Notes from a Summer Cottage

by Nina Burton

  For that matter, why had I myself been drawn to the ocean, and why was I now gazing out at the sound through the demolished wall? I was hardly alone in my fascination with the sea – it’s lured many a writer. Poets have willingly made it a symbol while novelists have filled it with fantasies. In the 19th century, the same whales that were expertly hunted for train oil for the machines of industry were described as sea monsters on old maps.

  The classic depiction of whaling is Melville’s Moby-Dick, which stood on a shelf on the school ship. I had paged through it to refresh my memory of how life onboard was described, for Melville built upon his own experiences on various whaling ships, and he had an ability to identify the similarities between flowing water and life itself. In addition, he had read all he could about the biology of whales and was inspired by a true story.

  About thirty years before Moby-Dick came out, the whaling ship Essex was rammed by an angry sperm whale that had seen its family harpooned. First it struck the ship with its tail, then with its head, and finally with all fifty metric tonnes of its body. Before the ship sank, the crew managed to save a few navigational instruments and provisions on a couple of whaleboats, but in these tiny boats they were soon as vulnerable as the whales they had just been hunting. Perhaps more so, since they found themselves in an unfamiliar element. Waves fifteen metres high fell over the boats, and when the saltwater soaked into their hardtack their thirst became unbearable. The men were surrounded by sea, but only 1 per cent of the Earth’s water is the freshwater that mammals need to drink.

  They were also fearful of other people. There might be cannibals on the nearest islands, ready to make quarry of the sailors themselves. Eventually they came across a deserted island that brought temporary salvation, but they so voraciously cleared it of anything edible that they soon had to go to sea again. And there they finally began to eat each other.

  The interest surrounding Moby-Dick had, of course, nothing to do with the details of whaling, but with the book’s symbolism. For Captain Ahab, who had lost his leg in a previous encounter with the white whale, the creature was as evil as the Leviathan of the Old Testament. But Melville himself didn’t seem to see it that way. In fact, some interpreters viewed Captain Ahab as a symbol of the ruthless profit-chasing that would become our downfall.

  Other 19th-century authors too wrote novels with maritime themes, but without the personal experience. The romance of the sea was in the zeitgeist, and the creatures of the ocean were still so unknown that one could fantasise freely about them. In Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo described an attacking octopus as an otherworldly monster, and when Jules Verne let an octopus assail Captain Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, the creature seemed tailor-made for the science fiction themes of the book.

  But oddly enough, octopuses and other cephalopods turned out to be even more stimulating to the imagination in factual reports from biologists. There they truly seemed to represent another world, and I was intrigued, because the out-of-the-ordinary can allow for fresh perspectives. Cephalopods even demonstrated something that touched upon the history of life.

  Each of the hundreds of cephalopod species has its own peculiarities. The largest is a giant squid fourteen metres long and the oldest – the tiny nautilus – has navigated its way through 500 million years essentially unchanged, adjusting its buoyancy like an ancient submarine. Other species can blend in with their surroundings by suddenly assuming the shape of a flounder, a snake or a piece of coral.

  Still, the most remarkable cephalopod of all is the eight-armed octopus. It has three hearts and the blue blood of a noble, nine brains and eight investigative arms – or, if you prefer, six arms and two so-called legs. Each arm is, in a certain sense, a world of its own, with vision cells, touch receptors, a refined sense of smell and taste, and a sort of short-term memory, so octopuses rather test the boundaries of our concept of an individual.

  There is no denying they are multi-faceted. In aquariums, they can use their arms to do puzzles, open jars and pull corks from bottles, when they’re not inquisitively inspecting objects dropped down to them. They’re observant and quick to learn from other octopuses’ problem-solving methods; they have a good memory, so they remember which people have been unpleasant and which have given them food. Since they can tell when they’re being watched, they are easily irritated by aquarium visitors, which has prompted some to build small barricades out of stone slabs and others to carry around coconut shells to hide beneath. Still others have figured out that if they squirt water onto the spotlight above their tank it will short out, leading to blessed darkness. One octopus threw rocks at the aquarium glass; another managed to escape with the help of his mental and physical agility. First, he contracted his boneless body and squeezed himself out through a gap in the aquarium lid. Then he crawled down to the floor and a drainpipe that led him back to the sea. Other eight-armed break-out kings soon followed. Some took nightly trips out of their tanks to cross the room and slip into aquariums full of crabs. After a proper feast they dutifully returned to their own exhibits, so the staff had no idea what was going on until the whole caper was captured on a hidden camera.

  Thus, octopuses could escape from the limits of their present situation by combining their own memories with plans and complicated actions. I found this more exciting than any horror film, because it was evidence of considerable intelligence.

