Notes from a Summer Cottage

by Nina Burton

  Late in the day, the Spanish attendant might walk by with boxes of books on a clattering cart. He knew I had occasionally worked with Spanish material, so sometimes we exchanged a few words. Since I was often the last one in the room, he started calling me Hormiguita, Little Ant. ‘Will you turn out the lights when you go, Hormiguita?’ Then he went on with his load of books. In our own ways, we were each doing our share, like ants pulling straws to an anthill – for, like most things in life, our work required contributions from many quarters. The efforts of others weren’t always obvious and yet we depended on one another.

  The ants had vanished from the cottage kitchen. Surely they were still hard at work inside the wall, just as they most likely had been all along, even though I hadn’t noticed them before. The invisible life is certainly the most common one, given that the contributions of millions of anonymous beings are behind almost everything, including societies and books. In passing, someone might be fondly called Little Ant, which, when I thought about it, seemed like high praise.

  Chapter Four

  A Veranda with a Sea View

  Although it seemed rather strange to have ants moving around in the wall, almost everything else in the house seemed under control when summer came. The rest of the painting could easily be postponed until after the holidays; in the meantime, I would finally be exchanging tradesmen for family members.

  Suddenly another way of life took over. Cheerful voices filled the house. My sister’s curious grandchildren expanded the world of the property. On their very first day they wanted to go fishing in the sound, and afterwards we solemnly shared a small fish. It was as if this ceremony inaugurated the children into cottage life.

  ‘I finally feel anchored,’ one of my nephews mumbled as we walked across the property.

  Anchored … the word drifted in my mind. We shared lovely memories of rented cottages, often situated by the sea. One was even on an island, and we’d had to row to fetch fresh water. I suspected my sister still dreamed of such coastal spots, even though these days she had a back injury. The fact was, a romantic view of the sea flowed through our veins, thanks to our English heritage. Our paternal grandfather was raised by a marine biologist and our grandmother by a naval officer, and the two of them met on the Atlantic when Grandfather was a ship’s doctor. Perhaps that kind of thing left a genetic stamp.

  For my own part, I had tried everything from dinghies to schooners but had come to realise I was not a gifted seaman. The thundery days on the deserted island had also dampened my love of the sea, so although I was still fascinated by the water, I preferred to explore it in a more tranquil fashion.

  Now I was writing about rivers. In time, they had come to suit me better than sailing voyages, for although they are in constant motion towards the sea, their journey takes them through meadows, trees and cities. Along their winding route they have birthed civilisations, watered crops, transmitted impulses and drawn borders – in short, they have shaped history, so researching them took time. Thus, during my holiday I would be setting out anew on riverboat expeditions.

  By the time I returned to land, summer was over and the last of my family members had left the cottage. I planned to spend some more time there, working on what the rivers had shown me, as soon as the tradesmen were done painting. But life had other plans – water-related ones, in fact. The painting was hardly underway before the crew boss called me, his voice tense. He had bad news. When they started to paint the north wall, the one facing the sound, they found that it had suffered severe water damage. It was so badly rotted that it had to be torn down.

  Water in a river was one thing, but in a house it could only spell disaster. The ants in the wall were a bagatelle compared with the fungus that causes dry rot. Even the tradesmen were shaken, now that they knew that six months earlier they had been working atop a roof that turned out to rest on rather dubious supports. The rotted wall had to go, and apparently negotiation was out of the question. To be done properly, in fact, the demolition should continue until they’d found timber that was definitely dry. ‘Although you can’t afford that,’ the crew boss added.

  To get a good view of the situation, I went out to the cottage as soon as I could. The tradesmen had gone by the time I arrived, and they weren’t the only thing missing. The remains of the north wall lay in a sad pile alongside the cottage. Perhaps it had given in without much resistance.

  I entered the room with three walls and found that the bunk beds had been dragged out. Where once there had been a wall, there was now an ocean-blue tarp. It was a little hard to take in. A house with three walls was no longer a house. It was more like a bus shelter, or like the open storage shed. In any case, it wasn’t a place to live in.

  In the kitchen was a bottle of cognac one of the nephews had brought. I poured a glass and took it into the room, along with a chair.

  It was all so ironic. Here I had been planning to work on my facts about water, and now one side of the cottage was water – or had been, until the rotted wall was torn down. When I pulled back the tarp, I saw the sound out there, glittering innocently as though none of its rainy sea breezes had carried moisture to the cottage. With the tarp folded open, I grimly sat down to take in the view.

  As the cognac in my glass disappeared, my despondent mood began to ease after all. The meeting of inside and outside in this room reminded me of a veranda. Paradoxically, it was also rather calming – almost comforting, even – to gaze out at the sound. In preparation for my river journeys I had read about how water made its way into philosophies of life. Rivers are holy in India, and Chinese philosophy compares seeping water to the Tao that nourishes life. Among the old Greek nature philosophers, Thales considered water to be the primeval element of life, and he was right about that. Each drop out there had existed since the dawn of life on Earth. For more than three billion years, those drops had passed through seas, clouds and bedrock, and then through plants and animals in a never-ending cycle, until there was just as much water flowing through plant life as could be found in the earth’s rivers.

