I introduced myself now, I’d never get away. Hatsumi would run out of quarters before I was finished.

  “It’s dying here,” the harbour master said again. “Every year, more boats on the beach. We just want it to be the way it used to be.”

  Don’t we all, I thought. I stuffed my biological baggage firmly out of sight and shook her hand. Better now than later, because reviewing fish farm effects was a thankless job. Neither side liked grey areas, and either one could come down hard on you if you identified one that wasn’t to their liking.

  “Get some of those sockeye,” I said and went out to find my wife, whose own country was far more fished-out than this one. In Japan, it was rare to find a protected bay without a small aquatic city of nets and cages. I found her reading an enormous bronze plaque erected at the entrance to the parking lot. There were three such, each with three columns: boat, crewman killed, and date. The dates ran from 1937 to 2001, and I counted thirty-one names. Half of them were Finns, two had the same last name. Brothers? Or father and son? One boat, the Ocean Star, lost five men in 1966.

  Beached boats, decaying boathouses, and the bones of all these men somewhere at the bottom of the sea. Theirs was the past that the woman in the wharfinger’s office refused to let go of, and if it took a high-profile activist to somehow stop time and get it back, who was I to question their motives? I was right to have stayed out of it, to go back to my waiting piles of data. Facts are emotionless, and that’s what I would be paid to analyze. The story told by the ruins and the memorials to missing fishermen were the same up and down the coast: people died for the fishing, and now we’d somehow managed to kill off the fish themselves.

  Back down at Vera, someone had tied up behind us. Our new neighbour was taking his black and white tabby for a strange, stop-and-start walk along the dock. I asked him about his boat.

  “Used to be a gillnetter,” he told me. “I found it in the bushes, rebuilt it myself. Kind of a retirement project.”

  “Retirement from what?”

  “Commercial fishing. I spent thirty years in the Charlottes. All that time, I told myself all I wanted was a hidey-hole away from the wind.” He gestured at the whitecaps in Rough Bay. “And there’s still too much of it!” His cat leapt onto the derelict tug and disappeared into the chaos of the wheelhouse. “Jeez. I gotta go rescue him. Last time he fell in, we had to net him like a salmon.”

  I lay on my stomach and watched a school of coon-stripe shrimp on one of the pilings that secured the dock. Do shrimp form schools? Probably not, but this group was definitely interacting. It seemed to me they were having a kind of meeting, as though the piling was a wrap-around boardroom table. The longer I peered into their world, the more of them I counted, and once my eyes adapted, I saw that the creosote-black pole was studded with their greenish bodies. Now and then, one of them would do the shrimp equivalent of getting up from the table and stretching its legs. They swam horizontally, front legs extended as though readying for an embrace, propelled by the flutter of paired swimmerets that allowed them to go backward and forward with equal speed and ease. Sometimes they took a brief yoga break, flinging all of their appendages straight out and sinking, perfectly motionless, until I lost sight of them.

  I suppose that a competent crustacean biologist could have told me what all these behaviours meant, but I was happy just to feel the sun on my back and watch. As always, when confronted with one of nature’s marvels, I found myself guiltily unable to summon up much interest in how it worked, or what it meant. Wonder was enough.

  Guts

  The next morning, the wind was smacking Rough Bay by nine o’clock. Breakfasting inside Vera, we could feel her snatching at her mooring lines, like a dog on a chain. It would only get worse. We wouldn’t be leaving Sointula today unless we went by ferry.

  “Hey,” I said to Hatsumi, “let’s go and see that processing plant in Port Hardy.”

  “That what?”

  “Processing plant. For the farmed salmon. I met this guy back in Port McNeill who tried to help out with our electrical problem. Ron? Remember him?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He turned out to be the manager of the plant. I told him I was a biologist. He said we could get a tour, all I had to do was call.” I reached for my phone. Hatsumi looked at the dog curled up between us on the settee.

  “What about Charley?”