  Still, octopuses don’t fit into our theories of intelligence at all, as these are rather descriptions of our own aptitude. In many cases these theories are passably supported by our knowledge of whales, but octopuses sabotage them in the most shameful way. We usually say that the prerequisites for intelligence are an extended period of care during a creature’s youth, a prolonged and social life, and the ability to adapt to varied environments. Nothing of this is true of eight-armed octopuses. They are short-lived, starving to death while they tenderly care for their hundreds of thousands of eggs, so they don’t live long enough to impart knowledge to their young. They’re also asocial and each species keeps to its natural environment. Yet the most embarrassing part is the fact that these brilliant creatures belong to the phylum Mollusca. We are said to be more closely related to sea cucumbers than to octopuses. Apparently, intelligence developed along several paths during the course of evolution and manifests in different ways in different species. Just as echolocation has emerged in both dolphins as well as bats, both octopuses and crows are astute. So evolution has no definite goal or peak, only branches like an octopus’s arms, and all of them can point the way to some remarkable realisation about life.

  A sudden breeze caused the blue tarp to flutter in the cottage. It sounded like when the sails of the school ship were about to be taken in rapidly by many arms, for the surface of the sail was as large as the deck, and the size of the ship rivalled that of the bulkiest beasts of the sea. The water’s buoyancy doesn’t only allow huge dimensions in ships. Waterborne animals can also have a massive size, so the blue whale has become the largest creature that has ever lived.

  I too had been fascinated by this colossus, although I was starting to wonder whether an unreasonable amount of attention hadn’t been paid to its size. The blue whale builds its 150 metric tonnes upon the tiniest creatures of the sea, and while these creatures may not seem as charismatic as whales, the oceans would be dead without them. In other words, life in miniature could balance out the largest lives and carry as much weight.

  The blue whale feeds on plankton, which drift with the currents. Zooplankton can be fish larvae, crabs, mussels, sea stars or barnacles, but the most common kind is krill. A blue whale easily eats four million krill in a day, so enormous amounts of them are needed, and their miles-wide schools are greater than any swarms of birds or insects. The Guinness Book of World Records has called them the ‘largest aggregation of animal life’ because they have even been seen from space. A school of krill can contain as many individuals as I have cells
in my body.

  Could these schools even be considered a sort of superorganism? Krill are always discussed in the plural, since it’s hard to make out any detail in their compact mass. While they drift through the sea together, their tiny swimming legs keep a common rhythm like a single breath. Yet a researcher, when studying them, suddenly saw one tiny creature break out of the school to observe him. It was only a few centimetres long, but it gave the impression of being quite curious with its dark eyes and forward-pointing antennae. Eye to eye, two individuals from different families wondered about one another, and in that moment size made no difference.

  My own experience with krill had been as food. The fisherman who sold them said they tasted more or less like shrimp, with a hint of crab. But it’s not the flavour that sticks out in my memory. In the evening, when it was time to eat in the darkened room, they took on a bioluminescent glow reminiscent of the deep sea.

  Krill are, in fact, safest in deep, dark waters. There, fragments of dead sea creatures filter down like a gentle snowfall. Only at twilight do they venture up to the surface to eat their meals of even tinier plankton, which are sometimes so small that several million of them could fit in a tablespoon. They’re called phytoplankton from a Greek word meaning ‘plant’, but they have no roots or leaves. Instead, they belong to the huge kingdom of algae. And they live in a world of their very own.

  There’s something remarkable about algae. Even though there are hundreds of thousands of species, most of them remain undiscovered, and they can vary widely. Some are microscopic, while others are sixty metres long; some glow like sea-fire, and some, like bladderwrack, spread eggs and sperm under the full moon in June. Some transfer their red pigmentation to shellfish and corals, while others provide Omega-3 fatty acids to fish, and still others release toxins when they decay. Many also live outside the sea, anywhere from moist stretches of land to springs and lakes.

  The biologist I once shared my life with was an expert on freshwater algae, and on occasion I came along as he was looking for them in lakes. The milieu was the peaceful opposite of whale-hunting and the romance of the sea. You could row calmly across the mirrored surface, on the hunt for the green foundation of life along blooming shores. Beneath the tiny fish was a glimpse of the lake bottom, and as glistening drops fell from the oars they formed rings in the water. Time stood still. Anytime the biologist lay down in the bow to keep a lookout through his aquascope I had to take the oars. I could see from his bent back how full of anticipation he was as the dredge came up with its random harvest, almost as if he were on a treasure hunt. Gradually he filled the small bottles on the thwart with samples, and when they were later viewed under the microscope, it turned out that many algae truly did display a jewel-like beauty.

  Was this how some of the first children of the water looked? After all, algae are more than just the foundation of the oceans’ food chain – they are among the oldest living things on Earth. During the millions of years spent quietly absorbing nourishment from sunlight they were also turning carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen, forming the air we now need to live.

  Considering the fact that life arose about four billion years ago we don’t have a very clear picture of how it happened. It could have been that energy from a lightning strike transformed hydrogen, ammonia and methane into organic elements that reacted with one another, but it could also have happened by way of volcanic eruptions on the bottom of the ocean. In any case, most people believe that it happened in the sea, in hot springs under it or in a warm lake. Water was a necessary ingredient.