  A sailboat was slowly crossing the sound, rousing memories of the boats I’d spent time on when I was young. Although it was only for a few summers, it felt like I had spent an era in close contact with the water. Most of my memories revolved around the slightly larger sailboats that had at once given me the expanses of the sea and a stable deck to stand on.

  What I recalled most clearly was keeping mid-watch on an old, schooner-rigged school ship that provided my initiation into seamanship. Night was turning to day and seven bells had been struck on the ship’s bell. At eight bells, when the hourglass turned, it would be time for the port-side team to be relieved, for we kept watch in four-hour shifts. Beneath me slept the starboard team, in the bunks of the mess; above me the sky teemed with stars.

  Sea-fire. Foam. The cardinal points lived in a binnacle stand where the compass communed with Earth’s magnetic field. Under my oilskins I was wearing a fisherman’s sweater, and at my waist hung a fish knife from a tarry-smelling rope I’d spliced and whipped. Others were handling the sails, so I kept watch over the stars and the sea.

  The sea’s proportions were all its own, its borders as permeable as watercolours. Shiny or matte, light or dark, the shifting colours told of wind and weather. Currents brought warmth from distant coasts, and the sun might rise above the horizon like an island of magma or sink like a golden Atlantis. The tides responded to the phases of the old moon, for it had probably been torn from the Earth in a collision with another celestial body and now circled us in longing revolutions. The water communicated still with its dry lava seas, if from a distance.

  The waves also spoke with the winds. Sometimes the waters were in such tumult that the gimballed table in the mess swung like a pendulum as it strove to remain level and full of food and crockery. Many on board then lost their appetite and an almost untouched roast was later hoisted up the mast where the fresh breeze
s would keep it cool.

  On shore, the waves instead brought gifts from distant coasts. During a raid on an island I picked up smooth stones in every colour. They told of how the sea has worked away at cliffs and slopes for millions of years, loosening pieces of rock that have been carried by currents and polished by sand. The same process turned the sharpest shards of glass into soft ovals of light.

  The grains of sand were the younger siblings of those stones, and they too had a long relationship with the sea. It incessantly ground mountains to rocks and rocks to sand, so with every second some billion new grains of sand were born. Together their layers told of vanished landscapes, and yet each one was unique as a result of being formed during its journey with the water. When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek placed a grain of sand in his brand-new microscope in the 17th century, he saw what he considered fantastic shapes. In his eyes, he was viewing the ruins of a temple with kneeling figures. Later, when sand could be magnified a hundred times more, its grains were found to more closely resemble planets with chaotic terrain.

  Even their sizes could affect the individual fates of these grains. The very finest ones would measure time in an hourglass or dry the ink on old manuscripts. Others might be formed by Tibetan monks into holy mandalas that would be poured into a river leading to the sea. Children used more robust grains of sand to build their little sandcastles on the beach.

  Wasn’t sand the perfect medium to illustrate the breadth of life? Philosophical Heraclitus likened time to a river and imagined history as nothing more than a child building sandcastles. Each needed water to hold it together. For their part, astronomers compared the Earth to a tiny grain of sand in space. Given those dimensions, the Sun would measure ten centimetres in diameter and be eleven metres away from us. The distance to the nearest star would be three thousand kilometres, and space might contain more stars than there were grains of sand on every beach and in every desert on Earth. And new ones were always being created. From this inconceivable cosmos came all the matter and water on Earth.

  Being at sea prompts many a thought about life, since Earth is in fact a ball of water. Not only are two-thirds of it covered in ocean; if you take depth into account the ocean makes up 98 per cent of the sphere we live on. So why does the ocean feel like a different world to those of us residing on the other 2 per cent? With its sea stars, clouds of plankton and flying fish, it’s almost like a space all of its own.

  Everything there is in constant motion. When birds migrate in the spring they cross the seas, reflecting on its surface like silvery schools of fish. Salmon and eels cross entire oceans to frolic in the brooks of their youth. They find their way with the help of the Earth’s magnetic field, as well as pheromones and the specific tastes of streams, and they can sense minuscule changes in temperature and pressure. Equally indefatigable are sea turtles, sailing around the world towards the shores where they were once born and where they prefer to lay their own eggs. They arrive like primeval creatures, guided by memory.

  Yet ocean life is not just a reflection of life in the sky. It has different conditions that demand different senses. For instance, light moves slower through water than through air and is rapidly scattered, so many fish in the deep provide their own light. Sound, however, travels both faster and further in water, although it cannot be heard above the surface, which separates the two elements like an invisible wall. You must dip an oar vertically through the surface and place your ear to the shaft to appreciate the sound beneath. This is what fishermen historically did in the South Seas and in West Africa, and in the 15th century Leonardo too discovered the method. But only in the 1940s did researchers begin to listen for the sounds of the sea, and they were overwhelmed by what they heard. They hardly knew how to describe all the different noises. There was creaking, clucking, cracking, croaking and drumming. There was bubbling, howling, jabbering, whining, whistling and plopping. It sounded like sizzling steaks, ear-splitting saws or heavy, rustling chains. Where did these sounds come from? It turned out that some fish clack their jaws, some blow out air and some use special muscles to bang their air bladders. Schools of herring can make such peculiar noises that the Swedish navy once tracked them, certain they were dealing with a submarine.