  “Maybe someone can take care of him there. Let’s ask.”

  In five minutes, it was arranged. Ron’s wife would pick us up in Port McNeill and look after Charley while we toured the plant. The next ferry left Sointula in forty-five minutes. We’d be back in time for dinner.

  We hurried past The Scream and got to the ferry just as it was loading. On board, the wind whistled through the open car deck, gathering speed in the constricted space so that I had to pull my hat low over my eyes.

  “Too cold,” said Hatsumi, handing me Charley’s leash. “You take him.”

  She and all the rest of the foot passengers vanished into the passenger lounge. Charley and I tucked in behind a bulkhead at the stern and watched Sointula recede behind an expanding plain of whitecaps. I sat on a sack of stove fuel and cradled Charley’s head in one hand. An eyeball fluttered under my fingers. The deckhands looked frozen, and by the time we walked off to look for Ron’s wife, I was frozen too.

  The road north to Port Hardy was intermittently bounded by new growth, where a logged-off area was beginning to regenerate. “We call it the salad bar,” said Gwen, a solid, cheerful woman who also seemed to work for Marine Harvest, the company operating the processing plant. “See the bears?” I spotted a couple of blacks, nose down, the first large mammals we’d seen since the wolves back in Douglas Bay. On a ridge behind them, what looked like a giant waterslide curved down and away toward the sea.

  “What the heck is that?”

  “Orca Gravel,” said Gwen. “Like a treadmill, a kilometre long, from the pit to the port. Look for it when you go past in your boat. You’ll see the big bulk loaders. High-quality stuff, they ship a lot to Hawaii.”

  That was British Columbia all right, ship out the timber, ship out the gravel, and, now that the wild salmon were petering out, truck out the farmed fish. I hadn’t told Gwen’s husband I was about to write a report on salmon farms, just that I was a biologist. Had he Googled me? Was the tour a subtle way of getting me onside? How easy was it going to be to stay neutral?

  “This really is awfully kind of you,” I said.

  The plant occupied an attractive piece of waterfront a half mile or so north of the town of Port Hardy. The building, cream-coloured with blue trim, might have been anything — a warehouse, a shoe factory — except for the dock, where a sixty-foot commercial salmon boat was tethered by lines and hoses like a patient in a hospital bed. The reefer trucks, invisible from the sea, were around the back — seven semis a day, packed tight with creaking Styrofoam boxes of farmed Atlantic salmon. Ninety percent went to the United States. I learned all this, and much more, from the production manager, Tanya, an athletic-looking woman in her mid-thirties who escorted me and Hatsumi through the plant.

  “I used to be a commercial fisherman,” Tanya said. Her office looked out across Hardy Bay to the fishing harbour where a dozen seiners and gillnetters were tied up. “So was my dad. He lives in Sointula.” She laughed. “It’s okay, everybody gets along. But I don’t wear my Marine Harvest jacket when I go over to visit.”

  “So how does that work, the fishboat down at your dock?”

  “We pay them to go around to the farms, wherever we’re harvesting. There are three boats on contract.”

 
I didn’t bother pointing out the ironies; by now, everybody in this story was long past irony. But I was curious about what happened to the fish. The big selling point of farmed salmon, besides its lower price, was freshness.

  “You corner the fish in the pen and suck them into the boat,” Tanya told me.

  “And then?”

  “Electric stunner, then bled through the gills. After that, they’re refrigerated in seawater till they get here.” She gestured to the dock outside her window. The fish boat was listing to one side, like a glass tilted to get the last of the milkshake.

  “And after that?”

  “What size are your feet?” said Tanya.

  We followed her down two flights of polished concrete stairs to a kind of receiving room where we exchanged our shoes for blue Crocs. “Very Japanese,” I said to Hatsumi.