  Ancient water clocks kept time by way of droplets, and I thought that was fitting. In time, such droplets could erode rock and fill entire seas. They also provided the backdrop for the dawn of life, when energy and moisture were captured in microscopic membranes. There was a weak electric force, and thus the cells that became the innermost part of all living things were born.

  Although these cells measured only a few thousandths of a millimetre, they comprised all the necessities of life – metabolism, movement and communication. That seemed familiar. Wasn’t that exactly how life is in every home? People eat to replace nutrients, move about to perform various tasks and communicate with one another or gaze out the window. That was certainly what we’d been up to in the cottage. And suddenly I saw an incredible, uplifting parallel between our cottage and the cells. Like the cottage, cells were little one-room homes with porous walls, and the very fact that those walls were permeable paved the way for a crucial development. A different, simpler cell – by all appearances a bacterium – made its way through them. But it became a good lodger and contributed to the power supply, until eventually the cell could expand its small room.

  It was hardly likely that something similar would happen to the cottage, for in the cellular world this transformation took a goodly amount of time. Still, once penetrated, the cell wall opened itself to a new, expansive chapter of life where plants were able to emerge.

  But cells are also united in other ways, and one of them can still be seen among the porous sponges of the ocean floor – those creatures who, after their death, often become household sponges. If living sponges are pressed through a sieve they become mere crumbs, but if they’re placed in water they will re-form into a sponge like the one that’s just been mashed. Those little crumbs really want to stick together. Even tiny pieces that are torn off can form new sponges. Thus, they must have some system of self-organisation.

  Somewhere within this mystery, life unfolded. Cells turned out to be just as social as ants. They could exchange substances right through their membranes and communicate with the help of proteins. And this communication deeply affected me, as it was what kept me alive. Like all living things, I too am made up of cells. They have a language inscribed in water, and it is shared by all beings on Earth. Thanks to this, we all carry something of the origins of life within us.

  It was starting to get chilly on my faux veranda, so I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As the steam rose in the saucepan I thought of how smoothly water transforms from sea to cloud, rain to ice. It’s in everything that’s alive and everything we eat – yes, even in the driest biscuit or piece of crispbread. If anything could be called the basis of life, water was truly it.

  I took my cup of tea out to the writing nook and closed the door to keep the warmth in. Four walls surrounded me like a little cell, and why not? Life is written in cells. But how to describe life itself? It was hardly a straightforward story. Storytellers as a rule avoid branching off with many tangents, but that’s what life is all about. Cells communicate in all directions and mix up the most varied alphabets. One has been assigned 107 letters, for chemical elements; another is for all the chromosomes of a cell; a third describes the four bases that form the infinite combinations of a DNA spiral. I could never capture such vastness in the linear sequences of our alphabet.

  Still, I wanted to understand the story life had written. So let’s say it began three or four billion years before my birth. Then came a series of chapters, each of which lasted many millions of years. Since some were more eventful than others, I browsed ahead in my mind, stopping again in the Cambrian Period about 540 million years ago.

  By that point, the movements of the continental plates had turned the spot where I was sitting into a warm groundwater pond, decorated with formations of coral. These were the exoskeletons of small, flower-like cnidarians who got their pigmentation and energy from a symbiotic relationship with algae. Once a year, during the full moon, they sent out sperm and eggs so that the new exoskeletons of larvae expanded the coral reef, and in other places such reefs became the largest structures on Earth and home to a quarter of the creatures in the oceans.

  Trilobites, those prehistoric creatures that bore a certain resemblance to the woodlouse, left an equally great legacy. While they might not have looked like much to the world at large, they may have been the first to see it, for eyes were a novelty at t
he time. Those of the trilobites had six-sided parts just like the faceted eyes insects would come to sport later, and since the lenses were crystalline calcite prisms, some have been preserved.

  It’s not that trilobites were the first to discover water. It takes comparison and distance to get a proper perspective. But the trilobites’ diffuse panoramic view of the water was predominant during the 300 million years that their thousands of species ruled the seas. At the same time, they died, like all individuals, and drifted with their calcium-rich eyes to the sea floor to join snails and corals. For millions of years, it was all compressed into the limestone that in one brief second of Earth’s history became pyramids, cathedrals, roads, fertiliser and toothpaste. Contained within were some of life’s first eyes.

  I put down the teacup on the windowsill, where a bowl of fossils united marine history and summer memories. Next to petrified coral and brachiopods were a few younger snails with grooved layers in their shells. These were the decorative calendars of their years of life. One tower shell was like the spiral shapes in the marble of our landing that had fascinated me as a child – it oscilliated with the ancient movements of time. But the fossilised spirals in that marble were orthocerida – cephalopods that lived 400 million years ago.

  That was around the time the seas began to fill with fish. They, too, came equipped with an important novelty: they had spines to protect the sensitive nerve fibres between brain and body. From these fish evolved all reptiles, birds and mammals. Greek nature philosopher Anaximander suspected there was a connection when he studied fossils a few thousand years ago. And I too had a fossil before my eyes as I pondered life. Hanging near my desk was an exuberant little fish, preserved in stone. It was one of my ancestors.