  The recording of fish sounds I’d heard personally were equally astonishing. Some reminded me of the echoes of ringing bells, some sounded like a silver spoon stirring the contents of a small glass and others were like the hum of a spinning top. These sounds were like voices from a world both distant and related. Everyone from the tiniest shrimp up seemed to be sending messages to one another. Even the tone might be saying something, for it was deeper in older and larger fish than in younger, smaller ones. A lovesick cod gave a low growl while a haddock rumbled.

  Aristotle suspected that fish can converse, and it does seem to be the case. One researcher, for example, learned to interpret fish sounds that communicated ‘annoyance’, ‘warning’ and ‘combat alert’. In addition, there are many nuances of body language, such as the holding of the fins in a different position, or a change in body colour or pattern. Some fish even have electrical fields that announce their species, age, sexual maturity and personality to a potential mate.

  So it turned out humans had been overlooking the communication methods of 98 per cent of life on Earth. The only thing that separated us from this world was a thin layer of water; beneath the surface was a vast network of sound waves. They run the gamut from solos to duets and choirs. Like birds, fish love to sing for their females at dawn and dusk, and the gobies that young cod depend upon for food can’t even mate until the females have heard their song. Unfortunately, these days it is often drowned out in the racket from recreational watercraft, so it probably isn’t solely due to overfishing that cod have vanished.

  On my old school ship the interest centred around whale song. The bright chirping of belugas could be heard right through the hulls of boats, so they were called the canaries of the sea. The songs of humpback whales, though, are duller. Their chants can go on for hours, with certain sections repeated like a common refrain. Today, it’s thought that their memory is assisted by something like rhyme, for even when a humpback song has hundreds of elements each whale remembers it on the way to their breeding grounds. But the song is gradually updated over time by way of new parts with a faster tempo. By the time eight years have passed, the entire song has been remade to keep the repertoire fresh.

  I thought the transformation of a whale song was a lovely way to measure time. On the school ship, a bell rang each time the hourglass was turned, and watches relieved one another as the nautical miles added up. A whale song lasted about as long as one bell, and then it started over again.

  Like birds, whales seem to use songs for both expression and communication. And why shouldn’t those in the sea also wish to create beauty? Down on the ocean floor, a small pufferfish was observed drawing beautiful flower shapes with its fins in the sand. As a final flourish it decorated the big sand flower with seashells, which the fish brought in its mouth, for when the artwork was completed it might attract a female. Surely this same creative impulse is found in whales.

  Sperm whales have dryer voices, with little glissades of clicks that can be heard for miles. To a human ear it sounds like a single creak, but the whales themselves must be able to make out the tiniest part, for the sounds can function as an identifier, a call to gather or a warning. They can also be a fine-tuned echolocation that helps the whales find their way even at a depth of a thousand metres.

  Sperm whales have the largest brains of any creature on Earth. So what do they use it for? What do they think about? No one knew. The only whales with which people had attempted to communicate were captive dolphins, but it wasn’t to learn anything about them. Instead, their trainers tried to teach them to pronounce human words, even though dolphins lack a larynx. But when taught sign language they could understand about sixty signals for our nouns and verbs, and with the aid of these could u
nderstand around a thousand sentences. Most of these were along the lines of ‘Touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it.’

  I had observed this at a dolphinarium and found myself rather depressed afterwards. Self-centred humans can be so simple-minded. After all, dolphins’ lives in the wild demand much greater intelligence than it takes to show off tricks, and of course their communication system is very different from our own. It’s suited to an environment with its own set of demands, so we could never master their language. A dolphin can produce seven hundred clicks per second and, based on the information returned by the echo, form an image of an object a hundred metres away. In doing so, it can not only differentiate between materials like copper and aluminium but also tell whether something is alive, and if so, whether it’s friendly or aggressive.

  Among themselves, dolphins communicate with whistles. Each seems to have its own signal tone, rather like a name, and one researcher described 186 different whistles, which she sorted into twenty categories for different actions. It truly does appear to be its own language.

  At close range, dolphins use gestures or touches instead and these can even be extended to other species, for dolphins do not limit their social circles to their own kind. Aristotle described small boys riding on them, and I had myself, on a Greek odyssey, seen them leap friskily ahead of our ship as if to tow it along. They were playing with us and could tell what course we were on so immediately that they seemed to predict it ahead of time. Greek seamen gladly interpreted it as such. Apollo is said to have taken the form of a dolphin when he went to the mainland to establish an oracle, and that was why it was given the name Delphi.

  Could dolphins actually have some archaic memory of kinship with us? We do have a common ancestor, although the family tree later branched off in a complicated way. Fifty million years ago, whales were also related to even-toed ungulates and lived an amphibious life on the coasts. So why did they return to the sea? Was it out of loyalty or due to their foresight?