  Tanya laughed and splashed through a shallow disinfectant tray, across a plastic grid, and over a yellow-painted curb into a second room where a thickset, hairnetted woman was kicking off a pair of white rubber boots. We shucked our Crocs, selected rubber boots, wrapped ourselves in green smocks, and surrendered our jewellery to Tanya in exchange for blue nitrile gloves and hairnets. Then we stumbled after her through an automatic boot sprayer. Tanya paused at the door.

  “Usually we wear earplugs,” she said. “But then you won’t be able to ask questions. Okay with you?”

  “Okay with me,” I said. She pulled the door open.

  We were on a metal gallery. If our feet rang on the grid, I would never have heard it. The plant howled at us from below, and the noise and motion made it difficult at first to take in what was going on.

  “Four gutting machines,” Tanya screamed into my ear, ticking them off with a finger. Way across the room, which was the size of a football field, the salmon were arriving on a conveyor that split into four arteries. Each gutting machine was a twenty-foot aluminum box that straddled a conveyor. At one end, a worker fed a whole salmon in, belly up; seconds later, its reamed-out body was grabbed by a worker on the other side.

  “I’ll show you,” mouthed Tanya. We followed her down some steps. Despite the horrendous noise, the two guys servicing the machine seemed to be having a conversation. One of them wore a beard net. Tanya caught my look of surprise.

  “Probably talking about the hockey game,” she yelled.

  But what they were doing here was horrifying. The box that housed the gutting machine sprouted numerous hoses, some of them hardwalled and relatively thin — I figured they would be the supply lines for water and hydraulics — and others, which had to be suction hoses, ribbed, flexible, and much wider. The thickest of these exited straight up, like a kind of chimney, and every time a fish went through the box the hose writhed violently, as though swallowing hard. What was happening in there? I peered through the misted, blood-spattered window.

  There were three machines inside, and the first was the scariest: a stainless steel head with spinning blades and a gaping mouth that dropped suddenly down onto the fish’s offered belly, punched deep between the pectoral fins and ripped savagely back to the vent, inhaling the shredded viscera and spitting them out through the jerking hose. Then, just as suddenly, the mouth was retracted, jets of water misted the window and two flexible arms rooted in the pink cavity, reaming out the kidney that ran along the underside of the backbone, picking off stray bits of viscera. Up close, I could practically feel the impact of the robots, but the general noise level was so high that what was going on behind that clouded window appeared silent and dreamlike.

  The worker on the receiving end ran a practised eye over each fish as it came out, leaning in with a knife from time to time to nick off a dangling fin or an errant length of disconnected esophagus. I thought immediately of my friend Chris, and the awful operation he’d just had. I couldn’t help it.

  “Do you grade them?” I yelled, and Tanya struggled to explain the computer system that scanned and sorted fish, but I couldn’t follow her in the din. All I could see was that, downstream of the gutting, some stayed in the round, while others trundled around a corner into another room.

  “Value-added,” she shouted. “I’ll show you.” I looked around for Hatsumi; she looked startled, as though she couldn’t take it all in.

  “You look cute in that hairnet,” I screamed. A salmon landed in a puddle and drenched her with seawater and blood.

  “Sorry!” mouthed a jolly-looking middle-aged woman, handing her a towel. Everybody in the plant smiled at us. I made a mental note to ask Tanya what the typical salary was. The workers changed stations regularly, Tanya told me later, and while we were on the floor, I saw a group break away, draw together in the middle of the gutting room, and go through a stretching routine.

  “Value-added” meant filleting, and it was quieter than disembowelling. We had to splash through another set of disinfecting baths and jets to get there. As with the gutting, some of the machine’s work was touched up by hand; I watched a gowned worker deftly round the corners of a rich red slab before tossing it back on the belt.

  “A lot depends on the customer,” said Tanya. At least we could talk in here. “Costco is really picky, they want the skin off the fillet.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask me, but we do it. I’ll show you.”

  The skinner was a Freon-cooled drum to which the skin was frozen long enough for a blade to flense it off. When I saw it, the machine was being ministered to by two men whose blue suits contrasted with the greens and whites of everybody else.

  “Maintenance,” said Tanya. “When they move in, everyone else backs off.” Ron, the guy I’d met in Port McNeill who’d set this tour up, must have trained this crew, a kind of SWAT team injected onto the floor every time there was a problem. Time down was money lost; no wonder the other workers kept out of the blue-suits’ way.

  Like the fish that were sold in the round, the fillets were layered in a rectangular Styrofoam coffin, buried under an avalanche of ice from an overhead hose, capped, shrink-wrapped, and palleted for the waiting trucks.

  “Some of it even goes to Japan,” said Tanya as we shrugged out of our smocks. “For sushi.” The product was obviously about as fresh as you could get without catching the fish yourself. But what happened to all that waste I’d seen flying around in there? And where did the water come from?

  “It’s all local fresh water,” said Tanya. “And we built a three-million-dollar wastewater plant to deal with what comes out the other end. We’re pretty proud of that.”

  “What about the guts?”

  “We donate it all to a local pet food maker. Truck it over to him.”

  I felt dazed. The noise, the ceaseless storm of deconstruction we’d just passed through, now this comical image of a truckload of guts and gills sloshing across Port Hardy, it was all starting to get to me. I’d cleaned plenty of fish in my life; when I was a graduate student trying to measure liver enzymes in trout, I briefly became a one-man gutting machine in the service of science. This industrial-scale processing was something different, and it seemed to me that the millions of years of evolution that had resulted in such a superb eating and reproducing machine were being tossed aside every time the saw dropped into a salmon’s belly. All those exquisite systems for propulsion, fuel supply, long-distance navigation ripped out in seconds and spat into the cat-food truck. It was like jumping up and down on your iPhone.

  But there wasn’t anything going on here that anyone could rationally object to, and the opponents of salmon farms were usually silent on the topic of high-paying, reasonably secure jobs. But this wasn’t the part I was being hired to assess. The real problems caused by farms were outside the controlled spaces patrolled by Ron’s blue-suited SWAT team, out where the perturbations that came from growing an alien species at high density in local ecosystems were complex, hard to predict, and even harder to study.

  We thanked Tanya a
nd stepped out into the bright, natural light. Charley was waiting in Gwen’s truck. He began yipping ecstatically.

  “He didn’t chew your seats up, did he?” I asked. “I’m not sure where he stands on salmon farms.”

  “Nah,” she said. “Piece of cake.”

  Gwen drove us back to Port McNeill, where the wind had picked up even more. With that wind behind it, the little ferry would fly back to Sointula. On the way through town, we passed Phil’s chandlery.

  “At least we never have to see that guy again,” I said to Hatsumi. “Two more days, and we’re around Cape Scott.”

  But I was wrong.

  When we got back to Rough Bay, we found a message on my cellphone. It was from Chris.

  “What?” said Hatsumi, watching my face as I listened. “What?”

  Two months after the horrendous surgery to remove his esophagus, a scan had shown new shadows in my friend’s liver. The surgeons hadn’t gotten everything. The chemotherapy that had started just as we left on our trip had been called off. To go around Cape Scott and back down the other side would take another six weeks. All I could think of was the gutting machine and the eviscerated salmon with the wobbling shred of its torn-off esophagus. Esophageal cancer was a bad one. I cried; we both did.

  “We have to go back,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I dialled, listened to Chris’s voice, left a message: we would return to Port McNeill tomorrow, buy provisions, and ride the northerlies back down Johnstone Strait. If we pushed hard, we’d be home in two weeks.

  “Dave and Nancy are here, you know,” said Hatsumi.

  “They are?”

  Where had we last seen them? Burial Cove, another portent. But I could do with some calm, something Dave seemed to exude. We walked over to Sanctum, leaning into the gale, and it looked cozy in there; the portholes glowed, and I could hear voices. I leaned over to rap on the hull.